(Notes to myself #rethinkeverything)

Switch hands

• Move the pain 
• Rewire the brain

It’s your data…

• Hand Copy it in Triplicate.
• If its social then scrape it and automate it. God knows they do.

It’s your work.

• They can’t own what you learn.
• Redact and copy your notes in Triplicate.
• Create/test and share open source gists/solutions
• Make work pathways to give back to the community
• If you have to learn it you best use it at home (lxd5/ansible/jellyfish/usw)

Work on one less thing (simplify).

• Every convenience is a point of failure or an attack surface.
• Git does not need to look good to be usefull. (–gitea, –gitlab, ++bare-git+hooks/mirrors)
• — Twitter
  • with or without musk
  • also #fuckthatguy).
  • If your content is usefull it will recieve the appropriate tweets, links, usw.
  • and if it doesnt the internet is fundamentally broken.
• If your wysywig is so unusable you don’t “blog” Throw it away. (–wordpress) 

Home is where the heart is.

• Don’t let pi/routers do server/container work.
  • PiHole (filtering dns)
  • dhcp
  • look at virtualized routing
• If you can’t netboot off of it is it really your network.
  • Same goes for centralized management (ldap).
  • dhcp
  • tftp
  • iscsi
• All active work behind at least one firewall.
  • Automate pushes (including this site).
  • Streamline/cleanup html generation
  • It should also be replicated in at least one other location

Let’s go to your place.

• Ticketing systems should be more like distributed punchnotecards. –trac
• You shouldnt be giving out XXX bucks a month to post your public images so they can be “distributed”
  • flicker free
  • multi homed

Just because you have source control doesnt mean it’s all code

• use markdown/git for most things.
• but focus on the english.

Work imitates life

(What problems are we trying to solve)

• Minimize technical debt both past and future.
• Disentangle the various interconnected pieces and dependencies
• Automate as much as possible
• Document what is to be done. (Specification and sample implimentation)
• Experience based stepwise refinement.

Sarcasms (link them later)

1. See: Tufte’s critiq of power point.
2. “as code” is only as good as the management understanding of the job of the people actually write and maintain it minus corporate whims, the abuse of executive privilege, and cultural constraints..

In our last post we talked about wanting explore the use of two I2C based io expanders in an old school application. If it werent for the fact that there was a readymade lcd library for the mcp23017 I would have swapped the io expanders. No Pull-ups, No Pulldowns and no decent documentation on the circuitpython libraries makes the AW9523 a sucky choice for an old school keyboard matrix. But Hey, F**k It Dog. Life’s A Risk. We are gonna make do with what we have.

Looking under the keyboard membrane and tracing the connectors we can get the following key map under a 4×12 array (16 pins).

   0123456789A(10)B(11)
   --------------------
0) *# ZXCVBNM/    <STOP>
1) -LASDFGHJK<N/C><ENTER>
2) 0912345678<BS> <START>
3) POQWERTYUI<CAN><DIAL>

Of course for this to work we needed to solder 10k pull up resistors on all but the last 4 pins (8-11). This was relatively straightforward since there is a strip of connectors to VIN on the board. Still, kind of a pain. On the other hand I have reals of 10k resistors and I guess I have time.

Here is a simple circtuitpython program which presents a prompt and then puts characters scanned by the keyboard onto the display.

import time
import board
import busio
import adafruit_character_lcd.character_lcd_rgb_i2c as character_lcd
import adafruit_aw9523

keymap=[]
keymap.append('*# ZXCVBNM/\001')
keymap.append('-LASDFGHJK\r\n')
keymap.append('0912345678\010\002')
keymap.append('POQWERTYUI\030\004')

lcd_columns = 24
lcd_rows = 2
i2c = busio.I2C(board.SCL, board.SDA)
lcd = character_lcd.Character_LCD_RGB_I2C(i2c, lcd_columns, lcd_rows)
lcd.message = "PiTerm 1986 v0.0\nOk >"

aw = adafruit_aw9523.AW9523(i2c)
row_pins = [aw.get_pin(8),aw.get_pin(9),aw.get_pin(10),aw.get_pin(11)]
for pin in row_pins:
   pin.switch_to_output(value=True)

col_pins = [aw.get_pin(0),aw.get_pin(15),aw.get_pin(14),aw.get_pin(13),
            aw.get_pin(12),aw.get_pin(7),aw.get_pin(6),aw.get_pin(5),
            aw.get_pin(4),aw.get_pin(3),aw.get_pin(2),aw.get_pin(1)]

for pin in col_pins:
   pin.switch_to_input(value=True)


old_row=0;
for pin in row_pins:
    pin.value=1

switch_state = [[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
                [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
                [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
                [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
               ]
while True:
    for r in range(4):
        row_pins[old_row].value=1
        row_pins[r].value=0
        old_row=r
        for c in range(12):
            if (col_pins[c].value==0 and switch_state[r][c]==0):
                switch_state[r][c]=1
                print(keymap[r][c])
                lcd.message+=keymap[r][c]
            if (col_pins[c].value==1 and switch_state[r][c]==1):
                switch_state[r][c]=0
    time.sleep(0.01)  # debounce

References

• https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-aw9523-gpio-expander-and-led-driver
• AW9523 Datasheet

https://www.opensignalpdx.org/calendar/music-and-video-programming-with-max-msp-jitter/