First working monday starts off with weak coffee. Missed one or two spoons of beans!!This is not the way starting this year!!! Have to make another pot :expressionless:

So, a wonderful christmas holiday has come to it’s end. Many warm cozy evenings in front of the fire, with what our traditions bring. Die Hard marathon, rice porridge, plenty of food and all that what makes christmas special in our family. Haven’t gone from my home for over a week. It has been fantastic, and we got plenty of snow this year!

This is a annual post I’m making where I have a retrospective over the past year and taking a glance at what happens in the upcoming year.

Holiday Projects

GRBL and Milling Machines

I have always been curious about CNC milling (or talking to a machine with g-codes in general) and I finally got to it and tried out GRBL. I hooked it all up with A4988 drivers and some steppers.

I found GRBLWeb on github to have some kind of UI for testing. A good entry point to see how I could create my own integration in the future. There is also of course OctoPrint (my favorite repo on github, use that software every day!) that I could use as a reference.

My father has been nagging me about completing a CNC-conversion project we started a couple of years ago. Went over one day between christmas and new year to hang out and build on it. Got to a point where we tested all the axises. He is still in that zone where he uses Mach3 for everything and a PC tower just to get that parallel-port. I introduced him to the arduino based approach but he Wanted me to try out Mach3 so I had to give in (switching it out when we finish it ;)). Mach3 doesn’t run on linux!

AVR Programming without Arduino IDE in pure C

Following along in this book Make: AVR Programming

A good introduction to AVR Programming and without the Arduino IDE!

Make AVR-Programming

2021 Quick Recap

  • Completed my education and became a junior system-developer!
  • Landed my first job directly after, at Centiro Solutions
  • Got my own space/workshop/office inside the house :D
  • Replaced the entire front-suspension/drive-train on my Jetta.
  • Bought my first mech-keyboard
  • Minimized my travels and that resulted in splitting my annual milage in half, Go Team Earth!
  • Started composting and began to be more restricted when recycling (recycling even more). Recycling/Repurposing over 90% of my stuff.
  • .NET 6 :heart:

A fairly good year in general I must say.

Saying ‘No’ to minimize focus areas.

It’s time to take a step back, being that new developer who says yes to everything without knowing how to estimate time is not going to end well!

By limiting my area of main focus should result in more efficient work. I guess hitting the wall is fairly easy in this line of work. Bringing this up at my next self-reflection/personal development meeting.

Another year, do I have goals to achieve?

I’m building my own keyboard.

  • Trackpoint (have to salvage from ThinkPad)
  • Ortholinear
  • Split
  • QMK Firmware (dhaa!!)
  • Hand Wired
  • Backlit

Ramp up my 3D-Printing.

I want to get another printer to the collection and finish upgrading my i3-clone so I have three printers. Maybe expand and do some on-demand printing to gain a little profit (buying more filament and upgrading).

More embedded/low-level Programming

Creating electronics, hooking things up on breadboards and writing software on a lower level is really fun and I wish that I had more time with it. Having the ability to print my own enclosures and mechanical constructions to embed these projects makes it even more interesting.

My goal is to do more of this for 2022 and get more knowledge of what I could accomplish.

This is a year I will remember. If I could live 2022 like 2021 I would be happy with that, from my personal perspective.

As far as I could tell, there’s nothing more I need But still I ask myself, could this be everything? Then all I swore, that I would never be was now So suddenly, the only thing, I wanted to become To be someone just like him

– Octavarium by Dream Theater

Don’t be afraid, adapt! But most important, stay safe people!