Posts tagged as mayhill

Where were we?

I last wrote notes around Week 374. My Makefile tells me this is about Week 380. I think that’s correct. If not, well, time has slightly lost some of its meaning in recent weeks, and who’s counting? Week 380 it is.

In week 375, I finally finished my career review, and [wrote that up]. That was a prelude to more formally seeking out new projects and clients. Of course, what then happened was COVID-19 made it quite clear that we were not proceeding as normal for a bit. I left the studio and went to work from home, and started trying to investigate new work from there.

Which was not, at that point, particularly fast-moving, and, coupled with the strangeness of lockdown, everything slowed down a little. It was going to be a challenge to write ongoing weeknotes where I invented euphemisms for “not very busy over here”, so I went a little quiet.

When I write down what I’ve been up to since then, though, it’s a decent amount:

• I made voipcards. This was, initially, one of my one-line-gags turned into a small project. It was also a useful tool to prod at learning a bit more Svelte, to practice building PWAs, and to occupy my mind. It turned out quite popular on the internet, which led to me writing about the problems of solutionising, and why I’m still not sure it’s that good a project.
• I released the 2.0.x firmware for 16n, and wrote about that here. This had been on the shelf for a different project - Mayhill - for a while, and I realised it could easily be ported to 16n. The big feature this introduces is configuring your hardware from the browser, over USBMidi. Really pleased with how this turned out, and the community feedback has been great.
• I built up a personal electronics project over a few days, which turned out rather well after some fettling. Fun things I learned here included using naked board substrate as a transparent surface for LEDs to shine through, how to drive 256 LEDs off only 64 channels (four sixteen-LED drivers chained over I2C), and then tweaking the update rate of the LEDs so they don’t flicker on cameras as well as to the naked eye. (That involved moving the update rate to an integer division of 30 frames a second…)
• been spending some time volunteering on Makerveristy’s PPE effort - primarily, on a tangential project to the 3D printing they’ve been launching, where I’ve been lending some support on digital logistics work as well as comms and lightweight project management.
• pitching a bit and having phone-calls and chats.
• quite a lot of business-related admin.
• setting up two new projects. Let’s called them Bradnor and Easington. I signed the contracts for Bradnor, a short project around infrastructure for an IOT project, last week, and we’re nearly there with Easington.

That felt like enough to finally write about. And now I’m back in the saddle, it should be harder to break the chain next week. As ever: onwards.

This week I:

• spent a half day on Monday wrapping up a polish pass on Willsneck with its designer. I then gave a short talk about Willsneck to the direct client on Thursday Morning. Primarily, I talked about the deployment strategy we were using, and why it was a good fit for the project and client. It was good to validate the thinking we’d been doing as a team, and also to communicate that what looked like off-the-cuff decisions did still have a bunch of thought behind them. There were good questions and some nice feedback, so that was satisfying.
• spent Tuesday workshopping with Tim. Early investigations into something, digging into what really interested him (and me) about a particular idea, and then some due diligence and research into prior art.
• continued from my end-to-end breakthrough on Mayhill with further iteration. The firmware feels pretty complete; there’s one error at the level of hardware design that will need resolving before I can confirm that, but otherwise, I’m pleased. I also continued to iterate on the software end of things, adding features to the browser-based editor. I looked into the state of the hardware, but then got a bit downcast as I realised the effort required to take it beyond the workbench. With its own fast microcontroller in, it likely falls under FCC regulation of “unintentional radiators”, which puts another hurdle in front of selling or shipping it. Something to think about, but meant I largely parked thinking about it for a bit.
• finally, snatched a victory from the work on Mayhill by realising there’s nothing to stop it working with 16n, so started working on a version 2.0.0 firmware for that, which should be ready soon. Early feedback from the community has been highly positive, so it’ll be good to ship that to as many people as possible.

Lots of work on Willsneck this week, to bring it into land. We wrapped everything up by Thursday PM, and I’ve got a half-day on this left over to finalise the production deployment. Happy with how it’s turned out, I think.

Hallin got merged into master by the client, so I’m looking forward to hearing how they get on with it in production.

I had a good chat with Christian and Miguel from Schema who were in town, having been introduced by a friend. Always nice to meet new people, and interesting to chat to them about designing for data, working with clients on that problem, and the tools used to do it. Thanks to Steve for putting us in touch!

Finally, I spent some of Friday working on Mayhill, and had a really big breakthrough. That breakthrough is what we called end-to-end at Berg: a complete workflow up and running, even if every component is a bit ‘version one’. I began by working on overhauling some of the browser-based UI: making it look a lot tidier, and refactoring a lot of the large App.svelte file into smaller components, including a big wrapper component for handling the MIDI context. Then, I wrote the JavaScript to translate edits in the browser to Sysex data. Finally, back in firmware-land, I wrote the firmware code to intercept that stream of data and write it to Flash RAM. There were other small firmware kinks to iron out, too.

By the end of the day, I had a system where you could open an editor in your browser, connect a physical object (that I’d both designed the electronics for and coded the firmware on) and see it appear automatically, and reconfigure it in the browser app. The browser app could transmit edits back to the hardware, which would persist those changes. Hugely satisfying: what’s largely left on this is polish, now, and working on the “1.0” hardware (rather than this ‘development board’) that I built for myself.

Still not quite sure how I feel about Svelte. I like the compiled-up-front approach, especially for something that couldn’t really be done many other ways; I’m not quite sure about its idiosyncratic syntax, and whilst I quite like its two-way reponsiveness, that leads to a propensity to get yourself in a tangle. Still, it’s enabled all the things I’ve needed to do so far in a reasonably straightforward manner, and I’m a big fan of its Vue-style single-file components, so it’ll do for now. One thing in its favour is that it was easy enough to pick up after months away: most of it, most of the time, is just browser-based technologies.

A good week, then: mainly code for clients, some more esoteric code for myself with a serious breakthrough, and some good conversations to round it out.

This week, I:

• spent three days wrapping up a lot of Willsneck. That meant pairing on finishing up all the content edits, and working through the designer’s snaglist, sanding off many rough edges in my work. Lots of fettling SVG files and learning about some of the esoteric bits of CSS that only apply to SVG. By the end of the week, I’d cleared almost all of my ‘todo’ column, and we’re just in to some final bits of QA and layout tweaks.
• had a long meeting-cum-workshop on Hallin to refine the specification we were agreeing to. No huge surprises here, but it helped a lot to meet the team and go over a lot of things in detail. I’ve got a clearer understanding of their product and domain model, and we’ve largely agreed on what’s to be done.
• found a few spare hours to prod at the electronics project I mentioned last week. Let’s call it Mayhill. This week, I started work on the computer-based tool that will talk to it. I’m writing it in the browser, with a view to porting it perhaps to Electron later on. By the end of the week, I had a neat flow of information between hardware and browser, over MIDI Sysex, and a reactive UI built in Svelte playing ball with everything. Fun!

A very busy week. Longridge is clearly in the home stretch, owing to the small number of minor tweaks and bits of polish that needed applying. Hopefully I’ll have more to say on that soon.

Over on Willsneck, I ported the site to be built and managed with Hugo. Whilst the static prototype isn’t quite complete - there’s one major page that still needs designing - there was enough in place to start. It helped that the structure of my Parcel-based prototype was highly similar to how I’d go about building the site in Hugo. So I bit the bullet and dived in.

This all went quite smoothly. I took the opportunity to port some pieces of content that I was generating from JSON files to using headless page bundles, meaning adding new content objects is as easy as adding new markdown files.

Once the templates ported over, the rest of the process was very smooth. CSS was still being processed with PostCSS, so I could just drop all the SCSS over. JS, for now, is just being loaded as-is. And fixing up deployment was as straightforward as changing a few lines in our Github Action workflow. The fundamental model - download some dependencies, build a static site, force a commit of that static site to the appropriate branch - is exactly the same. The only thing that’s changed is what the dependencies are, and how to build the site. I was pleased that the previous week’s decision had paid off so neatly.

On Wednesday, some fabricated prototypes for an electronics idea I’m working on arrived. The fabrication quality was excellent, and definitely worth investing in for this project. I rigged up a USB-C port on the board, and started on writing firmware. A few hours on Wednesday got me to a point where we had a bootloader on the board, code flashing over USB-C, USB MIDI working, and a microcontroller writing and reading data from a small flash RAM module. There’s still a way to go, and there’s definitely bugs on the board - I had to remove a few pre-soldered components and bodge one jumper wire before we could bring anything up, and that took an hour to work out - but progress was largely encouraging. I’m probably going to spend a few hours each week working this up.

And then, at the end of the week, I spent three days teaching with Hyper Island again, acting as industry lead for the “Digital Technologies” module of their MA in Digital Management. As ever, it was an intense, exciting opening few days: several talks from me, some excellent guest speakers, a workshop, and then coaching the teams on their work for this module. I’ll be returning in January for another intensive weekend to wrap up my teaching on that module.

That was a lot. It’s going to be a little quieter in the final two weeks up to Christmas, but it’s still a fairly full slate to the end of the year.