What is it about?

Well about me, Martijn Casteel, as easy as that!

A lone writer, writing about some thrilling encounters mainly in IT. First exciting point to elaborate; Who am I? Quoted from a strange movie with Jackie Chan. Well I'm not that old (yet) and I do like programming.

I'm an IT guy, I've studied Computer Science and Technical Artificial Intelligence. The latter is quite long and I have to explain it every time, so the short version is I'm building Jarvis.

I like watching movies among many other hobbies you may, or may not, find out reading my blog!

For the last two years I have been working on Launchpad (trademark pending). This is a simple device with just 7 buttons that would make me the best Microsoft Teams user there is! A device that can easily mute my microphone with the press of a button, or even holding it to talk.

It was an awesome way to learn more about hardware, flashing microcontrollers, and learning embedded programming. I spend more money and time than I would admit, but I liked it a lot. Unfortunately, I have not achieved my goal. Microsoft Teams requires a certification to really create a device that manipulate Teams without being in focus.

I started of by creating schematics. The opensource schematics of Arduino are very helpful. After like half a year of checking the schematics, the bill of materials, and the crystal circuit I ordered a manufacturer to create and populate five of my Launchpad 1.0 boards. There was a small problem where I added the wrong usb-c port to the bom. So that probably set me back another half year. After ruining 2 boards myself I found someone with better equipment and a steadier hand. He managed to solder all the pins of the usb-c port. Thanks!

Then the programming began, first I started with the Arduino IDE. The Atmega32u4 is a very common microcontroller in the Arduino Pro Micro and Leonardo. What a great feeling to see the led blinking. But I wanted more, I have been using Arduino quite often and I liked to be more in control. Also, I needed it since Arduino doesn’t provide USB-HID control out of the box other than a mouse or a keyboard.

So I set up VSCode to be able to make use of avr-gcc. A simple Makefile made my life a lot easier. Using an example of one other guy, some great explanation videos of Ben Eater on USB keyboards, and reading through lots of documentation of USB.org. I managed to get ahead with small steps. Eventually, the board was able to increase and decrease my output volume and mute it. As mentioned, the board is not able to mute the microphone on Teams without having focus.

It’s been a while for me to write a blog post. Last weekend I tried out something new, creating a simple single page website with tailwindcss. I started off with finding a simple html generator, something like haml for npm. I couldn’t find one that worked for me, so I decided to stick with plain html. I’ll get back to it.

Offcourse tailwind has a cli for me to generate a css file. I started with using the --watch option and developing went quickly keeping the docs nearby. When I tried to use the build command I omitted the input argument and some stuff like google fonts and font awesome were gone. It took me some time to figure out but I added the input argument, unlike demonstrated on their website.

For the html framework I looked at Nuxt, Next, and Gatsby but all are more than I looked for. I just wanted a simple html generator to write a page short and simple. More or less like middleman on ruby for nodejs. I didn’t like the idea of creating websites that require client-side javascript to render a simple view. Isn’t that what html is built for? I thought about creating my own framework for nodejs but I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. If you have any suggestions for a better html framework I’d love to hear them!