[email protected] saw some mentions from you on my old account on the social.coop instance, this is the current one :)

I’ve been making slow but steady progress on #rainpsc but mostly on the software side, in fact yesterday I started a new project that ties a number of efforts together. I’ll have a blog post about it soon.

@vertigo

My #rainpsc project got kind of stalled when I got focused on how to finish the control panel in a "non-one-off" way. Ironically the complexity of producing PCB's that met the needs snowballed into a bigger project than I had time for and the whole project got hung-up.

Recently I started getting into "freeform" electronics and it got me thinking about what I could apply that style to. Yesterday it occurred to me that maybe I could get RAIN moving again if I looked at the panel as a freeform circuit design exercise instead of something I could "mass" produce.

So now I'm noodling on how I might "charlieplex" the entire panel and use a single MCU to drive it from the head node instead of making a separate interface for each node.

If I can make this work, it simplifies things a *lot*.

Of course that means a lot of point-to-point wiring, and it's completely impractical for building more than one or two machines, but if it gets the working machine on my desk sooner, it's probably the way to go.

Ran across this yesterday, might be a handy way to add some (large) mass storage to #rainpsc

https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc1

Still trying to figure out everything that this device does, but for $12 it might be a low-risk (har har har) way to start playing with RISC-V (and potentially have utility in the ML-related workloads I'm experimenting with on #rainpsc):

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAix-BiT-for-RISC-V-AI-IoT.html

Working on a new chassis for #rainpsc. Needed something simpler to get the cluster operational sooner now that I have some specific applications to run and not just benchmarks.