One surprising function of nix/nixpkgs that I often use is having the option to easily generate darwin app bundles out of things that normally wouldn't be.

I packaged a wine-wrapped bgb (the gameboy emulator), created a desktop entry for it, and then a darwin app bundle out of it. Now I can easily fire it up with Alfred just like any other macos app.

Got all the parts and built up my https://github.com/CoretechR/OMOTE.

Can’t wait to configure it and eventually replace all the remotes that we have accumulated!

I used the last weekend to make a rack-mountable enclosure for the ARRIS/Vodafone TG3442DE cable modem.

I was frustrated how high and out of reach it was on my shelf and how inconvenient it was to get to its ports and power switch. I wanted to bring it down, but I had no space for it because the original case it comes with is slightly larger than 1U...

This new enclosure (or should I call it faceplate, lol), hides the indicator lights away, but it solves all of the other problems!

I made progress on my custom firmware for the nuphy air60!

I setup a sdcc-based toolchain and produced working firmware that initializes all the base peripherals: sys-clock, watchdog, ldo, uart.

This allows me to run my own code and jump back into the ISP bootloader making it a fairly ergonomic dev setup.

Read more: https://carlossless.io/nuphy-air-60-part-2/
Code: https://github.com/carlossless/sh68f90a-experiments

I've been using Sensepeeks PCBite holders for a while and they are pretty neat, but I just got the Omnifixo M4 and it's an improvement in pretty much every way.

I can see it becoming my daily driver for all my small projects. https://omnifixo.com/

Today I took a look at the hardware powering the NuPhy Air65 keyboard.

After disassembling it I found this BYK916 microcontroller, which has very little info about it available online, other than it's (probably) a relabeled SinoWealth SH68F90

Pin connections seem to match the part in the datasheet, and the JTAG header is freely exposed, though I don't have anything to interface with it...

Fortunately, someone made a bit-banged firmware dumper for ATMega328 based Arduinos - https://github.com/gashtaan/sinowealth-8051-dumper

Time to get my first Arduino Nano 😂