February 24, 2025

Today’s project was all about building out logbook! Over the weekend, I played around with the kramdown library and found that I could use their built-in converters for the most part to convert markdown into HTML. The purpose of this project was to be able to write very simple daily logs of what I worked on, which might span multiple projects. Rather than having to take notes per-project, I can take notes for the day and, if appropriately tagged, my logbook site builder will generate both the daily log HTML and the project-based daily logs as well. My hope is that this will make it easier for me to come back to projects even if it’s been a while. A one stop shop for project notes, if you will.

Today’s work was to write the custom Kramdown::Converter for my project. This essentially looks for any HTML elements which have a particular project attribute added to it, and build out html files for each project. The attribute is added by the kramdown library if I use the correct syntax in markdown ({: project="logbook"}).

There’s a ruby file that parses all the log markdowns and builds these files up. The build process is in a custom script called ./build which I can call locally, or from GitHub Actions. Then, I can use the GitHub Pages actions to upload the built artifacts and get them shipped to the GitHub pages site. Because I already have the CNAME for katestud.dev set up, logbook gets deployed to that same domain.

I added some really basic styling for now. I was planning to look for a template but I was inspired by someone at Recurse Center to style the site however I want. For now, it’s a very basic (and somewhat ugly) basic site with centered content, light blue glowing background, and a fun font. I want to add some more pizazz here, like adding a toggle to switch between two color modes, and mess with the padding a bit. But that can all come tomorrow or a later day.

Some other recommendations / inspiration for styling:

• melodecho - a sonic wordle, built by an RCer
• FarbVelo - build your own color palettes, also built by an RCer

Notes from SunFounder Training Kit

I picked this back up, too, and learned a few things:

• Raspberry Pi devices typically make it a bit difficult to read analog voltages, it requires installing an external analog-to-digital converter, but the Pico doesn’t require any external components!
• Notes on potentiometers:
  • Three pins: Resistor sits between the top and bottom pin. The middle pin acts as a variable resistor. The outside pins always have the same resistance, but turning the dial on the potentiometer changes the resistance between the middle pin and the top, and the middle pin and the bottom. The total sum resistance middle-to-top and middle-to-bottom is always the same.
  • Need to use a GPIO pin to read the voltage off the potentiometer, but need to use a special type of GPIO pin (analog-to-digital-converter, or ADC)
  • Read 16 bit voltage number using machine.ADC(<pinnumber>).read_u16(). Convert the binary number to a voltage number by calculating the slope.
• Pico W operates at 3.3 Volts