Notes for August 12-18

It was a quiet week, but still devoted to (pretty literally) mopping up stuff and checking off some long-standing items from my TODO lists.

I finally got around to adding InvokeAI to my AI stack, mostly so that my kids could play with it when I’m not fiddling with ollama. Progress on my own AI projects has been slow both due to the lack of focus time and a few detours into sqlite-vec, but my news summarization pipeline is still looking like the best candidate for an “upgrade” to both GPT-4o and a more modern stack.

I finally got a replacement part cooling fan for the TwoTrees SK1 I reviewed months ago, so I also took the opportunity to upend the printer and replace all the underlying system fans with 40mm Noctuas–which also required me to splice in a pair of 24-12V buck converters to power them:

Now the only (still very) noisy fan when the printer is idle is the 30mm one that cools the toolhead. Of course the new enclosure fans drown it out when the printer is running, but that’s a different story.

I spent a fair chunk of time getting a TFT SPI screen working with an RP2040 for a project (first in CircuitPython for basic–if slow–testing and now in C).

That of itself is not very notable, except that I am doing it using a Waveshare RP2040 Pi Zero, which is a very neat drop-in replacement for the regular Pi Zero:

I hope they get around to making a version with the new RP2350, but for now this is more than enough for what I need it to do, although SPI updates are much slower than I expected (I clearly need to learn how to do batch updates).

As to the board itself, it’s just great–having all the GPIO headers broken out like this makes it trivial to do quick prototyping without a breadboard, but I am very interested in using the second USB port (which is PIO-driven) as a host, so I suspect I’ve just found myself another deep rabbit hole to dive into.

After replacing that dead drive I realized I had subtly different settings across my Proxmox nodes, so I spent some time standardizing storage layouts.

A power outage yesterday was a great reminder to update Wake-on-LAN configurations (as usual, the one machine I needed was the one missing from the list), but I also took the time to document how to get NixOS on LXC.

I expect the next couple of weeks to have a little less hardware stuff (although I am expecting some parts to arrive for a project), so I hope to get back to some more software-oriented hobbies.