Background I have rather terrible self-organizational skills. For the last 4-5 years, I’ve essentially been just winging it. To meet the deadlines and requirements given to me by life, I’ve been using solely a calendar (for tracking very important events) and sheer will. In a nutshell, I’ve just been controlled by the demands of life. Tasks are usually only done when the deadline is looming over me, and I have almost no hobbies. I do however manage to rapidly complete projects if a sudden wave of motivation hits me, but if hardships hit or it takes longer than expected, the project gets abandoned. And yes, having a heavy procrastination problem is a given. ...

Note: This isn’t going to be an explicit guide on how to add a dongle to any ZMK board. I will create a post for that later. Background I’ve since daily driven the Swan40 for quite a while, and it’s been working perfectly… on my desktop. Since it’s been working out so well, I wanted to make another one to have on-the-go, for use with my laptop. However, this is where some problems appeared. ...

In this module, we will be taking our first steps towards optimizing the 3D printing process. Why Optimize? Yes, the default settings in the slicers mentioned in the last module should work for most cases, but the issue is that they are designed to be a catch-all solution. In simpler terms, they are designed to be able to avoid

Introduction For the “A Guide to 3D Printing” bundle, the idea is to create a practical guide for people who currently view 3D printing as a black box that creates their desired 3D models in real life. You may check out the current posts here. Initial Difficulties For basically all my life, I’ve always been the learner, never the teacher. While trying to compile my knowledge into articles, the biggest difficulty I had was with structuring. Since pieces of knowledge tend to be connected with other pieces of knowledge in a web-like way, it is very tricky to structure everything such that the knowledge can be understood linearly. ...

NOTE: This bundle will be focusing on FDM/FFF (Fused Deposition Modelling/Fused Filament Fabrication) 3D printing. In layman terms, the type of 3D printing where plastic filament is involved. Prerequisites To follow this section, I suggest having the following: A functional 3D printer PLA filament A computer Objective After reading this article, you should be able to: Find 3D models from online sources Use a slicer to turn a 3D model into gcode Successfully print a model Understand the general 3D printing process TL;DR: You should have the bare minimum of understanding needed to print a 3D model. ...

Tricks In my goals for this project, my number one goal was really the battery life. However, on a tiny split keyboard, I have not seen any good battery mounting methods that do not involve tenting the keyboard to make space below it or having it on the side. I want the battery to be part of the keyboard such that the keyboard’s physical footprint doesn’t have to extend too much to accommodate for it. ...

Note: You can find the relevant files of this project in the Swan40 GitHub repository. Goals Hardware On-off switch (Like the Corne) There should be a switch to disconnect the battery on the hardware level. Usage of a XIAO nRF52840 It should utilize Seeed Studio’s XIAO nRF52840 as the controller. (This was a cost-cutting measure; the nice!nano, a commonly used bluetooth microcontroller, costs about 26€ a piece excl. shipping, while this board costs only $10.) Software ZMK It should use ZMK as its firmware. Design Large and flexible battery capacity The PCB should allow for mounting of large and small batteries. There should be at least two battery mounting options. The battery mounting spots should be able to accommodate up to 1000mAh LiPo batteries. 3D-printed case It should be possible to mount the board in a 3D-printed case which does not tilt or raise the PCB significantly. Melted PCB traces The traces should be melted using the Round Tracks plugin. (Because it’s cool!) Aggressive column stagger (Like the Ferris Sweep) The column for the pinky finger should be aggressively staggered.

Introduction For most people getting started with 3D printing, it usually seems like a black box; you give it a 3D model of something you want, and it spits out a real, tangible object. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with viewing 3D printing this way. However, that’s like buying a racing bike just to use it in 1st gear all the time; gaining a little more understanding about how the machine (or bicycle, if we are to continue the analogy) works goes a long way for getting what you want done faster and better. ...

From my post about my digital setup, I wanted to quickly write a small post about getting nushell and starship working in an Alpine Linux Toolbx container. So, the problem is that Alpine Linux uses the musl C library instead of glibc. This causes a compatibility problem when running Rust programs that were compiled on the main system within the Alpine Linux container. In addition, the PATH environment variable is inherited from the host system due to how Toolbx works. ...

If you haven’t already checked out the about site page, please read it first for some context. Attempt 1: Wordpress Link to Wordpress. When one usually looks to create a website as a complete newbie to the web development space, the first results usually tend to be either website services like Squarespace or Wix, or Wordpress (the open source web content management system, not the hosting service). Squarespace and Wix felt a little bit restrictive in terms of what type of content I could create with it, which made me attempt to work with Wordpress. ...