I started working my way back towards spending more time programming as the summer started (in between getting re-addicted to CDProjektRed’s Gwent).

I started off by working on my btrfs snapshot program, Snap in Time. I finally added in the ability for the remote culling to take place. (My backup directories had started getting a LITTLE too big) I also added in official text log files so that I wouldn’t have to rely on my cronjob log file hack.

First time soldering headers

The last time I tried to solder something, it was just a few pins and it gave me so much trouble and took hours. So, when I was thinking about how how I was going to redo my BBQ thermostat with Adafruit Circuit Python and Stemma QT, I was afraid to get the FeatherS2 since it wasn’t sold in a configuration that came with headers already soldered on. The idea of soldering some 28 pins filled me with fear of screwing up the board. After it arrived, I procrastinated. Finally, today I did it. I don’t know what changed from when I tried to solder last time, but it worked reasonably well. Yes, if you look at the picture, I need to fix the USB pin and pin 38 before I try inserting into any headers, but it just took me about 15 minutes and I didn’t have any feelings of giving up or intense frustration. So, I just wanted to celebrate this milestone. Hurray for me!

I’ve been awaiting this Adabox forever because of the pandemic. It’s finally here. Celebrate my excitement at my first Adabox!

https://youtu.be/CSYSXjjHyCY

Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of code, a digital spinner we called The Sibling Chooser. Here’s the code, and you can see that it is indeed like Scratch: