A Year in Review
Last year I posted my New Years’s resolutions and discussed my hopes and ambitions for 2020. Needless to say, things didn’t exactly go as planned. I had three resolutions. The first was to do 3 sets of push ups every day. As the pandemic unfolded that evolved into “do 50 push-ups prior to each serving of alcohol that I consumed. Generally that meant 50-100 pushups a day, translating into roughly 20,000 pushups over the course of the year. The second was to limit my gaming to 7 hours a week. The lockdown very quickly put the kibosh on that as gaming over Discord became my only social outlet. The third was to write a trading algorithm that integrates with an online trading RESTful API. I used this developer’s blog as a point of entry and pursued his recommendation concerning TD Ameritrade. I immediately ran into various issues with the API. I spent a couple weeks on the project, contacted support (which was unresponsive), and finally abandoned the project. Reading through his update, it appears that I wasn’t the only one who ran into issues.
I plan to make this year’s resolutions more concerned with recovering from the fallout of last year. Because my friends often only gamed during the evening, my early-morning programming became unworkable. After I get the vaccine I’d like to resume in-person board gaming with friends local to Portland. This should allow me to start going to bed sooner and resume my early morning programming. My second resolution is to learn a new programming language, Rust, and a new programming environment, microcontrollers. I’ve already done a fair amount of work on Raspberry Pis, to include toy breadboard circuit projects, a media center for the kids, and a retropi Gameboy for long car trips. MCUs seem like the next logical step from my past work on SBCs. Based on a recommendation from a friend I’m considering getting a couple ESP-32S Development Boards. I plan to use one to upgrade my fluid resistance spinner for my road bike to a Bluetooth connected sensor conforming to the FTMS profile. The second one I plan to use to construct a ruggedized anemometer for my catamaran. I’ll probably only be able to complete one of the projects this year, but I’ll keep the second as a stretch goal. Happy New Year!
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