Norm's Projects

Welcome to my blog

I'm publishing notes about what I learned - in case it can help others. I try to write them as comprehensively as possible, for people who are just starting.

I publish instruction on how to build my projects - electronics, or code, or both. and provide links to the code - if it runs on raspberry pi.

I also provide screen shots and user guides for the ios apps I develop.

Note: I just started posting in December 2021... It might take a little while to get all my notes and projects on here.
How this came about...

Having accumulated enough years of working, I took a break when Covid hit. It was going to be a one-year "sabatical" ... but so far, I'm still on "sabatical"

What am I doing?

I do electronics projects and some software goals I wanted to hit - like writing an IOS app or creating Raspberry Pi powered devices.

Physics and electronics were just as I left them 30 years ago, so I could dust off my old Tecktronics 465B Oscilloscope to investigate how dirty the power supply of a raspberry pi can be when trying to build audio circuits...

Software, on the other hand:

Software has changed, since I last wrote web applications in the early 2000's(or programs in the 1980's - but let's not go there)..

  • Python went from version 2 to 3 - and almost nobody is writing new stuff in python 2
  • IOS introduced Swift and SwiftUI - and it's early enough that every new IOS version changes things...
  • Relying on Other People's Software: So many people now just use libraries to do stuff - This is very different philosophy for me - given that I started on Fortran on punch cards...

And then I had to learn some new things - because of the choices I made:

  • I finally said goodbye to windows and bought me a MacBook Pro for writing code
  • I read "UNIX in a nutshell" - and became somewhat proficient in the Raspbian world of Raspberry Pi
  • I learned that how to do stuff in linux changes every 10 years or so, like DBus and SystemdD, while others remain arcane and obscure like alsa audio...
Why publish my notes?

If you are very new to something, or have been away for quite long, instructions and examples on the web can be cryptic. Don't get me wrong - without Stack Overflow, it would have taken much longer. However, the experts who freely share their knowledge on the web, have all but forgotten that the basics they know are so obvious to them, had to be learned at some point: hence, they no longer think of defining them.

I am rarely content to only copy code examples to solve a problem. I want to understand why it does what it does. This means, tracking down concepts or digging into explanations - which often are difficult to comprehend because the most basic principles, unknown to me - the new guy - are not explained. Of course, these principles are defined on the web - just not always easy to find.

So I resolved to write down my learning process. I want to pay particular attention to the things that appear obvious to those who already know them. I hope I succeed in helping out those who will read this blog in search of comprehensive guides, instructions etc.