Winter Quarter: Benches, Boards and a Lot of Information Requirements
The year started gently: a stack of half-read books finished over the break, a couple of project pages written (cyanotypes, because Blue January is a thing now, and the Futures one), and the vague feeling that this would be a calm quarter. It wasn’t =) But it was a good kind of busy.
On the making-things side, hardware set the pace. It started with a proper test bench: four piezos, a bit of documentation and, yes, Legos to hold everything in place (best mechanical engineering tool ever, innit?). Then came MUX tests driven from the CLI, chip recommendations, specs for a bigger tool, and the first look at the ECP5 boards with and without the FPGA. The AFE got rerouted, boards got ordered, the RP2350 boards got a new pulser, a v1.2 AFE and a v1.1 MUX, and direct sampling between 10 and 35 µs started to give something sensible. By March the repos and branches were up, the first lines of Verilog for a CLI were written, and boring-but-vital things landed: autodocumentation, the git head injected into builds, autobuild and releases. Meanwhile pic0rick kept travelling, this time to Japan.
Work-wise, the quarter was all about structure. On the project at work, lots of time on information requirements: knowledge maps, process maps, flowcharts, decks, workshops (in French and in English), and a series of interviews to understand what people actually need, as opposed to what the templates say they need. Several trips to London, a training session there too, and the first round of quarterly check-ins with the team. Less visible than a board coming back from the fab, but just as much iteration.
The teaching and PROBONO threads kept going in parallel. My project finance sessions at HEC restarted in March, with the usual mix of preparation anxiety and fun once in the room. On the PBN side (PROBONO, the EU-funded project), comments on the placemaking articles, slides, and a day booked in Porto. Also a first meeting for a Data4Good-type collaboration, and a small personal system of “people cards” to stop forgetting who’s working on what.
Life admin was there too, of course: flat paperwork that finally moved, a new jacket after putting it off way too long, sorting out the medicine cabinet. Not glamorous, all necessary.
And plenty of play and culture to keep the balance. Books: the end of the Belgariade (3 to 5, back to back), The Wee Free Men, Gogmagog (twice, two volumes), Silent Jenny, Les mains vides, Genefort’s Points chauds, the first Wayfarers by Becky Chambers, and the start of Abercrombie’s First Law. Screens: Stranger Things S5, Wake Up Dead Man, Platoon, Dark Star (before Alien, it shows), Bambi (yes), and a lot of The Office, both US and UK. Out and about: Dakh Daughters, Boléro, a Sherlock game with the neighbours, a race around Montmartre, momos with friends, CS2 evenings, cousins in London, a Winota deck built for MTG, and the first plans for Prague.
Travels: London (four times, including a training session there), and the Moselle.
If there’s a theme to the quarter, it’s probably foundations. Test benches, build pipelines, process maps, information requirements: none of it is the final thing, all of it is what makes the final thing possible. Slow to show, quick to pay back.
