Summer: Milestones, Moving Boxes, and a Very Long Hardware Queue
Summer is supposed to be quiet. This one had a beach, a guinguette and an eclipse, but also the most hardware I’ve ever had in flight at once, a new home moving from “offer” to “works have started”, and a lot of cardboard.
On the making-things side, it was a relay race. Most of the hardware work this quarter was done with a small group of friends, and my job turned into specifying, reviewing, testing and chasing (a skill in itself). The IMU worked in Verilog by mid-July, and then the boards just kept coming: a SEPIC HV supply, a USB3 bridge board (GL3224), a storage board v2.3 with the BNO055, an intermediary AFE/pulser rework, an RP2350B board, and ultr4rick, the high-end big sibling of pic0rick. On the firmware side, the RGB I2C display, I2C scanning, and DSP running on the RP2350. On the FPGA side, a friend took the gateware forward milestone by milestone, a bigger LUT design, then a ROM trick to bring the LUT count back down. By the end of August a batch of repos were pushed to GitHub and an initial dump went to Zenodo. September added the first GL3224 v5 panels, the start of minUS (a smaller, simpler take on pic0rick), and a fresh batch of boards back from the fab.
pic0rick, the old ultrasound side project that refuses to retire, kept going around the world: Germany, Singapore, Denmark, Norway and Mexico this quarter. The Tindie shop got a proper Stripe setup, then went on pause for August (holidays apply to shipping too). And a couple of new toys: an ESP32 listening to C-ITS traffic signals, and a look at the CH569 “phantomdrive”.
Work kept its own momentum on the project at work: OIR decks for the safety case and sustainability, a documented ontology and its graph, the MIDP loop, a trip to London in July and another in September, quarterly check-ins with the team. The HEC presentation in mid-September (project finance, as ever) was a nice way to restart the academic year. On the PBN side, the Maptivity paper came back from reviewers, comments were addressed, a v2 went in, the final proofread went off at the end of July, and it’s now accepted and out in Sustainability (MDPI). Yeay! I also gave Formed Not Prompted a major rework in August.
Life was full, in the best way. The home project moved fast: paperwork, signatures, kitchen designers, insurance, and works officially starting in late September (I even used Claude Code to build a small 3D view of the flat to follow the works, very satisfying). Moving boxes have been ordered, cables sorted into little transparent bags, six bags of junk out. The new place is going to be worth it =)
Plenty of play and culture too. System of a Down with the neighbours in July, Brest and the beach at Cléder, Saumur, a guinguette, a food truck festival, the eclipse in August, an Unlock game with the family, homebrews tasted (cherry-ginger holds up, the Milly wine too), drinks with friends, cards with friends. MTG had a big summer: Commander decks updated, lots bought and packs sold. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II got its monastery DLC finished. Reading: L’Assassin royal (BD), L’Anniversaire du monde, Dungeon Crawler Carl 6 and 7, Afterburn and Di Rollo’s Bankgreen, with Lies Weeping waiting next. Watching: Godzilla Minus One, L’Odyssée in the cinema, Midsommar, Castlevania S4, Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom, Vox Machina S4, and Screamboat Willie, which is exactly as silly as it sounds. And Utopiales tickets are booked.
Travels: Brest and the beach at Cléder, Saumur, Île de Ré, the Moselle, and London (twice).
If there’s a theme to the quarter, it’s orchestration. Less soldering myself, more making sure many hands pull in the same direction, on the boards, at work, and at home. It’s a different kind of building, and summer was a crash course.
