Hardware arrived! It was broken. A line mode gemini client, gmnlm!

My parts arrived for a v0.1 of a project I've got on the backburner, that I'd hoped to bring further ahead over the previous weekend. Unfortunately, the main part had been part of a bad batch of adhesive and had cracked, and was unusable for my use case. A replacement is currently winging its way to me now, but I was definitely saddened by it. Further to that, I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn't connect to it from my laptop. Initially there were wayland related problems with Arduino IDE. But those I fixed by setting an environment variable on launch.

So that was an interesting fix. But that worked fine. Then it was time to figure out how to actually install all the libraries I needed for my new hardware (I'm deliberately being discreet about it in case it really doesn't work for what I want to do with it), and connect it up. That then took a lot of trial and error and eventually I got to the point that I could see the device, could try and send code for the device, but wound up with an invalid head of packet error, which was particularly frustrating, as none of the answers that I could find helped.

Then I decided to boot up a spare raspberry pi I had lying around, figuring that maybe there's something in the USB-C -> USB-A adapter that I'm using to connect my laptop to the cable for the device, and the raspberry pi has bare USB ports, that was my thinking anyway.

Then yet another roadblock, this time that the libraries I wanted to install weren't available for ARM. That really took the wind out of my sails, but thankfully there was another computer available, the big Windows desktop. That had an x64 architecture and USB-A 2.x ports available.

I had hoped that maybe I'd be forced to really get to grips with why my laptop was unable to accomplish this, but fortunately (unfortunately for the tinkerer in me), it worked, and I was able to compile and flash some of the example programs successfully.

So on the plus side, when the replacement comes, I'll be able to write software for the little espruino/arduino device, but on the negative side, it'll be on windows, coming with all the fun of trying to install other programming tools on there. Perhaps I can figure out some way of writing on the laptop, and just doing the actual flash from Windows, but that's going to be annoying. At least I can still use my mechanical keyboard on Windows. That's a nice positive I guess.

On an unrelated note, I saw on the gemini mailing list that ~sircmpwn, sr.ht founder and general software extraordinaire, (thanks for swaywm, it's really awesome!), had discovered and written a gemini client. In C. With the potential to extract out a library to allow interacting with gemini in C. That's tremendously interesting, especially the library part. That could come in really handy in the future.

[http] gmni source code on sr.ht

Also there's a line mode browser which I may have to look into more, as it may solve a problem that I'm likely to come up against soon.

But yeah, I need to go to bed. I'm going to have a long week, even though I took Monday off so it'll only be 4 days. More updates to come as soon as I have anything to say again.

~lewiscowper