How roro9stack gets built, written up as it happens: what worked, what broke, and what the firmware taught me on the way.
One post for each stretch of work, newest first. They are written after the fact, from the commits, the decisions and the logs, and they keep the bad parts in: every post has at least one thing that turned out not to be what I thought. For what the firmware does today, read the user guide; this is how it got there.
My other write-ups (a vinyl remote, a ZFS rescue) are on twisla's experiments, where these posts were first published.
roro9stack learns to browse its SD card and keep notes that save themselves, CI starts building and signing every release, and the device installs the project's releases on its own, which nearly took all of its memory while IRC was connected.
Read where the memory went →roro9stack's housekeeping milestone: the SD card that "refused" writes turns out to be a driver asking one byte too soon, fixed and reported upstream; networks without DHCP get fixed addresses, DNS and NTP; and a System App shows tasks, memory and network use live, starting with a main loop that eats a whole core.
Read who was really at fault →roro9stack switches on its LoRa radio, receive only: a Radio Service that shares the SD card's bus, a Scanner that decodes Meshtastic headers and records Wireshark captures, and a Sweep of the whole band. It works, and in an hour outside it heard exactly nothing, mostly over the noise of its own electronics.
Read what it's listening to →roro9stack gets a Gemini client: pages over TLS with trust on first use, links, search prompts, bookmarks, and pages saved to the SD card to read offline. On a device where IRC already holds most of the memory, every page goes through the card, and the big ones are read from it as you scroll.
Read it, offline if you like →roro9stack learns where it is: a GNSS receiver read in the background, a sky view of every satellite overhead, the clock set from space, and Tracks recorded to the SD card. Then a memory hunt that found 47 KB the firmware didn't know it was wasting.
Read where it went →My Cardputer firmware now updates itself over Wi-Fi or from its SD card, refuses anything I didn't sign, rolls back an update that crashes, opens a debug console over the network, and sulks in Safe Mode when all else fails. How it works, and the three times it lied to me along the way.
Read the flight log →A pocket computer with a keyboard and a LoRa radio, and my first firmware written from scratch. In three days it learned to join Wi-Fi by itself, stay on IRC in the background, keep its logs on an SD card, map the Wi-Fi channels around it and find an access point by ear. The mesh messenger it's meant to become comes later.
Read how I built it →