posts by Jonathan Davies
Cargo crates - Stable Diffusion 2024
I’ve released a rust crate called cargo-open. It provides a handy cargo subcommand that opens an installed crate’s directory in your $EDITOR. It’s modelled on bundle open from Ruby’s Bundler.
To install it, run:
cargo install cargo-open
Then:
cargo open crate-name
Note that this is meant for inspecting a crate’s contents, making changes is not a good idea.
Have fun! 🦀
The two halves of the ZigStar OliZig POE
My zigbee-based IoT empire (mostly turning lights on and off) has historically involved a raspi running zigbee2mqtt, talking to the zigbee network via a CC2652R-based USB dongle called a zzh. Zigbee devices are presented on the mqtt message bus, and can thus be automated however one chooses.
Latterly the zzh has been repurposed as a bluetooth sniffer, so I needed a new TI chip to take over zigbee duties. Enter the OliZig POE. It’s built on an Olimex ESP32-POE, an ESP32 dev board with a PoE ethernet port. On top of this sits a daughter board which is basically the same thing as the zzh. The ESP32 presents the zigbee radio on a TCP socket, and zigbee2mqtt on the pi can connect to it over the LAN. This allows us to place the zigbee coordinator where it can get the best signal, while keeping the pi tucked out of the way.
It works great out of the box using the shipped firmware, with no need to change any settings or re-pair anything, two thumbs up. However we’re now in a situation where most of the work is still happening on the pi, and we’re using the powerful ESP32 SoC just to send the raw zigbee packets over the LAN to be processed by a bunch of javascript code in the form of zigbee2mqtt. Not very tidy. Surely the ESP32 could handle zigbee2mqtt’s job and process the packets locally? Enter tasmota.
Before christmas I finally installed the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model on my local machine. This post features my favourite images from a couple of afternoons spent playing around with it.
Click through to see them all, and a few thoughts on the AI art debate at the bottom - the page might load slowly if you’re not on decent wifi.
I’ve been having a lot of fun recently playing through the Ocarina of Time PC port. Released March 2022, it’s accumulated a lot of nice enhancements as open source ports tend to do. It runs in 60fps with the viewport scaled to the resolution and aspect ratio of your choice. There’s a host of gameplay tweaks, and the option to use a freely orbiting camera controlled by the right analog stick, as seen in modern games.
During my playthrough I was pondering what enhancements of my own to add, and after vanquishing Ganon in 4k I decided the free camera would be most impactful thing I could improve.
