Hi, I'm Alex! :coffee:

What is this blog? I started writing articles back in 2012, ranging from travel logs to programming tutorials in PHP. I enjoy writing texts here and then when I find (or don’t find) certain things that might be interesting for others. All those articles I wrote in the past years were spread over different platforms, including self-written blog websites using flatfile storage… A lot of these platforms, including Medium, Patreon and Ko-Fi are missing fundamentals like syntax highlighting without using screenshots or github gists, which can be very annoying considering the type of content I focus on.

What is gaia? Gaia is..or better will be.. an easy but deep software to manage your pets, targeting Reptile and Insect-Hobbyists. The idea is to have a central system to monitor your loved ones. Why did I start with gaia? I currently have a neat little book that contains all my infos and care-taking notes. Heck…I even published the templates for it and I love it. But it still consists of a lot of manual work that begins with checking the calendar every day, taking out the book and a pen to write in it.

About 2 years ago, I wrote a small library to create menus on an ESP8266/32 utilising the SSD1306 OLED Display and MicroPython. MicroPython is a stripped down variant of Python, basically made for IoT devices. A very well known example of such device-series is the Arduino Family or ESPs. Installing the USB-Serial driver There are two common chips on ESPs: CP210x or CH340x. Those chips can be found close to the USB-Connector on the ESP-Board.

This is the second part covering the simple scheduler script. In case you didn’t read the first part Writing a simple scheduler for a Discord bot it is encouraged to read it first for the context. Thank you :3 Our first attempt to schedule tasks inside our Discord bot contained a lot of clutter and unused variables / parameters. After giving the scheduler a second thought and re-reading my own article about it, I wanted to improve the code a bit and make it more tidy and clean.

While I was working on some recent additions to some Discord bots written in JavaScript I stumbled upon the demand for a way to schedule messages or actions. Such actions can be the refresh of some counters after a given period or the check for due dates to send out notifications etc. Sure, you can utilise built-in functions like setTimeout or setInterval for each action but you end up with a bunch.

Drawing an eye diagram with Python I just got a task for university…well, lets say it was a bunch of tasks but this one was kinda heavy for me at first. Imagine getting a dataset consisting of millions of values resulting from just measuring the Voltage of a USB transition for a couple of seconds. The task was to analyse those values and draw the results into a so called eye diagram to see how distinctive the symbols aka ON / OFF levels are.

Disclaimer: This article has been imported from Ko-Fi with limited syntax highlighting capabilities and might be updated in the future to better showcase the code. Designing IoT devices always brings the aspect of costs per device / per system with it. The SSD1306 OLED display and the ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller are relatively cheap parts but also highly available and powerful. While Arduino was and still is the go-to platform for many people, especially beginners, ESPs tempt with their built-in WiFi and the possibility to program them with MicroPython.