During my holidays, I’ve been reading Breve Historia de los Juegos de Mesa, a gentle introduction to the origin and history of various board games. From the earliest known examples, like the Royal Game of Ur, to modern mechanics.

Recently I got a 3D printer and I have been experimenting with it. After a few prints for “very important things”, like a drill guide, a wine bottle holder or a Lego Extension Card for my Framework laptop, I thought that it was time to design something myself.

Dev Container is an open specification to build and use an OCI container as development environment. It is something I already used in my Chip 8 emulator for having a development environment that can be reused across platforms. Lately, I’ve been looking into Dev Container templates as a way to have reusable devcontainer.json files for new projects. The idea is that while a new project is setup, you can use a template as a starting point, and modify it from there for the new project needs. My template contains those features, VS Code extensions and settings that I always set when I start a new project. Making use of it for a new project is as simple as copying the .devcontainer folder of the template on your project or just use the devcontainer-cli:

During the last months I’ve been developing a CHIP-8 emulator in Python. My main goal was to learn how an emulator works and how to program one. That’s why I tried to write as good and comprehensive code as possible. At this point, tagged as v1.0.0, I consider the emulator complete, as a piece of code that fully emulates a CHIP-8, which does not mean that I will not continue developing some new features now and then.

A beautiful and decorative pot with flowers created with my children. My contribution was some soldering and electronics for powering RGB LEDs that cycle across colors. The components used are a couple of RGB LEDs with their corresponding resistors and a Raspberry Pi Pico (my favorite microcontroller). The source code for the RGB cycle can be found on this repository. The project has been strongly inspired by a similar project from Adafruit.

This is a little project for our greenhouse. Even if we do not really need it (and I still need to make sure that the battery will be safe), this circuit uses a Raspberry Pi Pico for monitoring temperature, humidity, gas and and atmospheric pressure. The collected information is sent every 5 minutes to my Home Assistance instance via MQTT.

Using an ESP32, a potentiometer, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a sleek 7-segment display, I crafted a functional and stylish addition to any workspace. Nestled discreetly within the IKEA frame, this clock is not just about telling time. With a twist of the potentiometer, switch between displaying the time, current temperature, and humidity on the 7-segment display. The ESP32 acts as the silent orchestrator, ensuring seamless operation and connectivity, and using your Wifi to keep the time in sync with a NTP server.

What to do after creating a Space Invaders game for an RGB LED Matrix? Obviously, build a cabinet for RGB games. Using an online service called Boxes.py’s Console2 for designing the cabinet and the PiTop-4 to run the software, I iterated over the previous code and adapted it to the actuators provided by the PiTop: a potentiometer and a button.

Embarking on the journey to build a video game from the ground up has always been one of my ambitions. Understanding the inner workings of a video game and implementing classics have been on my to-do list since my university days.