We’ve all been there. You’re rummaging through your electronics graveyard and you spot them: a spare 3.2" OLED display and an ESP32 microchip just gathering dust. Your inner engineer immediately whispers, “We could build something with that.” Then you remember your 15-year-old daughter is a massive
There is something deeply satisfying about seeing your hard work visualized. While I love diving into the deep analytics provided by the statistics-for-strava project, I wanted a way to see my progress without opening a browser or checking my phone. I wanted a physical object on my desk that whispered
There is something inherently magical about watching the International Space Station (ISS) streak across the night sky. It is a football-field-sized laboratory hurtling at 17,500 mph, 250 miles above our heads. But unless you are constantly checking an app, it’s easy to miss. To solve this, I built
They say five monitors are enough for anyone. They were wrong. My latest desk addition: the "6th screen" - isn't just another display; it's a dedicated, ambient window into my entire life. I built nextUp Calendar, a self-hosted ecosystem designed to bridge the gap
A quick reference to all my public GitHub repositories at github.com/merlinmb, covering ESP32 hardware projects, home automation tools, and various utilities. Repository Description Language esp32_cosensorCO₂ monitor using a Sensirion SCD4x sensor on ESP32, with a 256×64 OLED sparkline display, MQTT telemetry, and a built-in web server
Building a Custom CO2 Monitor for my Home Lab My study is more than just a place where I take work calls; it’s a high-density engineering hub. Between the 3D printer humming in the corner, the frequent scent of solder smoke, and a 10U rack housing my full homelab,
Bringing the GitHub Contribution Graph to Life There is a certain rhythm to a developer’s life, often measured in the small green squares of a GitHub contribution graph. For years, that graph lived behind a browser tab; a digital ghost of my productivity. But as I’ve rediscovered my
From ZX Spectrum to IoT: Rediscovering the Joy of the Code For many of us in the technology sector, the screen is a workspace: a place of pipeline metrics, revenue projections, and strategic roadmaps. But lately, I’ve been finding my way back to the screen as a canvas. Rediscovering
For anyone living in a commuter town like Newbury, the "train stress" is real. Am I going to catch the Great Western Railway (GWR) service to Paddington? Is the Bedwyn shuttle on time? Instead of fumbling with a phone app, I decided to build a permanent, glanceable solution
Building a handheld arcade machine is a rite of passage for many makers, but my latest journey—creating a portable Pac-Man powerhouse—pushed me far beyond the comfortable boundaries of the Arduino IDE. The goal was specific: porting the PELLETINO project (a faithful Z80-emulated Pac-Man arcade) onto the Waveshare ESP32-C6
I hate it. I love it Today sucked, so I climbed on the treadmill and ran. 1.98km in and I'm already dying. Tired, bored and regretting my Friday evening choice. Okay, just get to 5. You can do it. The sound of my feet pounding away as
One of the few quirks of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W—the brain of my Pwnagotchi—is its lack of a Real-Time Clock (RTC). Without an internet connection to sync via NTP, the Pwnagotchi forgets the time every time it reboots. This leads to messy logs and "back