Eyes Front: Giving the Volvo EX30 the Speedometer It Forgot

A CAN bus dead end, a rectangular prototype, and a little round M5Stack StopWatch that now lives exactly where a speedometer should have been all along.

The AI Meeting Buddy: A Pocket Recorder for People Who Talk Too Much to Take Notes

A portable, voice-controlled meeting recorder built on the ESP32-C6, three prototype expansion boards, and the two hours of UI debugging that nearly did me in.

Building a Portable AS3935 Lightning Detector with the XIAO ESP32-C3

A handheld lightning sensing and ranging device built around the Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3, a Grove AS3935 Franklin sensor, and a 240x240 round display. For those rare moments when Britain actually has weather.

Building a Custom ESP32-S3 ADS-B Radar Display with Ultrafeeder

How to build a dedicated, real-time ADS-B flight-tracking display using an ESP32-S3 480x480 screen, LVGL, and a local Ultrafeeder/dump1090 stream.

Taking Back Control: How a Cheap ESP32 Saved My Car From the Data Harvesting Overlords

There is a distinct flavor of modern irritation that only a "smart" gadget can provide. You buy a piece of hardware; you plug it into your own property; and yet, somehow, you are suddenly signing away your digital soul just to read a simple number. Such was my

The Ultimate Arsenal Fan Accessory

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

From Miles to Microcontrollers: Building a Custom Strava Dashboard

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

Tracking the Heavens: Building a Laser-Guided ISS Tracker

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

The 6th Screen: Building a Unified, Multi-Surface Calendar Dashboard

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

My GitHub Projects

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

Is my study environment toxic?

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,

More (Green) Glow on My Desk

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

Re-becoming a coder

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

Scrolling Through Time: Building a Newbury Train Tracker with the LilyGo T-Display-S3 Long

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

esp-idf pain. building a Pacman console

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

Not a runner, runner

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

Keeping Time in the Dark: Adding an External RTC to My Pwnagotchi

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

Better Pwnagotchi

Connecting an M5Stack GPS Unit (typically the AT6668 or AT6558 based modules) via UART is a smart move—it's more power-efficient than USB and keeps your build slim. Moving Beyond USB: Integrating M5Stack GPS with Pwnagotchi When building a Pwnagotchi, most people start with a simple USB GPS