Hello on Sarah's Microblog

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:54:31 +0200

Way to go sniping myself with figuring out a neat way to do bandcamp embeds. Turns out you can getRemote the url of what you want to embed and then likely find relevant embed links and data in the meta tags using findRESubmatch. Don’t forget to safeURL it!

If you don’t mind the loss of interactivity you could get rid of the iframe entirely by extracting the track info and album cover to host locally… Later.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:08:14 +0200

Bowie by Ingrid and the Ministers, released 21 April 2023

Background music from some yt video on DIY guitar pickups reminded me…

Pagination

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:57:49 +0200

It was becomming necessary, so I added rudimentary pagination using HUGOs inbuilt solution. This means replyTos don’t currently count, which might need fixing at some point…

Also I should probably add some little js thing to collapse long reply chains with some readmore buttons.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:27:28 +0200

So anyways I started ~~blasting~~ redesigning.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:03:10 +0200

Complete RE of the original Frekvens controller and LED matrix board.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:01:38 +0200

The MCU on the controllerboard has the markings 89F112 000, which appears to be the CMS89F112 from Cmsemicon. It’s listed on jlc, for an estimated unit price of 0.3 USD. Hard to beat. The datasheet is in chineese, but looks to have

A 2K x 14 bit flash memory (I’m unfamiliar with the practicality of 14 bit memory?).
144 bytes of RAM.
Inbuilt ADC, comparators, timers, PWM outputs, buzzer driver and a sleep mode.
A voltage range of 1.8-5.5V (at 4MHz, or from 2.5V at 8MHz).

A very capable little device. 144 bytes of RAM is not a lot, a bitfield for the LED matrix would take up 32 bytes, almost a quarter of memory. Still, that is absolutely enough for more complex or interesting effects on the matrix, like iterative or dynamic animations. My claim still stands: TE’s embedded developers dropped the ball on this one.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:49:39 +0200

Scans and sketch of the original circuit:

Cleaner sketch to follow…

Ikea Frekvens LED matrix modding

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:22:47 +0200

I found a couple of ikea frekvens LED matrix cubes from that teenage engineering collab in a thrift store in Vienna. They were cheap and I’d heard about people modding them. Plugged in, they provide possibly the most dissapointing lightshow I’ve seen:

The LED matrix cubes 'dancing' to sounds.

Download

Whatever electronics they’ve got in there, it’s doing a very simple job: Show a static frame of a pre-baked five frame looping animation. Monitor a microphone and progress the animation each time a loud sound occurs. Check two buttons on the back to turn the LEDs on or off, and switch between a few different animation sets.
That’s it. Nothing dynamic, nothing exciting. Why not make it just a bit more exciting?

Partial solar eclipse

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:24:57 +0200

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:34:22 +0200

Soldering a v1.1 board of the flying checklist project. Blaming my tools in the solder paste being way out of date and unrefrigerated. Reflow went surprisingly well though. No tombstones, one bridge, a few unconnected pads.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:27:47 +0200

Moesgård Strand

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:32:47 +0200

Found a 60x60 LED panel for 20dkk in the thrift store last week. Found an LED driver in the trash a couple days later. Just had to adjust the output power and change the power connector. Who knows, dali control might be broken, but I’m not living in an office. Think it’s gonna be my new work desk light.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:09:17 +0200

Okay, image rendering is in a workable state now. I also fixed up the front page to show sections properly (and added a right hand sidebar):

Some obvious next steps:

Don’t convert png’s if smaller output.
Automatic read-more solution to shorten replied-to posts?
Return to main page button if header disabled.
Figure out tags and comments.
RSS feeds for everything.
Video shortcode.

7 years ago

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:18:08 +0200

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:55:31 +0200

Bought a couple of the AKY0477 batteries from TME and got them installed. There’s a bit of free space around the camera lens where extra cable can be tucked in.

Batteries replaced aaand.. it works perfectly.

Now what in the world can I use a little action cam for…? I also found the cage for it with a broken hinge. Maybe worth fixing.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:47:17 +0200

Okay gallery shortcode implemented.

Readmore shortcode as well… Currently using the details html tag to have a js-free solution. Seems to work fine, as long as the button doesn’t need to move to the bottom. Wondering if that could be solved with css as well…

Next up… Better image rendering? The building the plane as it takes off approach is pretty neat tbh.

From writing a first post

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:27:59 +0200

Okay this thing has been in the works for a bit… And on the backburner for much longer. The general idea is just to have some place to put things that I’d want to share, or might be useful for others.

Immediately obvious TODOs from attempting a first post:

Add the read morefunctionality as a shortcode.
Fix up image rendering.
- Do auto-processing of images so I can paste without care. Also a shortcode thing..
- Specifically, clear EXIF data and such…
- Click-to-maximize.. With higher resolution versions?
- Add gallery view style rendering…

Also I’m not used to spur-of-the-moment writing. Interesting exercise. Also, doing proper automations for creating posts etc was a good idea.

Rollei Bullet HD actioncam with dead batteries

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:23 +0200

I found a Rollei action camera in the trash. Seems fully functional except it won’t take a charge. The shell clicks open after removing the four visible screws at each side of the camera. The camera has two lipo flat-packs wired in parallel and soldered to the board. Only one of the cells has a protection circuit, the other’s wired in behind it. Both cells have swollen significantly.