There are three projects that I hope to progress on over the winter of 2022. They are all purely software and exist in some states already. They are:

1. Thermistor LUT Code Generating Tool
2. Telemetry Packet Code Generating Tool
3. TinyFEA

Winter brings a slowdown in what can be mechanical work I can accomplish. Renovations on the house are largely put on hold and the cars are only worked on in emergencies. As a result, I’m hoping to spend some time investing in software projects that both keep me busy and develop my skills and digital footprint.

Thermistor LUT Code Generating Tool

This project is inspired by the times I’ve had to make a custom look-up table for thermistors in different embedded projects. I’m hoping to make a tool that simply generates all the required code for the table based on parameters pulled from the thermistor circuit. Something that I suspect will be an internal tool, but it should help speed things up when generating code for temperature data loggers. Something that I find myself doing quite a bit.

The goal is something along the lines of a CLI tool that takes in the parameters of the circuit and some other options and spits out a LUT in a header file ready to be included in a project along with some performance metrics in the comments. I like having the degrees per ADC step for instance.

Telemetry Packet Code Generating Tool

Similar to the amount of time I spend making Thermistor LUTs, I feel like having an easily portable telemetry packet standard is a great way to speed up project development. Again I see this as a possible benefit as a few projects I have in mind are focused on data acquisition.

I imagine a CLI tool that reads in a CSV or XLS description of the telemetry packet and then creates a header file ready for the project that provides some standard output functionality, like CSV, or base64 encoding. More exacting requirements to come.

TinyFEA

I want TinyFEA to become an educational tool. Mainly for myself, but hopefully for others. I started this project years ago hoping to design a bicycle in it but it has since evolved into more of a technology demonstration. I’ve taken on other responsibilities that overwhelm any bike-building plans but I still want to have the tool. So I’m pivoting the goal of the program not to design the bike, but to practice better software development techniques.

TinyFEA is currently a CLI tool that reads in a model file and then solves for displacements but there are problems with how matrices are represented and so a pseudo-from-scratch approach will be very beneficial both in improving the quality of the tool but also giving time to work on the documentation.

How much will I get done?

I have no idea. I’m going to try and dedicate time this winter, but who knows? I’m going to blog no matter what. But something else might come up and I’ll just have to go with the flow!