Years ago, back when every conference had an “IoT track” and nobody was talking about LLMs yet, I bought a Nandland Go Board with the intent of learning FPGAs. The board went into a drawer, life happened, and I never got around to it. A few project ideas have brought FPGAs back to the front of my mind, so I pulled the Go Board out of the drawer and went back to basics using an entirely open-source toolchain on Fedora. ...
My main keyboard for the last six years has been an Atreus62 — a 62-key ergonomic split mechanical keyboard with column-linear, vertically staggered keys. It’s been bulletproof the entire time. Then, last week, it started dropping keystrokes here and there. The flakiness got worse over the next few days. Eventually the entire top row of letters went silent. This is the point where a closed-source peripheral becomes e-waste. Instead, I spent an afternoon at the bench, rebuilt the firmware from source, swapped an inexpensive microcontroller, and got my keyboard back. The only reason that was possible is that every layer of the thing is open. ...
My first instinct, whenever I’m using an AI coding assistant, is to follow along with every step. Guide it, redirect it when it drifts, catch mistakes before they compound. It feels responsible. But it also puts the human squarely inside the AI’s feedback loop — which defeats a lot of the point. Recently, a few colleagues and I started an experiment to find out what happens when you deliberately remove that tight human-in-the-loop. The result is drellabot, a lights-out software factory. ...
After a long gap, I’m starting to write again. This blog is called Orderly Chaos because that’s more or less how my project workbench looks on a good day — organized enough to find things, chaotic enough to stay interesting. The posts here will document technical projects as they happen: hardware builds, firmware, software, FPGA work, motorsport data systems, and whatever else ends up on the workbench. A few things I’m working on that will probably show up here soon: ...