Recently I’ve been working on a project that involved using an AWS Lambda to interact with resources that required authentication using secrets. This is a fairly typical problem in cloud engineering and the "modern" approach is to use a secrets management engine to make sure only resources that should have access to specific secrets can get access to them.

Having bought a bunch of the materials I need to make my dumb wearable project and told the internet about it I now have no excuse to get started. I think the project can be reasonably broken down into 3 components; the twitter account that people can interact with, a server that exposes an API for my jacket to consume and the jacket itself.

An idea has been floating around in the back of my mind for a few months now. I want to build a coat that connects to the internet. This is what motivated me to figure out how to use micropython on an internet enabled microprocessor like the esp32. The internet of things gets a bad rap but being a massive nerd who loves William Gibson novels means I dig the idea of connecting pointless things to CYBERSPACE so long as it’s the bit of CYBERspace I control. So I’ve embarked on making a stupid leather jacket with lots of shiny LED’s stapled to it.

I’ve had a couple of ESP32 dev boards knocking around for years now but thought I’d pick one up in lockdown as a fun little project to see if I can make something cool ahead of COVID permitting EMF in 2021. This afternoon I sat down to install Micropython on the board . This isn’t the first time I’ve done this and probably won’t be the last so I thought I’d write up how to do it.

I’ve wanted to build a robot for as long as I could remember and with the price of the electronics needed to do so falling exponentionally now feels like the right time.

My initial plan is to build a small two wheeled rover that I can control using the arrow keys of my computer. The new Raspberry Pi Zero W is absurdly small and includes wifi and bluetooth which makes it perfect for this type of project.

I've recently picked up working on my programming and come back to the course Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw.

With Pelican installed and configured the final couple of tasks are sorting out the design and posting content to your site. Thankfully Pelican makes both of these really easy. Themes are handled by the excellent Pelican Themes git repository and submitting content is as simple as write, build and push. Write a post in Markdown. Tell pelican to build your site, and then push it to your web server.

I've posted on why I picked Pelican as a static blog generator but now I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of how to use it. It does require you not be afraid to edit configuration files, and a little knowledge of Python and markup languages will go a long way. You will also need a webserver, but if you just want to get your feet wet, there are plenty of free hosting providers you can try out before you fork out for hosting. However if you want to use Pelican hopefully this will be a good introduction.