soch.cc

One of my favorite texts

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Trees by Philip Larkin¹ was one of my favorite texts when I was doing A-Levels literature and it remains one of my favorite poems.

It has straight forward structure: three four-lined stanzas, each with eight syllables, with one exception. Reading it over and over again, the repetitive syllabic structure, the verby lines and sparse use of adjectives make it memorable.

In particular, the image of trees as “unresting castles” is deeply ingrained in my mind. When I am in Brunei, Malaysia or China, the thick lush forests leave a deep impression on me. I look upon the masses of green and feel drawn to their opaqueness.

Emulating I2S on STM32F103

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I like building audio and music related things. Recently, I’ve acquired an INMP441 as an addition to my slowly growing rack of electrical and digital components. The INMP441 is cheap digital microphone that uses transmits data via I2S.

With this and an STM32F103C8, I set out to make an LED react to audio as a “Hello, World!” of sorts.

Method

I2S is not available on low and medium density STM32 devices¹, but is easily emulated, as AN5086 demonstrates. With the INMP411, which transmits a 32-bit dataframe comprising 24-bits of audio data, the challenge is aligning the data as it comes.

Fastest GPIO Read Speed on STM32F103 (Tight Loops vs DMA)

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I was building Lookshi—a portable mini logic analyzer—I asked myself: How fast can you read GPIO on the STM32F1?

I needed to figure out the maximum GPIO read speed on the STM32F103. I ran four benchmarks and measured the number of CPU cycles needed to perform 128 consecutive GPIO reads. This small experiment taught me quite a bit about the limitations of the STM32F103 but also the ins-and-outs of DMA.

Accidentally bricking an STM8S

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The STM8S001J3 is an 8-bit microcontroller that’s dirt cheap. I recently bought some at 60 cents a piece. Alright, I admit, it’s not quite as cheap as dirt. I was looking for a cheaper alternative to the rather popular ATTINY85.

The STM8 chip has a few quirks. For one, it has 5 usable pins instead of 6, with the usual VDD and GND now accompanied by VCAP. It doesn’t have GCC support. It has no external reset pin (relevant for this story). It uses the SWIM protocol.

Programming AVR chips with an Arduino

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick reference on programming any AVR microcontroller using any Arduino as an ISP.

Required Materials

Hardware

An Arduino
An AVR microcontroller

Software

Arduino IDE
avr-gcc
avr-objcopy
avrdude

Step 1 - Flashing the Arduino

This step sets up the Arduino as an ISP. The easiest way to do so is with the Arduino IDE. Simply load the “ArduinoISP” sketch and upload it to the board. This can be found in the examples. Otherwise you can simply copy and paste it from this gist.

Remapping a third-party Switch Controller

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I love rhythm games. I grew up on Guitar Hero. A while back, I bought a third-party taiko controller for my partner so that we could play Taiko no Tatsujin together on the Nintendo Switch.

In the product listing photos, the controller looked like it was wireless. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

You had to connect the controller via the USB cable to the Switch and via a wifi connection. This inevitably led to a poor Taiko experience and the novelty quickly wore off. Despite this, my partner was still able to adjust her timing to the latency and beat me many, many times.

Free Continuous Deployment for Reagent Apps with Glitch

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Edit (18.09.2025): There are now many ways to setup continuous deployment for some of the more niche stacks out there with the most widely used platforms like Netlify or Vercel. The information in this article is outdated.

So you have a Reagent application you want to deploy somewhere. Probably, you have experience deploying frontend applications on platforms like Vercel, Netlify or Render. You try this with your ClojureScript application and quickly find out that none of these platforms support building ClojureScript applications, because the build environment lacks Java.

Testing the p5.cljs editor

Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There was never a time where I the JavaScript ecosystem more than when I tried to write tests for the p5.cljs web editor. Things broken left and right, missing plugins, babel, transpiling, modules, npm. Disclaimer: I don’t hate the JS ecosystem in earnest. Just … sometimes.

This article is about why I chose Jest as the test runner for the p5.cljs editor and the steps necessary to get it working with third-party components I was using.

The Best String Compression in JavaScript

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

edit: 23.05.22 - add benchmarks of gzip, zlib and deflate via wasm-flate

Lately, I needed to find a decent algorithm to compress strings in JavaScript so that I could encode it as a URL param. Since the strings to be encoded where p5 sketches that ran in the p5.cljs web editor, it was important that the compressed string was short enough to enable longer sketches to be written.

The algorithms

After some searching on the web, I found some algorithms that I could use for this purpose. These are:

Learning ClojureScript with P5.js

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s December and you know what this means. T’is the season to learn new languages! Lately, I have been learning ClojureScript and have been having a blast creative coding with it. I think you should give it a try.

Who this tutorial is for

In order to follow this tutorial, you should be familiar with coding in P5 already. If you are, great! It will be a breeze to follow along. Let’s get started setting up.

Creative Coding with Generative Colors in 3 Levels

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article was first published in a medium article.

Prelude

Alright, I’ll be honest, I’m not an expert. But I’m no spring chicken either. Still, having started creative coding in 2019, my understanding of color hasn’t grown much.

With so many generative techniques out there like jumpflooding, cellular automata, river erosion, mold slime simulation and so on, it’s easy getting caught up in the challenges of implementing them, getting blown away by the super ultra mega cool visuals that they create and forgetting about color, if not outright avoiding it.

Creative Coding with Circles

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article was originally published here.

Right around the beginning of May, in the last few days of April, I began learning OpenRNDR. As a way to learn the framework, the first things I tried to code were circles. And lots of them! I coded circles in such profundity as I’ve never had in my life.

With that impulse, I found myself coding every single day and most of the work I produced involved circles. I would like to share what I found with you!

Atomic Counters in OpenFrameworks

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since OpenGL 4.2, atomic counters have been a core feature. They help solve a variety of problems, like counting the number of red pixels in a fragment shader or acting as a form of shared memory that can be altered by shaders.

The use case I’m interested in is to create a particle system using compute shaders. This means that I need to keep track of the number of particles that are alive or dead at any given time. To do that in the GPU, I can use atomic counters.