Top all-time · #9668
... and another thing ...
Personal blog · nick.zoic.org · on HN as nickzoicprogramminghardware
... and another thing ... is a personal blog at nick.zoic.org about programming and hardware. Since 2011, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for hands-on embedded and retro posts: QR code design, prototyping on ESP32 with MicroPython, and a multi-part series on writing an Apple II game.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
Another example, Victoria Australia COVID tracking QR code. https://nick.zoic.org/art/qr-codes-advice/#no-funny-business
Comment linking /art/qr-codes-advice/
on “Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower case?”Submitted Writing an Apple 2 game in 2021 as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI also got one of those, unfortunately the V1 which doesn't have the microphone. It has a decent feel to it, plenty of features packed into small form and decent amount of open source support. Hardware wise, display and touch sensor is quite good and I was surprised that I was able to type with 90% accuracy on a tiny qwerty keyboard. The tiny speaker is very low quality and not really usable for speech. There's also…
Comment linking /art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/
on “Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch”Submitted Turning a Guitar Hero controller into a MIDI controller as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThere was a good talk about these at LinuxConf AU: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2016/05_Friday/Wool... ... they're a very exciting device and incredibly cheap, and the supplied SDK libs look very nice, even though they aren't quite fully open source. The NodeMCU boards are very useful even if you're not interested in Lua, they add power, USB and breadboard friendly headers in a smallish package. I've sta…
Comment linking /etc/flobot-graphical-dataflow-language-for-robots/
on “ESP8266: A $5 microcontroller with wi-fi that runs Python”Submitted Boot Naked Linux as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"data:" URLs are pretty good for this too, no web request needed. See RFC2397. I've been using these a bit lately for little icons and such, I think its a cleaner approach than spriting in a lot of cases. I put a little script to generate data URLs up at http://nick.zoic.org/art/etc/make-data-url.html How good is cross-platform Unicode support these days? I do like the idea of just using characters which look like i…
Comment linking /art/etc/make-data-url.html
on “The Shapes of CSS”Submitted Smooth Move: Taming Trajectories with Polynomials as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI found micropython to be quite valuable in board bring-up stage. It is nice to be able to interactively test peripherals in repl, and these interactive sessions can be solidified in C code. This article about prototyping esp32 in micropython is great example: https://nick.zoic.org/art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/
Comment linking /art/lilygo-ttgo-t-watch-2020/
on “A virtual machine for microcontrollers”https://nick.zoic.org/art/writing-an-apple-2-game-in-2021-3/ He's made it to Part 3 - really interesting stuff!
Comment linking /art/writing-an-apple-2-game-in-2021-3/
on “Writing an Apple 2 game in 2021”
