The Life of Sam

3d printing

Building a 3D Printer from scratch

One of my big projects for the year was building myself a Voron 2.4R2. This thing is BIG and FAST (compared to my old Ender 3 Pro anyway). So I started with a kit (350mm) from Magic Phoenix (the kit was amazing, but unfortunately I can't recommend

programming

Best tool discoveries of 2024

I love finding new tools to work with on my computer. Now some of these may be old tools, but ones I've just discovered this year. No particular order here, but things I've found extremely useful. None of these are sponsored (if anyone wants to, feel

programming

Adventures in the terminal

So I've been a bit obsessed with the terminal lately. I'm on the cusp of even moving away from VSCode! It all started when I was watching a video on YouTube about alternate terminals to iTerm2 on macOS (also was using tmux), and I came across

programming

Advanced GraphQL — Subscriptions

Originally published on Medium - 29th October 2019 If you read my previous posts on GraphQL, you’ll know that I’m a fan. I left it at the basics however. So starting with this post, we’ll dive into some of the more advanced parts of GraphQL. And when

programming

An Introduction to GraphQL — Part 3 — Client in React and Apollo

Originally posted on Medium - 5th May 2019 So now we’ve seen the server side of things, it’s time to play on the client side. This will be a very basic React application using Apollo as its GraphQL library. Unfortunately there is a lot of boilerplate to get

programming

An Introduction to GraphQL — Part 2 — Server implementation

Originally posted on Medium - 6th May 2019 In part one, we covered how we got here, so how about some code? I’ve picked Go for the code (server side) in this, no particular reason beyond that’s what I’ve been playing with lately (and also to show

programming

An introduction to GraphQL — Part 1 — How did we get here?

Originally posted on Medium - 15th April 2019 You may have heard the term GraphQL doing the rounds over the last couple of years. You may have even heard it’s technology developed by Facebook, but like all new-ish tech, there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding it. So

programming

Separating web apps — Service Workers

Originally published on Medium - 27th December 2018 So as a bit of a followup to my PWA article I wrote a while back, I thought I’d do a bit of a write-up on the main part that separates a regular web page from a progressive web app — service

programming

The other side of the desk

Originally published on Medium - 11th December 2018 Interviews can be intimidating, make no mistake about that. But what are we looking for with the various parts of an interview? I’ll break this into four sections… Culture, Coding Challenge (this isn’t actually done in the interview, but still

programming

Native? Hybrid? Web App?

Originally posted on Medium - 27th June 2018 - So this prediction didn't age well, we still don't have great PWA support on iOS, and we now have tech like Flutter which is working quite well also. Where have we come from? In the last ten

programming

Moving from Javascript to Typescript

Originally posted on Medium - 4th April 2018 - Some of the info here (in particular the tooling) is out of date, but it mostly should work. I won’t lie, I love TypeScript. Microsoft, say about them what you wish, but they do know how to support their developers

programming

Death of the for loop

Originally published on Medium - 3rd April 2018 So I was hit with a revelation recently. I haven’t written a for loop in months. Is this the end of it? Has it been replaced with functions like map, filter and find? Well, no, but definitely a reduced need. Functional

My thoughts on AI Generated Art

Over the past two weeks, I've been playing with AI Generated Art, in particular DALL•E 2 and Midjourney, and what can I say, I'm addicted. What a fun thing to play with. So is it going to put artists out of work? No, at least

drones

New Goggles

So yes, I've been missing a bit lately, just a lot of personal stuff going on, I'm exhausted! But on a happier note, I have some new (second hand) goggles for my drone. Managed to get a pretty good deal on some Fatshark HDO goggles with

drones

Ummagawd 2Fiddy

So yes, that time of year again, time to build another drone! Since Tommy's series on designing a sub 250g drone [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWcnsjEeOOc&list=PLw0Jlwl4Jneba_2KdF-mzbDas7zLO03-s] (highly recommended viewing if you have the time), I've been wanting to build one.

drones

Out of lockdown and over the trees

Having completed 14 days of quarantine (plus some horrible weather), it was nice to get back out with the drone.  A little rusty, and trying out new propellors (I think I'm a little obsessed with trying new ones out). I must say, I'm a big fan

programming

Ben Eater's 8-bit Breadboard CPU Simulator

A number of years ago, I stumbled upon Ben Eater making an 8-bit CPU on a breadboard [https://eater.net/8bit]. I even started to replicate it myself, but only made a couple of the modules (project to come back to one day). I've had in the back

drones

FPV Terminology - Part 3

Final part for terminology, and covering all the stuff we haven't so far. Not extensive, but should cover the majority. Punch Out - Full throttle straight up into the air. A good way of testing how much raw power your drone has. Flip - Literally flipping the drone

drones

Wind and a line of trees

So I lost my first drone. My beloved Flywoo Explorer LR4 is MIA. Quite upset about that as it was one of my favourites (just chilled relaxing flight), but on a positive, I have ordered the upgraded version, now the long wait until it's in my hands. In

drones

FPV Terminology - Part 2 - Software

When it comes to the software side of FPV, things are much simpler than the hardware. On our flight controllers, we need to run some firmware to do all the hard work. There are a number of common options to choose from. But first, a bit of history. In the

programming

Next.js + Strapi + Github Actions = Bliss

I recently made a links site for my social media, essentially it's my own version of Link tree, something I wanted to do for fun and learning. A simple static page would have sufficed, but where's the fun in that? Since I already use Strapi [https:

drones

FPV terminology - Part 1 - Hardware

So I've been writing about FPV (First person view) for a while now, but realise I've probably mentioned a few terms or acronyms that may be unfamiliar, so I figure I'd do a post about them. Part 1 will focus on the hardware. Drone

drones

Explorer LR4 Range test

A very chilled flight along a road. Unfortunately I lost video at the end on the way back, around 1.6km from where I was parked. I'm so glad I was able to reattach the buzzer last week, made finding it so much easier. Considering buying them for

drones

Gemfan Hurricane 51433

After my last freestyle flight [https://sdickinson.com/freestyle-day/], I was left wanting. My beloved Azure LCP 5040 were no longer up to the task of carrying my drone nicely now that I had a much heavier GoPro onboard (74g vs 158g), so time to try something else. Given that

drones

Freestyle day

Nice to get out and about with my freestyle drone (Armattan Marmotte) today. First flight since being repaired (not the one I fixed in my previous post). A pretty rough flight bonking the ground a couple of times and nicking the trees. One thing I'm noticing with this