Write-ups from the workbench: teaching myself Rust with a calculator, taking file formats apart byte by byte, and making small electronics do what they're told.
1 LATEST ARTICLES
4 articles
2026-07-03
TRK-016
5.1 kΩ: the resistor that decides whether your gadget charges
How USB-C devices introduce themselves, and how the Raspberry Pi 4 saved half a cent and got mistaken for a pair of headphones.
2026-06-28
TRK-015
The keypad is lying to you: matrix scanning and debouncing in Rust
Part 2: reading 16 keys over 8 pins, phantom keypresses, and why a button is an analog device doing an impression of a digital one.
2026-06-21
TRK-014
Learning Rust by building an RPN calculator firmware
Part 1: a stack evaluator that never eats your operands, some 1972 calculator history, and the awkward discovery that my chip can't do floating point.
2026-05-30
TRK-013
PNG chunks, annotated by hand
Every byte of a real 69-byte PNG: the signature's paranoia, IHDR, flag bits hidden in capital letters, and why everything is checksummed twice.