Over a year with no updates, well there goes one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2024. But it wasn’t all bad, actually it was quite a great year for personal growth. I went to Japan twice! Which was a valuable experience, and a first time for me traveling around an unknown place alone. This post will be a bit all over the place. I feel like writing down some things I have done, or have some thoughts on.

This post was just me wanting to rant into the void for a bit, and maybe I will use this blog more for this purpose. It’s a nice opportunity for some self reflection as well.

The CNC Setup

This one deserves its own blog post at some point, so I’ll keep it brief. I somehow burned the chip on the repurposed Ender 3 motherboard I used. So I got an MKS TinyBee as a replacement board, which I set up using FluidNC. Purely on control and software features, this is much better for a CNC machine than my old hacked setup using Marlin (which is great for 3D printers, just not for this use case). Besides the software and control electronics: I upgraded to stiffer, wider belts; redesigned a bunch of 3D-printed structural connections for improved rigidity, and redesigned the gantry for the same reasons. Still, I need to build a better belt tensioning mechanism and do a bunch of testing. The new control board can support an additional motor as well, so I could make a 4-axis machine, but for now, I am happy to have a machine that works again. Sadly, I rarely need to use it lately.

The Indoor Bike

Sometime in 2023, I started to exercise more regularly again, and in 2024, due to a small injury from running, I picked up and started doing some road cycling. With the prospects of terrible weather in winter and wanting to keep building and improving, I dusted off an old indoor bike trainer. Cycling indoors is incredibly boring; luckily, there are some things we can use that make it slightly less boring with virtual rides. But here we arrive at the first hurdle: the old trainer I have is not smart in any way and can’t talk to any application. But if we know the resistance setting and speed, we can estimate power and emulate a Bluetooth indoor trainer. Sounds like an easy project, right?

Let’s start with the easy part, a power estimate. We need to connect to a speed sensor mounted on the rear rim and calculate the speed from this. Except for some small mistakes, this was fairly simple. Next is figuring out the power curves for the Tacx Satori I am using. Luckily, I found some documentation online for the different resistance levels and made the calculations to convert that data into a single function. Oh, and one thing I did not mention yet: I am using a stepper motor to control the resistance level. Because of the fine motor control, I do not only need the resistance at the set levels but also for each level in between. After some programming and testing, we have a (probably very inaccurate) power reading.

Next up: pretenting to be a Bluetooth indoor trainer. I think I used three different Bluetooth libraries before something worked somewhat okay. Luckily, the specs for the devices are available online, and some nice people put their code on GitHub that I could use as a reference. After some hair pulling and cursing like a sailor, as is normal when working with anything Bluetooth-related, I had a working Bluetooth FTMS device. Until I put it together with the code to read data from the bike sensors, [reaction redacted]. Finally, I split the code base onto two ESP32 devices, one to read the sensors and do some basic calculations, one to emulate the bike, calculate the simulation parameters, and control the resistance-level motor.

In the end, I had a working, but completely inaccurate setup I could use for virtual rides. It did convince me to get a better direct drive trainer for bad weather. Since then, I have a bike with a power meter, so I’m tempted to go back and create accurate power curves and see how accurate we can make such a system when calibrated. Though I doubt I will find the time.

Japan - 日本

Due to amazing and unexpected circumstances, I managed to visit Japan last year! Longest flight for me so far, which was pretty okay compared to what I expected. There are a good amount of little stories I should write down someday. It was the first time I was time traveling alone, and while I enjoyed it and did a lot of things, I really missed having someone else to share the experience with. It feels strange to write, since I am someone that enjoys being alone from time to time, but in the end, we are social animals. Still, I believe it was an important experience that helped me push myself.

3D Printing

I got a new Bambu P1S, great machine, no issues so far and a great out-of-the-box experience. Unfortunately they had some controversy recently. Still, the printer itself has been amazing, and its great to see how far desktop 3D printing has come. I’ve printed PLA, TPU, ABS, PETG all without any issues. I’ve also got the hardened extruder gears and nozzle together with a spool of PA Carbon Fibre filament which I want to experiment with.

Doomscrolling

I did an experiment removing all “doomscrolling” apps such as Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and it was interesting. While initially I was constantly grabbing my phone, eventually that diminished and my screen time went down significantly. I started spending more time on other projects and playing games. It was great, though I must admit I’ve fallen back into the doomscrolling hole. It’s interesting to see how these apps are made to maximize the time you use them, most of the content you are served is total garbage, the same thing that maybe was funny the first time, but after seeing the exact same thing 30 times with maybe a different reaction face added, it gets infuriatingly boring. Still you keep scrolling for that occasional little hit of dopamine like the silly little monkey that you are. Come on, it really seems like the algorithms are tuned to give you a minimum of good content surrounded by filler garbage to make sure you stay as long as possible, because if they only showed the good stuff they would run out after 5 minutes.

I quite like the streaming model for music, unlike the video streaming where everything is completely fragmented, you can mostly listen to any music you like. To be clear, I like the model as a consumer, I despise the services that treat artists like dirt, and don’t pay them a fair share. But since I am ranting a bit on algorithms I want to bring this up, automated playlists and suggestions are a great idea to discover more music. Unfortunately, these popularity driven playlists start out great based on what you are listening, but if you are lazy like me and just want some background noise so you keep them playing for hours and hours, they become the more and more generic and completely mess up your recommendations. It just annoys me way to much, because I love listening to music I have never heard before, but just getting the same generic crap in your “Discover Weekly” is annoying.

The past often seems better since we humans mostly tend to remember the good things, but I feel the internet was way more enjoyable when I was a kid. No algorithm trying to manipulate your behavior, not everything was trying to sell you something or get you to pay a subscription for basic services. I guess there was less money involved, and fewer people, making it more feasible to host something for other people without your server burning down. Many sites such as Reddit moving to appeal to more mainstream audiences made the general content worse as well. I miss the things people did for the fun of it, not trying to manipulate an algorithm to get clicks. To be fair, there still are great communities on the internet, go take a look at all the different Mastodon instances for all kinds of interests. Maybe I am just becoming bitter, it just feels like a lot of the fun has disappeared and turned into mindless scrolling. After doomscrolling for way too much time, ask yourself: “Did I enjoy this?” If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably: “no”.

Sports

Just doing some walks and sporadically doesn’t really help keep your body fit enough, at least not for me. So after working for a year, settling into that rhythm, I felt the need to exercise. Mentally I was constantly feeling tired, my back started aching if I forgot to stretch once. So I started running again, but since I am no longer 16 years old, quickly got injured from running longer distances my body was not prepared for. As an alternative I dusted off my old city MTB and went into the forest. Initially this was suffering, partially because my cardio level was still pretty bad, but also because my bike is extremely heavy and not suited for anything harder than a dirt road. Eventually to build some more capacity, I borrowed an almost 20-year-old road bike, and started riding.

I expected to strongly dislike road riding, but it’s not bad. I still prefer riding in forests and in between fields. Eventually, I joined the GS Belisium B group on Sunday rides. It’s funny to look back on how those B group rides would destroy me for 2 days, and now I’ve been going with the A group using a gravel bike. So yeah, I got a gravel bike for some winter training and off-road riding. I plan to do some multi-day trips with it at some point, but we’ll see. For the new road riding season, I’ve restored a 10+ year-old full carbon Wilier bike, a massive upgrade for me. I still plan on buying a new bike at some point, but riding some older bikes that are still fast enough is much better to see if you like a sport or not. And it’s funny to ride past people on the most expensive equipment using an old “low tech” bike.

Still, there is a lot to look forward to. I want to keep up the exercise I am doing. I feel immensely better, physically and mentally, from doing more sports. I can focus better and get more stuff done. Currently, I am still young enough that it is easy to improve and build capacity. Anything I do now, I will take with me.