
![Taking Inventory](/images/makerlog/001-taking-inventory.jpeg)

_New year, new intentions._

With the beginning of the new year. I'd like to set myself some new intentions. One of them is to sort through my graveyard of unfinished and abandoned projects and actually finish a few. But let's start with one.

For January, I will focus on setting up systems and cataloging everything I already have created in the past.

One of the things I want to do is post a weekly update, here in my maker log. Both for me to look back on and to keep myself publicly accountable.

This week I focused on setting up a new workflow in Notion. Made an overview of all the projects I have and added analytics to them. So I can see if any of the landing pages already have any traffic. I’ll also create a small form in Google Forms to see if people actually click through. Maybe they will leave some useful feedback?

For Analytics I chose [Plausible.io](http://plausible.io?ref=robindeneef.com), they are privacy friendly analytics tool. They are lightweight and open-source. I also liked their interface. I’ve configured Plausible to send me a mail every month for every domain. I will need to find a way to track these numbers over the year.

That’s it for week one of 2022. I have a GCP Security Engineer exam coming up at the end of the month. So I don’t think I will be able to spend a lot of time on side projects. But I will be able to write some content for [GCPSecured.com](http://GCPSecured.com?ref=robindeneef.com)


#1 - Taking Inventory


![Taking Inventory](/images/makerlog/002-sideproject-cemetery.png)

This week I spend my time trying to map all the things I already have. I went over all the domain names I own, wrote a little write up about the idea and why I hadn’t worked on it. I added [Plausible Analytics](https://plausible.io?ref=robindeneef.com) to all of the domains that actually have something hosted. Did some updates on my older projects to update all the packages to the latest versions and wrote this little post.

## Domain Names

### CloudPurse

🌐 [CloudPurse.io](http://CloudPurse.io)

A project I started in 2021. I wanted to build a tool that tracks your GCP spend on projects and can automatically trigger action based on the amount you are spending. For example, send you an email when you’re budget reaches 1,000 dollars, or to shut down your development environment if your budget goes too high.

Unfortunately, Google’s Cloud Billing API doesn’t support getting your current GCP spend for a project at the moment. It is possible for the client to set up a sink to BigQuery and that I can query it, but it feels like a cumbersome process for my users. And I can only get an update every day. In a day a lot can happen if you’re app suddenly goes viral or is under attack. I feel like CloudPurse can’t do what it promises with such a delay. That’s why I halted it for now.

### Fullstack Almanack

🌐 [fullstackalmanack.com](http://fullstackalmanack.com)

I got the idea to start a tech blog and write some how-to articles on how I do certain things. More for myself than for anyone else but it’s a good way to build some extra credibility.

### GCPSecured

🌐 GCPSecured[.com](http://RobinDeNeef.com)

A website I made during a Twitch Stream over a weekend. At work, I’m constantly working with Google Cloud Platform. I wanted to create a learning resource about everything GCP Security. I’m adding articles to it as I go. I’m currently also studying for the Professional Cloud Security Engineer Certification. I’m mainly working on this site to build credibility in this domain. [I also created a Google Form to gather feedback.](https://forms.gle/iqw1pm34HF9MQ91C7)

### Generic Excuse

🌐 [genericexcuse.com](http://genericexcuse.com)

This is one of the oldest domains on the list and it has quite a funny backstory. During my college days, a friend cancelled on me very last minute with a vague excuse. I did what every person would do and opened a bottle of Jameson whiskey and wrote an API that allows you to get different excuses for different occasions. Finished the whole project that night. Afterwards, I used this project to make a Slack Integration and [a Telegram chatbot](https://fullstackalmanac.com/post/2020-10/write-a-telegram-bot-with-python-flask/).

### Grabelton

🌐 [grabelton.com](http://grabelton.com)

Can you call a person really your friend if you didn’t, at some point, wanted to start a business together? This domain comes from one of those moments. I’m holding onto it because what hasn’t happened yet can still come.

### RobinDeNeef

🌐 [RobinDeNeef.com](http://RobinDeNeef.com)

The site you are currently on. My own little cosy corner of the internet. Here you can follow my adventures and read some notes I’ve made along the way.

### SobrinoStudios

🌐 [sobrinostudios.com](http://sobrinostudios.com)

I bought this domain since it’s the name of my Freelance Business. I haven’t really made a good looking website for it yet. But I want to put up a portfolio here in the near future.

### Software Scrolls

🌐 [SoftwareScrolls.com](http://SoftwareScrolls.com)

I bought this domain at the same time as FullstackAlmanack, I couldn’t decide on which one to take for a technical blog so I bought both. Ultimately I went with [FullstackAlmanack.com](http://FullstackAlmanack.com) but I still keep this one. I feel like it would be a good one to host some courses or something else.

### Spreadshop

🌐 [UseSpreadshop.com](http://UseSpreadshop.com)

A project I started in the summer of 2020. The corona epidemic saw an increase in eCommerce and I heard from friends and family that there was an increase in demand to set up Shopify stores. I wanted to lower the barrier even more. So that people didn’t even have to look for help setting up a webshop.

To lower the entry I wanted to use a technology where most people are familiar with, spreadsheets, and use it to generate a web store from a template, with some customization options. This could then also become a funnel for freelance work if clients wanted to have custom designs.

Most of it did get finished. One thing the whole project got stuck on was images. The V3 API of Google Sheets had no support to retrieve images out of spreadsheets. At this point, I would have had to create a form or something else to handle image upload and it felt more that I was cloning Shopify. The new V4 API does support images. So I think this idea is actually quite viable again.

### Virtual Room

🌐 [vroom.rocks](http://vroom.rocks)

I made this website as a pitch for a project to do over the holidays. We were all locked down and it felt like a cool idea to bring people together. And I think VR and AR are technologies with a lot of untapped potential. I parked this project since my pitch didn’t make it. But with the recent metaverse and NFT hype, I think it would actually be fun to create a demo for this.


#2 - Side Project Cemetery


![Sleepylight](/images/makerlog/003-build-a-lamp.jpeg)

Week 3 of 2022, January is flying by fast. This week was not my most productive, I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather. This week I mainly focused on my 9-to-5 job and studying for my upcoming GCP Security Engineer exam next week.

However, in between those, I build a lamp! When I was making my inventory last week I also went through my hardware projects. Most of them are just disassembled electronics gathering dust. Last year I [build a Game Boy with a Raspberry Pi](https://robindeneef.com/blog/002-hardware-pigrrl), but a few years before that, in 2018, I build a bedside lamp that would nudge you into better sleeping habits, for example pulsing red when it’s time for you to go to sleep and not turning off unless your mobile phone is not detected in your bedroom.

I had most of the parts, so I put the lamp together and wrote some code to turn the light on and off. It’s using [a RGBW neopixel ring](https://www.adafruit.com/product/2851?ref=robindeneef.com) so I had some colouring options. I added a fading mode as well that loops through all the different colours and a candle mode that simulates a flickering candle.

[SleepyLight.webm](/images/makerlog/003-SleepyLight.webm)

A few years back I started working on CATTS (Connect All The Things Securely), a DIY home automation system that would allow me to interact with all my devices from all my devices. It was time to set that one up again, so I could control this light. In its current form, CATTS is just an MQTT server with a front end website that sends messages to the MQTT server. The devices then listen to a specific topic, and change depending on the messages. Nothing to fancy as of now.

The main reason I wanted to dive into the hardware part again was mostly that I think it’s awesome to have digital code translated to the physical world, but also because I have finally found a [Nintendo Power Glove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove?ref=robindeneef.com) that wasn’t too expensive for me to ship to Europe. This piece of 1989 retro technology would be an awesome platform to control my home automation and other things like PowerPoint presentations. So I’ll try to plan a hardware project with it for PiDay this year.

I’ll probably write a bigger blog post going into more detail on CATTS and the SleepyLight build but for now, I have to concentrate more on studying for the exam.


#3 - Build-a-Lamp


![Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Security Engineer](/images/makerlog/004-gcp-security-engineer.jpg)

Last week of January, spend most of this week studying for my Google Cloud Certified Cloud Security Engineer exam. I can proudly say I passed! 🎉

GCP has clearly expanded it’s arsenal of security tools. When I started working with Google Cloud we did Secret Management by putting encrypted strings in a Cloud SQL database, now there is a Secret Manager with a handy API to do all that work for you. We also had to maintain a Forseti Instance to have any oversight in our security infrastructure. Now Google Cloud has a Cloud Security Center and some handy tools like IAM recommender to help you set better permissions and Firewall Insights to help you make sense of all those Firewall rules. 

And that’s not all. We’ve also seen a clear shift towards hybrid cloud. Running your workloads partly on-prem or in some other cloud. And still being able to use GCP for specific workloads. 

Both of these where a big part of the exam. 

Diving into all the documentation also gave me a lot of new ideas for posts on [GCPSecured.com](http://GCPSecured.com). I’ll probably spend some time next week transforming my notes to more full fleshed articles. 

Next to that I’ve been slowly probing into the Nintendo Power Glove to see how it works and how I want to turn it into something more.

Becoming a Certified Cloud Security Engineer

#4 - Certified GCP Security Engineer


![Drawing of mailman](/images/makerlog/005-we-have-a-newsletter.jpg)

This week was a bit all over the place. Last weekend I had a talk with a friend who had sold a simple NFT generator for 15 000 euros. So I did the only sensible thing and tried to build one myself. After 4 hours I had something working if I only I were a better artist. But this got me a bit down the NFT rabbit hole again. I had mostly avoided NFT’s since I think it’s a big hype and current NFT projects are not bringing a lot of value. But I might rethink my stance and whip up one or more MVPs if I can find some time. 

I also did a deep dive in the power glove I bought a couple of weeks ago. I think I’ve figured out most of the inner workings of the device and placed an order for new components. They should arrive before the weekend so you can already guess what the next maker log will be about! 

And finally some real work! I noticed that my website and blog post didn’t have any meta tags or open graph tags. So I spend some time updating my blog generator code and use it to generate these tags for every page based on metadata like the featured image etc. Since we also ended the first month of the year I hastily decided on starting a monthly newsletter. You can find that one on [https://robindeneef.substack.com/](https://robindeneef.substack.com/)

Work at my day job is ramping up so I might take my foot off the gas a little in the coming weeks. But don’t fret. I will be playing with electronics during every free moment I can find.

#5 - I Have A Newsletter!


![A keyboard in the matrix](/images/makerlog/006-keyboard-matrix.jpg)


> *This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the *blue* pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe that keyboards are magical devices. You take the *red* pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole 
goes.*

This week I started with the first part of retrofitting the power glove. I wanted to start with the keyboard. This led to a small deep dive into how keyboards work. Let’s share some findings.

A keyboard is just a collection of keys. A key is normally connected to 2 wires. One of those is connected to a power source and when the key is pressed, the power can flow through the second wire to whatever pin that is listening on the other end. If that pin receives power, it knows that the key has been pressed and we can register that button press. 

If every key would need 2 wires, a standard 101 key keyboard would need 202 wires and its controller would at least need 102 pins. It would be hard to cram this all into a small form factor. Luckily there is a circuit called a keyboard matrix. 

In a keyboard matrix, you divide your keyboard into rows and columns. First, you send power through all of the rows and you listen to the columns pins. When a key is pressed the corresponding column pin will receive the signal and we’ll already know which column was pressed. Next up you switch the roles around. Now you send power through all your columns and start listening to the rows. Now the corresponding row will receive a signal and you’ll know exactly which key in the matrix was pressed down. In a normal keyboard, this all happens at incredible speeds that allow the keyboard to register multiple keystrokes at the same time. This is a very simplified overview but it will allow us to continue to the Power Glove.

The Power Glove’s keypad is also a keyboard matrix. Since I don’t want to damage the glove too much I started creating a “dev kit” version of it on a breadboard. I loaded up some keypad library provided by Arduino but I got very weird readings on it. After reading countless blog posts and diving into the internal code. I think I found the issue. The Arduino keypad library was written for AVR chips and the Arduino RP Connect I am using is ARM-based. I haven’t pinpointed exactly and have already written a part of the controller code myself, but it’s not so reliable and feature-rich. I might revisit the library later and make the necessary changes to support ARM processors. That’s it for this week.

#6 - The Keyboard Matrix


![A robot playing an NFT slot machine](/images/makerlog/007-botting-nft-games.jpg)

My workload has been ramping up at work, so I didn’t have a lot of energy for other things this week. I got bitten a bit by the NFT bug. And I have been reading up a lot on it. The current state of the NFT landscape does feel to me like mostly a cash grab. But I think it has some potential. 

Certificates, achievements, and badges would be great as NFT but it would be stupid to make them tradeable since you don’t want to grind multiple hours to get an achievement if somebody else can just buy it. Most of the projects also don’t have any real utility, only promises. I’m quite curious how it will evolve. 

Most of the games that do exist feel a bit like early 2010 browser games, where I spend loads of time. But currently, for every action, you do you have to confirm a transaction. This doesn’t feel very user friendly, nor cheap. 

I also stumbled upon a tweet of someone who was making quite some money with a bot he had created for an NFT game. This was genius, botting on Runescape might have been one of my first experiences with coding and automating. (Sorry Jagex 🙃). 

I wanted to implement some bots myself. It adds zero value to the NFT space but if other people can go for cash grabs, so can I! Or at least I thought so at that moment. I spend some time setting up a bot for Bridgeworld. But most games require you to already have an NFT to play the game. Most NFT prices for these games start at a couple of thousand euros. Not really what I want to spend on it. I got stuck at automatically accepting transactions afterwards I kind of gave up for now. 

I used a small script to execute some clicks at certain locations at a certain interval and that’s it for now. If anything changes about the game my script will crash and burn and maybe accidentally confirm a transaction sending all my money away, so it’s not really running at the time. 😅

However, I did find some interesting resources if you want to get into Blockchain Programming. 
 * [Welcome to NFT School](https://nftschool.dev/)
 * [#1 Solidity Tutorial & Ethereum Blockchain Programming Course | CryptoZombies](https://cryptozombies.io/)

#7 - Botting NFT Games


![Scoreboard with Firebase winning 1-0 against MQTT](/images/makerlog/008-iot-statemanagement-with-firebase-vs-mqtt.jpg)

One of my freelance products I have worked on a few years back is a scoreboard for a local football club. The scoreboard software runs on a Raspberry Pi, and a user has to use TeamViewer to connect to the Pi and access the controls, not the most user friendly. 

To improve the user experience I had quickly build a small progressive web app. Using MQTT to send data to the scoreboard. This led to a few problems.

```json
topic: scoreboard
payload: {
	field: "homeTeamScore",
	value: 1
}  
   
```  
   
First, I had to maintain the app, the scoreboard and the MQTT server. If one fails all fail. Not the ideal scenario since I’m just maintaining it on the side. 

Second, there is no central state management, when another users connects to the scoreboard it has no idea what the first user has already sent to it. It’s possible to request the state from the device every time. But it’s not very handy.

And third, I had a bug with the timers. When a timer was started in the app, it would start the timer on the scoreboard with a few seconds delay, and sometimes when the timer was paused, it would continue running. I’ll elaborate on this issue and my fix next week. 

So, how did I tackle this issue? Firebase! I moved all the data, like team and team logos to Firebase. I’m also planning to deploy the scoreboard software and the app both from Firebase Hosting. 

For the state I’m using Firestore Real Time Database. I created a collection *"state"* with a document *"gameState"* and this object has all the data I need. The selected teams, the score, elapsed time etc. With Firestore Real Time Database both the scoreboard and anybody with the app can listen to this state, when one client performs an update this will be propagated to all the other clients and the scoreboard. 

```json
{
   "awayScore":1,
   "awayTeam":{
      "image":"https://link.to/awayteamlogo.png",
      "name":"Away Team"
   },
   "elapsedTime":0,
   "homeScore":2,
   "homeTeam":{
      "image":"https://link.to/hometeamlogo.png",
      "name":"Home Team"
   },
   "id":"scoreboard",
   "startTime":"19:30",
   "status":"PLAYING",
   "timerTimestamp":null
}
  
```

I’m still not sure if it’s an anti-pattern and I’m sure it will have it’s downsides. For example I don’t think the game state can handle big amounts of updates in a short time. But for this use case it works and I have almost nothing to maintain anymore!

![Scoreboard deployed in the real world.](/images/makerlog/008-scoreboard-in-the-field.jpg)


Using Firestore to manage the state of IoT devices instead of MQTT

🛠️ Maker Log