Leonti Bielski's blog

Controlling a stepper with PIO on Raspberry Pi Pico

While working on the next iteration of AvoBot I wanted to improve the accuracy of odometry and navigation in general. Instead of using brushed motors I decided to replace them with Nema 17 stepper motors. This way I can get an amazing precision which…

Building a DIY webcam based on Raspberry Pi with RPi HQ sensor

Getting a good camera during COVID-19 pandemic is not easy. With the initial surge of demand prices skyrocketed, and even now high-quality webcams are overpriced. I wanted to get one for two reasons. Firstly, I'm not satisfied with the quality of the…

AWS Budget Killswitch: Disable AWS Services When Budget Is Exceeded

I like creating small projects and hosting them on AWS. AWS is what I use at work and using it for my personal projects makes sense because it's convenient and it's what I know. However, my personal projects don't make me any money so a huge…

3d Printer Setup for a Studio Apartment

Having a 3D printer in a studio apartment has certain problems which need to be solved before it can you can really enjoy using it. The 3 main problems are: Space Some 3D printers can be pretty big which can take a lot of precious space in a studio…

Testing: A Practical Approach

Automated testing is important to build software in a sustainable way. No one wants to manually test their entire application on every change. That would be slow and a waste of time. On the other hand, covering an application with all possible kinds…

Deploying an SPA on AWS

Hosting a static website on AWS has many advantages but it has a few moving parts which need to fit together to get a fast and scalable static website. While working on AvoCV I decided to host it on AWS for a few reasons. Backend for the project is…

Testing APIs Using Functional Programming in Scala

In this post I’m going to describe a testing approach you can take to reduce the amount of time spent writing tests, whilst gaining enough confidence in your code to ship it. I’ll be focusing specifically on testing APIs, as they often are…

Home automation with Raspberry PI

This a tutorial about how to build home automation system for switching lights. Raspberry PI perfect home automation. It's small, always connected to the internet and has a full-blown Linux with a direct access to GPIO ports. At first I looked at X1…

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