Cranberry Grape

Welcome to my personal site / blog. I’m Tim Lovett otherwise known online as Cosmic Bee. I’ll be using this site to post articles related to projects I’ve been working on with the hope to do a decent job documenting my efforts to learn and expand on different areas of interest to me such as machine learning, circuit board design, and embedded development.

I have a professional background in software development primarily working in a backend role supporting frontend development with APIs, building order pipelines using payment APIs, building discord bots, Ethereum contracts, and other such work.

When it comes to languages I prefer Rust as I have used it extensively in a professional setting and am comfortable with the ownership system. I have enjoyed working with actix for its actor system and actix-web which I’ve used for webservers so would definitely recommend it. It’s coming along as a language for embedded development as well.

For embedded development I enjoy zephyr as the devicetree and its overlays make setup of the underlying system a straightforward process. For development with Matter though I enjoy Espressif’s setup enough to switch to their build ecosystem entirely. Their approach to remove the need to deal with the zap tool makes it really easy to get up and running.

When it comes to hardware my favorite at the moment would be ones from Seeed, DFRobot, and WCH. The Xiao line from Seeed is consistently good, their documentation superb, and the Grove ecosystem makes getting up and running with new sensors fast. DFRobot has a lot of interesting boards as well and their Gravity line of sensors is really neat. WCH I’m still a bit new with MounRiver Studio but they provide some really powerful chips. For example Stefan Wagner’s CH224K PD Decoy uses WCH’s CH224K which is a configurable USB PD chip to allow for a DIP switch configurable voltage selection. Their microcontrollers are cheap yet powerful so I feel they will be very useful in the future and have a few plasic boxes of them I picked up from their store a bit back.

Going forward I’ll mostly have articles related to projects I’m working on or things I’ve discovered in the process of doing so. I’ll attempt to keep the categories well defined such that they are easily traversable. In the future I may add comments powered by github issues or discussions if there’s any inclination a community would form around the posts. Thank you for taking an interest in my site.