What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I have decided to learn Julia, and the way I have chosen to do so is by writing a wrapper for a C program I use often in my research. It has been interesting so far!

I'm working on a simple software to control window blinds in a home automation setup. First (never finished) iteration was written in go and was expected to run on a RPi, but since then I've decided that using an RPi is not a perfect idea, because of:

1. Too many moving parts. To run it on RPi I need to set up Linux there, set up all services needed to make it work, set up a systemd service for it... It's not that much of a work, but still, it needs to be done, and there's a lot of stuff that may break after a while.
2. Too much power requirements. Sure, RPi doesn't require that much power when compared to a "big" PC, but it's still quite a lot to exchange a few MQTT messages and use I2C to talk to a few devices. Also, it gets warm.
3. It's not that cheap, especially lately.

So I've started learning how to work with Zephyr RTOS. So far it's a pretty nice experience - the docs are helpful, there are tons of examples, the workflow from installing the toolchain to flashing the application is really pleasant. I've moved from RPi being the target device to the STM Nucleo F207ZG (because of the ethernet port) and so far I'm really happy with the choice. Obviously, writing software for that instead of Linux means that I have to deal with some stuff that Linux smoothes out and hides from me (even basic ones like: where am I going to store the application settings?). Still, I am learning a lot, and I'm really happy with that choice so far.

I've been slowly chipping away at trying to set up a Mycroft instance on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I've got an old Logitech webcam hooked up for the microphone and a really old Logitech speaker plugged in. Ideally I want to build it from source and run it on the existing Arch Linux ARM install it's got (as opposed to using a pre-built Mycroft specific OS image), because that Pi is also running a nightly script to do some data backup. So far it's proving to be really difficult--after spending hours building all the dependencies and stuff I get met with segfaults--so I may just bite the bullet and swap the OS because setting up my backup script on whatever the Picroft image uses will probably be easier than what I'm doing now. I also toyed with using the official docker image, but it doesn't seem like they have one that runs on an ARM host.