W7: a rusty week
Last week I focused on studying, which is likely not of interest to anybody... But this week's activity is! I've been hard at learning the Rust programming language. What for? Well, because I intend to write all code for the Big Project in it :)
Rust is truly wonderful. It has most features one can desire, is rooted in formal theories and, more importantly, offers the highest reliability for a language almost as fast as C. I only miss a stable ABI for plugins and low-level stuff, but I'll work around that in due time.
Remember that sub-project of mine to 3D-print circuits? Well, I've uploaded it to my hackaday.io account. For now it's just a description of the mechanics and the start of a log of my work. You can read more about it there!
If you don't want to, here's a TL;DR: I want to use my custom scripts to print tiny water-tight channels and then make use of electroplating to grow copper crystals along them, controlling the process so it's reproducible and the copper actually bonds with all contacts (and the voltage doesn't fry anything!). Once I get a prototype that works, I'll upload all the files to Hackaday; I'm making a third prototype right now, after getting modest results with the previous two.
And, regarding my Big Project again... I'm in the initial design phase for its code. Which means I'm redacting a huge LaTeX document with things like design goals and code organization, and I've yet to write a single line of it ;). I don't typically dedicate that much time to design, but this one's really important (and also really complex), and I believe I'll otherwise regret it down the road.