romilly-cocking.bsky.social
@romilly-cocking.bsky.social
Some friends here follow my RAREblog. Old content will stay in the old location, but all new posts and notes will be on rareblog.substack.com

My current geeky project (not quite finished) is to plot how the current varies with voltage when you drive an LED. Video below:
May 6, 2025 at 5:56 AM
After years of blogging about Digital Maker stuff on blogger, I'm switching to substack: substack.com/@romillyc/no...
Romilly Cocking on Substack
Curious about I2C? I’m having lots of fun building tiny projects using the Raspberry Pi, Pico, inexpensive breakouts and I2C. Here’s a great building block: an OLED display for the Pico W. I’ll share...
substack.com
May 3, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted
recent polling is just a total repudiation of the idea that full spectrum opposition to trump across every area was/is a bad idea
New NYT/Siena Poll:
—Trump's approval rating is 42% vs. 54% disapprove
—59% of voters think Trump's 2nd term in office is "scary"
—54% say Trump is "exceeding the powers available to him"
—Trump has negative approval in all policy areas

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/u...
April 25, 2025 at 9:07 PM
I just became a member of the European Movement, the only organisation with the courage to reverse the calamity of Brexit. Join me and thousands of others at @euromove here >>> www.europeanmovement.co.uk/membership
European Movement
We're the UK's largest pro-European movement. Our goal is to reverse the calamity of Brexit and restore relations with our European neighbours.
www.europeanmovement.co.uk
March 31, 2025 at 10:48 AM
Reposted
Join me today at 7pm GMT as we celebrate the 20th Birthday of the @arduino with a look at the best Arduino-based robot:

youtube.com/live/Ylc84kA...

#arduino #robotics #micropython
The 3D-Printable Robot That Turns Arduino Newbies Into Pros—How?
YouTube video by Kevin McAleer
youtube.com
March 23, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Today I asked Claude to create a FORTH VM. It wrote a lightweight implementation of the language for the Raspberry Pi Pico in Python, along with documentation, in about a minute.

The project is on GitHub, and there's a short demo video.
github.com/romilly/pico...
youtu.be/fXhMrK3_kTY
GitHub - romilly/pico-forth-from-claude: A functioning FORTH implementation in Python for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
A functioning FORTH implementation in Python for the Raspberry Pi Pico. - romilly/pico-forth-from-claude
github.com
March 15, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Reposted
Happy Pi day! If you have a @RaspberryPi and want some inspiration be sure to checkout www.kevsrobots.com/ideas/raspbe... #PiDay #PiDay2025
Raspberry Pi
Unleash the power of the Pi with these fun projects
www.kevsrobots.com
March 14, 2025 at 7:29 AM
Is X down atm? Asking for a friend :)
March 10, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted
March 8, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted
It's our birthday! 🎂 The Royal Institution was founded on this day in 1799 for "the teaching by courses of Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life".

In this 1985 video, George Porter shows us Faraday's lab, which you can still visit today
March 7, 2025 at 1:48 PM
I'm feeling happily surprised this morning.

At 7 AM, over breakfast, my wife and I discussed our plans for the day. I told her what my main goal was. Using windsurf, an AI coding agent, I finished the job by 9 AM.
March 7, 2025 at 9:14 AM
@neuranne.bsky.social where did the data for your 'find your purpose' graph come from? I have similar phrases I'd love to search for.
March 6, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted
I hope it passes!!
March 6, 2025 at 6:52 AM
A great start to the day: my kindle copy of @neuranne.bsky.social's book Tiny Experiments has arrived.

It's amazing, and the surprises start early. Anne-Laure le Cunff has made the front page accessible, by describing the front cover in text.

First impressions: *****
March 4, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Reposted
Happy birthday to all the Pirates at @pimoroni.com :-)
February 24, 2025 at 12:00 PM
I've been using Codeium's cascade AI coding agent a lot recently. It's pretty good, so long as you keep it on a tight leash, but it's often meh at debugging.
Its "Ah, now I see the problem" is the equivalent of Baldrick's "I've got as cunning plan, my lord"
February 24, 2025 at 7:49 AM
I'm now running an LLM using ollama on a Raspberry_Pi 5 with 16 GB ram and 256 GB nvme SSD.
Alibaba's qwen2.5 runs acceptably well: see session screenshot below. The Pi is a key component in my current stealth project :)
February 19, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted
Johns Hopkins is running a 2-day executive course on the modern space economy, led by folks from JHU Applied Physics Lab. Looks very interesting >> lifelonglearning.jhu.edu/jhu-course-s... 🚀🧪🔭
Our Current Space Exploration
Learn about groundbreaking missions, technologies, and opportunities shaping humanity's journey into civil space exploration.
lifelonglearning.jhu.edu
February 17, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted
I released LLM 0.22 this evening. Release notes are below, or you can read an extended version with extra background and commentary in the annotated release notes on my blog:
simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/17/...
February 17, 2025 at 6:23 AM
Reposted
Tomorrow at 2pm ET / 7pm GMT we have a pre-recorded episode of Tom's Hardware: The Pi Cast. This week I've got some new Pineboards Modulo Compute Module 5 and 4 carrier boards to talk about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQA-IP-m0Q
February 17, 2025 at 5:13 PM
I've just used Claude AI to build a really useful tool which can summarise an arbitrary document as an editable mind map. Sample output below.

Here's a friend link to the story: medium.com/@romillyc/bu...
February 12, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Reposted
This is a #RaspberryPi and CamJam event at the William Gates Building in Cambridge on Saturday, 1st March. Come along - it's always a lovely time with like-minded people!
February 12, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Reposted
Some good news re H5N1…

A single dose of broadly nAb protects macaques from H5N1 flu. All the pre-treated animals survived, incurring very limited signs of disease vs controls developed severe or fatal illness. Protection from severe disease would last wks.
shorturl.at/jfOo0
#BlueSky #MedSky #IDSky
Single dose of broadly neutralizing antibody protects macaques from H5N1 influenza
NIH science lays groundwork for future studies in people.
shorturl.at
February 11, 2025 at 1:11 PM