dimboo.net Notes, projects, and writing from dimboo.net. 2026-08-21T14:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/ dimboo.net Weather display, take two: enclosure and firmware notes 2026-08-21T14:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/weather-display-enclosure-and-firmware/ Follow-up to the weekend weather display project — it no longer looks like a breadboard experiment on my desk, and the firmware has settled down enough to write up properly.

Parts list

  • ESP32-C3 dev board (Wi-Fi, deep sleep support)
  • 4.2" e-ink panel, SPI
  • 1000mAh LiPo + basic charge/boost module
  • 3D-printed two-piece enclosure (PETG, printed in a matte black)

Total cost was well under what a commercial e-ink display would run, and most of that was the panel itself.

Firmware

The loop is intentionally boring: wake up, connect to Wi-Fi, hit a weather API, render to the e-ink buffer, go back to deep sleep. No web server, no persistent connection, nothing to keep alive.

void loop() {
  connectWifi();
  WeatherData data = fetchForecast();
  renderToDisplay(data);
  esp_sleep_enable_timer_wakeup(HOUR_IN_US);
  esp_deep_sleep_start();
}

Deep sleep between refreshes is what makes the battery estimate realistic — active Wi-Fi and the e-ink refresh together only draw meaningful current for a few seconds each hour.

What’s left

Battery life is still an estimate rather than a measurement — I’ll know more once it’s been running unattended for a couple of weeks. If it holds up, next on the list is a second unit for the kitchen with a shorter refresh interval.

]]> Shipping this blog: a few bumps along the way 2026-08-21T09:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/shipping-this-blog/ This site went from an empty folder to live on blog.dimboo.net in an afternoon, but not without a few surprises — worth writing down before I forget them.

Plugin ecosystems move fast. By the time I actually installed dependencies, @11ty/eleventy-plugin-rss had gone ESM-only, which meant switching the config file from eleventy.config.js to eleventy.config.mjs and updating a couple of filter names that had been renamed upstream (rssLastUpdatedDate → getNewestCollectionItemDate | dateToRfc3339). Small fix, but a good reminder that a plan written even a few weeks earlier can drift out of date.

Cloudflare Pages deploys changed too. wrangler pages deploy no longer auto-creates the project on first run — you now need wrangler pages project create first, and a stray delegation to the newer unified Workers deploy path meant the very first attempt needed a --force flag to land on classic Pages. One-time hiccup; every deploy since has been a plain npm run deploy.

Domains don’t have to be all-or-nothing. dimboo.net was already doing a job elsewhere, so rather than fight over the apex domain, this blog just lives on blog.dimboo.net — a separate subdomain, attached as its own custom domain in Cloudflare Pages, without touching anything else on the root.

None of this was hard, exactly, just the usual cost of gluing together several fast-moving tools. Onward to actually writing about things other than the blog itself.

]]> A weekend project: tiny weather display 2026-08-05T00:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/a-weekend-project-tiny-weather-display/ Spent the weekend wiring up a small e-ink display that pulls the local forecast every hour and sits on my desk. Nothing fancy — a microcontroller, a weather API, and a battery that should last a few weeks per charge.

Prototype e-ink weather display sitting on a desk

Next step is a 3D-printed enclosure so it stops looking like a breadboard experiment. Full write-up with the parts list and firmware once it’s tidier.

]]> Notes on learning in public 2026-06-10T00:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/notes-on-learning-in-public/ Writing about something before you fully understand it feels risky, but it’s one of the fastest ways to actually understand it. A few things that have helped:

  • Publish the rough version. You can always revise later.
  • Link to sources so future-you can retrace the reasoning.
  • Treat comments and pushback as free debugging for your mental model.

None of this is novel advice, but it’s easy to forget when a draft feels “not ready yet.”

]]> Why I'm betting on static sites in 2026 2026-04-22T00:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/why-im-betting-on-static-sites-in-2026/ Every few years the pendulum swings back toward simplicity, and I think we’re in one of those moments again. For a personal blog, a static site generator gives you almost everything a database-backed CMS does, with none of the operational overhead.

Here’s roughly what the build step looks like for a page in this project:

eleventyConfig.addCollection("posts", (collectionApi) => {
  return collectionApi
    .getFilteredByTag("posts")
    .filter((item) => !item.data.draft)
    .sort((a, b) => b.date - a.date);
});

No server to patch, no database to back up, and deploys are a single wrangler pages deploy away. For a blog like this one, that trade-off is an easy call.

]]> Hello world, starting this blog 2026-02-14T00:00:00Z https://blog.dimboo.net/posts/hello-world-starting-this-blog/ I’ve put this off for long enough — welcome to the first post on dimboo.net.

The plan is simple: write about things I’m building, learning, or thinking about, without worrying too much about polish. This site is built with Eleventy, hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages, and the whole theme is hand-written CSS — no framework, no client-side JS beyond a tiny dark/light toggle.

More posts soon.

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