elitecoder.at

Hugo blog

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/11/ -

Restructured the blog part of my website using Hugo. The older I get, the more I tend to make use of easier solutions. Moved from pure html to md files. Adding new posts has become a piece of cake and static pages are the fastest.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/11/ - elitecoder.at

Embedded development

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/14/ -

I am currently employed as a full time developer in the embedded field. My main task is maintaining the Ginzinger electronics embedded Linux distribution, in short GELin2.

This entails spending endless hours building and debugging (CI) buildroot builds. Thankfully we have a lot of equipment here. Always a joy to play with toy projects on the boards developed and produced by the company in Weng.

Our latest boards offer a 4k camera, 5g WIFI and the IMX8M+ chip, LVDS touch screen displays, and all sorts of interfaces (serial, can bus, usb, ethernet). all on custom hardware, with custom kernels, custom U-Boot bootloaders.

Every day is a technical deep dive.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/14/ - elitecoder.at

Smart alarm clock

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/12/ -

My latest electronics project is an ESP32 based alarm clock with integrated webserver for configuration and setting alarms. By default shortly after midnight my home server (Zima board) will determine if it is working day or a holiday and set the alarm clock accordingly. I can change the setting manually from my phone, via a ready-made app that lets you configure curl calls.

The clock has three display modes: Normal time, countdown to alarm and Swatch Internet time. Countdown mode counts down to the currently set alarm if any and is indicated by displaying a dot in front of the shown time. If there is less than an hour to the alarm, the clock switches to minutes and seconds display.

I decided to use the Eclipse based ESP IDE for this project, as a more professional choice, compared to my previously used Arduino IDE.

In the beginning I used to have flickering issues with the MAX7219 LED matrix, which I solved by soldering a few capacitors. I’m planning on 3d printing my own case in an upcoming project.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/12/ - elitecoder.at

Linux ricing

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/13/ -

For the first time in my career I’m fully using Linux on my working computer, as well as at home. I almost went the full ricing route. What stuck with me was the combination xorg, i3, gnome-terminal, thunar, polybar.

Couldn’t fall in love with kitty nor alacritty. Wayland is too “secure” for my taste and doesn’t easily scripted automations, which are the basis of a good life on the terminal.

Most of my time is spent in lf and vim. I have grown fond of docker, tmux and Waterfox. All my machines are blazingly fast, no Microslop fan noise anymore. Ollama is running fine with GPU support inside a docker container.

My custom polybar doesn’t offer the full comfort of a real desktop environment but the shutdown button does exactly what it is told, no questions asked. The folder icon opens thunar. The bar also displays swatch internet time, using my own tool written in C, which I’m also hosting as a Debian repository on this website.

I’m currently running Ubuntu and Debian, although Ubuntu will probably leave as the distro is heading into the wrong direction (buggy rust coreutils, no xorg support anymore). I’m using rofi as a search engine for my music library as suggested by Youtuber bread. i3 is all around very satisfying. Its counterpart Sway on Wayland on the other hand didn’t really convince me, because of all of its incompatibilities with i3.

Tiling window managers are cool. On my old Ubuntu setup, it was to cumbersome to build hyprland. Maybe I will try it some day.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/13/ - elitecoder.at

Dr. Mario port for Miyoo Mini+ and ESP32 cheap yellow display

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/15/ -

Our family loves Dr. Mario. That’s why I decided to write my own clone Dr. Vida. The 2025 Sars Covid edition is available for Miyoo Mini Plus and Esp32 cheap yellow display.

Porting the game to Miyoo mini was a very interesting challenge, as this was my first program for this device. One needs a patched SDL library, because the display is built in upside down. See my early renderings. The ebook application that comes with Onion OS was a good starting point, as it already shows how to render to display and how to use the buttons. The final touch was audio, for which one needs to kill the pre-installed audio server on app startup and rerun it when the application is closed. I’m very pleased with the outcome and playability of my version. It has all the original combo sounds from the Gameboy edition, color sprites from the SNES version, Gameboy font, menu, all the levels (1-20).

The cheap yellow display has quite a low resolution and no input device, besides the touch screen. So I fetched the input via serial console and wrote a tiny bash script that forwards linux joystick input over the serial connection.

As I was already on the flow I also created a little desktop version for Linux, too.

For copyright reasons I decided not to put the code and graphics on Github. I know there is not a huge load of code available for the Miyoo, so if you want a copy of the code, feel free to contact me by email.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/15/ - elitecoder.at

Gameboy restoration

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/5/ -

Did a Gameboy original restoration. The repair kit was quite cheap, easy to use and also came with the necessary screw driver. Maybe I will also exchange the display some time in the future, as I couldn’t get rid of the banding despite trying my best with the soldering iron across the display cable.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/5/ - elitecoder.at

Training and learning

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/1/ -

After some months of relatively high mileage running my estimated Vo2Max has increased to 55ml/min/kg, a value I have never achieved previously in my whole life. Despite a few setbacks due to some short periods of minor illness I managed to stay in peak shape. As for coding I looked into Scala and brushed up my functional programming knowledge a bit. Added e-mail forwarding and stock value tracking to my telegram bot, which made several apps on my phone superfluous. Spent quite a substantial amount of time on studying and playing chess, then reached yet another plateau. Inflation and economy in Austria still not rosy. Europe is currently experiencing heat waves, not a good sign for coming years. My daughter will start a new school in September. She managed to finish her last four years with the best grades only making her dad proud.

That’s me cruising up the Hochalpenstrasse on Großglockner - Austria’s highest mountain.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/1/ - elitecoder.at

Website overhaul

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/2/ -

Today the website received a little overhaul. Among other things I added this blog page. So far the contact form has proven its stability as I received a lot of spam in the last couple of months but no real inquiries. Turns out that forms on the web are still an attractive target for spam bots. I’m not trying to protect myself from spam through any CAPTCHAs on here as this never ending arms race is a waste of time. Mail filters usually perform this duty much better.

Through decent investing in the stock market I managed to keep myself afloat. Frugal and healthy eating choices have saved me tons of money and also helped me lose the 8 kilos I gained around Christmas time in 2023. The last months were the best of my life. I reached new peak fitness levels. Last autumn I achieved 260W on a 20 minutes FTP cycling test. My current Vo2Max is around 52 ml/min/kg (Garmin guesstimate). I’ll hopefully be able to run a full marathon soon. Last weekend I already finished a 24 km training run.

The Fachkräftemangel in Austria (German for skilled worker shortage) doesn’t seem to be as bad as they say on the news. IMHO it is basically a hoax repeated by the media to keep employees poor and the upper class rich. I would be readily available for software projects basically any minute, using any toolset.

As many probably expected 2024 will be the year when our country is going through a mild recession. Back in 2022 when I quit my corporate job the economy was already on its way downhill. Inflation is still way too high compared to other countries in the European Union.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/2/ - elitecoder.at

New hardware project - Sudoku game

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/3/ -

Another hardware project: I built a Sudoku console, including joystick and an E-Paper display. Right click video above to start playing. The most annoying part of the display is the poor refresh rate. Even using partial refresh, which took some time to implement the refresh time is now bearable. The power consumption of the device is almost non-existent.

My father didn’t seem to enjoy his Birthday present later in the month as the fonts are too small for him to read. Nevertheless it was extremely fun building and programming this device.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/3/ - elitecoder.at

Stock trading and the AI hype

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

elitecoder.at https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/4/ -

As my predictions for the economy are all bearish I looked into options trading or rather put options warrants, as they are commonly used in Europe. The only company stocks that are rising at the moment are driven by the AI hype, which in my opinion isn’t going to last. Sure, there has been made a lot of progress with text, video and image processing but these algorithms can hardly be called intelligent. AGI is still way out of reach and probably will be my whole lifetime - Thank God.

- https://elitecoder.at/blog/posts/4/ - elitecoder.at