What have I been up to lately?

3D Printing

Well alot of 3D printing that is for sure.  I have two printers now and a good set of colored filaments for printing things.  The problem is that I am lacking in new things to print.  I really should try working on my own 3D designs.  I am very comfortable with OpenSCAD but it does has some limitations.  One is the "interactivity" aspect of the interface.  You have to tweak script code, refresh, tweak, refresh, etc....  Sometimes it would be nice to be able to grab primitives and move them manually.

Some of the more useful OpenSCAD scripts are for containers and such.  Walter Tsao has a great set.  For example, this useful object... http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:384919.  He includes a nice OpenSCAD file to let you tweak and size your own model.

ESP-8266/Wemos/MicroPython

Another obsession has been with these small ESP8266 modules.  For one, they are programmable through the Arduino IDE which makes them extremely accessible to many.  For me though, the real gem is being able to run MicroPython.  It's an amazingly complete implementation of Python that has built-in libraries for the hardware.