Front_End on Charlie Howlett

Reverse Engineering Roland TM-2

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While building my compact hybrid drumming rig, I became very familiar with the Roland TM-2. The module has an enormous number of settings and even lets users save configurations to an SD card as .TM0 files. One day, I opened one of these files on my computer to see what was inside. I found mostly unreadable raw binary data, with a short string of plain English text at the top: the name of my save file. This led me to wonder whether I could reverse engineer the format and display all the information in a web-based user interface.

Hugo Teletext

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I decided to revamp my personal site’s style and introduce a blog. I chose the static site generator Hugo because it keeps post content, written in raw Markdown, cleanly separated from site styling. Which should help reduce maintenance time and make cross-posting easier.

I originally planned to use a third-party Hugo theme, but after stumbling across the Teletext font at galax.xyz, I was inspired to design my own reusable teletext-inspired theme.

Automating Lights with a Raspberry Pi

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pi Lights was a fairly simple idea and my first exploration into DIY home automation: measure the ambient light level throughout the day using a Raspberry Pi, then switch Wi-Fi lights on or off automatically.

Implementation

The system polls several light-dependent resistors and averages their readings before deciding whether to switch the lights. Using multiple sensors and rate-limiting changes made the automation less sensitive to brief shadows or sudden changes in brightness. A dedicated light-sensing Raspberry Pi HAT would have been more accurate, but I wanted to see if I could build a first pass using components I already had lying around. I ran the software as a Linux service so it would start automatically and continue working in the background without needing any attention.

Procedurally Generated Clouds

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Fullscreen

While at university I first started thinking about building a personal site, and from the beginning I knew I wanted it to feel unique and a little artistic. So in 2019 I built the procedurally generated p5.js sketch above and deployed it as a simple single-page app on Netlify, along with some basic contact information.

Each cloud is created algorithmically rather than relying on static images, which means every run produces a slightly different scene. I later expanded the sketch with mountains, a moon, stars, and a dark/light switcher to make the whole scene feel more complete.