Engineering log // 6 posts

Notes from the bench.

Tutorials, devlogs and honest engineering writeups. If something here saves you a respin or a weekend of debugging, it did its job.

Devlog Jun 8, 2026

Engineering This Website

How vivaanshah.tech is built: Astro 5 static output on Cloudflare Pages, a dependency-free motion engine, seeded generative circuit art, and a CSP with no unsafe-inline.

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Engineering Mar 14, 2026

Taming Stepper Motor Resonance with TMC2209s

Why my robotic arm sang like a violin at 400 mm/min, and how StealthChop, microstepping and a firmware notch filter fixed it.

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Tutorial Feb 9, 2026

Serving a Realtime Web UI from an ESP32

WebSockets over LittleFS with gzip-baked assets: how Helios pushes LED state to four browsers at once with ~11 ms median latency on a $4 microcontroller.

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Devlog Jan 18, 2026

Atlas Devlog 01 — The Cycloidal Redesign

Replacing the shoulder joint's printed spur gearbox with a printed cycloidal drive: eccentric bearing, BB-loaded race, torque tests, and a 10x backlash improvement measured with a dial indicator.

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Tutorial Dec 9, 2025

Five UI Patterns for 128x64 OLEDs

The five interface patterns I keep reusing on SSD1306 displays: status bars, rotary menus with inertia, toasts, sparklines, and transitions — all inside 8KB of flash.

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Engineering Nov 18, 2025

Ten Lessons from My First Custom PCB

What two respins of my macropad board taught me about footprints, decoupling, USB routing, and why 0402 passives were a mistake I made on purpose and regretted.

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