Hej 🦀🔌

This is the personal blog of Gerhard de Clercq. I am a South African living in Sweden and an electronic engineer who loves programming. Here you will find my crazed ramblings about code, electronics and who knows what else :)

Merus Starter V1I1 PCB 3D Rendering

Merus Starter V1I1 built

Introduction As alluded to in my previous post, I am working on a rather long term project that will (probably) be powered by an ESP32-C3. Specifically, I am working on building my own wireless speaker. And here “wireless” refers to the audio source being either Bluetooth or WiFi (i.e. a Spotify client). Unfortunately the power supply will be very much “wired”, at least for now :) Anyway, I am developing this project in smaller pieces that I can test individually and once each one has been confirmed to work, I will squish all the PCBs together into one....

May 29, 2022 Â· 4 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq
ESP Starter V1I1 PCB 3D Rendering

ESP Starter V1I1 ready

Introduction I am working on a project that will be powered by the ESP32-C3. Unfortunately, I don’t want to provide more details on that project right now… Anyway, in order to get used to this ESP32-C3 and to make sure that I understand how to create a custom board based on it, I decided to create my own custom dev board. My design is of course greatly inspired by the standard dev board, albeit with a few tweaks here and there....

March 20, 2022 Â· 3 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq
Two Raspberry Pi Picos wired together

RP2040 Development with WSL

Introduction I recently started working on a project where I want to use the RP2040 on a custom board. FYI, the RP2040 is the “chip” used on the Raspberry Pi Pico development board. Development for this board is actually quite straight forward, or at least if you’re on Linux, because that’s what most of the documentation is written for. You simply clone the SDK, install a few prerequisites and start building....

March 7, 2022 Â· 4 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq
Renode Screenshot

Initial bare-metal testing with Renode

Introduction This is a follow up to my blog post on Bare-metal Rust bootstrapped by C. In this post, I want to discuss how I used the Renode emulator to verify that my setup works. I won’t go into too much detail about how to use Renode. I just want to discuss the part that was relevant for my tests. Installation The first step of getting started with Renode is obviously to install it....

March 6, 2022 Â· 5 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq

Bare-metal Rust bootstrapped by C

Introduction As you might have noticed, Rust is already quite popular in the embedded space. And getting started with embedded Rust, even on a bare-metal level, isn’t all that difficult. However, I’m not a fan of the standard method as it has a bit too much magic for me. When it comes to embedded, I like to know exactly what is going on and that includes knowing the very first code which is run and “kicks off” the main code....

February 19, 2022 Â· 11 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq
Rusty Electrons Logo

Rusty Electrons?

Hello and welcome to my blog! I am an electronic engineer who loves programming. My passion in life is computers and my mission is to understand how they work on every level. This blog is for anyone who wants to follow along on that journey and learn with me; or for those who only briefly pass by as part of a frantic web search :) At the time of writing, my job title is “Embedded Systems Engineer” and I work for a small Swedish company named Terranet where I am tasked with “saving lives”....

February 18, 2022 Â· 1 min Â· Gerhard de Clercq