Let’s write a Python 3 daemon to animate an RGB LED according to the CPU load. Let’s also learn Python 3 from scratch as a Java developer and see all the gotchas we can encounter along the way.

Each node of my cluster computer is nameless and stateless like an AWS Lambda, so the entire OS must reside in memory. Having explored minimal Debian, Alpine Linux, and even RancherOS, the most exciting conclusion is to learn to compile the embedded Linux kernel and bootloaders from scratch for ARM64 and learn how to network-boot bare-metal hardware over HTTP.

My project this weekend was to fork both the BlinkStick C firmware and the Java API to make the Digispark USB hardware with the AVR ATtiny85 microprocessor do something never done before: execute color patterns on the microcontroller, not the host CPU. I outline how I failed many times, and how I eventually succeeded with links to my Github repos and pictures of my hardware hacks.