A field notebook

I work with AI to build, investigate, and learn.

My work spans software, Linux systems, infrastructure, and hardware.

Explore the work
Old HiSilicon camera board connected to a USB-TTL adapter during the attempted bring-up

From the notebook · Aug 15, 2026

Twelve volts, one wrong pin

I tried to bring an old HiSilicon camera board back to life. The plan was cautious at first: identify the H1102NL Ethernet magnetics, verify the USB-TTL adapter with a loopback, keep its VCC disconnected, and listen for boot output. The mistake was the…

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Recent pages

All writing
  1. Above Qingshui Gong

    Two photographs of B-5688, Xiamen Air’s 100th aircraft, passing over the roofline of Qingshui Gong.

    photography · Xiamen · aviation

  2. An iPad at the front, a workspace behind it

    How I am moving my personal work toward an iPad interface, a local Ubuntu workspace, and AI tools that carry out the technical steps.

    workflow · ai · ipad

  3. GPT-124M from scratch: benchmarking and restart recovery

    A randomly initialized GPT-124M trained on 1,000,341,504 tokens using free Kaggle T4s, with verified cross-session recovery and final in-domain evaluation. A completed pretraining demo, not an instruction-tuned assistant.

    language-models · training · checkpoints · kaggle

  4. Making a four-province expressway atlas lighter

    A four-province OpenStreetMap atlas: static snapshots, quarter-degree data partitions, and smaller viewport loads, with visual QA still unfinished.

    maps · openstreetmap · performance

On the workbench

All work
  1. 3 TP-Link Security Cameras

    Curiosity teardown note for three TP-Link security cameras: power-on observations, reset and app behavior, internal modules, UART wiring, and hardware design clues.

    electronics · camera · teardown · embedded

  2. AI-native website interfaces

    An evolving proposal for websites built around AI-readable investigation objects, with the human interface as one view.

    ai · interfaces · agents · web

  3. Alpine Builder

    FriendlyElec and NanoPi Alpine image builder web UI for rootfs and SD-card builds.

    alpine · nanopi · images

  4. Cell Field

    A restored generative field of hand-drawn cellular forms, preserved for screen and print.

    generative · cells · print

Notes along the way

Browse the notebook →
  1. An old flashlight, a new idea

    An old flashlight shared across generations inspired a 3D-printed toy concept. I shelved the project after reconsidering its suitability for my baby.

  2. From silent UART to a working NanoPi R2S

    An evidence-led NanoPi R2S investigation: isolate an unreliable UART path, identify a wrong Rockchip image, boot Alpine Linux, and map the RK3328 SD-card chain.

  3. OpenLens: a local-first camera that admits what it does not know

    Building a portable multilingual learning companion, testing offline vision on Android, and keeping model uncertainty visible.