Been doing a lot with Kickstart recently, as I’ve had to build some airgapped VM’s in a hurry and have gone off Ansible again. Been templating the more complex bits using j2cli and YAML, so its a bit like Ansible without the SSH - and its ready at first boot rather than afterwards. I’ve uploaded my RHEL/Alma/Rocky/CentOS 8.4 CIS-hardened kickstart to github Oddly enough I’ve found that the SLES install being so slow in esxi appears to be SUSE (or AutoYAST?

I thought I’d give Ansible another shot now it’s owned by RedHat (IBM). As kickstart is a bit limiting. It seems a bit more robust these days, there’s less need to shell out to do the simplest tasks - probably due to the growing number of builtin modules. Inventories seem to have matured as has Vault, which is now very simple to use - especially if you use it inline. For example, to encrypt your ssh/su/grub password you can use the following in inventory.

My charlieplexed dice boards have arrived from JLCPCB. It uses an ATTiny85 and vibration sensor and only three output pins to drive 6 LED’s. I’m powering this via a rechargeable LIR2032. I also made a charger for it using my favourite TP4056 modules with Rprog replaced with a 30k resistor to set the charge current to about 35mA, a bit of spare perfboard and a coincell holder (and yet another 3D printed bumper!

I’ve made some more PCB’s since the decade counter; first was a modification of that board to use a 7-segment display and a CD4026 driver IC. I had to make a custom footprint for the RL-S5610 display, but it wasn’t too difficult and came out perfectly. I also removed the variable resistor and added a couple of pin headers so it could be powered from a LiPo battery with JST connector not just the DC jack.

I had a bunch of old DIP IC’s like 555 timers and 4017 decade counters, so thought I’d do something with them, and of course blinkenlights was the first thing that sprang to mind! I had a JLCPCB voucher so set to work making a PCB. First off I merged the basic tlc555 astable circuit and cd4017b decade counter circuit schematics in KiCad: Next, I switched to KiCad’s PCBnew mode to make the circuit board, its a little messy due to having to route ten LED’s, still only a few vias and a couple of islands: