Many projects have me finding myself in a position where I cannot find all of the information in one place to solve what should be a simple problem.

I’m on Manjaro Linux trying to use the Arduino IDE to create a USB UART interface from an ESP32 devkit I have in the drawer. Before getting started, we needed to find a board support package for the ESP32 to shove into the Arduino IDE.

The deployment of this website went through several iterations which generally failed for being too complicated or expensive to maintain before landing on this stack explicitly to solve that problem. Since this involved stringing a number of tools together, it seemed prudent to write up these efforts for others (including future me) to benefit from. This is not a perfect guide to build any website in any scenario, and it doesn’t aim to be; this is how this website was deployed to suit the needs of this website’s maintainers. Some parts (especially those using Hugo and inside the theme) should could be done better, but these work.

Checking my git logs, I’ve worked on what would become mumen-controller for nearly 3 years at the time of writing this and have never stopped to record my progress in a useful way (though I have written about it in various private chats with friends and posted photos of build progress to a few group chats). For the beginning of this post, I’ll focus on a historical recap to the best of my available records and recollection. Some details may deviate slightly from the way things went, but it should give a useful enough background on the project, some of the hurdles to cross, and where the current goals were generated.