@Kvin

Open it now and a whole galaxy drifts quietly behind the title, waiting for you.

Tap the small speaker in the corner. The universe starts to sing. A slow score drifts and resolves beneath you as you fly, and every jump between stars carries its own sound.

I’ve fixed the auido. There is not a single sound file in the whole project. The music, and the whoosh of each warp, are built live from oscillators and a little maths, exactly the way the stars and worlds are. Nothing here is downloaded. It is all conjured from your word.

I spent this last stretch trying to break it. Zoom out as far as you like and it stays smooth. Click like a maniac and nothing trips. Y

So that is the whole thing: a universe from a single word, that you can fly through, land on, scan, listen to, and hand to someone else with a link!

It’s done.

The last part was just tidying and fixing rather than new features. I fixed all issues, and set it up for submission, by doing my least favourite part: organizing my github.
At this point it’s all in place: design files organised into CAD/PCB/Firmware, production files generated, README with the screenshots and BOM. It’s finally done!

It’s live!
Where there used to be a black loading screen, a whole galaxy now drifts quietly behind the title, waiting for you at https://kvin-21.github.io/Aether!

Type a word, warp in, and everything glows. Bright stars bloom and bleed light into the dark around them. Same as the first day: none of it is downloaded. Still flat 2D, still pure maths, still conjured from your word. It has just put its make-up on. This is the part where it stops being a build and starts being a place. It holds together now/
I spent this last stage trying to break it, then fixing whatever broke. Strange seeds, empty ones, ones in other alphabets, ones two hundred characters long, all land somewhere real. Zoom as far out as you like and it stays smooth. Click like a maniac and nothing trips. Your browser’s back and forward buttons move through the universe with you now. And a share link, opened cold by a stranger, rebuilds your exact world on your exact planet, every single time.

So that is the whole thing: a universe from a single word, that you can fly through, land on, scan, listen to, and hand to someone else with a link. Try violet-tide-77 and watch a lava world glow on its night side. Try bin-3 for a system with two suns sharing one centre. Then type your own name, and go and see the universe that only you have.

But ofcourse, there are still some bugs with the sound :(

Now it casts shadows

Look closely at the planet. That bright spot on the ocean is the sun, reflecting off the water exactly where it should, and it vanishes the instant a cloud drifts over it. Those clouds sit above the surface and throw soft shadows onto the ground below. The rings lay their own shadow across the globe.

Now the surprising part, the same one as last time: none of this is 3D. There is still no GPU, no model, no texture, not one downloaded file. It is all flat 2D and pure maths, conjured from your word. It has simply learnt to pretend it has depth, and it pretends well enough that your eye stops asking.

Drop onto a planet now and it is actually alive with detail. Clouds drift a touch faster than the ground turning beneath them, and they shade what passes under them. Moons now circle on their own lit paths, slipping in front of the planet and then behind it. Lava worlds, ice worlds, deserts, oceans, green terran worlds, each one scanned and flagged for whether anything could live there. The lore has grown a memory too: it reads the world’s gravity, its heat, its moons, have a different story for each.

Systems are stranger than before. Some stars have a companion, two suns sharing one centre, each with its own corona. Belts of asteroids hide in the gaps between orbits.

Clicking a star now is no longer a cut. The camera dives, flying you down into the star before its system opens around, and flying you back out when you leave.

There is a jump-to-seed box in the corner if you want to leap straight to a particular universe, with your seed, coordinates and zoom always on show!

What if you could create a universe from your favourite words?

What loads is a universe. Your universe. A galaxy of stars nobody has ever flown through, scattered over nebulae nobody has ever seen, because none of it existed until the moment you pressed Enter. Type a different word and the old one is gone, replaced by another entire cosmos waiting to be explored.

That is Aether.

And here is the part that’s surprising: there are no images in it. None. Not a single texture, model, photo or downloaded file. Every star, every ringed gas giant, every drifting smear of colour is pure maths, generated live from your word. The whole thing is light enough to run on your phone, because there is nothing to load. It is all conjured on the spot.

This is the first build, and you can already travel. You start above a galaxy map, an endless field of stars you can drag and zoom through, drifting over layered clouds of gas. Each star is coloured by its real stellar class, from hot blue-white giants down to dim red dwarfs, and each carries a name. Hover one and it tells you what it is called. Pick one and you warp in, starlines streaking past.

Inside a system, planets swing around their star on live orbits, rocky worlds and banded gas giants, some having rings. Choose one and you fall towards it. It turns slowly under its own sunlight, wrapped in a thin halo of atmosphere, its rings passing in front and behind. A scan panel reads out the world: radius, gravity, surface temperature, atmosphere, the length of its day, its moons, and a line or two of lore about the place.

Then you can leave, and the whole universe is still sitting exactly where you left it.

Every world has an address. Hit share and you get a link holding the seed and your exact position, down to the planet you were staring at. Send it and the other person opens the same cosmos, in the same spot, on the same world. Try a different name, and watch a completely different universe assemble itself.

Next, I am deepening every layer: richer terrain and weather on the planets, binary stars and asteroid belts, more believable names and histories.

Focus Totem — Devlog #2

I changed the board from a rough cluster to a proper routed PCB now, and every error i had before is pretty much cleared. Both LED-chain labels were quietly landing on the exact same point, so I re-spaced them to each own their stub, and the dangling chain-end output got a proper no-connect flag instead of sitting there as a one-pin net. The bigger job was the footprints. I built accurate ones from scratch for the XIAO (7 pads a side, 2.54mm pitch, 0.6” rows) and the SK6812 MINI-E, added a footprint library so nothing looks like its floating, and switched the switches over to the correct stock footprints. After that it routed cleanly: 70 × 72mm, two-layer, ground pour both sides, M3 corner holes, and the XIAO’s USB sat on the bottom edge ready for the case cut-out. The ratsnest is completely gone. On top of that the firmware’s now actually a timer instead of a stub. I added the set → run → pause → done plus the break presets. The encoder sets the minutes, the OLED shows FOCUS / BREAK / DONE / SET with a live mm:ss countdown, and the two LEDs do the thing I wanted from the start, amber while idle, green while running, red in the final minute, then flashing when you’re done. It’s the first time it’s felt like the actual desk totem I pictured rather than a wiring diagram.

SynthwaveOS - Devlog #3
It is finished. Most of the time was spent fixing the some issues rather than adding brand-new features. The biggest change i added was the music player, so that you can now load any MP3 from disk, the player remembers it for the whole session, updates the track label to the filename, and lets you switch away to the synth tracks and back again without losing it. I also expanded the built-in tracks so they feel more like real songs. Neon Drive, Midnight Run and Afterglow now run through longer chord progressions with 32-step patterns, and Afterglow has a slow filter sweep drifting over the top so it evolves over time. I also optimised the drawing code so it runs more smoothly. At this point all is in place and done.

SynthwaveOS - Devlog #2

The whole thing actually looks like an OS now instead of a wireframe. I dropped the full synthwave theme on top of the previous skeleton: an animated perspective grid scrolling toward you, a sunset sun, scanlines, neon magenta/cyan glow on everything, and proper retro fonts (Orbitron + VT323). Now each track is its own little pattern - Neon Drive is a busy sawtooth lead with a square bass and hats on every beat, Midnight Run is punchier with offbeat hats and gaps, and Afterglow is a slow soft triangle with a filter sweep and no drums. I also split the visualiser so the bass drives the left bars, the lead and harmonics the middle, and the hats the right. I also added MP3 support with a Load MP3 button that picks any file off disk, so the visualiser reacts to your own music too.

Focus Totem — Devlog #1
I started building Focus Totem, a little Pomodoro/study-timer macropad. The idea is a small desk totem you twist to set your focus minutes, press the knob to start, and it counts down on a tiny OLED while two LEDs breathe amber → green → red so you can feel the time going from the corner of your eye. I built it because I doomscroll the second studying gets boring, so I wanted a physical thing sat on my desk that I have to deliberately start. I’ve set up the whole skeleton from scratch: the KiCad schematic fully wired (13 symbols), a rough PCB with all the parts placed, and a QMK keyboard folder that compiles. Pinout’s locked in and the schematic and firmware agree pad-for-pad: three keys on D0–D2, the encoder on D3/D6/D7, the OLED over I²C on D4/D5, and the SK6812 data line on D10. I wanted the whole thing wired and testable before I touch routing, so that if something breaks later I know it’s the layout and not the connections. Ran the first round of checks though and the PCB threw up a fair few errors when I opened. Nothing fatal, looks like footprint and outline gremlins from the skeleton stage. Next up: sorting those errors, routing the board, drawing the Edge.Cuts outline, and building the actual Pomodoro state machine with the OLED countdown and the LED breathing.

SynthwaveOS - Devlog #1

I started building SynthwaveOS, my very own web-based operating system with an 80s synthwave theme. The idea is a little neon command centre you can boot up in the browser with a Winamp-style music player with a visualiser that reacts to the audio. I’ve set up the whole skeleton from scratch - three windows (Welcome, Player, Tracks), a top bar with a live ticking clock, and three desktop icons that select and open their windows. For now, the windows drag around, close with the x, and raise to the front when you click them, with the top bar always staying on top. I wanted the whole thing working and testable first, so if something breaks later I know it’s the styling or the visualiser. Next up: the full synthwave with animated perspective grid wallpaper, the sunset gradient, glow everywhere, a proper retro font, and the gradient magenta→cyan visualiser bars.

Mission Control - Devlog #1

Well, I messed up with the projects, so I had to delete my devlogs. The actual time logged for this 1st devlog was 29m 44s
I Started creating a Slack bot called Mission Control.
The idea is a little space-themed command centre that pulls NASA + ISS data right into Slack.
Felt very on theme for a NASA-backed event so I went for it.
I’ve set up the Slack app from scratch, grabbed the two tokens, and registered four slash commands, all prefixed mc- so they don’t clash with the dozen other bots already in the workspace: /mc-apod → Astronomy Picture of the Day /mc-iss → live ISS position /mc-mars → Mars rover photos /mc-crew → who’s actually in space right now.
Right now every command just replies with plain text. I wanted the whole thing wired end-to-end and testable first, so if something breaks later I know it’s the API layer. Tested all four in Slack and they all replied (screenshot below). So commands register, the bot connects, and Slack and the bot are talking. Next up: splitting the commands into their own modules and actually hitting the APIs - NASA’s APOD, wheretheiss.at for the ISS, the Mars rover photos endpoint, and rebuilding the replies with Block Kit so they show real images instead of placeholder text

Mission Control - Devlog #2

All four commands now reach live data and render proper Block Kit instead of placeholder text, so the replies actually look like something now.
Each command’s wrapped in try/catch too, so if an API has a wobble it posts a friendly note instead of taking the whole bot down.
/mc-iss is my favourite right now, it pulls the live ISS position from wheretheiss.at and lays it out : latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, plus whether it’s currently in daylight or eclipsed. /mc-crew lists everyone actually in space right now with their role, agency and craft. /mc-mars gave me a detour. The classic api.nasa.gov Mars photos endpoint is dead at the moment (just returns a “no such app” error), so I switched to pulling Perseverance’s freshest raw images straight from NASA’s mars.nasa.gov feed instead. The one that’s not happy yet is /mc-apod. NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is the one I most want working since it’s the best output, but right now it’s hitting the catch block: “Couldn’t reach NASA’s picture of the day just now.” So the error handling is doing its job, but something in that request path is off.

Actual time logged - 54m 19s