Added links in the top navbar to NinjaTerm and NinjaCalc.

New page on the PowerPC e200 CPU architecture.

New page on controlling a LED using PWM.

Added a new page with info on system basis chips (SBCs).

Improved the consistency and look of a number of component package pages by removing the old table design and adding more references.

Add more component package pages for the packages in the DO-204 family.

Added more info on EMA filters.

Added a new page on the SMF (DO-219AB) component package.

Added info on bitter coatings added to coin cells.

Started a new page on Optimizing BLE for Low Power.

Released a new version of NinjaTerm, v4.13.0 which adds smart copy/paste support with Ctrl-Shift-C/V.

Started using Umami Analytics for analytics alongside Google Analytics. Umami is self-hosted on a Amazon Lightsail instance. The subdomain umami.mbedded.ninja points to the IPv6 only instance. If Umami works well (it’s privacy focused and is unlikely to be blocked by ad blockers), Google Analytics will be removed in the following months.

Added a new page on how to setup Umami Analytics on Amazon Lightsail.

Added info on C compile-time asserts().

Added a new page with a small amount of info on Infineon 32-bit AURIX TriCore MCUs.

Added info on MCU ADCs and switched-capacitor array architecture.

Started a new page on low power design.

Added info on the Thevenin equivalent circuit for a resistor divider.

Started a new page on RC Charging Circuits.

Started a new page with info on the opaque pointer design pattern.

Added info on Zephyr threads, mutexes, work queues and GPIO.

• Added info on the Law of Cosines.

  

• Added info on the Trigonometric Ratios.

  

• Added the ability to do a site-wide search with the help of the pagefind library. At compile time, after hugo builds the site, pagefind is then run and creates a search dictionary that is downloaded to the client when they want to perform a search. All the searching happens client-side, no server is needed.

  

• Added more info on Zephyr, including semaphores, the polling API, workqueues, watchdogs and commons errors.

• Noticed that the inline equation text colour was different to standard text (thanks to a Bootstrap CSS file), so I added SCSS rules to style it correctly.

• Added info on the non-standard use of MCU SPI peripherals to send data to WS8212 RGB LEDs.

  

• Added a new page with info on real-time clock (RTC) ICs.

  

• Added more info on various Zephyr peripheral APIs.

  

Statistics for 2023

2023 saw 436k (436,000) page views as reported by Google Analytics! This was up from 384k last year, an increase of 52k or 14%.

I discovered that many ad blockers also block Google Analytics, so this figure is likely less than the true value, given many people visiting this site will be software/electrical engineers who will use ad blockers. In an attempt to get a more realistic number, I paid for a month of Netlify’s analytics service which can’t be blocked in the same way as it’s working on the server side when requests are made (I use Netlify to host this blog). Netlify reported 729k visitors in just 1 month!?! Is this is to be believed that is approx. 8.7M visitors a year. This seems too high, so maybe it’s also recording a lot of bots? The true value might be someone between the two?

At the end of 2023 the site had 639k words, up from 604k words last year (an increase of 35k). These words were spread over 1221 pages, and included 4,518 images (an increase of 199 from 4,319 images last year).

Most Popular Pages

The top 10 most popular pages, ranked by number of page views:

Programming related pages again took the top spots. I’m not sure what “(not set)” is, this wasn’t here last year!

Acquisition

As usual, most of the traffic was from organic search (e.g. Google search engine).

Donations

I received NZD$59 worth of donations through my Ko-Fi page from this blog, NinjaCalc and NinjaTerm this year. Some kind folk donated NZ$3 a month, and there were two one-off donations of $15 and $20.

Achievements in 2023

• Asciidoc pages have been fully phased out.
• NinjaTerm was fixed up and turned into a PWA.
• Finally, the end of the year saw the blog get a dark mode!

Plans For The 2024 Year

• More content, and improving existing content: As always!
• Add the ability to do a site wide search: I’m thinking I’ll write a frontend along with using pagefind for this. I feel like this is a better approach than using Algolia, which is a paid for (although they do give out open-source licenses if you contact them) third party search service. Mostly because I will not depend on the 3rd party, the search index can be built at compile time and then the searching done by the client browser.