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Raspberry Pi WS2812B Lightstrip Control with .NET
05 Aug 2025

Raspberry Pi WS2812B Lightstrip Control with .NET

By BEN ABT dotnet raspberry ws2812b lightstrip 7 min reading time

In this beginner-friendly guide, you’ll learn how to control a WS2812B (aka “NeoPixel”) LED light strip with a Raspberry Pi using .NET. We’ll enable SPI on the Pi, wire the strip correctly (including best practices like a level shifter and a series resistor), and write a small .NET 9 app using the Iot.Device.Bindings library to animate colors. We’ll also publish the app as a self-contained linux-arm64 binary so no .NET runtime is needed on the Pi.

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Raspberry Build HAT: Controlling LEGO Engines with .NET
24 Jul 2025

Raspberry Build HAT: Controlling LEGO Engines with .NET

By BEN ABT dotnet raspberry buildhat lego 5 min reading time

In this beginner-friendly guide, you’ll learn how to control LEGO motors connected to a Raspberry Pi via the official Raspberry Pi Build HAT – using a simple, pure .NET application. We’ll use the Iot.Device.BuildHat NuGet package, which provides a friendly .NET API for the Build HAT. No Python required. We’ll also publish the app as a self-contained .NET 9 binary for linux-arm64 so you do not need to install .NET on the Raspberry Pi. This approach is easy to set up, reliable, and a great starting point for your own robotics projects.

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Scheduled Builds for Cloudflare Deployments with GitHub Actions
14 Jul 2025

Scheduled Builds for Cloudflare Deployments with GitHub Actions

By BEN ABT cloudflare github actions devops 4 min reading time

Static site generators like Hugo do not have a built-in mechanism to automatically publish content–such as blog posts–at a specific time. If you want a post to go live at a certain hour, you need to rebuild and redeploy your site at that moment. This means you have to trigger the build process yourself, which can be inconvenient or easy to forget.

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Automatically deploy GPT-4.1 Mini in Azure OpenAI via Bicep
10 Jul 2025

Automatically deploy GPT-4.1 Mini in Azure OpenAI via Bicep

By BEN ABT Azure OpenAI Azure AI Foundry 3 min reading time

The official Microsoft documentation on deploying Azure OpenAI models is generally helpful, but specific examples are often still missing, especially for new models such as gpt-4.1-mini and newer SKU types such as DataZoneStandard. Anyone who wants to provide a current model such as the gpt-4.1-mini programmatically is therefore quickly faced with unanswered questions.

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From ASP.NET Core to Hugo: My Blog's Migration to Cloudflare
07 Jul 2025

From ASP.NET Core to Hugo: My Blog's Migration to Cloudflare

By BEN ABT .NET ASP.NET Core Hugo Cloudflare SchwabenCode 4 min reading time

Like many developers, my blogging journey started with WordPress. More than 20 years ago. It was convenient, widely supported, and quick to set up. But over time, the drawbacks began to pile up: security issues, constant updates, performance tuning, plugin juggling, costly – the overhead was real. I wanted something more streamlined, something that gave me control without stealing my time.

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Running a Local Docker Registry with PowerShell
25 Jun 2025

Running a Local Docker Registry with PowerShell

By BEN ABT docker 1 min reading time

Setting up a local Docker registry is a great way to manage and share container images in your development environment without relying on external services like Docker Hub. This guide walks you through setting up a private Docker registry on your machine using PowerShell on Windows.

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Task.Run vs. TaskFactory.StartNew
10 Jun 2025

Task.Run vs. TaskFactory.StartNew

By BEN ABT .NET CSharp 2 min reading time

When working with asynchronous or parallel code in C#, you’ll inevitably encounter two common ways to start tasks: Task.Run and TaskFactory.StartNew. At first glance, they seem similar - but they behave differently and should be used appropriately depending on the context.

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