Blog - Alan Edwardes

Posts in 2026

Anti-Aliased MicroPython Fonts with a Few Kilobytes of Memory on 8 of Mar
Driving SPI Displays with Vanilla MicroPython on 6 of Mar

Posts in 2025

Drawing Images Quickly with PicoGraphics and MicroPython on 28 of Jun
Replicating the iOS Lock Screen Temperature Gauge on 17 of Jun
Streaming Video to a Pico 1 with MicroPython on 8 of Jun

Posts in 2024

Update News Presentation Markup for Games on 6 of Oct
Remembering USB Devices in VMware ESXi on 13 of Sep
Automatically Mounting USB Disks on Ubuntu on 12 of Sep
Raspberry Pi Pico HTTP Admin Dashboard on 12 of Aug
Raspberry Pi Pico Ionising Radiation Sensor on 7 of Aug
Loki and Grafana for Logs on 17 of May
Optimising Rocket Chat Content Delivery with CloudFront on 27 of Apr
Raspberry Pi Pico W WiFi Resiliency on 17 of Mar
Raspberry Pi Pico Carbon Dioxide Sensor on 7 of Mar
Using a New Hard Disk on Ubuntu on 2 of Feb
10 Year Anniversary of Estranged on 16 of Jan

Posts in 2023

Raspberry Pi Pico Home Assistant Motion & Temperature Sensor on 12 of Nov
Racing Tasks in C♯ on 8 of Oct
Using Material Layers in UE5 on 23 of Sep
Running Rocket Chat on an Intel Celron CPU in 2023 on 25 of Mar
Running Rocket Chat on a Raspberry Pi in 2023 on 15 of Mar
Fixing UE5 Actors Disappearing when Building Lighting on 1 of Jan
Fixing UE5 Level Sequence Assertion on 1 of Jan

Posts in 2022

Raspberry Pi with Docker on 30 of Dec
Fixing UE5 Chaos Events at Runtime on 27 of Dec
Scam Warning on 26 of Nov
Casting Video to VLC via Home Assistant on 20 of Nov
Advanced Git LFS and Jenkins on 16 of Nov
Baking Ambient Occlusion using Blender on 2 of Oct
Live GivEnergy PV Inverter Data in Home Assistant on 10 of Apr
Useful ffmpeg Recipes on 31 of Jan
Force Refresh Rocket.Chat Snap SSL Certificate via Caddy on 29 of Jan

Posts in 2021

Pushing to Public AWS Container Registry with GitHub Actions on 23 of May
Graphing Sensor Data from a Raspberry Pi with Grafana on 22 of May
Create Meshes from Height Maps using Blender on 16 of May
Recording Camera Animations for UE4 with a Phone on 15 of May
The Art of Mirror's Edge on 11 of Apr
Serving Static Websites Using Lambda@Edge on 20 of Mar
Thread Safe Random in C♯ on 16 of Mar
Spotting Fake Indie Game Key Requests on 11 of Mar
Jenkins Library for Unreal Engine 4 on 13 of Feb
Three Approaches to Readable Materials in First Person Games on 7 of Feb
Cheap Synthetic Monitoring with AWS Lambda on 24 of Jan

Posts in 2020

Generating Mipmaps for Render Targets in UE4 on 24 of Dec
Routing DNS over HTTPS Using Raspberry Pi on 6 of Oct
Tips for Building Games with Unreal Engine 4 on 3 of Oct
Serving Localised Assets from S3 Using Lambda@Edge on 17 of May

Posts in 2019

Automating macOS Notarization for UE4 on 23 of Nov

Posts in 2018

ISO Country Code to Unicode Flag in C♯ and JavaScript on 22 of Jul
Serverless Git LFS for Game Development on 6 of Jan
Adding Custom Map Checks in UE4 on 3 of Jan

Posts in 2017

Building and Deploying a React App Using AWS Lambda on 24 of Dec
Git HTTP Username and Password in Environment Variables on 22 of Dec
Capturing and Uploading Screenshots in UE4 on 20 of Dec
Using Capsule Shadows on Large Objects in UE4 on 8 of Dec

Featured: 10 Year Anniversary of Estranged

Featured: Using Material Layers in UE5

Featured: Create Meshes from Height Maps using Blender

Anti-Aliased MicroPython Fonts with a Few Kilobytes of Memory

📅 8 March 2026 🔖 iot ⏲️ 8 minutes to read

If you've been following the other posts on this project, the previous entry covered how I replaced PicoGraphics with a custom framebuffer stack that drives SPI displays using vanilla MicroPython. With the display layer working, I needed a way to actually draw text.

The built-in framebuf module includes a minimal 8x8 pixel font, which is functional but too coarse for a real information display. I wanted proportional, anti-aliased text rendered from proper font files, and that meant implementing a BMFont loader (bmfont.py).