Build Instructions

29 September 2019 | Kevin McAleer

For the last couple of weekends I’ve been making tweaks and changes to the SMARSFan website; I’m hoping to getting back to coding and developing the software side of things soon.

I’m pleased with how the site now looks, using Jekyll has paid off - its much easier to add new content now and additional pages to existing areas. The site is published using Github Pages, authored in Atom using Jekyll to generate the final pages.

One of the things I like about Jekyll is that its easy to create lists of links and tags in the ‘front matter’ as its stored as YAML which is very easy to write and read. Jeykll can then build tag and link indexes across the site. Checkout the Tags page.

I originally stored the electronics components as a YAML data file, however to update content I would have to update several pages anyway, so I reworked this, creating an individual file for each component and having Jekyll build a collection of the pages. The front matter contains a type to describe the type of page content (electronics, parts, etc) so its now much easier to add additional components and have Jeykll generate all the links and update lists.

I’ve shared the source code for the website on github. Feel free to view it and if you want to help me add content - fork a copy and send me a merge request when you have something. I’ve also got a Trello board and a Slack team setup.

Build Instructions

I’ve created detailed build instructions for both Quad and Wheeled version of SMARS, with new links sections to relevant content such as parts, electronic components, STL files and where to buy components from.

I’ve also added new graphics, as well as photographs from my own builds.