Tweets
Replying to @josecastillo
I feel pretty good about leaving it here for now! It fits, it works, but I really want to think through all the modes I expect to want before sealing it up again. Solid color modes, party mode, a (warm!) white lantern mode, rainbow swirls because OF COURSE we need rainbow swirls.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Flashlight working! And since A0 is the DAC pin, this isn’t dimming with PWM, it’s a true analog ramp. One bit of rewiring: battery now goes straight to QT Py, and the flashlight runs off 3.3V; when I had run it the other way I couldn’t get A0 high enough to turn the light off (:
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Replying to @josecastillo
Still some work to do (hooking up the flashlight, writing the software) but so far this is looking pretty good :)
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Replying to @josecastillo
Wiring, as I wait for hot glue gun to warm up. Found the pads that correspond to the button and sense switch on the lantern, so those now run to QT Py inputs. Battery power in yellow goes to the original board to power the flashlight, and soon to the QT Py’s 5V input on the back.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Reassembly time. Just using my photos to trace steps backwards; once the pieces are stacked, the big screw keeps the lantern part together and the little screws attach the base to the body. I also like the little O rings that let the lantern bit slide up and down smoothly.
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Replying to @josecastillo
AND WE HAVE LIGHT!
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Replying to @josecastillo
Some careful wiring inside the cob, and the lantern bit is looking pretty good! Haven’t wired up the battery, switches or flashlight yet, but this should be enough to test the general concept.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Also, I shouldn’t have been so hard on this lantern at the outset. It’s not so much “disappointing,” as the color temperature was just too cool for my taste. It actually feels rather well put together, and if not for the bluish hue, I probably would have used it more often 🙃
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Replying to @josecastillo
Good morning! The lantern build continues. After sleeping on it, I’ve decided to restore two of the parts from the original controller board. Some poking around revealed a P-channel MOSFET and 2 ohm resistor that should be ideal for driving the original flashlight from the QT Py.
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Replying to @josecastillo
also realize I may have erred in pulling all the components off that original board: I probably am going to need a MOSFET to switch the flashlight on and off, and it definitely had that. But I took photos, and saved all the parts; I can put back what I need tomorrow. For now, 😴
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Replying to @josecastillo
calling it a night but leaving some notes for future self. Want to use the NeoPXL8 library to drive the three strips, which requires the TCC0 peripheral. Then there’s two buttons I want to act as interrupts, a pin to control the flashlight, and I²C which I want to keep available.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Used hot air to remove all components from the original controller. Only three wires will go to this board now: ground, the sense switch and the button. What controls the pixels? Well, lantern is getting a light transplant and a brain transplant, in the form of an Adafruit QT Py!
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Replying to @josecastillo
Progress! Sandpaper fixed both issues: sanding the top and bottom got the Neopixel bars to fit, and on the sides (where the capacitors are), removed the conductive paint from the reflector. Some hot glue secures the bars in place. It feels like these were designed for each other!
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Replying to @ScarceSam
Yea, unfortunately it looks pretty completely unmarked. No matter, though! My plan is to remove everything from the board except the two buttons, and hot glue one of these where the components once were :) http://adafru.it/4600
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Replying to @josecastillo
This is where I’m at so far. The Neopixel bars are just barely too big; some sandpaper on the top or bottom of the opening should make them fit. Also realized that whatever the shiny coat on the plastic is, it’s conductive, so I’ll have to deal with that as well. To be continued!
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Replying to @josecastillo
The lantern “cob” (as the silkscreen calls it) is flexible plastic with some bright LED bars on aluminum PCBs. Plastic tabs hold them in place, but a little force liberates them. This is where the Neopixels will go! But these are fun, and bright! Saving them for a future project.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Other side of the microcontroller board. A button for turning the light on, which I’ll also reuse. Took a moment to document the existing situation (coloring one of the two red wires to the flashlight black for clarity); then desoldered everything, so it’s all in separate pieces.
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Replying to @josecastillo
One bigger Phillips screw holds the whole assembly together, and with that, the lantern is in pieces. Cute little microcontroller board in here, with a sense switch that determines when it’s in lantern mode or flashlight mode. I will probably reuse this bit.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Come join me on this project! I started documenting the process, anyway; let’s hope it turns out ok. This gadget comes apart pretty easily: battery compartment on top unscrews; so does the ring around the flashlight. Two Phillips screws later, we’re in the base of the flashlight.
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Replying to @josecastillo
oh dear. shared this link before reading the part where the author goes maskless at one of these parties, has three drinks and then SHARES A VAPE PEN WITH A STRANGER. Like, I appreciate the need for reporting on this phenomenon, but WHAT THE FUCK.
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“The politics of partying is something no one here wants to discuss. Ignoring reality is part of the premise. The 20-somethings sharing spit particles on the dance floor seem to have a generational nihilistic streak, born as they were into a dying world.” https://www.thecut.com/2020/11/nyc-underground-nightlife-covid-19.html
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Replying to @josecastillo
DigiKey order submitted! Now I have a day and a half to kill ’til I can do my prototype, so I’ve chosen (from the island of misfit projects) this disappointing camping lantern. I’ve been meaning to tear it apart and retrofit with Neopixels. Good project; short and sweet (I hope)!
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It’s in print, and now it’s online! My step-by-step guide on how to build the E-Book FeatherWing. With thanks to @make for publishing it and @adafruit for the designs that inspired the wing (and guides that taught me what I needed to learn to make it real) https://makezine.com/projects/the-open-book-and-the-e-book-featherwing/
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Replying to @josecastillo
on the plus side I’ve also unearthed a half-dozen half-finished projects, so I’ll have some distractions while I wait for a new dev board to arrive 🙃
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unpacked every box in my room three times looking for the dev board I need, and I’ve come up empty. I feel as though there’s a phantom DigiKey box somewhere in my house that has all the things I’m looking for and cannot find.
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Replying to @montemmmonte
that’d be the plan! There’s also some open source hardware in this direction already; @eradionica uses 6" Kindle screens for their Inkplate 6 device: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6
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Replying to @Automatid
I agree! Their 4.2" screen, the one I use in the Open Book, punches far above its weight; fast refresh, partial refresh, 2-bit grayscale. Really impressive tech.
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Replying to @JosefZvolanek
😍 that is AWESOME!!
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in other e-paper news, finally broke down and got an evaluation board for some more advanced e-paper screens and WOW do I ever want to build something with one of these someday. (this is a recycled 6" Kindle screen and a new 4.3" display, both 800x600, driven over the same pins!)
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Replying to @rpitechguy, @KafesGourmes, @unexpectedmaker, @oshpark and @adafruit
So far it’s a DIY affair; you can buy the circuit board here, but you also have to get all the parts and solder it together yourself. I’m working on figuring out how to get them made though! https://www.tindie.com/products/joeycastillo/the-e-book-wing-pcb-bare-pcb/
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Replying to @unexpectedmaker, @oshpark and @adafruit
Espressif’s installation instructions changed since your YouTube video; now they direct folks to make a shallow clone, which means you can’t check out other branches (with a really opaque error message). Just need to tell folks to omit the –depth=1 bit. https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/master/docs/arduino-ide/mac.md
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Replying to @unexpectedmaker, @oshpark and @adafruit
Not much! Minor code changes to play nice with the ESP32 Arduino core, but otherwise pretty seamless. The one roadblock was a git issue that flummoxed me for a bit when setting up the ESP32S2 board support; a documentation tweak could make it easier for folks in the future. (1/2)
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One of the joys of the E-Book FeatherWing is that it makes it super easy to play with new platforms for the Open Book. Today: E-Book FeatherWing × FeatherS2 (by @unexpectedmaker); trying Espressif’s ESP32-S2 on for size.
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Replying to @josecastillo
hmm. added some mock silkscreen art to the mock board (“more pages”, roughly, is the idea) and suddenly I’m less bothered by the chunky version. Of course now folks in replies are saying they like the original better, so I remain as ever in a state of uncertainty 🙃
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Replying to @sohojoester and @BuffitoMojito
Oh wow. somehow I had missed that e-reader. That is leaning all the way in on asymmetry!
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Replying to @sonicase
Alas, I wish, but I have evaluated that display and it takes too long to refresh; you’d be waiting 15 seconds to turn a page. Really pretty screen, great colors especially for illustrations, but not yet suited to the book reading use case.
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Not sure if this is a problem, or just familiarity bias. Doing a new variant of Open Book. Decided to fix the asymmetry of the front face, a longstanding quirk. The mockup feels weird & chunky in the hand, BUT it’ll look WAY better in an enclosure. IDK. Open to feedback. (thread)
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hacking on a new pcb today, and dang this feather connector turned out nice :)
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spent some time last night getting circuitpyui working on the new @Adafruit MagTag. not that fancy as demos go, but this is an event-driven UI with two on-screen buttons; up and down to navigate, right to “click”. more to come here :) https://github.com/joeycastillo/circuitpyui/blob/main/examples/MagTag/minimal.py
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lost in the cacophony of our post-election nightmare: the Republican Party’s public affirmation that the will of the people no longer matters to them. even if this autocratic attempt fails, this is the new normal. they’ll sue, cheat or break the law to cling to power after losses
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It is happening here. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/19/us/joe-biden-trump-updates/trump-tries-to-subvert-the-election-inviting-michigan-gop-lawmakers-to-the-white-house
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RT @RonBrownstein: Trump’s America. Five years ago, did anyone imagine that threats of violence against public officials would become routi…
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
100%. I also fear that as long as conservative propaganda engines (FOX News, Facebook) exist, we’re going to be at a disadvantage there too. People are voting based on false information. How do we steer the ship of state when a third of the nation is living in a state of fantasy?
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Tonight, two Republican officials in MI refused to certify election results. After IMMENSE pressure, they relented. Our democracy may yet be saved, but don’t think for a second the outcome was inevitable. If democracy is saved it will be because good people stood up and saved it. https://twitter.com/FirenzeMike/status/1328880419106942979
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Replying to @matterpoetry
I think Facebook was fine until the invention of the News Feed. The news feed is probably the most destructive possible design for a social media platform, and (regrettably) every subsequent social media platform adopted it wholesale.
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watching the Crew-1 launch and I’m relieved that the #LaunchAmerica logo has been redesigned since last time. New version on the right looks a lot less… well… you know.
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Replying to @josecastillo
side note, as much as I enjoy ratio’ing our stupid shitty lame duck president, this isn’t disputed. it’s false. it’s dangerous. it’s anti-democratic. twitter should probably disable his account at this point (or at least prevent people from retweeting because, like, this is bad).
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this doesn’t make alot of sense.
i’m happy for u tho.
or sorry that happened. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1327279929319432200(original)
Replying to @tomfleet, @adafruit and @johnedgarpark
It’s 2bpp for 4 colors. actually a clever hack: when refreshing there’s memory for the old pixel value and new pixel value so you can differentiate W>W vs B>W, the grayscale mode uses those two buffers and different timings to trick the screen into showing shades of gray!
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I’ve been a fan of Make: Magazine since the very beginning, so it’s hard to overstate my excitement about this: the E-Book FeatherWing is featured in this month’s @Make Vol. 75! It’s an 8-page guide, and my first time being published there. Hope to be able to share a link soon!
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