Tweets
Kickstarter alert: my friend Zaq Landsberg’s colossal 25-foot Reclining Liberty statue has been in Morningside Park all year. Now he’s fundraising to move it to a new home in NJ, & as a bonus, he’s doing a small edition of 3D-printed statues for backers! 🧵https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/recliningliberty/move-reclining-liberty-to-jersey-city
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Replying to @AlperenAkkuncu and @MohitBhoite
Different directives apply to different products, and in my particular case only RoHS applied, which is fulfilled through documentation and not testing. The other CE hoop I’ll have to jump through is that I’ll have to provide printed documentation in both English and German.
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Replying to @MohitBhoite
Apparently not — and since Mouser does the fulfillment, they’re very specific about the requirements. I don’t think Crowd Supply will mind me sharing this excerpt; this is from the project onboarding document related to CE guidance.
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Replying to @frivolous_circs
There is, and come to think of it I might explore that. To make the icons fit I had to shrink them slightly below their statutorily mandated 5mm height. If I can credibly say “they just won’t fit” I think I can put them on the manual and packaging. I’ll ask the CS folks about it!
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Replying to @kfury
Maybe we’ll finally see the turtles!
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Replying to @josecastillo
I was describing this to a photographer friend tonight and I liked the metaphor: like, you know how bigger lenses let in more light? So like a 50/1.4 lens is chunkier than a 50/2.8? Yeah well these folks had to build a lens the size of THE PLANET EARTH…
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Replying to @bikerglen
NARRATOR: “But it wasn’t.”
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Replying to @MarkKomus
Get you a Casio A158; it’s the best stainless steel watch under $30, and utterly compatible with the Sensor Watch board swap.
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“I got bored one day and put everything on a bagel.” https://gizmodo.com/reactions-black-hole-milky-way-image-release-1848918887
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Replying to @josecastillo
realizing i’m also going to have to steal some useful documentation away from your temperature sensor boards. You’re welcome!
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Now that I have chips for the watch, I need to order boards, and for that I need to make the silkscreen change I’ve been dreading: in which for applicable regulatory compliance purposes, we digitally remove as much fun as possible from the design, and replace it with these. 💫
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RT @a2: Sensor Watch buddies at @the_prepared happy hour with @josecastillo! Thanks to @helenleigh and @crowd_supply as well :) https://t.c…
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Replying to @josecastillo
Forward-looking statements, I know. Things could change, and I’ll write a proper backer update soon. but it’s hard to overstate my excitement at what’s just happened.
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Replying to @josecastillo
That’s enough to cover ALMOST everyone who backed the Crowd Supply campaign. The remaining connectors should ship by November, so there’ll likely end up being a second batch later this year / early next for the last few backers and anyone who ordered after the campaign closed.
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Replying to @josecastillo
I OBTAINED THE UNOBTANIUM! Alas we’re not entirely out of the woods with the parts shortage. I’m also waiting on my 9-pin flex connector. I have ~220 of those on-hand. DigiKey was holding another 403 for me. Assuming some loss, I sense I can make 600 boards in the coming weeks.
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Floored: arrived at the workshop today to find 1,650 SAML22J18A chips waiting. Depending how you look at it, that’s either one or ELEVEN months early! This means I’m going to be able to deliver A LOT of Sensor Watch boards not just on the original schedule, but potentially ahead! https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1524039024469745665
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Hey you! Are you in the New York area? Interested in hardware-oriented stuff? Drop by the workshop of @the_prepared in Brooklyn this evening! 5:30 or so; we’re hosting a Hardware Happy Hour with @helenleigh of @crowd_supply. Details here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hardware-happy-hour-brooklyn-edition-tickets-335601060807
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Replying to @crulge
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RT @attiegrande: The interview / show-and-tell show that I’ve been planning is becoming real! 😱
I’ve got four fantastic guests lined up, a…
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UPDATE: I feel much better. Lots of new feelings, though. https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1522235636597641216
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Replying to @a2
It’s subtle but on the SAML22J18, we can steal up to 8192 bytes from the program storage allocation and use it as an EEPROM emulation area. When configured this way, it can be read or written even while the main Flash array is being read, which makes it super simple to work with.
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Replying to @josecastillo
now if only I could get some of them this year. *wink* *wink* @MicrochipMakes @MicrochipTech
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One last thought. Look at this board. Not counting the 3.3V supply (which isn’t even powered on-wrist) there’s one piece of silicon. Timekeeping, LCD display, analog, USB, I²C, SPI, UART, light, sound, and now storage. Sensor Watch is a lesson in getting the most out of one chip. https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1524018740521840640
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Replying to @josecastillo
And funnily enough, this little disk drive also works on the Sensor Watch emulator — simply by statically allocating 8 kilobytes and pretending it’s our Flash memory! A future improvement could stash the buffer in localStorage, but this works for now. https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/ed526355f69a931d51a6ebff1b45c70988e7b255/watch-library/simulator/watch/watch_storage.c
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Replying to @josecastillo
The hardware implementation of those functions is here, and it’s a good example of working with the EEPROM emulation area on @MicrochipMakes SAM D/L microcontrollers. Cribbed a bit from their NVM driver code, but it’s actually much simpler than I imagined. https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/ed526355f69a931d51a6ebff1b45c70988e7b255/watch-library/hardware/watch/watch_storage.c
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Replying to @josecastillo
the code. Is it my proudest work? No. But it does work well enough, and serves as an adequate example for building littlefs support on an unfamiliar platform by providing just four functions (read, write, erase and sync). https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/8455bfc9a5b07d58fcabf35bba6f32837ea91f46/movement/filesystem.c
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Replying to @josecastillo
To be clear, this does require disassembling the watch and plugging it into USB. Which is why I think it’s most useful for one-time setup like the TOTP use case outlined above. Still, this little filesystem feels like it has big possibilities.
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Replying to @josecastillo
As much as I’d love to expose it as a USB drive eventually, this should nail a lot of use cases. Watch face wants to log some data? List files with ls. Want to read one? Cat it with cat, remove it with rm. The space available is small — 7680 bytes — but enough to do useful stuff!
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In a branch, Movement now has a basic set of commands for managing files on non-volatile storage. How might one use this? Here, I’m writing a TOTP secret and a label, “SL” for Slack, to a file a watch face can read. You’d do this once over USB, then it would stick once assembled.
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Replying to @bateskecom
I used shipstation in the past but found it to be a hot mess. Moved to Pirate Ship and it works well for my low volume, but I’m curious how it will go later this year when I’m (hopefully) shipping more stuff.
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Replying to @bateskecom
That reminds me, long ago Apple’s developer portal sorted certificates by date… alphabetically of course, by month: April, August, December, February. Drove me mad enough to file a bug report (that of course came back wontfix).
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Replying to @josecastillo
I was moving too fast and wrote
pos += strlen(text + 1);
instead of
pos += strlen(text) + 1;(original)
a rare off-by-two error gave me this gem while adding a file manager to the watch.
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RT @PercyRover: We live in a universe where black holes wider than the orbit of Neptune can shake gravity wells on the other side of galaxi…
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RT @jotajotahermes: @josecastillo Even for the same place, this also changes with the time of the year. At the equator, this is how people…
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I discovered two things today:
- The waxing / waning animation on the Sensor Watch moon phase complication is wrong for folks in the Southern Hemisphere.
- On the equator, the moon waxes from bottom to top? 🤯
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Replying to @josecastillo
Meanwhile, the second battery test (with the new, more efficient firmware) is at day 75 and 3.06 volts. This is our new steady state, with the watch consuming 11 µA awake and just 6-9 µA in sleep mode. I am very curious how long this one will go.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Battery test, day 180: 2.99 volts. This is promising because even with the old, less efficient firmware, we’re halfway through the year and still near nominal voltage! My prediction: this watch will blast past its anniversary in November, last 10,000 hours and ring in 2023.
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Replying to @josecastillo
kudos to the six of you who imagined that we don’t live in hell. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/06/indiana-gop-murder-andrew-wilhoite/
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RT @matseng: This video about the humble 7-segment display and real & possible variants of the design is quite interesting. Well worth to s…
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Replying to @tannewt
This feels like a line from a “stop making filesystems” / “statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged” meme.
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REAL OR ONION:
“Man Accused Of Killing His Wife Wins Republican Primary”(original)
Replying to @GregDavill and @JameyLawson5
After hacking on it a bit this afternoon, this sounds like a great solution. I have plenty of code space + RAM, and I love littlefs for the low overhead and smart wear leveling. For now I think I’m going to run with littlefs, and an eventual plan to add USB mass storage this way.
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Replying to @JameyLawson5
Yep I’m realizing that I’m likely going to have to redo this as a FAT12 filesystem. currently using littlefs (linked) but I’m realizing that the USB mass storage class is going to play nicer with something like FAT12. On it. https://github.com/littlefs-project/littlefs
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Replying to @josecastillo
so far it’s a lil 8 kilobyte disk that the watch firmware can write files to. more challenging will be making it also show up as a thumb drive, but since the watch uses tinyusb, I don’t think it’ll be _too_ too complicated :)
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git commit -m “add support for a small filesystem on the watch”
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RT @KGsGOAT: This is insane
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You can’t change your feelings, but you can change your feelings about the feelings. I still feel overwhelmed, but I have a plan for fixing the things that’re making me feel that way. Knowing I can fix this doesn’t make me feel less underwater — but it helps me breathe down here.
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Replying to @tahnok and @MareNextDoor
This would be a great resource! I also want to put a page together about how to spot counterfeits (and why they won’t work).
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Replying to @moxnr
It wouldn’t be different at all! I believe it’s even the same liquid crystal inside; the only thing that makes it negative instead of positive is the angle of the polarizing film on the front. I believe some folks even DIY invert them by scraping it off and sticking a new one on.
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