Tweets
Replying to @crulge
I can second the David Frazier rec; he helped me with some loft law stuff and another friend with some non-loft-law issues. He’s great.
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Replying to @rohansingh and @RueNahcMohr
dropping white-hot takes first thing in the morning, I see
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Replying to @tahnok
a few small things like a couple more SERCOMs, but the big thing is way more pins (100 vs 64) which opens the door to more complex LCDs. I want to play with some 14-segment x 8 digit displays, and the J is just a couple pins short of being able to drive the whole thing.
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damn. digikey got 800 SAM L22 N’s in stock over the weekend. I’ve wanted to play with that variant, so I started laying out a board. Anyway I went to order some just now, and boom: they’re all gone. I guess this is where we are now, you have to buy now and think later.
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I’ve never spoken at a conference before, but I’m preparing my slides and code and demos for @hackaday #remoticon and my gosh, I think I can make this talk blow minds. It’s going to be a jam-packed 30 minutes. Tickets here! It’s free or $25 with a T-shirt. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hackaday-remoticon-2021-tickets-172183193567
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booted my windows machine and the login screen asked “are you finding great prices while you shop online?” fun fact: YOU ARE AN OPERATING SYSTEM. You have NO RIGHT.
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Replying to @_nitz, @timonsku, @Twitter and @thingskatedid
this is honestly what got me to be diligent about adding alt text
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Replying to @timonsku
under any circumstances that’s pretty impressive; in this situation it’s damn near heroic. congrats! 🎉
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Replying to @josecastillo
OH RIGHT, if you want to sign up for updates about the circuit board that makes this possible — updates like, “sweet mercy, when can I get one?” — you can do that here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-watch
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Replying to @theavalkyrie
I’m in this tweet and I don’t like it 😬
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I put this together for the Sensor Watch demo last night, but tbh it’s just too good; I have to share. Sound up! (also @crulge, for the record, you were totally the inspiration for this)
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Replying to @inwardshed and @crowd_supply
Custom bottom plate with a bump could work, there’s also a little round area at the bottom of the internal plastic housing that one could cut out to make a path for light to pass (it’s a space for an inductor in the stock F-91W) https://mobile.twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1452456705535758340
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Replying to @davedarko
I hear ya! my one short tip would be, your future self will be pleased if PB02 is a user input in some form or fashion :)
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Replying to @davedarko
split the diff, 16 GPIO expander and four pins tied directly to the micro? Because I figure you’re going to want at least one button connected to the external wake / RTC input.
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Replying to @wormyrocks
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on us.
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welp! time to test the famous water resistance of the F-91W: with just an hour til show & tell, I spilled coffee on *all three* of the watches I planned to demo tonight. I’ve since rinsed them off in the sink; so far they’re ticking along, happy as can be. fingers crossed! 😆
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Replying to @josecastillo
More honesty: I’m only tweeting this because I need it for my talk tonight, and it’s easier to pull up old tweets than to figure out how Keynote works. 😬
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Replying to @ttaskett and @glowascii
respectfully I’ll ask you not to engage further in this thread unless it’s to apologize for being out of line.
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Replying to @ttaskett and @glowascii
it’s wild how easy it would have been for you to not act shitty toward someone whose work I clearly respect and admire. all you had to do was not tweet. anyway this is about people building their own DIY robots, not big tech manipulating people, so I don’t even get your objection
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actually forget coming to tonight’s show and tell for my stuff — @glowascii will be sharing her brilliant work on companion robots (pictured!) and tools for getting them to be more accessible to makers and hackers. Her projects are so unbelievably cool! https://www.meetup.com/AllHandsActive/events/sjjcksyccnblc/ https://twitter.com/glowascii/status/1453756358440873987
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Replying to @inwardshed and @crowd_supply
The first light sensor I’m trying is a high dynamic range light sensor. While the calculated “lux” level wouldn’t be too useful from underneath the screen, my hope is by calibrating it against a proper light meter, we could make a table to look up exposure from an analog reading.
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Replying to @inwardshed and @crowd_supply
I’ve thought about this! While I don’t have a definitive answer yet, I hope to have some notes soon. My plan has been to put the light sensor under the screen. Some light definitely gets through; it’s just a question whether it will be enough in low light for this use case. 1/2
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Replying to @josecastillo
Would you like to know more? Join me tonight at the @AllHandsActive #MakerShowAndTell, where I plan to show some of the latest work on the watch (plus some gadgets that came before it), and share a vision for what I hope it can do in the (near!) future. https://www.meetup.com/AllHandsActive/events/sjjcksyccnblc/
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THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG! Thrilled to share that I’m pairing up with @crowd_supply to launch the Sensor Watch! We’re still in the prelaunch phase, but if you want to get updates (and a notification when the campaign goes live!) you can sign up right here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-watch
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I tried to explain the tungsten cube NTF to a colleague today, and while I understood that it was dumb and had fully internalized its dumbness, it felt so much dumber when said aloud.
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there is something so soothing about a single-layer PCB layout.
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Replying to @thembeddevguy and @AllHandsActive
My experience with Casio watches has been the opposite, they always seem to work. One thing is the alignment needs to be super precise. The F91W has a plastic housing that holds the board and strip in very tight tolerance; that may be part of the reason it’s been reliable for me.
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oh hey, that’s me! Come by tomorrow at 8 PM EDT; I’ll be one of several folks presenting work at the @AllHandsActive #MakerShowAndTell! I plan to share some of the history and inspirations behind the watch, demonstrate some of its newest features and talk about what comes next :) https://twitter.com/IShJR/status/1453359900734668801
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i used to imagine the internet as a feudal system, and we as digital serfs. more and more i realize how much i overestimated our agency. they see us at best as crops to be harvested.
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Replying to @aitesam961 and @github
For sure! Right now this is just me preparing for my @hackaday Remoticon talk next month, but once the event draws closer I’ll have slides and notes to share :)
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Replying to @josecastillo
(what you’re seeing here: the waveforms driving a single segment of the seconds display in a Casio F-91W wristwatch. the common pin is the tall square wave; the segment pin is the short one. after I flip the switch, you see the result of adding the two square waves together.)
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🎶 Yeah, I’m gonna plug my watch into the old Tek scope / I’m gonna trace signals til I can’t no more. 🎶
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RT @the_prepared: @josecastillo Turning a Casio watch into a Castillo watch. 😎
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Replying to @the_prepared
OMG HOW HAS THAT PUN NEVER OCCURRED TO ME?!
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Replying to @josecastillo
ANYWAY: I’m moving a mile a minute toward manufacturing of the first 100 boards, and wheels are turning on bigger plans. Still, this software work is essential; I don’t want to put half a thing into the world. TL;DR: I’m feeling pretty good about Movement this morning :)
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Replying to @josecastillo
One final note: it’s not only the main clock face that can take advantage of those once-a-minute low-power display updates. Here you can see how @tahnok’s Beat Time face updates the time with fractional beats on a normal tick, but only the whole-number part on a low power update.
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Replying to @josecastillo
When we get that once-an-hour background task we wake up the ADC and power up the thermistor circuit, take a reading, and then shut it all back down. It’s a sip of power once an hour — and again, any watch face can make use of this API! I sense this is how we’ll implement alarms.
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Replying to @josecastillo
So the watch is only waking up once a minute, to update the screen. How are we supposed to log the temperature if the watch is asleep? Answer: background tasks! When the watch wakes up, it also asks each face if it wants a background task. Once an hour, the logging face says yes.
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Replying to @josecastillo
At that point the watch is still updating the screen once a second, but after a longer timeout (2 hours - 7 days) it enters Sleep Mode, and updates once a *minute*. That’s where we were in at the start of the video. It’s super low power; most of the time it’s not doing anything.
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Replying to @josecastillo
But if the user isn’t using the watch for a while, it takes a lot of power to read the temp every five seconds. Well, not that much, but it adds up! So after a configurable timeout (1-30 min), the watch face gets a timeout event; we have it return us to the first face, the clock.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Here’s what’s going on under the hood: the watch ticks once a second, which lets watch faces update their display. Let’s say we left the temperature display on screen: its tick handler is designed so that every 5 seconds, it takes a new temperature reading and updates the screen.
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Yay! Background tasks are working in Movement! And I logged overnight temperatures in the loft. By leveraging Movement, I made it more power efficient than the old temperature logging app, more feature-rich, and 1/3 the size at 103 lines of code. A thread! https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/88f41b12fc99542e2ace7b63651971e5907cfd1d/movement/watch_faces/thermistor/thermistor_logging_face.c
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“What we think is fun about working with coin cells: they provide very limited resources, so every choice matters. Using coin cells forces you to focus on your power budget in a way that tossing a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack into a box doesn’t.” https://hackaday.com/2017/12/22/coin-cells-the-mythical-milliamp-hour/
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Aside from being brilliantly engineered modules, my gosh the @wntrblm aesthetic is out of this world! 🤩 https://twitter.com/wntrblm/status/1452749549542445060
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Replying to @josecastillo
anyway. testing now. hopefully my bug fix bears fruit in the morning.
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Replying to @tahnok
oh it very much could! CircuitPython on the watch is a dream of mine, really hope I can get back to it when I have some free cycles.
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Replying to @josecastillo
for the record, this was not a braces problem; I just forgot that I didn’t want to do that. Anyway, fun takeaway: wondering whether to blame the API designer or the application developer is easy when you’re developing both. it’s always your fault!
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Over the weekend I added background tasks to Movement and ported the temperature logger over to the new framework. Great, except, it didn’t work. I assumed the issue was a subtle error in the library; turns out it was just a boneheaded user of the library. https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/commit/88f41b12fc99542e2ace7b63651971e5907cfd1d
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Replying to @dcbaok and @thomasanovosel
Funny enough, inspired by the gadget from It Follows, I did end up making a version with a connector for a second screen. Never finshed the second screen, but yea. saw that movie and it felt like an object that ought to be made real :) https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1299369843695722496
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My planet is so beautiful when the sun is low. Rolling over the sands, you can see pumpkin spice in the air.
At nightfall, the pumpkin spice harvesters land. They ravage our lands in front of our eyes. Their cruelty to my people is all I’ve known. What’s to become of our world?(original)