Tweets
Replying to @josecastillo
look at this. play the tape forward. We’ll likely have an actual fascist running for President in 2023. That fascist could take power in 2024. There will be protests. And the idea that a former cop could be mayor of NYC during all of this? It frightens me. https://mobile.twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1401375516309983242
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help me out here: as of a few wks ago, my attitude was to not rank Yang for NYC mayor (#NotEvenFifth). But the videos of NYPD in the parks this week have me terrified of Adams in power. It seems inevitable that our next mayor is going to be a cop or a fool. Why not rank the fool?
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Replying to @orbatos
but yea still an area that needs some work. Arabic for example needs to be pre-converted to presentation forms to display correctly right now. I have all the data necessary to do that conversion on device, and a CircuitPython script that does it, but still need to port it to C++.
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Replying to @orbatos
It’s still a work in progress but I designed the software to handle it. One quirk is that if the direction switches (i.e. a Hebrew word in an English paragraph), it moves to a new line rather than trying to render the run inline. This is less of an issue if the whole book is RTL.
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Replying to @glowascii
Thanks, I 😍 it! /via @EmojiMashupBot
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Replying to @JayBigGuy10
The design is up! C1-01 is the book, C2-01 is the castellated module, of which I have like two dozen already assembled and should probably put on tindie. I might make a couple of tweaks before I hit a final design, but nothing that would change the pinout. https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book/tree/main/Open%20Book%20Abridged
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Replying to @josecastillo
I do need to work on a highlight or underline feature at some point, though. My current strategy is to just take a photo with my phone and draw on it wirh a virtual highlighter, which involves one more gadget than is strictly necessary. Anyway. Loved this line.
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my minimum viable ebook app is opinionated software. It supports exactly 1 typeface: an open source, monospace 8x16 bitmap font. Limiting, on one hand. But because it supports UTF-8 and the whole basic multilingual plane, the word “façade” can show up in a book and it just works.
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Replying to @dcelectr
YESSSSS!!
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Replying to @josecastillo
Anyway. I digress. Point is, I’m getting on a plane for the first time since 2019. I’m going to see my friends and family, eat some brisket and drink some margaritas. But when I get back to the city…
It’s on.
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Replying to @josecastillo
…but in a way I could look at this as my education. A self-directed program, in EE and a whole lot more, with this gadget as my master’s thesis. And if I look at it that way, two years is about the right amount of time. which is all by way of saying: it’s time to ship it.
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Replying to @josecastillo
I was talking to a friend about the book yesterday. The genesis was I wanted to build this quixotic object — a kindle you can build from scratch — and to do that, I had to learn some skills. It’s taken a while, and a few iterations that I thought were right but turned out wrong…
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Replying to @josecastillo
…mean that I could probably assemble them here at the shop — no need to contract out manufacturing. To be clear, I haven’t ordered any of what I’d need to do that. But this Open Book redesign could be the thing that finally lets me ship a version of this gadget, after two years!
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Replying to @josecastillo
then there’s the book. I’m a quarter of the way through rereading Gatsby on the Pi Pico book, and I have to say: the damn thing works. The software needs some work to add a low power mode, but I think I feel comfortable with the design. And the simplification and low part count…
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Replying to @josecastillo
first up: the watch. I have panels and stencils and all the parts needed to make an initial run of 20; I’m one bootloader glitch away from making good on my plan for an F-91W you can program over USB. I plan to try to fix that while I’m away; then I think I can build & ship some.
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Welp. I’m at the airport. I’ve succeeded in accomplishing some of the things I’d hoped to do before going on vacation. (Also _dayjob got extended, so it’s only half a vacation now). Anyway. Point is, I’m trying to take a break and recharge, but I have PLANS for when I return. 1/?
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Replying to @josecastillo
update: they didn’t blink at any of it. Thanks to all for the advice not to worry about it.
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Replying to @ZxSpectROM and @pdp7
Oh! This happened to me with a big deck of Cards Against Humanity a few years back. I figured that was the reason; still it was a funny item to get pulled off the line for.
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packing to fly home; balancing “which gadgets can I bring” with “which are too much effort to explain to TSA”. I think my current sensor is gonna have to stay. My conference call mute button… might be able to come? I want to bring a test board for the watch, but it’s borderline.
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Replying to @geekquixotic
I think I’ve decided that as soon as dual-extruder printers get affordable, that’s when I’m going to upgrade. Multiple colors and dissolvable supports would be a game changer for my use cases.
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Replying to @uhohnaomi
I’m enjoying reading this so much more as an adult. Like, I liked it in high school, but I’m glad to be coming back to it now (especially now that I live in NYC).
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Replying to @mr_rythom
that’s a good vintage, that’s a good year. Think it’ll age better than the era of “person woman man camera TV.”
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Replying to @josecastillo
I’m just saying, between videos like these, Tucker Carlson, our former McDonald’s loving president, and, y’know, *gestures vaguely at everything*, half of the country in every age group spontaneously developing dementia would explain so much. https://mobile.twitter.com/RayRedacted/status/1402778297658925060
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Hypothetically: if a degenerative prion disease like mad cow had spread in tainted beef a decade ago, and it disproportionately affected people that ate lots of red meat, and its incubation period was about 10 years… how would our world look any different than it does right now?
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Replying to @josecastillo
Side note: that’s The Great Gatsby on the screen in that video. How did I read this as a questioning kid in high school and not catch that Nick (the protagonist) is gay? Or definitely bi. Read those 3 pages in the clip. Nick and Mr. McKee 100% hooked up after that party, right?
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Replying to @josecastillo
other than that it’s hard to overstate how much nicer it feels in hand. The volume is smaller, so the whole thing feels more dense. And the heavier battery is at the bottom of the device, putting the bulk of the weight at the point where you’re holding it. It just feels… nice :)
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not quite there yet but I’m dialing it in. Enclosure for the Pi Pico book. Thanks to the slim battery, the case is now just 9.5 mm thin. That’s less than 1 cm! For comparison, an old 13mm thick enclosure. (also ignore the long metal screws; my nice nylon screw set is at the shop)
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Replying to @kaangoksal
Only when I’m trying to print a part with small details on a top layer; sometimes it doesn’t extrude as much of as accurately as it should. But I mostly use it to iterate on enclosures for gadgets, and at boxy flat things it excels :)
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i have gotten so much mileage out of this bargain-bin, open-box, cheapest available 3D printer i picked up a few years ago. It may not be the prettiest machine, and it has some battle scars (like from the time it fell down some stairs with me). but damn if it doesn’t do the work.
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Replying to @matterpoetry
i had to check. my god that place is the worst.
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Replying to @matterpoetry
That article seems to studiously avoid the use of the singular ‘they’, and I have to assume the reason is chronicled in a pages-long debate on its talk page.
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“I used to worry that living in New York would turn me into an asshole. Now I don’t worry about that anymore.”
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Replying to @femtoduino
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Replying to @TheJustinTo
The science is weak, but the stomach is strong!
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Replying to @TheJustinTo
Be careful, pineapple is the only fruit that eats you back ;) https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/why-pineapple-burns-your-tongue
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Replying to @sneenyc
When it fills up you should cast it in resin, make a fossil record of failed parts.
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Replying to @ajbauer
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Replying to @heyitry, @Yorks_STEAM and @adafruit
The feather compatible version is still in the works! tho it will probably be powered by an ESP32-S2 instead of a SAMD51. I want to apply all the lessons learned last year to that design, and give it the advantage of a larger keepout area for the big slim battery.
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my “not a place of honor” sign has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my sign. https://twitter.com/hdevalence/status/1192256741632663552
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rereading The Great Gatsby (now public domain!) to test out the new prototype. There were no lawns for miles, and the rent is off by a factor of 10; other than that, this sentence perfectly describes my old loft in Williamsburg (especially toward the end).
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Replying to @dcelectr
The funny thing is it already sort of exists: the E-Book FeatherWing will accept a Feather RP2040, and may even use the same pin assignments as the M4 Express! Would love to do an update though, to bring in this simpler MicroSD and castellated EPD driver. https://makezine.com/projects/the-open-book-and-the-e-book-featherwing/
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Replying to @fast_code_r_us
Pico doesn’t have a ton of flash relative to the glyphs in every language on earth tho :) which is why I have a secondary 2MB chip filled to the brim with bitmap data. I do think it could make sense to cache some of the LUT data to RAM tho; that’d save me some trips to that chip.
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Replying to @zephray_wenting and @fast_code_r_us
But yea these are all bitmap fonts; even if there are a lot of glyphs to sort through, a device like the Pico shouldn’t have any trouble rendering them. I’m sure there are optimizations I can find; past-me wrote some of this code two years ago and I’m smarter than that guy now :)
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Replying to @fast_code_r_us
I mean it’s mostly my code, so it could be that 🙃. Babel uses ~200 lookup tables for constant-time access to glyph data (which I’m pretty proud of), but the LUTs are all in Flash, so there’s a lot of mucking about on the SPI bus. My cutting the bus speed in half may be a factor.
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Replying to @josecastillo
and actually come to think of it, the Pico has gobs of RAM. if my bottleneck is text layout, I could pre-render the previous and next pages and waste 30 kilobytes just having them buffered and ready to go; it wouldn’t put a dent in the 264KB that I have at my disposal.
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Replying to @adafruit, @JLCPCB and @GoodDisplayCN
The UI is a wee bit slower but it’s still quite impressive. Pi Pico is a Cortex M0+, and it’s really holding its own against the Cortex M4 in the original. I also had to underclock the flash chip to get around some character glitching issues. Anyway, bottom line: the thing works!
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Replying to @gennyble
thank you!!
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The Open Book Abridged Edition, powered by @Raspberry_Pi Pico. Low power E-paper display with eight buttons, three STEMMA ports, one MicroSD slot and 57,053 glyphs for reading almost every living language (plus a few dead ones). Just 32 parts, including the circuit board itself.
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Thanks so much to everyone who joined, asked questions and shared comments! I really appreciate it and it was a lot of fun. I had meant to test the STEMMA ports too, but completely blanked and ended the broadcast early. Then again, maybe there’ll be another livestream for that :) https://twitter.com/josecastillo/status/1401605385190969346
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Replying to @davidskeck
thank you!
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