Tweets
Replying to @abetusk
It’ll eventually be a watch; this version is too thick to fit ,but it’ll help me learn about this chip and see some power numbers. The plastic bit is actually a reused part from the Casio F-91W that it’s going to fit inside of (hopefully!)
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Replying to @josecastillo
I know my soldering isn’t great here; prolly need a proper microscope if I’m to work with anything smaller than 0805’s. Also: thanks to @oshpark for the super swift turnaround! 11 days ago this was just a harebrained idea; tonight I’m writing code for a gadget on my kitchen table
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I should probably get further along than a blinky LED before declaring “nailed it,” but man oh man getting all these parts soldered and finding that it fits feels pretty rad. Lots of work still to do on this one; I’m not quite to the beginning of this one just yet.
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Replying to @_nitz and @Hacksterio
IO Shaders, I love that!
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this… this could run my Open Book HD. the PIO peripheral seems like it would be perfect for bit-banging a parallel e-paper display. And it replaces 20+ placements with one $4 castellated module. Needless to say I ordered two to play with. https://www.hackster.io/news/hands-on-with-the-rp2040-and-pico-the-first-in-house-silicon-and-microcontroller-from-raspberry-pi-effc452fc25d
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
Hope springs eternal, I suppose.
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
Does he really think that the most hardcore MAGA types are going to regroup and say, “Yeah, TED CRUZ, that’s our guy now! We’ll follow HIM into the abyss!”? I find it difficult to believe any R can capture lightning in a bottle like 45 did, but I believe in Ted Cruz least of all.
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It feels really weird adapting to optimism. For years I’ve woken up terrified about what horrors the day might bring. The possibility that good things could happen today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, makes for a new and confusing feeling. It’s nice, though.
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Dropped by the @adafruit Show & Tell tonight with the last Pycorder demo for just a bit: an LCARS-inspired environment board! These Sharp memory displays may be one-bit, but even simple dithering looks gorgeous. And of course the code is #circuitpython :) https://gist.github.com/joeycastillo/dab1b1d513e5114df73bf56bf5ef7918
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The month isn’t over.
Normally I would say this with a hint of pessimism, a sense that next week could be worse. Not this time! We clawed our way back from a dark place this month. I hope we can look back on it as a turning point; that from here on out, our days get brighter. 🙂 https://twitter.com/jesus_jimz/status/1351976607905439750
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Replying to @rabid_inventor and @digikey
EVP-BB1AAB000, it’s this lil guy: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-electronic-components/EVP-BB1AAB000/10259392
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I cannot find enough superlatives for Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem.
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Replying to @lorforlinux
it is. noticed like 30 seconds after I posted. twitter needs an edit button 🙃
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As we bid our farewell to the Trump era, let’s not forget about all the good times.
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Replying to @toybuilder, @MakeAugusta and @digikey
That is so cool, looks so intricate!
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oh my gosh look at this tiny button. IT IS SO TINY. in the second photo under the microscope it’s at the bottom left next to an 0603 resistor. basically searched @digikey for buttons and sorted by “tiniest”. Now I just have to solder the thing down…
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Replying to @solderparty
I’d love to see the keyboard interrupt pin brought out to one of the Feather pins! Even if it’s via an open solder jumper we’d have the option of closing. Could make it simpler for compatibility with boards like the Giant Board :)
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
3/29: “If we can hold that… between 100 and 200,000 [we’ll] have done a very good job.”
4/20: “It looks like we’ll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of.”
5/3: “Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people.”(original)
Replying to @josecastillo
Code here, and the discharge profile it was chewing on (it uses the 9-pin MicroSD from the other day to store data). What a shocker: a 350 mAh battery discharging at a rate of ~35 mA lasts ~10 hours! But hey, we try things so we can know things for sure :) https://gist.github.com/joeycastillo/676c86414de3c5a3e340268753da1dca
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Replying to @josecastillo
I’ll post the code in a bit; currently it’s visualizing the battery’s discharge profile. This one is actually going to be legit useful: I have several mystery batteries from AliExpress for the Open Book & Sensor Ring. This will help me get data about their capacity and longevity.
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They may not be dilithium crystals, but for the engineering Pycorder, I wanted to play with the lithium polymer batteries that power our gadgets. Here, a STEMMA LiPo fuel gauge pairs with a current sensor and real-time clock to visualize the charging profile of a 350 mAh battery.
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Oh this is cool: happening right now, @strangepartscom is assembling his Open Book in a live stream on Twitch! https://www.twitch.tv/strangeparts
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Replying to @josecastillo
Adapter PCB and code here. Technically, the connector is a pin short — AirLift needs both a busy and a reset pin — but since Pycorder’s 9-pin connector is on a secondary 3.3V regulator, you can use its enable pin to cycle the power. https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/LKH2xn6C https://gist.github.com/joeycastillo/00edbb8503c3635efe31be51f854e284
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Monday Pycorder idea! One of the reasons I like this 9-pin connector so much is its versatility: you can do so many things with it! In this case, I made an adapter to map the SPI & GPIO pins to an @Adafruit AirLift breakout; this demo shows a list of upcoming SpaceX launches. 1/2
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Replying to @josecastillo
i like this pulse oximetry gadget because while it doesn’t work exactly as I had hoped, I did learn a lot from building it and hacking on it. I also like it because it is literally held together by duct tape; a reminder that you don’t need anything too fancy to get results :)
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The Pycorder isn’t remotely a medical gadget, but there’s tons of fun biosensing you can do with it. Here I’m using an infrared LED and phototransistor to visualize my pulse. The raw value dances around a bit, prolly in relation to blood oxygen lvl; still, a fun proof of concept!
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Replying to @theavalkyrie
I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed the linker script and how asinine I thought the backlash was. Last time I interacted with a SAMD linker script I was trying a creative thing with a SAMD11 and it all felt a bit arcane; I found your script to be a wonderful format and resource.
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Replying to @gwilymgj
At least that gives me an excuse. “It was 2020;” you say it, and everyone nods their heads knowingly.
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Replying to @dcelectr
I was able to find a backup of the Eagle board file, which is something at least; alas, no matching schematic. Better than nothing, but still quite confusing.
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I’m so confused / upset with my past self. I’m staring at a sensor board I designed in June. Like, it’s in my hands. I had it fabricated. I assembled it. Yet somehow I no longer have its schematic. Am I so addled that I somehow erased design files for a thing I spent time making?
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Replying to @josecastillo
CODA: I’ve acknowledged it before, but this 9-pin sensor board connector was inspired by the @adafruit MONSTER M4SK’s eye cable. In this case, the soil sensor was pin-compatible with that board’s right eye! All it took was renaming a few pins for the same code to run there too :)
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Replying to @ivanhoe011
That’s honestly a good point. My instinct was that the moisture is a gradient, and that with overlap each channel would average moisture in the surrounding area, incl. the area above and below. But five totally independent pads might actually give better data. May be worth a try!
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Replying to @josecastillo
Oh, and the capacitive spike PCB! It uses the same 9-pin connector and pinout as several other gadgets I’ve shared. Fun fact: this is using the same pins that were delivering sound & data for yesterday’s MP3 demo, but now they’re just plugged in to dirt :) https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/woXHBrvh
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Replying to @RoMuscat
It’s similar in design to a capacitive touch slider; five interlocking zigzaggy pads, each connected to a GPIO pin and a 1MΩ drain resistor. Uses CircuitPython’s touchio method for measuring raw touch values, which is to charge each pad & measure how long the pin takes to go low.
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Replying to @josecastillo
Now I wish I’d left it running longer, because about 20 minutes after this, it showed the moisture diffusing back up through the layers of soil. Alas, there are no more bone-dry plants in my house, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Code here: https://gist.github.com/joeycastillo/bc892226806f17a457060a02b5299ae4
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In Star Trek, a tricorder is a multifunction device with three variants: science, medical & engineering. For the Pycorder’s science demo, I broke out my five-channel capacitive soil moisture spike, plus two STEMMA-QT sensors from @adafruit. Timelapse (in next tweet) is kinda rad!
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Replying to @digikey
I’m supposed to get it down to just one? 😬
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I think I’m gonna post a Pycorder idea a day between now and Show & Tell. Tonight: an MP3 player is my classic circuitpyui demo, and while Pycorder has no headphone jack or SD card, its 9-pin connector has hardware SPI pins and a DAC. So I can just duct tape them on the back. :)
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Replying to @efox29 and @adafruit
This is all @CircuitPython! Using touchio and Adafruit’s driver for Sharp memory displays, plus a Python-based GUI framework I’m hacking on: https://github.com/joeycastillo/circuitpyui
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Replying to @josecastillo
btw I am definitely going to release schematics and design files for this; rev 1 just had some issues: pull-ups that should be pull-downs, a silkscreen error, and a couple of iffy pin choices. I wouldn’t want anyone to build this version and find themselves bodging my mistakes :)
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Replying to @sulfuroid
Maybe! I’m going to try to make an on-screen keyboard with the gesture UI, but for a PCB keyboard, you’d just have to lay it out so each key activates one X and one Y channel. Different layout, but conceptually it might work. Could be a job for a dedicated cap touch chip as well.
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Replying to @josecastillo
The goal is gesture-based UI (for now I’m just naïvely using tap areas), and the design definitely had some issues (many of which I can fix by upgrading from a SAMD51G to a SAMD51J); still, I sense I’m going to be able to do a lot of fun things with this prototype! More soon :)
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Folks: meet the PyCorder! My take on a touchpad-based Sharp Memory Display gadget, in gorgeous @oshpark After Dark. More in the coming days, but feeling super stoked tonight because I finally got it up and running (and made a simple input task for circuitpyui; video in 2nd tweet)
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Replying to @peppertronics and @femtoduino
That is awesome! The Pluto is mentioned on the board silkscreen as an inspiration; I imported its board outline when laying out this gadget, and took lots of notes on segment mapping from its firmware :)
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Replying to @peppertronics and @femtoduino
that is the plan! Using a SAM L22, which has an LCD driver peripheral. Never done a project like this before, so we’ll see how it goes :)
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Replying to @arturo182 and @oshpark
in theory, this. But I would have to get the board in 0.6mm thickness for it to fit, so this is just to see if it could work, how much power it might consume and how far I can get with firmware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W
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Replying to @josecastillo
y’all. I thought I was exaggerating.
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Replying to @tannewt and @theavalkyrie
Thank you both, this was exactly the guidance I needed. The gadget lives!
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
I liked this tweet, but I do not like this fact :/
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Replying to @TrentonEmory
Oh god has it gotten like that among HS folks? Realizing now I haven’t been on Facebook in nearly three years…
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