> Why? > I'm super bored in lockdown. Add a Raspberry Pi 400 and a few tiny displays...
I feel like there are two distinct kinds of lockdown experience. One, you have kids, and you have absolutely no free time because now your kids are home and you're working from home. Two, you don't have kids, and you're super bored every day. Seems like not much in between.
Folks with more time and energy on their hands have managed spend it all on a broad variety of rabbit holes.
Folks with kids have managed to wither whatever minutes were left away, looking at the other group's reports on their rabbit hole expeditions
Both, together have managed to give google enough confidence to double their ads and disable the "skip ad" buttons on youtube.
I'm finding that I'm not using youtube that much anymore. It wasn't really a conscious decision - the annoyance pushed away my reptilian brain.
Just in case there's anyone from Google reading this: I'm tolerant of ads. I'd like the option to "skip the first ad" but watch the second. Or just put the short ad first.
Sometimes I don't mind watching a 15 second ad, but I really don't want to watch a 4 minute ad.
Quite a few people are just too confused, clueless and unconscious of what expeditions they are on.
Not sure how it would be different without pandemic? Maybe I'd spend few percent of my time outside and/or interacting with people in person, but probably no more.
I'm one of those people who found out that their preferred lifestyle is called quarantine.
At least in Norway the government has focused on locking down old -> young. So bars and restaurants and gyms are pretty much shut down, put kindergarten and primary schools are still open with some restrictions.
Mind you though. Most of the people I know with small kids didn’t have much time to spend on side projects before the lockdown either. Only difference now is that they save an hour of travel a day.
With kids at home only time I get is @ 1 AM.
My wife and I both try to give the other time for themselves. She goes hiking most days and I’ve built up 3 custom bicycles over 2020 and ride them on local trails at night after the kids are asleep. Bike lights have been my best investment this year.
Why? No kids there, but why would I be bored? I have plenty of things to do, as always. Having worked from home for years now, I don't really see that big difference in regular day other than the fact that socializing and conferences have moved online.
If anything, I imagine that it would be painfully lonely if I had to live alone during the lockdown. Thankfully, I live with my girlfriend. But why would it be boring? Lockdown or not, it doesn't make much difference.
There is a "happy" medium between the two I assure you. Personally, I basically have two friends, neither of which I have seen for a few months now - one won't leave the house, and the other "friend" is probably a mild psychopath. Bored and lonely, what a combination...
Myself, between WFH, my wife and my 18mo, I get about 1-2 hours of personal time after they both go to sleep, and half of those times I'm too tired by then to work on anything.
Maybe if they were a bit older?
Displays under 400x240 pixels, usually the gfx buffer can be managed in the ram of the MCU. Nothing fancy needed, can get decent framerate on SPI bus running at 16 MHz. Anything above this range gets super ugly: no good displays exist and if they do, they're expensive or outdated (800x480 resolution is basically impossible to obtain). Furthermore, driving this display requires crazy shit like multiple SPI channels (QSPI), or some neutered version of DSI protocol...impossible to find docs for and if they have docs, theyre in Chinese.
Then there are ultra high resolution displays, for e.g. cell phone market or laptop screens. You're now looking an entirely different beast. MIPI/DSI hardware support is required and a bunch of NDAs, need dedicated GPU and a proper linux running.
Ideal display tech would be 5"inch diagonal, OLED (low power consumption), 800x480 (or similar) and can be run using ARM Cortex-M4 or similar microcontroler arch. That would open up opportunities for so many device categories that doesn't exist today. Imagine a VT100 terminal clone running on 8" 1024x768 resolution screen with a cheap ESP32 + display driver chip. Or a slightly more beefy Cortex-M7 running zephyr/linux. So many things we could build.
A 4x4 arrangement with some clear plastic buttons on top of each individual screen would be pretty useful. Especially if it was a preview of a specific video source.
Just thinking about the possibility of having a linux machine always on you seems really exciing.
The Vufine+ [1] is about the best option I’ve found so far. It works and is a standard HDMI display but it’s really small in your vision (so need v large font sizes), has quite a lot kind of obstructive stuff from the casing etc. in your field of view, and feels bulkier than it needs to be.
I’d be happy with much lower resolution like these displays specially if it appeared larger and clearer. I actually bought a transparent OLED thing [2] recently with the intent of trying to hack it into something wearable but no progress on that yet and not sure if it’ll actually even be readable.
Maybe this would be a place to start.
Maybe it's just a computer for really, really, ridiculously good looking people.
There are already lego raspberry pi boxes. They are sold for less than $5.
Add your contacts, social links and donation button
Line editors like ed make much more sense when used with a printing teletype, which is what the RPi 400 would be with a little printer attached.
APs are the right tool for the job. It's true that for hobbyists, documentation is lacking and DSI is complex to get started with. The best solution would probably extend DSI with something like EDID. DSI displays can then be plug-and-play (like HDMI / DP) using an universal driver.
Another option is eDP, but it's not so common on cheap APs or screens.
It was fun developing a little algorithm to stream out full rendered frames in real time, bit-banging 16-bit colour over SPI at its max frequency, while rendering and compositing from an object tree with fonts, textures, gradients, blending etc without ever storing more than a few scan lines worth of pixels. Intermediate pixels and blending states were stored in an ever-moving queue to account for multi-pass rendering and the different timing between the rendering thread, which blended in each item at whatever speed could be done, and the bit-banging SPI thread which formatted the pixels into the strange bit order needed by the display. The bit-banging thread needed perfect, sustained timing as a single glitch would crash the display.
When all the complications were working perfectly, it just looked like a mundane but smoothly animating display, as if it had a boring GPU and framebuffer and some kind of clean GUI.
Oh... umm... the display, yeah. Maybe have an on-button for the display to power it up only when you want it?
http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/
> Batteries are included (they last about 45 minutes but are rechargeable)
https://nabil.me/2020/12/01/diy-reflow-oven-w-exhaust-build-...
I don't even own a hamster currently and haven't owned one in few decades.
I think I'm watching way too much random youtube makers.
But we’re a minority, obviously Google’s choice is paying off.
Or a growing towards a majority and Google is in a deathspiral trying to meet quarterly growth targets by extracting more attention from an audience that is catching on faster than it is growing in size.
One can hope.
Kept getting side tracked because it takes a dystopian science fiction set hundreds of years in the future to discuss basic income and climate change in television.
I have loads of side projects I want to work on, loads of games I want to play, books I want to read, movies and tv shows I want to watch and I have a relationship takes up a lot of my time.
I was doing Adventure of Code this year and I haven't managed to finish the last 7 days because I haven't had time for it yet.
Though I strongly believe that if I was single, it would be a very different story and I'd be very bored and restless with all this time. Maybe the relationship is the biggest difference.
The hamster will of course also need buttons to change the channel to other hamster-related programming if he or she so desires. :)
Edit for the BT labs injoke
We've tried extensive bedtime rituals, tried tiring them out by going to the forest and making em run etc, but we really can't get our 1,5 year old to need more sleep than we do.
Our 4 year old tends to sleep an hour longer in the morning, but the little one is really killing us from a freetime standpoint with his 7 hours a day of sleep he needs (5-6 at night, 30m-1h a day).
Naturally this is driving my wife and me insane.
Daycares were open, but we've decided to take our older one out to reduce his contacts and give the daycare some breathing room as they are also at their limits because they've had staff quitting because they didn't want to risk getting infected for this little money (understandable imo).
The whole situation for parents is absolutely disastrous, my wife should have been looking for a new job already, but it was simply not realistic for her to start working a new job with me retaining mine and the kids at home.
As a young family in a high cost-of-living metro-area we had to decide to move as we can't afford to live here while giving our kids the space at home they need without support that allows us to work effectively.
That said, I’ve zero idea how to switch sleep modes, sorry.
Our lifesaver was “healthy sleep habits, happy child” by Mark Weissbluth.
Even taking out my 2h45m (total) commute time, I'm more tired than ever. I'm sure a lot of mine is due to stress and low level depression - I have a lot on now but so does pretty much every person you interact with.
Before lockdown I was starting to get some arduino and electronics projects in during my commute, but I've barely even had time to watch videos of other people's projects.
I just remind myself that in time this will change, that I'll find time again for myself. Over Christmas I've been trying to go for a walk alone each day and also to step away from my phone more. But it is hard - but that is OK.
I assume you'd go out and meet some people? Sports? Other out-of-house activities, that's all time you can use as "you" time now.
Two small kids here, I’ll try to explain my experience.
First off, there was very little time for socializing before the pandemic. One evening a week to grab dinner with a friend was the gold standard and achieved at the cost of putting more childcare on my partner. My partner also got an evening a week for friends, so I’d have extra kid duty that day.
The pandemic has made life harder for me and my family in many ways. School closure is the obvious one. My oldest had about a year in preschool before the shutdown. They miss their school community and have backslid developmentally. My partner was already a full-time care giver, but making preschool means the younger child gets very little one on one attention, while the older one loses socializing experience.
We also lost secondary childcare. No more babysitters for date night. No more weekend play dates. Much more limited access to grandparents and other relatives.
And then there’s all the marginal stuff that surprised us. We used to take the kids to the grocery store. You could kill an hour and show them the world a bit. No longer. We used to take them to the playground and encourage them to play with other kids. Now best case my kid wears a mask and plays at a distance with a small number of kids.
I’ve found that we’re losing a lot more time to home maintenance. The kids use the house all day, we have to clean it up after they go to bed. I’m trying to get the kids to help more with that, and to move more cleaning before bedtime.
All that taken into account, I find that I can get maybe 90 minutes per day, after the kids are done, that I have some personal choice about. I can spend that time with my partner, pushing work forwards, larger chores/home projects, professional development, hobbies, socializing, or resting. There is no other time for those things.
In practice I’ve found myself avoiding large hobby and professional development projects. I love them too much. I get very frustrated when they’re started but I can’t devote any time to them. I love hitting flow State on a project, and it’s simply not possible at this point in my life.
I don’t expect this to last forever. The pandemic will break eventually. The kids will get older and need less intense supervision. I do my best to be present and focused on them during these early years. Everyone tells me they go by fast in retrospect.
PS this comment took me over two hours to write because of these circumstances
Well, you can. You just need to attach the accessory to a lego piece that suits your fancy, and you're done.
Still, in a world where 3D printing is sold as a happy path solution to everything, putting glue on a couple of COTS plastic pieces sold for about $0.10 seems like an absolute no-brainer.
can you array these off a single PI?
Imagine this:
An installation where there is an array of these screens - they are associated with whatever you want info on - they cycle btwn a screenshot of the item, some basic text (like IP/UPC/Barcode/QR to a fully detailed product/item page, uptime/health status...) etc...
And you can just have a PI running a bunch of these on a 42" rack, or on shelves of retail items etc....
Then why are you basing your argument on an approach which you already believe isn't sensible?
I mean, you can glue everything you wish on a lego piece, including all the M3 spacers you need.
But hey, why settle with an easy solution when you can bicker endlessly about problems that you don't need to handle?
I mainly use ESP8266, as it’s cheaper but it’s less powerful and doesn’t have 5v output, just 3.3v (or at least the ones I have were like this). I don’t have any real coding skill but between the Arduino IDE, ESPHome, MQTT and some mucking about, I got where I wanted to be.
The sensors are so inexpensive and there are so many (light, temperature, fire, smoke, moisture, humidity, distance, gasses, weight, open/close, current etc). It’s really impressive what is out there.
If you're just starting out I can recommend looking at m5 which has nice little kits to get started. It's a bit pricier though. https://m5stack.com
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introduci...