> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
