Starting to mesh

This week started off as a ‘get the cards done’ kinda week, So I made a start on the funky ‘Hub’ card as I thought it would be pretty handy

I thought it would be sensible to connect everything from one socket to the next. This would future proof the card design if my plan works out and the core MCU can work as a port expander and use those pins

That good idea soon became a bad one!! The card and the connections leave barely any space on the card. Routing the connections on the back of the card is easy, but this leaves no room to get the connections from the front of the card up to the seconds and third sockets

I might have to re-evaluate that card, and maybe only connect the pins that are in use for now…

While I have been working on these, My Awesome new friends have been working hard on their own respective operating systems, and making my life even easier!!

ByteWelder has been tweaking things over in Tactility camp. There has been some good work on the UI side maximizing the screen usage

The status bar has shifted to the side to make use of the wide nature of the display, there are nice icons and you can jump about to where you need with a few taps of the arrow keys

Even thought it is a touchscreen interface at heart, it works well with a keyboard too!!

With it all working well, I could see a nice little setting for mesh in there!! The sx1262 LoRa chip that I am using is supported, and it can connect to Meshcore and Meshtastic!!! I had aquired a sensecap T1000-e for testing, and it was already on Meshtastic, so I tested it there

At the moment tactility only connects to the mesh and logs the traffic, but full chat is coming soon…

I remembered that SolarOS did mesh, so I thought I would test things on there!! Meshtastic is not supported on SolarOS, so I thought I would give Meshcore a try

The first thing I spotted (totally unrelated to software) was how much more traffic there is round here on Meshcore!! In all my Meshtastic testing, I saw one other device. In 10 minutes of Meshcore, there were like 20!!

The setup process is a bit more involved, you can create a new SPI connection using the expansion app, then you can use the same app to hook up that SPI port to the radio device, then you use that radio device to connect to Meshcore

This can all be set to happen on startup, so its there and ready every time, an we were off!!!

SolarOS has a unified chat/messaging/contacts system that can work with Meshcore and ESPnow, so everything is all set!!

It always feels like I am trying to choose my favorite biscuit when I am comparing these operating systems. I love everything about all of them!! 🙂

I happened to mention the whole ‘does it play doom’ thing in passing to nilseuropa (Mr SolarOS) and he said ‘yeah I have already done that’. A few updates later and…..

I will whip up a video soon!! Its a bit tricky to see on such a low resolution black and white only screen!!

Good screen / Bad screen

Some of you might have seen this video about getting a gameboy emulator working at 30fps on an e-ink display

This would be amazing if such a driver could be ported over to the original e-ink screen I was using. and would level the playing field with the RLCD in terms of speed

That video came at a good time, as I got this message from my RLCD screen supplier

I went hunting and found the RLCD originally because there was a supply issue with the e-ink screen!! and now that option might be going away!! The e-ink issue was actually a silicon supply issue (pesky RAM chips taking all the supply) and is now resolved, but it just shows how fragile these supply chains can be

Things could be ok with a crowdfunding campaign that hits a few thousand units. If some magic happens and crowdfunding goes over 10,000 units, then there wont be enough screens (unless I commit to buy 300,000!!!) so that is something to think about!!

As a bit of a knee jerk reaction, I asked the e-ink supplier if they could make a custom front plate that has the e-ink screen bonded on, with frontlight and touch, and well…. yes they can!!!

If the super clear e-ink screen could be made to go super fast, with a front light, and touch, and it could all come in at a good price, then it could be a gamechanger!!!!

So maybe bad news can be a silver lining.. to be continued….