Its good to talk

Well, it has been another slow week!

If you remember last week, I was singing the praises of my 2 OS options, and how awesome they both are for supporting MeshCore already

You may also remember that tactility was read only at that point. Well no less than 24 hours later and Bytewelder informed me that there was a new update!!!

I really need to get a video whipped up to show the awesomeness.

While I was looking at the SX1262 module to double check that datasheet, I noticed that that seeed offer an LR2021 module for about 25% more money

This module is a bit newer, and is dual band, so it can do the sub Ghz frequency for normal LoRa, but it can also do 2.4 Ghz too!! There are also some interesting things that an be done with this module working as an SDR, so it could lead to some very interesting use cases in the future

While I was tweaking the mesh card to match the new pin rules, I thought I would see if this fancy new module would fit on the card. With a bit of squishing and squashing, I think it might just work

It is nowhere near finished, but I think there is just enough space

I haven’t had chance to add labels on the back side, but these let you tweak the way the board works. On the left, the bunch of solder jumpers let you change the CS pin on the module, so that it can work in combination with other modules using SPI. On the right hand side there are 2 jumpers to let you change where the antenna connections go. The default is that they are routed to the M2 slot so that they can be passed to the back and the baked in PCB antenna. You can use the jumpers to change that to use the antenna connectors right there on the front of the add-on card for the best performace

It actually looks pretty good!! Maybe a little bit tall

There has been some new developments on the e-ink front too!! Tactility has gained a speed boost with a bit of a revamp on how the screen updates. Screen updates happen in small chunks using the fastest partial updates, with a slower full update after 5 seconds of inactivity to remove any ghosting

see, there is a nice animation up there in the top right!!

Over in SolarOS camp, nileseuropa was recommended to look at a way to really push the speed way up

These display tweaks are not without risk!! you are pushing more updates on a 1 minute video that the screen is designed for in its lifetime. You can also mess up the electrical charge within the screen and badly damage the screen. This can normally be recovered with a few hours of toggling the screen between full black and full white to flip flop the ‘ink’ back into place, and reset the electrical charge

Not put off by the risks, nileseuropa implemented some of the tweaks, and as you can see in his tetris demo, it is pretty slick!!

These awesome tweaks mean that the limited access to the RLCD might not be a problem if you are wanting a faster screen

I have not heard back on pricing for my fancy bonded face/touchscreen/frontlight/screen idea, I need to give them a chase. It would be nice to have it all in one like a proper device

Im off to play dot-to-dot in kicad to get this mesh board finished!! catch you on the flipside…