💾 Archived View for gemini.cyberbot.space › gemlog › 2021-03-08-elecfiddling.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:40:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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I've been playing with some of my portable devices the last few days. The M5Paper, Odroid Go and PocketCHIP have all gotten some attention.
After getting the arduino ide installed and configured for the M5Paper I flashed a couple different sketches to experiment with. Link to my first post explaining what the M5Paper is below.
First I tried tinyTouch which is a very basic touch drawing program. While simple it does work reasonably well and reliably. It didn't feel very responsive because the stroke you are drawing does not show up until you lift your finger. It does have variable line thickness according to pressure and to clear the screen you do a quick 2 finger swipe. A stylus would probably be a necessity as I found it pretty frustrating using a finger due to the fairly small size and a finger being pretty inaccurate. I didn't have a stylus handy that works with the touch panel unfortunately but I will try to locate one and give it a try.
m5paper with "This is not very responsive" on the screen in my handwriting
Next I flashed paperweather which in my short testing so far works really well. It was easy to insert my wifi credentials and latitude/longitude and away I went. It wakes up and updates the info once every hour and the battery seems to be draining very slowly thanks it sleeping except for the once hourly update. I am going to charge it all the way up and let it ride and see how long it will continue to provide a forecast before needing a charge. It may be a while before the results are in on that.
m5paper with weather conditions and forecast on the display
With how much I have been playing and using my Odroid Go and Go Advance I came to the conclusion that I needed to reorganize the microsd card on my Odroid Go. Paring back the rather huge amount of roms to a smaller selection of games that are my favorites and a more natural fit to the device form factor will reduce the paralysis of choice effect so I don't have to think as much about what I want to play when I pull it out of my pocket. Because the Go is significantly nicer for carrying in a pocket at nearly all times simple mechanics and arcade style games meant for short play sessions work best for me with the situations I normally find myself playing it. I have also been finding myself listening to music and podcasts on it quite a bit so I loaded the majority of the sd card space up with music and a handful of recent podcasts I want to listen to.
Odroid Go playing a podcast and sitting next to a capuccino
The last couple nights I did some tinkering with my PocketCHIP and fixed the battery gauge that was not working in my JWM status bar and also successfully upgraded the OS to Debian Buster. Hooray! Pretty nice that this niche device from a defunct company can still be upgraded to the current version of Debian.
PocketCHIP browsing my gemini capsule with amfora
