I have had many projects over the years. A lot of them live in my head for a while but fizzle out after my interest wanes, or finances get in the way, or physics say no � But here are some that I'm currently working on. I'll put pictures up once I figure out how.
The first covid lockdown made me realise how much money I spend in petrol each month, so I started trying to fix up my old kijiji mountain bike so I could use that instead. Unfortunately it was far too busted to be salvageable. I started looking for bikes and, inspired by Not Just Bikes on youtube, bought myself a second hand opafeits from Go Dutch bikeshop in Toronto. It's pretty great! Super comfortable. But it does need work.
I have cleaned up the frame rust, and have overhauled the rear hub. I think I overtightened something, though. Gotta look into that. I have also bought an electric horn to compliment the ding-dong bell. The bell to alert pedestrians in a friendly way, and the horn to shout at cars trying to kill me.
Yeah I'm one of those mechanical keyboard weirdos. I'm building a Kimiko split ergonomic keyboard, with a pair of Adafruit KB2040 microcontrollers running the halves, with KMK as the firmware. I'm currently working on getting the firmware right, and I'm designing the case and keycaps. I'll print those with transparent PLA for the keycaps, and black PLA for the case and the tops of the keycaps. I'm attempting the "pudding top" style.
Update: (29MAY2022) I may have bitten off more than I can chew, using an RP2040 based controller and using KMK to run things. KMK is written in python, which is the programming language I'm most familiar with, but I have only ever learned the stuff I need to learn for the current project and then left it at that. It's a bit of a steep learning curve. But it's fun so I'm persisting.
I got an old eee pc 701 surf from work a while ago. It's pretty good! It took a while to find an OS that would work on such low end hardware. I ended up going with Antix-net. I figured I could learn the terminal more at the same time. I guess I intend to recreate crunchbang in a way.
The first thing I did was change the layout to colemak. It's much easier to type on the tiny keyboard with that layout.
Next I acquired a 2gb stick of ram, which doesn't really help when your OS uses about 30mb, but it'll be nice later on.
Next I will buy it a nice new battery. And I want to try to make use of the (unpopulated) PCIe connector. I have an mSATA SSD from an old laptop but I'll need an adapter of some kind if I want that to work. Long term I have to keep supressing the urge to build a Corne keyboard to replace the existing one, and replace the tiny trackpad with a trackball or something.
Update: Battery has been purchased! They emailed me to say that they haven't sold one of these particular batteries since 2019 so they don't stock it. Which means they will have to have it made for me. It'll take an extra month but I'll have a spanking new battery, so I'm fine with it!
As a part of my keyboard research I have been looking into designing a small bluetooth thumb board for my work tablet. The IT department won't let me plug in any USB devices, but are fine with bluetooth.
I also discovered the Kalq keyboard layout, which is interesting. I'm trialing it on my phone and it's not too bad. It wouldn't be too difficult to change the layout on a physical keyboard either. I'm leaning towards the nice!nano as the controller, mounted between the keyboard halves. I also need a mouse input of some kind. For practical reasons a trackpoint/thumbstick kind of input would probably be best. My hands are frequently covered in grease, or gloves, or both. So a capacitive touchpad might not work well, and a trackball would get gummed up.
That's just percolating in the back of my head, though. Other things are a higher priority.
I've always been interested in radio stuff. One of these years I'll get my ham licence. But in the meantime licence free packet radio stuff is pretty great! I especially like the idea of lora (or other things) integrated into a phone. Which makes the pinephone with the lora backpack, or the wiphone, are super tempting as my old oneplus starts to die. Though instead of a voice call focussed device, I'd prefer something text focussed. More like a modern Nokia N900 than a Rotary Unsmart Phone (though the RUSP is amazing in its own right)
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