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First Version made!

A project log for Psychic ePaper

Changeable, updatable Doctor Who psychic paper!

thornhillThornhill! 02/24/2020 at 00:590 Comments

Hey folks! I've just completed the first version of my Psychic ePaper and I thought I better start making a better job of documenting the build process, especially if I want to improve the dang thing!


The first version has gone A LOT better than I hoped (I honestly thought it was going to be held together by electrical tape) and has already been used by my partner in their Doctor Who cosplay.

So far I've programmed several different IDs that get refreshed with a button press. They mostly use the same template, with certain text and images swapped to represent different IDs. This makes the code more efficient AND it makes some of the joke IDs easier to get. The IDs are easy to make and I'm going to be adding a whole bunch more, with the goal of having a random one display when first used. 

Some of the different IDs on the wallet, all featuring a black and white photo of the 13th Doctor and different text. Top left shows her as Chief Clown of the Intergalactic Clown Council. Top right as Chief Investigator of the Department of Investigation. Bottom left as a Gumshoe for the Gladragged Gumshoes. Bottom right, a library card for the largest library in the universe, The Library!

Code

Speaking of code… the Psychic ePaper is currently being programmed with CircuitPython. I'm extremely new to CircuitPython and slowly learning about its strengths and weaknesses. Loading and displaying images are a dream compared with Arduino… but even with an M4 chip I'm coming up against some memory issues. I think with some practice, cleverness, and the frequent community updates to CircuitPython, we can get around this and make something very robust.

I'll be making an Arduino version of my code purely for completeness, and will be putting both on github soon.

Improvements:

Discussions