Codepope's Development Hell

I was going through the drawers in the lab when I happened across a Kim Uno that I’d put together a long time ago. It’s an Arduino Nano emulating the 6502 at the heart of the Kim-1, one of the classic early microprocessor machines from the late 70s. The board is super bare bones, and with the arrival of a Flashforge Adventurer 3 it was time to get exercising the new printer to make the Kim Uno more finished and all boxed up.

So, what do you do with old Pi projects? I had a Pimoroni Keybow on the side and thanks to RedRobotics’ tiny Pico2Pi board, I had the chance to breathe life back into it by replacing the controller board. Drawing back the Keybow Back in the day, the original Keybow was an interesting little beastie. A 3x4 keyboard of clicky switches with RGB LEDs as a compact keyboard; add your own Raspberry Pi Zero underneath and use a bare metal Lua implementation to configure the keyboard to send codes.

The Dazzler boards have arrived in my Development Hell. These boards, from James Bowman’s Excamera, are a continuation of the Gameduino family of devices which strapped a GPU and a Touchscreen to an Arduino to make a more than functional, graphically rich hand held games device. With the Dazzler, James has taken the Gameduino-3X GPU and moved it to a standalone board which also has an FPGA programmed up to manage more of the work and generate an HDMI signal.

So I’ve been having a little bit of a hack (at HackWimbledon) on the Adafruit Clue alpha and having some of Elecfreaks Joystick:bits to hand I thought I’d get them working together. The Joystick:bit has been replaced by a version 2. Apart from anything else, all the supporting code and libraries (what little there were) have been updated for the new Joystick:bit. Which is a pain as the original has the oddest buttons you’ve ever seen.

What should be a great machine on paper, the Udoo Bolt, isn’t. And its for the most ridiculous of reasons. Let’s rewind… Udoo do SBC (Single Board Computer) PCs and blend in an Arduino and a whole bunch of hackable IO. Great idea. The Udoo Bolt is another of these with an AMD Ryzen processor at its heart rather than the old Intel x86. Again, great idea. Signed up with Kickstarter and eventually, the device arrived in super stylish (if logic puzzle to assemble) metal case.

So, I was looking for something to do at HackWimbledon today and as I’d just got my hands on the Hex Neopixel panels from M5Stack, I thought I’d see what I could get going. And down I fell into a hole which lead to playing with spreadsheets. Lets look at the device in question: Pretty neat eh. The demo code was easy enough to get going and it slaps a rainbow over all the pixels.

So Adafruit’s latest is the PyPortal, an Atmel-SAMD51-powered, Python-running board with a touchable LCD display, an ESP32 for WiFi and BT, and a form factor which makes it easy to mount. I got mine with the Adabox subscription and it came with an acrylic enclosure and a tube you could fill with pennies (UK pennies work) to weight down the enclosure which has a curve in the back where it can sit.