Post · bonfire.cafe

@alcinnz@floss.social last mo.

I'm slowly skimming the Papyrix ereader firmware, and... Nice! It includes a bare-metal international text-renderer, targetting a memory-constrained RISC32i microcontroller & eink display!

To achieve this it uses its own (raster) font file-format, with special handling for Arabic, Thai, & Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Naturally there's a script to rasterize normal fonts.

So now all I need to test my concept for mobile typing is... Someone (ideally local) to team up with on the hardware!

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@alcinnz@floss.social last mo.

Here's the link: https://github.com/bigbag/papyrix-reader

It targets Xteink hardware, reportedly not that much bigger than a credit card.

Incidentally: Does anyone know of a bare-metal speech-synthesis project? Or would I need to port eSpeak myself for the sake of a screenreader?

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

@alcinnz
> I'm slowly skimming the Papyrix ereader firmware

Glad to see more libre projects focused on e-ink devices.

> Someone (ideally local) to team up with on the hardware!

I replied to a thread about this recently, and learned that Pine64 have an e-ink device in the works. First editions for tinkerers are available;

https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

Could one these be helpful for your project?

PineNote

One of the most powerful Linux-based Eink tablets Introducing the PineNote – A new early adopter Linux Eink tablet. The 1404 x 1872 resolution Eink panel with a fast refresh rate has 16 levels of grayscale and is not only contained by a hardened scratch-resistant glass with an anti-glare coating and a wacom EMR layer, but it also contains a frontlight with white or amber illumination settings. Powered by a powerful and efficient RK3566 SoC with four A55 cores, and backed by 4GBs of RAM and 128GBs of eMMC storage this will be a powerful portable device capable of taking notes, writing and reading documents, reading books, terminal usage, and more.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

@alcinnz
> I'm slowly skimming the Papyrix ereader firmware

Glad to see more libre projects focused on e-ink devices.

> Someone (ideally local) to team up with on the hardware!

I replied to a thread about this recently, and learned that Pine64 have an e-ink device in the works. First editions for tinkerers are available;

https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

Could one these be helpful for your project?

PineNote

One of the most powerful Linux-based Eink tablets Introducing the PineNote – A new early adopter Linux Eink tablet. The 1404 x 1872 resolution Eink panel with a fast refresh rate has 16 levels of grayscale and is not only contained by a hardened scratch-resistant glass with an anti-glare coating and a wacom EMR layer, but it also contains a frontlight with white or amber illumination settings. Powered by a powerful and efficient RK3566 SoC with four A55 cores, and backed by 4GBs of RAM and 128GBs of eMMC storage this will be a powerful portable device capable of taking notes, writing and reading documents, reading books, terminal usage, and more.

@alcinnz@floss.social last mo.

@strypey The thing is that I know "8pen" has already failed on touchscreens, so for me to test something new... I'd need the physical controls!

Thanks for trying.

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz last mo.

@alcinnz
> I'd need the physical controls!

Couldn't you disassemble a PineNote to get at those?

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