As I was working on the preliminary letterbox design, I noticed a fairly severe oversight. All of my experiments were based on a single display module, which an ESP8266 or ESP32 can handle easily using our chosen algorithm.

Early experiments are complete; it’s time to put together the list of what I want in my new toy. This is… surprisingly complicated. There are a lot of moving parts, so to speak, and many rabbit holes to go tripping …

Today has been a non-hardware day, estimating the energy usage of the display under the various algorithms. I simply wrote a program to run the math, and found that my answers from yesterday were correct enough to be going on …

Sometimes you sit down to work and realize that you should have stopped earlier the previous day. This was an example of one such day. I didn’t really notice it until I looked at the pulse trains in the images I published, but the …

Display power consumption is going to be a problem for the LetterBox. Today’s project is to tinker with one of my newly-acquired displays and see what exactly I can get away with in terms of consumption. This will inform the rest …

Shortly after I revamped the site, I realized that I had a problem. There’s a nice feedback mechanism, but no way to tell if anyone uses it unless I go and look. It’s far too easy to miss incoming feedback. Sure, I could just make …

I just can’t resist tinkering. I’ve pushed out a change that does the following: Kills off an infinite loop bug that occurred if RabbitMQ lost the connection. Enables scrolling long messages.

I’ve long held a certain fascination with old-technology displays. There’s just something special about them. Notable on the list is the 14-segment alphanumeric variety. These displays are very similar to the ubiquitous 7-segment …