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"As I have grown as a person and as a maker-of-things, that question has come back to me again and again. I have learned how and when to stop talking and start doing. To other more-talker sorts of people, that can look like a magic trick. I have better learned to recognize when someone is frustrated by communicating-in-words about a plan instead of performing the plan. These are learnable skills; and I have seen that there are commensurate skills that have to be hard-won for doers.
Instead of an accusation or a challenge, it’s become a gentle reminder: you’re more of a talker than a doer. Keep an eye on it."
Writing from Sam Bleckley on talking, making, thinking, and doing. Moving from one state to the other, and back again. This struck a chord.
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A whole book about videos of things being made! Also: reading the full blurb at the Duke Press site immediately make me thing about the genre of music gear videos on Youtube affectionately known as Hands Videos…
An e-ink screen for a room
31 January 2019
I made a small display for my living room.
This project began when we installed a Hive thermostat at home. For various reasons, the thermostat ended up on the upstairs landing, and I thought it’d be nice to have a second display for it downstairs. I know I can look at the app on my phone, but I thought something more ambient might be nice. And, whilst I was at it, one feature I’d always wanted – the next trains at my nearest stations – and perhaps the outdoor temperature and weather as well.
This all coincided with Bryan Boyer writing up his Very Slow Movie Player project, which is a delight. (It shows a movie at a frame a minute, on a large e-ink screen).
I’ve been fascinated with e-ink for a long while. I’m well into the lifespan of my second Kindle, and it’s such a wonderfully un-technological piece of technology. It’s still, to my mind, the single best piece of hardware Amazon have made by a long, long way.
I wrote about the joy of e-ink when I was at Berg, in Asleep and Awake. As Bryan proved, it’s now fairly easy to both source e-inks screens and also to interface with them. The 2.7″ screen I used came ready-attached to a Raspberry Pi HAT, with libraries all written for it.
(As an aside: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pis for a while, but this was the first time I’ve used the Zero form factor; the £10 Zero W, with built-in wireless and bluetooth, is such a lovely fit for this project. It does make the thought of doing lower-level embedded work seem a little foolish for simple IOT prototypes – lots of power and connectivity, and the ability to write high-level code is a delight.)
So: I had a screen, and a Pi. I started with the output: getting a PNG of mocked-up UI to display on the screen. This didn’t take too long, although I’ve had no joy getting partial updates to work – I’m using a fairly heavyweight full screen refresh each time the screen updates. Still, that’s an improvement I can come to later.
With the sample PNG on the screen, there were two remaining strands of work: dynamically generating images, and gathering data to feed them. Again, I worked on the former first, using Pillow. I’m not a great Python developer by any stretch, but a recent work project featuring a lot of it made me a lot more comfortable with hacking on the language, and Pillow’s a lovely tool for simple image compositing. Google’s Roboto font and Erik Flowers’ WeatherIcons do most of the legwork; the rest is simple compositing, step by step.
Once the Python image processing was written, I moved onto data-scraping. I’m happiest in Ruby, but chose Javascript for this work. Why? Partly for how appropriate it was for dealing with lots of JSON, and partly to get more familiar with ES6. I ended up with three scripts: one to get the latest set and actual temperatures from the Hive API; one to get the next trains at some stations; and one to query the Dark Sky API for local weather. These would write out to JSON via lowdb. Then, the Python script could, separately, read that JSON directly, render a PNG, and trigger a refresh of the screen.
Having broken the task down, everything went almost entirely as planned. One by one, I replaced each section of the screen with live content. The only hiccups were the usual wrestling with cron jobs (when do these ever go smoothly?) and dealing with simultaneous writes to the JSON store. (It turned out lowdb wasn’t great for distributing across multiple files, and rather than rewrite everything to use SQLite, I just went with three separate JSON files. Easy fix). Nice to spend a few hours at the weekend motoring on some programming I’m entirely comfortable with: JSON, markup-scraping, server-side fettling and graphics processing.
I’m happy with the results. There’s a bit of a distracting blink when the display re-renders, but the lack of a glow makes it feel very different to a more obviously electronic device. It just sits, comfortable with itself, giving me a little bit of information. I was surprised how many people enjoyed it when I shared it on Instagram, so thought I’d write it up.
What’s next? I might add something else to that lower-right display; not sure what, yet. And, most importantly, I’m going to give it some kind of case – it’s a bit too ‘gadgety’ or ‘maker-y’ as it stands; it needs to be made more homely. Perhaps some wood. In the meantime, though, I’ve been living with it, and had no desire to repurpose it, or switch it off, which is usually the best sign.
Most notably: it continues to affirm my belief that e-ink is a most gentle and domestic technology. I can confirm that it’s now very easy to play with, if you’re so inclined; a Python library and bolting a £30 HAT onto a Pi was all this took to get live. I might do some more tinkering with this technology in due course.
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A nice talk from Adrian at Making It (which I was too ill to attend, annoyingly). In particular, good at covering the _middle_ of things: small-to-medium enterprise, small-to-medium-term companies, manufacturing between "China" or "hyperlocal".
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Every word of this is gold.
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Bookmarked mainly for its unpicking of that William Morris quote at the top – where it comes from, what he meant, and what he was talking about.
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"The characteristic grid-like simplicity of the view, the absence of barriers… a landscape where nothing officially exists, absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen… — that’s Reyner Banham describing deserts, though I like to imagine he was looking at a spreadsheet." Rod's component of By Hand & By Brain is just wonderful.
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"Having to learn how to make something ‘the long way’ helps you to understand how to manipulate materials at a fundamental level. It means that you can become fluent. The ability to articulate your thoughts through and with matter, rather than just make it into a shape you have thought of, means that you are more likely to find innovative or creative ways to exploit both materials and machinery. This is true whether you are talking about traditional craft techniques or more contemporary (digital) ways of making: I don’t think you can avoid the notion that time and effort are the only way to get good at something. Using digital technology as a way to shortcut the temporal aspects of craftsmanship is effectively relegating these sources of immense creative potential to the category of ‘labour saving devices’. I am really looking forward to a time where we can fully appreciate the potential for modern digital craftsmanship, by which I mean the skilful manipulation of digital systems as ‘matter’, rather than as express facilitators of shiny objectness." yes-yes-yes-yes.
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"When my brother and I wanted a new toy, we cannibalized whatever we’d made before, which had been made of all the things we’d ever made before that. So of all those years of guns and starships, I have only that Wrightian feeling for form in the fingertips — and the sound, somewhere between rustling and clinking, of a thousand plastic pieces tumbling from an overturned bucket into a disorderly pile, rippling away from a seeking hand." As Paul M pointed out, that sound is very, very visceral for many of us. This is a lovely article about what Lego does to the head.
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"We learned that being first is important, but should not be the only factor when determining the viability of a project. If you have an evolved approach to a preexisting concept, you are likely doing something original and the results have a good chance of being meaningful." So, in one sense, it's another physical mirror. But: I like this point, that sometimes, you have to do a thing for yourself to learn about it. And by learning about it, you might ultimately differentiate your own work. As long as you don't claim you were first, there is no shame in doing what other people do. How else do you learn things? Not by other people yelling "OLD!" at you, that's for sure.
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"Gifsicle is a command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations." Handy.
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"These three frameworks — objects as portals, objects as subjects, and objects as oracles — propose distinct (yet related) structures for thinking about how connected objects might begin to contain their own narratives, seek their own history, develop their own perspectives, and become storytellers in a multitude of ways." Nice article about the various perspectives on Connected Objects (which namechecks Hello Lamp Post).
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"My class handouts grew into a crude PDF textbook, which somehow escaped the walls of the school. Emails began to arrive asking me to conduct workshops. An editor at Routledge, invited me to elevate my drawings and prose to a publishable state, and the result was Handmade Electronic Music — The Art of Hardware Hacking" Might have to get this.