Tinker Niche

Notable technical stuff from another of my Blog  The Old Blog is here  Aj's Old Blog   Custom Android ROM generation and new hardware interface for a Micromax Funbook for an interactive table for a Coffee Franchise Needed a new touch screen with deeper depth sensing to be interfaced to an android tablet. A hackable Android tablet was found and its hardware enabled to make changes. Cyanogenmod was a popular alternative Android variant. The CM10 Android ROM was compiled for 24 hours and its ROM updated to a stock Micromax Funbook (P300?) Google apps were also run separately. A different touch screen needed for this was interfaced to Android and was found to be working satisfactorily. The link to a related blog is Cyanogenmod 10 (Android ROM) on Micromax Funbook Howto build a tiny Home projector Needed to build a DIY projector  By taking apart the reflector backing from a phones display one can get transparency like film. Using a strong light and some proper lenses, a p...

Long time wish to build a smart watch. Experimented with various platforms, not built anything usable yet. Many opensource variants: watchy, openwatch, pinetime, etc. Pinetime is by the Pine64 Organisation  Pine64 Org . They make many open source products like laptops, phones, watches, SBCs, etc. The Pine64 forum has a watch called the Pinetime. It looks nicely packaged and so wanted to see if its suitable for everyday use. More info here  PineTime It is an NRF52 based chipset with an IPS display and chinese sensors for heart rate and step counting. They have an FreeRTOS based OS called the Infinitime . It was WIP then (Mar2021), so many features were under development and also the UI was rudimentary. At about the same time there was another micropython based OS called WaspOS which was under active development.  Downloaded this and generated the OS. The advantage is that one can just write micropython apps and download to this board. No classical embedded development nece...