papertyper (digital typewriter #4)

Im reasonably done with the papertyper. As I write this I’m sitting on a bench in my garden. Listening to the birds sing and one of the neighbours works in his garden. The device turned out better then I had hoped, but I still have things I want to make better. The case is one of those things. It rests on my lap now, and that is good, still I’m not super satisfied with the angle. If this where a laptop I would have had to make it in another angle. Oh well.

To recap, I’ve used a raspberry pi zero, a waveshare power HAT and a waveshare screen. And a mechanical keyboard. I did some configuring of linux on the raspberry to get it to boot as smoothly and fast as possible. I made it synch the text written to google drive.

The text editor that is started on boot is not the one I coded. I could not get the Swedish characters to work. Instead I use micro, a spiritual successor to nano. Not that it really matters but nano could not be configured to save at regular intervals (the one I coded myself saved on every time I hit enter) oh, well. As I type this I notice that it doesn’t matter. I hardly look at the screens or the keys. Instead I’m looking at the parachute jumpers and the way the leaves move in the wind. So I guess It could have been anything (slow e-ink, mini lcd screen). Probably did not even have to have used this big screen. But it sure looks cool, when it boots.

If I would buy one of these from someone else (I would se if it has a good keyboard and built in power-management. I can call a script to se how much power I have left, but it’s not “convenient”) Still for this price, and the joy of making something truly original I’m happy . Now I’m going to take some nice photos to put together with the text you are reading.

https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/UPS_HAT 980,99 kr

Raspberry Pi 353,15 kr

Mechanical 10-key less keyboard. 319,00 kr

https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/7.9inch_HDMI_LCD 323,63 kr

SUM 1 976,77 Kr = 238,94 USD = 196,39 Euro

One thought on “papertyper (digital typewriter #4)

  1. Man, you’re in the wrong business) You should definitely be developing a casino or something like that. I think you’d have a great product. Maybe even similar to https://zeppelin-watch.com/, and they just have a great team and casinos of the highest quality.

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