I love working on projects - electronics projects that is. I can do all kinds of cool stuff, learn a lot in the process, and gain some serious confidence in the subject matter of whatever the project is. I don't have to know what I'm doing when I start - half the time I have no idea what I'm doing, but I stumble my way through because I figure it's gotta be doable... and then I'll learn something and unlock new projects and new ideas.
My latest is the rev. 2.0 of the hackers.town pager. The specs are pretty imppressive:
- ESP32-S3-Wroom-1 w/ 16mb flash and 8mb psram
- SX1262 LoRa Radio
- CC1101 sub-ghz transceiver
- GNSS (gps)
- ILI9341 TFT Color TFT display (320x240 pixels QVGA)
- SDCard
- Buzzer & vibration motor
- IO Expander
- RTC
- LED controller and all the blinkenlights
This takes the power of the v1 hackers.town pager (and hacker pager running VMOS) and amplifies it significantly. It features twice as much flash storage, 4x the amount of RAM, and adds GPS and Sub-Ghz capabilities to the device. The upgraded display also provides for a MUCH richer experience - admitteldy at the loss of a little of the nostalgia factor for the older displays... but trust me those older displays are a pain in the ass to work with and are the bane of my existence working on the rev 1 pager.
The original hackers.town pager was a fork and clone of the hacker pager by Exploitee.rs, and is still an absolute delight of a device. I love it and am glad to have made them. I got to thinking about what I would do different if I were to design my own version, and a few things popped up. Namely that the display was a pain in the butt to work with (it uses pogo springs and pressure fitting to connect, instead of an actual connector. This is problematic). But also that I wish it had GPS, and sub-ghz would be cool too. Hence, this project was born - a ground-up re-design.
Right now the project is in the design phase. I'm painstakingly connecting everything up in KiCad schematic editor, after which I will begin the process of running all of the traces in the PCB editor. Neither process is particularly HARD, but they are time consuming and not exactly exciting either.
After all of that is done, it'll be time to submit to manufacturing to (hopefully) get a prototype run done. If that succeeds (I'll be shocked...) then I'll figure out how many of them I need to make and get that process moving.