My mother was a "grader" and her workflow was actually very similar to software engineering. A designer would give her sketches of a garment. She would figure out how to build it - break it down to individual pieces of cloth and construction steps that then get fanned out to cutters and seamstresses to build.
When I got into software I found the parallels fascinating.
When qualifying a new semiconductor process, it is common to do "schmoo" testing, that is to intentionally drive the process steps away from nominal temperature, vapor pressure, doping levels, process times, etc, etc, in order to characterize the expected yield with variations from nominal conditions.
When my wife was in General Mills' Betty Crocker division, it was common to characterize the behavior of a new cake mix formulation under varying conditions to account for inaccurate measurement of added liquids, variation in the size of eggs added by consumers, variation in home oven temperatures, variation in cook time, consumers adding milk instead of water, etc.
From a background in graphics, it's a neat way to have edges grab and join. Maybe 3D modeling already uses this stuff somewhere in high end? Haven't seen much of just putting two 2D shapes near each other, and then making a 3D inflated design with edge grabs. Seems like it would be nice for hobby games / apps, where you could draw a character front/back, and then inflate to ~3D shape. Might exist, and be my lack of awareness of the community.
Not that I've seen. The Lilygo and BBQ20 keyboards all seem to use surplus Arabic BB keyboards that are made to be used with the little trackpad thing like on the tdeck.
Oh man. This reminds of the end of my developer career. I moved over to management because of awful RSI but in a desperate attempt to keep typing I learned the AlphaGrip. If I can master that thing, I can master anything!
These things have unfortunately been sold out for a while. Not only that, if I wanted to use the BBQ20 with my phone I'd have to connect it to a BLE chip and a battery which is way more hacking than I wanted to do on this project.
This is 100% true. The documentation isn't great. The code itself isn't great, either and it's the only thing you can go off of.
One thing Lilygo really should do is start merging pull requests. Many of them are fixing the documentation because we love tinkering with their devices and want to pave the way for others.
Thankfully most everything lily-go throws on their boards is pretty generic and generally adafruit has an equivalent feather wing or some such, and you can use their documentation to figure out how to get your lily-go stuff working with a bit of time spent cross referencing schematics and code.
After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard, I felt like this needed to be shared. I nearly built something like the Clicks for myself but the closer I got the worse it seemed, ergonomically. Not only that the Clicks key layout only has shift on one side and it doesn't have a backlight.
Some background: I have been shopping around for a bluetooth keyboard to use for thumb typing for the last few months. I have a book to edit and a newborn that is always sleeping on my chest. I tried a few bluetooth keyboards from Amazon but they were all garbage.
Eventually I found the T-Keyboard and have been really pleased by it. This is the keyboard from the T-Deck with a little 160x40 screen attached to it. The screen allows you to see what you're typing on the device without looking at your phone. It boots in half a second which means switching back and forth is lightning fast. If I'm typing a few words, I stick to my touchscreen. I'm editing so there's a lot of selecting text to copy / paste / annotate which is also touchscreen work. When I need to add a new paragraph or more, I set my phone down and pick this thing up to type with.
The problem I have with the blackberry keyboards is the omission of commonly used linux symbols such as tilde - how do you cope with that? Or perhaps I am missing a trick? I've resorted to salvaging Psion 5 keyboards and rolling my own hardware as the result.
> After the deep discussions on the Lilygo T-Deck and the Clicks keyboard
Care to link those? I've been poking around some of this stuff and have a Lilygo T-Display and T-Embed en route, would be nice to see other more knowledgable folks' opinion on the products, dev experience, etc.
If you apply for a home loan, you will get about 100 calls per day for the first week and it will trickle away over the next two months. I still get 3~ per day. It's insane.
The readme mentions a memory that lasts as long as each conversation which seems like such a hard limitation to live with.