“I could manually enter 100 lines of text or…I could spend all afternoon writing Perl to clean and correct my noisy OCR data…and end up with the same 100 lines of text.
But also I’ll have built a tool! A tool nobody asked for. I really hope I can get someone else to use it so I can feel better about my lost afternoon.”
We do these things not because they are easy, but because we want to
And later we can find 100 good excuses explaining why it was worth it
At least that's me. I've built sooo much stuff just because I wanted to learn how to build it.
>> DIY embedded hardware
20 years ago an Arduino was brand new and 50 bucks.
Now any one can get a PCB made. You can do hardware like software (iterative, casual).
This is both silly and amazing!
We will be there if we can send off a design and get back a small quantity of reasonably priced fully assembled devices.
And this is not only about ability alone. Learning the skills to assemble a board is pretty realistically possible for almost anyone. It's just so annoyingly boring and tedious once the initial fascination and excitement has worn off. Contrary to when I learned it, it is already a pretty useless skill and will be comletely futile in the future.
The original posting had the word "casual" in it. When I have to worry so much about parts availability and things like this through-hole to prevent prices from exploding it's the opposite of casual.
I think the author already knows this :-)
The primary goal in this project appears to be "fun", not "provide a cheap option for reading keypads".
I mean, the author ate the pain of learning-to-Rust-on-the-STM32, uses it for no discernible gain for a project of this scope, and for good measure adds in a home-written embedded OS.
For something of this scope no multi-task-driven design is necessary, and an 8051-or-cheaper uC with an i2c peripheral and ISRs reading with a while(1) loop writing is more than sufficient.
I attempted making and selling a thing like this (integrating 2x16/2x32 character LCD and keypad) waaaay back in 2003/2004, but the number of hobbyist uC developers just didn't make it worthwhile.
Today, with the arduino already a grandaddy in relative terms, everyone and their dog is doing embedded, so might be a good time for me to relook at all-in-one i2c peripherals for hobbyists.
I can buy a 5" 800x400 TFT color touch screen with an onboard 32-bit processor that has I2C and SPI ports that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. And for good measure, implementing an onscreen keypad is already built into the libraries available for it.
Cost is around $30 on Aliexpress. I have a couple of them and they are amazing for the price. A github project has sprung up around these devices: https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display