johnboiles

I cannot upvote this enough

Simpler and smaller to just use two screens.

Any interest in hacking on sol reader with us?

The only particularly cutting edge tech on this thing are the custom pancake lenses. Same optics style as in the Vision Pro and Quest 3. Those are $$$

Feature not a bug :)

Working on more, but nothing exists off-the-shelf for >300ppi eink. No one has ever done eink under magnification like this so higher density screens don't exist (yet). We made a custom bitmap font system and font to squeeze every bit of optimization out of this screen that we can. Text rendering isn't pristine at this low res but it's good enough to not hinder reading. https://x.com/johnboiles/status/1715136868290081104?s=20

You nailed it -- this is exactly what we want to do -- make the most comfortable reading experience.

This is the alternative right now: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/best-kindle-accessor...

I posted some IRL through-the-lens views yesterday on Twitter https://x.com/johnboiles/status/1715136868290081104?s=20

We would love to get this down eventually.

Probably not, it's statically projecting (with fancy optics) an eink page out in front of your face. There's no 3d tracking / fast refresh or anything like that. Imagine something that mounts an ebook a meter out from your face, but in a small package.

Thanks for the report, I'll look into it!

Hello! Sol Reader CTO here. What a fun post to wake up to. AMA

Sol Reader (solreader.com) - Eink-based reading device in a glasses form factor.

[ONSITE in SF] Mechanical Engineer with >= 2 years of experience.

[ONSITE in SF or REMOTE] Electrical Engineer with >= 3 years of experience.

Both roles are to support development of our glasses product as well as future products. This involves prototyping and executing on feature additions, building testers for use on production lines, root-causing problems.

Email me john@solreader.com to chat more.

I have one of these in our office that's been passed from company to company. We don't pay for it and just use it as a (very nice-looking) rolling TV (it has an HDMI input on the back, thankfully).

Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it'd be to get root access to something like this?

+1 to this.

My wife, toddler and I were liveaboards on a 34' Hunter sailboat for 2.5 years in the Berkeley Marina. It was a blast for that season. I would recommend it if you like sailing, boats, minimalist living, and maintenance/tinkering. I would not recommend it if your main goal is to save money. In retrospect we probably did save money, but not that much, and definitely not an amount that would justify the amount of time I put into the boat (though I found boat work very satisfying).

I also made my own variable speed diaphragm water pump for our boat's water pressure. The VSD options on the market were notoriously unreliable, so I took one of the best non-VSD pumps with a pressure switch and drove it with a custom board + software. This also meant if my controller failed (which it never did) I could switch back to the original pressure switch.

https://github.com/johnboiles/openvsd

My wife and I lived on a Sailboat for a few years. The boat had a 20 year old SeaTalk bus connected to the sensors (depth, wind speed/direction, water speed). I bought a newer radio with an AIS receiver. Of course I wanted to hook it all to my computer & phone.

So I built some hardware to interface with the SeaTalk network, the AIS radio (and a modern GPS) https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-hardware https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-firmware

And a Python proxy running on a Pi to pass messages back and forth across the network. https://github.com/johnboiles/NMEAProxy

And an iOS app that could drive my autopilot https://github.com/johnboiles/helm-ios

Since my proxy spoke the NMEA standard, you could also hook up with other apps like iSailor and get all the sensor data + gps + AIS data. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wärtsilä-isailor/id398456162

To my knowledge, 0 other people have ever used any of this but I've always been proud of it :)

humans are incredible

Buckle up everyone I hear 2023 is the year of the Linux desktop!

Is your 5us number from experience? Have you run SQLite on embedded before? Just hoping to hear some real world performance numbers for any hardware remotely similar!

Yeah seems like it would _have_ to be storage related but my profiling tools are limited. I've run Doom on this same processor/flash combo and loading assets from the WAD files is on the order of 1ms and I can run Doom smoothly at 70fps. Not very scientific but that's part of the reason I was surprised by how slow SQLite is running.

I wonder if it could be doing multiple small writes on every operation -- I could definitely imagine small writes getting very costly, especially with wear-leveled file systems that might be moving around pages on even small writes.

There aren't connections in SQLite like there are for network-connected DBs (eg MySQL). My simple code is like this:

  sqlite3_initialize();
  sqlite3 *db;
  sqlite3_open("/data/sqlite.db", &db);
  char *err = 0;
  sqlite3_exec(&db, "DROP TABLE table_name;", NULL, NULL, & err); // This takes ~5ms even when table_name does not exist

Oh I didn't realize you could just tell it :memory:. That's a great tip

I've been trying to use SQLite3 in an embedded (ESP32 -- dual core 240MHz w/ qspi NOR flash) project and the performance has been surprisingly bad. Seems like the minimum amount of time to make a query (even for example, selecting from a table that does not exist, takes a minimum of 5ms). For a simple table with 10 short columns I'm getting 10s of milliseconds per record to SELECT. I can parse whole JSON files with the same data to RAM faster then I can query SQLite which seems wrong. SQLite is performing ~10x worse than I'd expected it would.

Anyone had experience running SQLite on low-power embedded platforms? Is this expected performance?

I discovered this in the last year, and it has made Evernote usable again: Evernote still distributes and supports their old native version. In my experience it's way faster and more stable than the newer electron version. On my M1 Max laptop it's 5-10s to open Evernote.app and ~1-2s to open Evernote Legacy.app despite the legacy one being compiled for Intel.

SITUATION: there are too many competing SQLite forks...

Is this a journalism?

Came here to write pretty much exactly what you said.

I'm using ESP32-S3 chips in a project. Rust support is really nascent and I can't afford to burn too much time on fixing tooling & recreating libraries. Though it does sound kinda fun.

But I imagine there's a chicken/egg challenge where it's hard to see Rust on embedded platforms get more mature unless it gets more adoption and it's hard to imagine a significant uptick in adoption unless it gets more mature.

Modern C++ is getting a little better all the time. And perhaps someday Carbon could be a smoother path to modernity because of its focus on migrating existing c++ codebases.

Agree. Spaces is good and the others not as much. Though I do use the 'War in Ukraine' topic a lot.

The main diff though is that Twitter for a moment in time started taking some shots. Not that they were all the best shots. But for my first two years there it felt like the company took nearly 0 shots. That shift happened with Kayvon.

This is mind boggling to me. Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know. It was confusing to me in Dec that he wasn't Jack's successor.

Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to starting to take some shots. Behind the scenes he was often pushing against significant headwinds that resisted product change (not the least of which was the internal 'sacred cow' that all things must be built with Scala and only run inside Twitter's on-prem datacenters).