Oh boy. January has flown by. Winter is finally here in full force. I have spent most of January alternating between panicked study and depressed procrastination. Though that might be the ADHD. I'm still getting used to that as a concept, actually. The medicine is amazing, but for some things (Like studying for an exam in a field that I have little interest in, that I'm taking because the alternative is career death.) I still struggle to get started. Old habits can still defeat the good brain drugs!
Part of that procrastinating is me poking at a newish project. I have wanted a typewriter for a while, but the model I'm interested in isn't available at a reasonable price in a location I'm willing to drive to. So in typical me fashion my little brain gremlin (more of a gnome I suppose) has declared that I will Make My Own. 🤦 (facepalm emoji)
The plan in its basic form is to build an electric typewriter that uses a typewheel for its characters, and can take input from any USB keyboard. The feature creep wants it to also be able to type out text files from a USB stick, and to also be able to act as a printer in USB peripheral mode / act as a physical TTY interface for a computer. The chassis and case will be 3d printed, the typewheel will also be 3d printed and interchangable. I thought about embedding a small ROM in the typewheel that contains the character set and coordinates of each glyph. But I'm not sure how doable that is, so for now I'm hard-coding the basic English set, and maybe using a microSD card with a python file the main script can import on startup. I think this will work? I will have to do more research on how keyboards send glyph codes to the OS.
But, of course, I am procrastinating right now! Tomorrow I have to drive to Ottawa, and then on Wednesday maybe fail this test again. But it feels good to get this infodump out of the way. After the exam I will be free to work on my own projects for a time - including updating this capsule and my roughly-equivalent website!
