June 21, 2025
In the event that even a single soul is monitoring this blog, I'm posting today to let you know that I'm not dead. Sharpie is on hold because somebody bought up all the screens at the start of the year and they won't be back in stock until October (and I'm a bit concerned they will never be in stock again---the datasheet link is now dead, luckily I kept an offline copy, and a round variant of the LS021 is now marked obsolete). I have however made some changes to the PCB since the part 2 post: there's only two buttons, and they're both through-hole 6x6mm buttons like you'd use in a breadboard, and I also took out the battery connector and VCC voltage divider. I felt it was too dangerous to have the ability to connect a lithium-ion battery directly to 5V from a USB source, plus each actually interesting SMD part on the board costs $3+part cost to have assembled.
I finished Xenoblade X Definitive Edition as well as the school year. I am patiently awaiting an announcement of Takahashi's next work for Switch 2, and I will happily fork over many shiny rocks when it becomes available.
I haven't checked the goals document in a while but I am mostly on track. Like I said back then, I will do a post going over each one and whether I succeeded or not at the end of the year.
I promise that I will not let this blog stagnate like so many, at least for a long time (my understanding is that, say, having children takes away a lot of free time, but that's far away for me). I want to complete Sharpie and I have an idea for a project using its technology (hint: remember rakko?), but obviously I can't do that until I have screens. If Sharpie dies because the screens go out of production, or whatever, I will come up with new things to do. Either way, I will continue to improve myself every day.
I took this opportunity to update a number of the non-blog pages on this site. Enjoy!