Today I got Bluetooth audio working. I just followed this guide and aside from a misspelling or two, it went pretty smoothly. I wasn't able to get it to play over command line using SSH, but it did play after I installed VLC and double-clicked the MP3 file, which is good enough for me.

A while back, I had discovered that you could download Lynda.com videos with youtube-dl, which placed stuff unsorted. I created an AppleScript script that would go the the Lynda website, get the list of files in the course and sort and rename all of the files accordingly. Over time, I got it working 100% perfect...

Don't you just love breakthroughs? I was looking at the Network mapping data I had and swapped some columns and realized that it is in fact a grid of 7x8 (at least electrically) plus the on button. It's just not arranged physically in the same grid that it is electrically, but it still the same. That means I have the option of using the GPIO-Matrix Device Tree Overlay like I originally wanted.

I received the second USB port and have decided to go with the Adafruit one. The contacts are better and I think the shape works better, but in all honesty, I think either would have worked out just fine...

I found a great page here about how to write something in C that would be a great base point. If I run it in the background as a service or a daemon just like FBCP, then I think that will work fine. I'm also thinking about reading in a config file or something so that I can make the keyboard function different depending on the mode. I went ahead and set up SSH and got it to compile an example so that I can modify it from there.

I'm kind of getting anxious to put everything in the calculator case soon as I feel the hardware part of this project is coming to a finale and then it will just be sof...

I was out of town for most of the weekend, so I wasn't able to get much done. I worked on getting bluetooth audio working and so far that has been a bit of a challenge, but still appears to be within the realm of possibility. On the presumption that I'll get it working, I have been looking at some alternate layouts inside the calculator. Because of leaving out the audio board, I decided that I could probably now fit a USB port that will go directly to the raspberry pi onto the calculator, but I haven't decided if the HDMI port will be where the audio port was or if that's where I'll place the ...

This is just a short blog entry as I didn't have much time to work on my research. I now have the display working 100%. I got a little impatient and started digging in a little deeper myself. In the end I added spi_bcm2835 into /etc/modules to force SPI to start first and that fixed the issue. I posted my fix on the adafruit github for that issue, so hopefully that will help some other people out.

Another thing I realized that would make some more pins available is that I could just use Bluetooth Headphones. Then I could have my adjustable backlight pin back. I went ahead and ordered a broken ...

I went ahead and mapped out the circuit board today. It wasn't exactly the rows and columns that I was hoping for, but rather networks of circuitry. I counted 15 distinct networks plus the on button was separate. When I mapped them out in a spreadsheet, the bottom 8 rows are definitely in a matrix as expected. However, for the top 2 rows and the arrow keys, they use some of the row networks as columns and that's why I decided to map it out as networks (a term I took from Eagle regarding a series of connections all electrically attached) rather than rows and columns.

So what does this mean? Pro...

I feel like I'm very close. To start out, I found an alternative FBCP driver for the hardware combination I'm attempting to get working available at https://github.com/juj/fbcp-ili9341. I went through the initial build procedure and it seems to be working with a few exceptions:

After looking in the documentation, it explicitly says touchscreen will not work, but one may be able to get it working if they took a stab at it. After that, I switched back to the Adafruit FBCP. I found that if I run FBCP at the command line after booting it, it seems to work just fine with touch and everything. I tr...

I ended up getting my order of parts for my calculator, which I'm thinking of calling a Hackulator. One of the things I ordered was a mini HDMI port extender so I can hook it up to a monitor without taking apart the calculator and without having all of the ports exposed (though it is still an option at this point). I took all of the boards and the battery and I was able to fit them inside the case. After a little bit of moving items around inside, I'm pretty sure I know where I want all of the boards. For the new display board, I am able to fit it right behind the LCD display, so the extension...

It's worked! Once. I checked all of the connections and everything seemed to checkout fine. I booted it up and it did the same thing as it did yesterday with the black screen. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to try running the script again. It must need to probe something for the settings or my messing around with it may have messed something up, but it started working. As luck would have it, the very stiff HDMI cable I was using lifted the entire setup into the air and the LCD panel fell off. I attached it back on, but I still haven't been able to get it working. I switched to a regular HDMI ca...

I didn't have much time to work on it today, but I did discover one of the wires I used for repairing was attached to the wrong point. I moved it to the correct place and although the screen did initialize (changed from white to black), it didn't display properly. I still need to check that the connections are proper and that there aren't any other shorts in my soldering job. If that checks out, I can try running the init script for the display, but I don't suspect that will do anything. It could be a similar issue as well on another wire.