Notices by ninee! (0x9e01@snug.moe)

boy i've been having A Time trying to figure out what display to use for this. my ideal fantasy display would be 512x320 at 4.2 inches but no such display is made, so at first i settled for 480x320 at 4 inches, which seemed good enough for now.

originally i was trying to use a pi zero 2w (as evidenced by the previous post) but that only lets you use spi or hdmi for the display and i can't think of a way to do hdmi that isn't too bulky for this form factor, so i naïvely thought that maybe spi would be fine (it wasn't. doesn't refresh nearly fast enough and somehow any time it's running with the stock raspbian desktop it makes certain ui events take minutes to update. no this is not hyperbole). so spi is discarded, and with it the pi zero 2w. so much for doing this as a way to finally do something with it

so now i'm trying to find mipi dsi displays that fit the bill and having a surprisingly difficult time:
- i try to find another 480x320 4-inch display with a dsi interface, but it seems that although the driver supports it, every kit i've found uses only the spi interface and i haven't found it for sale standalone anywhere. i guess i could remove the panel from the board it's attached to and attempt to figure out what pins do dsi but that's not a satisfactory solution even if i succeeded
- looking at other options, 800x480 panels seem somewhat promising (despite the significantly less comfortable dpi), but the 4-inch ones are a bit smaller than i'd like (wider aspect ratio means less display area for a given diagonal). the 4.3-inch ones would be pretty close to ideal, except every single one, bafflingly, is made from rectangular pixels that stretch the aspect ratio to roughly 16:9 instead of 5:3 :neocat_floof_explode:
- the likely culprit of the previous phenomenon, the psp-style displays (480x272 4.3") are in fact also a promising candidate (if nothing else they're way more amenable to pixel art than the previous ones, which is one of my considerations) but i haven't looked into them enough to make sure they're commonly available with dsi interfaces and won't need some special conversion circuitry
- does dsi not support resistive touchscreens or sth? cos the ones i've seen overwhelmingly have capacitive digitisers and that's just not something i'm interested in for this project. if i actively enjoyed using capacitive touchscreens i'd just get a new smartphone instead of trying to figure this whole project out

dunno about dsi but psp displays seem to be quite commonly available with parallel rgb, which i hadn't previously considered, but also works since i didn't plan to use the spare gpio for much of anything and it puts the pi zero back on the table

i've also been warming up to the 800x480 panels (you can integer scale from 400x240 or 256x160 for pixel art, and the font i'm making for this is vector anyway) and not only can these also be had with parallel rgb, i found a non-stretched 4.3" one! though unfortunately it doesn't have a resistive touchscreen option.

when searching for other sellers though i've had trouble separating the rgb displays from the ones that use 8080 parallel, which i'm not sure would perform adequately, and finding anywhere else that will just sell them to individuals without having to send an enquiry (though remarkably ifan display claim to sell one that's not only parallel rgb, but also transflective? in 2025??)

also tried searching for 4" 480x320 rgb displays just in case but could only find them in 8080 parallel :neobot_sad:

so the goal of this whole project, as the previous posts hint at, is the design and production of a sorta mini cyberdeck pda handheld console kinda thing, heavily inspired in form factor by the t-mobile sidekick and on a more conceptual level by the old palm os pdas and the sqfmi beepy. it's actually an idea i've been toying with for like four years now (see third pic in my pinned post) and only recently decided to start acting on after getting paid for my work trip earlier this year and building my cygnus and thinking "how hard could it be? :neobot_woozy:"

now because it's such a funky form factor and input method for a computer (basically a gba with a scroll wheel and a mini keyboard; i originally wanted a resistive touchscreen too for drawing and as a fallback pointing device to be able to use normal desktop programs somewhat but the way sourcing the display is going i wouldn't count on it happening) it would either have to rely on tui programs almost entirely à la beepy, or have bespoke gui software made to properly leverage the control scheme

this is a problem, because i do want the latter, but producing such a bespoke software suite on top of all the hardware work would be a massive effort for just a personal project, so i'm trying to design it to be as reproducible as possible so other ppl could make one, and hoped to build just enough for a proof of concept that i could publish online and get other ppl to think "oh that's cool i wanna have one of those too" and help me finish it. but unlike a certain other recently-announced project with an inadvisably inflated scope, i don't have the concept artistry skills to advertise such a thing without actually uh. making the thing (i should try to get some updated ui mockup pics going tho)

tl;dr i'm attempting to make my own mnt nano reform in the style of "what if a t-mobile sidekick and a tapwave zodiac had a baby" and an ergonomically appropriate software suite and am in way over my head :neobot_sob:

@stage7 trying to make a smol handheld computer :>

:neobot_drake_dislike: computer-aided design
:neobot_drake_like: paper-aided design

weh

tfw you're trying to make a cool dingus but you're both the designer and engineer :aneobot_explode:

i mean someone had to do it

foss enthusiasts: use free and open source software!

the free and open source software: this is freecad, sometimes it lets you sketch a rounded rectangle and sometimes it doesn't, even if you do it the exact same way every time

current status: xkcd 303 but they're installing a windows vm

tangentially related: why do ppl keep putting up with qt

i download the offline installer to try to bypass qt's login wall, the zip file makes the windows unzipper freeze. i'm at the worst intersection of software rn

i am actually incensed rn

i give up trying to build it offline only for the installer to tell me it somehow wants twenty-something gigs of space to install

i am either using someone else's machine to build this thing or not making any windows builds at all. the uni computers this thing's gonna run on all dual boot ubuntu they can deal with it

update: NVM I FIGURED IT OUT LET'S GOOOOOOO