The Infinite Book

It’s finished!

I’m back guys, I know it’s been like 2 months and I apologize, I really procrastinated on finishing this project. So… where do I begin?

I finished wiring the components. For the buttons I designed and printed a panel to house them all. The voltage divider circuit that outputs the battery voltage also got moved inside of the button panel, before the whole thing was sealed off with hot glue.

Using a dremel, I hollowed out little pockets of the fake book to make the screen fit and to add a hole to charge. Everything fits snugly inside of the case. The battery is behind the screen, the microcontroller is propped up on a custom 3d printed piece so the FPC cable of the screen isn’t getting bent violently. The microcontroller, buttons, and battery are all held in by velcro, while the screen is held in simply by a tight fit and the micro SD card reader is attached by mere wires so it can move freely and be easily accessed. All this together means that the entire electronic system can be ripped out, which is super helpful in case of future changes.

On the software side of things, I didn’t have much to add. The screen now hibernates after five minutes of inactivity to preserve battery life. The book storage system isn’t exactly where I want it to be, but I can’t really work on it because my micro SD card reader died :(. This also means I can’t load books onto it yet, but once I can it will be 100% operational!

That’s really all there is to say, see you guys at the ship!

Guys I have some unfortunate news. I worked for a super long time yesterday but it just isn’t going to be done in time. It’s so close to completion but I’m leaving today the infinite book simply won’t be ready in time. Sorry guys. I’ll be back in three n a half weeks and ill finish the project then. this is some bad news but its okay. the project will eventually get finished.

Hey guys sorry for it being a couple days since the last devlog, I kinda forgot yesterday so this one is a combination of yesterday and today.

So yesterday I didn’t do much except I wired the SD card reader with a breadboard and got that started. I had to battle with it a lot for it to work as intended and that battle is far from over as I am still working on the file loading system.

Today I worked on fixing up my code for a while and finally got the SD card reader to what I would call a reasonable point, then I fixed an issue I was having with the opening of files off of the card. I’m still not completely sure what the fix was that made it start working all of a sudden, but my two main theories are that A) I was opening the file too early before the card reader could fully initialize or B) The breadboard wiring was just too unreliable to give a steady connection. Either way I started opening the file when it was actually needed instead of on startup and replaced the chunky breadboard wiring with soldered wires. One of the two things fixed the issue for what seems like permanently. I just hope I won’t have to revisit that part of the project later because I’m on a serious time crunch right now (this thing has to be done by Tuesday or else I am absolutely fried because I’m going on a 3 and a half week trip and my parents won’t let me bring my phone for some reason meaning if I don’t get my infinite book working in time it’s over for me).

Finally I also got both navigation buttons working as well as the reading light and light switch. All of those things are currently breadboard wired instead of soldered but that’ll get fixed when the code is looking a bit more solid. In terms of inputs I’ll still need a main power switch to keep the battery from draining as well as a home/select button. Theoretically after all that is working I can assemble and decorate this thing and the project will be done but unfortunately that’s easier said than done especially if I only have tomorrow to work but let’s all just pray for the best. See you guys tomorrow, hopefully for the last devlog of this project!

Today I’m gonna be honest I wasn’t able to get much done since the whole time I was basically just fixing stuff

I was able to actually figure out a way to do partial resets which is friggin aura

I’m starting work on the SD card reader so yeah see you tomorrow

Today I fixed the LiPo battery readings by using a LiPo flow chart to match the curved depletion of LiPo batteries. When I finished I checked with a multimeter and the predicted voltages were basically spot-on, matching the multimeter exactly once I added a calibration step to the math to account for the difference.

I also found out some bad news, which is that my e-paper display is incompatible with partial refreshes (updating the pixels of the display in the part you are changing specifically rather than the entire display) in the library I am using, and I have not been able to find a replacement library so I am assuming it is just entirely not possible. This does suck but I think the project will be okay and I will still be able to make a good final product. That’s about all for today, I was gonna work more but unfortunately I was busy, my goals for tomorrow are going to be working on making more UI besides the battery, dealing with the no partial refresh issue, and (hopefully) acquiring an SD card and starting to figure out how I’m gonna load text onto the screen. See you guys tomorrow!

Today I created a system that can detect the battery percentage of the battery, then found out LiPo batteries deplete on a curve so I’m gonna have to rework it so it is actually accurate 😭

On a better note I learned more about the Arduino IDE and was extremely happy when my voltage divider circuit actually worked (I know it’s simple but still I was proud)

Tomorrow I aim to fix the battery issue and hopefully find an SD card so I can start making the text display system work

See you guys tomorrow!

P.S. I didn’t have time to get a picture of the current contraption so here’s a picture of me soldering on pin header from my Lapse recording

I began coding but I couldn’t progress any further without soldering which my parents won’t let me do until tomorrow (for some reason?) so yeah that’s all for today