The NoteOn Smartpen by [ Nick ] aims to digitize your writing on the fly while behaving like a normal pen. The major hardware challenge of this device is packaging it in something as small as a pen. With the hardware working, [Nick] is now tackling the firmware that will make the device usable. The project featured in this post is a quarterfinalist in The Hackaday Prize. There are only a few more days until The Hackaday Prize semifinalists need to get everything ready for the great culling of really awesome project s by our fabulous team of judges.
Here are a few projects that were updated recently, but for all the updates you can check out all the entries hustling to get everything done in time. The NoteOn smartpen is a computer that fits inside a pen. Obviously, there are size limitations [Nick Ames] is dealing with, and when a component goes bad, that means board rework in some very cramped spaces. YouTube user "chipos81" has managed to port Infocom's Z-Machine virtual machine to the pen the Echo , specifically , and you know what that means: Zork on paper.
Look down. Examine link. Go past break. I had not really noticed them before but a local store has them on special offer at the moment so I am tempted to pick one up. Reading the bitter comments on here, running a good forum and dev programme requires lots of dev and moderator time not just the hosting fees.
If the company is on the edge, shutting it down would be a quick way to be able to loose some headcount. Had direct experience of that one. MS software is OEM software and has been since the 80s.. Perhaps they are re-gearing some of the underlying tech to use in another product and want to shut off any IP leak.
Like I say it probably depends very much on your target demographic. Being around software a lot and writing a fair bit, I very much agree that it depends on your end product. Now lets take the android platform as a whole. Yet android still survives — because it still solves the problem of creating your own device-specific OS. Just for the record. I do have a livescribe. Several of my friends and past co-workers have livescribes. They were invaluable for professional services consulting teams.
Also hand sketched diagrams and the sort would also be available. I mean… it was and is an incredibly useful tool in some areas of business. One of the areas the pens saw heavy use … was as a peripheral for blind people. A keyboard can be a daunting instrument for a blind person… but a pen that can provide voice feedback is not. Not to mention it could be used to literally sketch new interfaces. They are just people benefiting from the technology existing. But aside from that lamentable woe, the reality is the way in which livescribe completely pulled an about face without any notice to developers on their product is utterly galling.
It is a betrayal of the trust of people who had invested time, money, and expertise in their product. And as a company their image is now permanently tarnished. This will impact them. I just bought one.
Livescribe is simply the best tool in the world when it comes to capturing interviews and listening to voice mail record from speakerphone while jotting notes.
Note the "pry slots" on either side of the case near the screws. I found that I could pry up the 'screws-end' of the plastic shell by a couple mm, then slip tiny screwdrivers progressively along the crack on both sides, prying up the front shell as I went. This unsnaps the first pair of internal hooks, then I lift and pry to unsnap the next pair and the next. There's a trick to it, so go slow to avoid snapping off the plastic hooks. Heh, it helps to be repairing the clear-shell version of Echo, the transparent edition where the internal hooks are visible!
With the top shell gone, two more identical screws are exposed. These hold down the camera pcb. Remove and store these. The glass OLED display is permanently glued to a small plastic carrier clipped to the processor pcb.
On this carrier, locate the four plastic hooks at corners; the little ones holding it against the main processor PCB. Pry these away with a tiny flat screwdriver. When it's loose you'll find that the display is connected by a flexible Kynar pcb-strip soldered to the main pcb. Your task is to de-solder this strip. I use tweezers and a fine-tip iron to melt each of the ten pads in sequence, lifting gently with tweezers. Next use fine solderwick and a little flux to clean up the PCB solder-pads.
I didn't bother to clean the Kynar-strip pads, just the PCB. Then, solder in the identical display assembly removed from a CPU-crashed pen. To avoid getting the cable flipped around backwards, first mark the upper surface of both display cables at the solder end.
It helps greatly to use tweezers rather than fingers, unsoldering each pad and lifting up one edge of the cable as you go. Note that the solder pad at one end goes to the PCB ground layer, so that one takes extra heat. Kynar is high-temperature plastic, but can still be destroyed by a too-hot iron and slow crude soldering skills.
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