The Challenge

Published on 2022-10-16 in PewPew LCD.

This project was submitted to the 2022 Hackaday Prize, and it qualified to semifinals, so let me take some time and talk about the challenge that I am trying to tackle with it.

Of course, the theme of the round was re-using existing parts, so that they serve a purpose instead of ending up in a landfill, and that is of course an important thing. In case of this project, the part being reused is the display, which used to be produced for a number of very popular phones, and which is still available as replacement part for them, even though those phones are not nearly as popular as they used to be. It’s a dated technology, which has long been replaced with OLED screens, but which still has some indisputable advantages, such as very low power consumption, and is more than adequate for this particular use case. So yes, we are re-using a part that would otherwise just pollute our world. Good. I also made some other conscious decisions about what to use, such as settling on a battery type that is practically, in reality, recycled, or a USB connector that works with older hardware.

But the main goal of this project is not related to protecting the environment, a worthy goal that it is, but rather it looks forward into the future a little bit further, to give a better chance of saving the world to those who come after us. Technical culture is a big thing. You either understand the tools that you use and control them, or they control you. With the tools around us getting more powerful and ubiquitous, and with them having increasing effect on our everyday lives, it’s more important than ever to understand and control them. But it is also becoming increasingly harder to do that, as they become more complex, harder to inspect and repair, and more dependent on centralized services. If our successors are going to learn this, they need a stepping stone, something that is easier to understand and learn from, something they can own and control. I hope this project to be that. Or one of such things, anyways, for I hope there will be many more.

Obviously they also need teachers and the materials to learn from, but while I do some teaching myself, I’m not an organizer and there is little I can do about encouraging people to teach and write books. What I can do is to give them tools that will make the teaching easier and less challenging. I can design a device that is not only useful in the teaching, but also not tied to any large corporation or government, and not dependent on their sponsorship, like the Raspberry Pi or Micro:bit projects are. Something that is cheap and easy to get because it was designed to be cheap and easy to source, not because someone poured a ton of money into it to subsidize it, and can at any moment change their mind. Something that is truly open source, without any binary blobs or secret sauce, without a trademark or a patent, without strings attached.

It’s not ideal. While the screen is recycled and the battery is recyclable, the microcontroller itself is new, and affected by the global chip shortage at the moment. Using any other chip would make this project more complex and more expensive, and possibly also tie it to one of the organizations that could control it. It was a trade-off. Perhaps in the future there will be a chip that better fits the goals of this project – one that is more open, or that can be recycled from old hardware, while not adding a lot of complexity. But I currently don’t see anything like this, and I believe that it’s better to make something imperfect now, than to wait for perfection forever. We are not getting any younger.

I also hope that in the future there will be many more PewPew- compatible devices. The pew library is already ported to pretty much any homebrew console that runs CircuitPython, and some platforms that run regular Python. As new devices are designed, PewPew can be ported to them as well. So maybe you will not need to produce new devices for a workshop anymore, because everyone will already have something that can be made to run the pew library in their drawer already. Sure, it might require more work, but that’s learning too, and there are hackerspaces and repair cafes to help with that. So there is actually much more opportunity for reuse and bringing old things back to life, in the future. Things like smartwatches and sportbands, alarm clocks and fancy remotes, pocket translators and music players could all potentially become pewpew-compatible, with the help of the community.