A preview: the Minimum Viable Book

Originally published on Patreon.

Not quite ready to share this with Twitter, but this is something I’ve been working on today. It’s the first Arduino sketch I’ve written for the book that feels like more than demo code: 

Here’s what’s happening in that GIF: the device is reading a list of files from an SD card, finding the ones that are compatible with the Open Book, and using the Babel chip to render a menu with the available titles (fully Unicode-aware; note the accent on Honoré). The title and author information comes from the text files themselves; it’s a really simple file format for now, basically a table of offsets for title, author and pages of text. Then it’s reading the buttons, and depending which was pressed, rendering a partial update of the left column to indicate which title is selected. 

The next step is to add a mode for displaying each of the text files, fixing the word wrap algorithm and figuring out pagination. I’ll probably share it with Twitter then. But for the first time this is code that feels like it’s doing more than demonstrating features. It feels like code that’s bringing them together into something that can fulfill the vision.