News of the Book

Originally published on Patreon.

It’s been a a big week for the Open Book! Last night, the project was named the grand prize winner in Hackaday’s Take Flight with Feather contest. It shares the winners’ circle with some truly impressive projects in robotics, assistive technology, communications protocols from the retro to the bleeding edge, and even space-based computing! The contest brought out some really amazing projects from makers that I respect and admire, and it’s an honor to see the Open Book recognized among them. 

This also means that Adafruit will be manufacturing 100 of the Open Book boards, to be stocked at DigiKey! Which is by way of saying, you should be able to purchase one in the near future. 

This week also saw the first CircuitPython beta with support for the Open Book! If you’ve never used it before, CircuitPython is an open source programming language for microcontrollers that makes it super easy to write code that runs on devices. CircuitPython boards show up as a USB drive when you plug them in; you can edit their code with any text editor on your computer, and the code will run automatically. In the case of a device with a screen like the Open Book’s, the results of your code even appear automagically; I used this functionality to quickly fetch some local weather reports as a demo: 

This week I also demonstrated an early version of MVBook, which you saw here first last weekend! Since then I added a book reading mode, including a progress indicator at the bottom of the page to show your position in a book. I showed off this code during the Adafruit Show and Tell livestream last night, and shared a more detailed video explanation this morning.

Finally, there’s that new wooden enclosure for the book in that photo up top: it’s stained, laser-cut basswood at 1/16" thick. The size and thickness is perfect, although the wood is a bit soft. I hope to play with some hardwoods soon; someone on twitter suggested cherrywood, which sounds lovely.