@ekaitz_zarraga I'm not making up the rules, it's the logic.

Drunk? Don't drive!
Not drunk? Drink!

@ekaitz_zarraga left or right?

@ekaitz_zarraga @piggo I was going to write exactly this. Don't try to find single women that would be potential partners for you. Instead, socialize in general. Meet your old friends, even if they long ago married. Be active in clubs. Go to conferences. Give talks. Go to parties (you don't have to stay long if it's tiring). Generally be visible getting along with other people. This will first of all make you feel less lonely, and will also attract the kind of people that you enjoy being with.

@piggo school and university worked pretty well for me

@ekaitz_zarraga It's nonexistent next to the servos.

@ekaitz_zarraga I wouldn't know about the toolchain, because I use it with CircuitPython, but generally I can't complain. I want to write a half-duplex uart implementation for the pio at some point, for now I'm just using regular uart shorted with resistors into a single signal.

Some progress on the mechanical side. I had to use the older leg pieces made from PCB, because the 3mm laser-cut pieces are too thick for those smart servos - they have shorter shafts. The PCB just connects all the servos together.

I still need to write a proper library for controlling the servos, but I don't have any energy left for programming right now.

I got the little fren to move. And reply to pings and report its position and all that. The examples in the documentation were invaluable, I wouldn't manage to do it with description alone.

For now I'm using a regular uart with two resistors to turn it into a half-duplex uart, and discarding the data I send and read back. I might leave it like that, it works well enough for my needs.

I even received the documentation for their protocol from the manufacturer, and it mostly makes sense, so I'm very optimistic about them. Just like any other smart servo out there they use a half-duplex serial protocol, with data frames on top of that. Now I'm reading about the rp2040 pio assembly in order to implement that, but I might stoop down to just putting resistors or diodes on the RX and TX pins and using regular uart...

I always wanted to play a bit with proprioception in my walking #robots, that is, sensing of joint positions and forces, but with the low budget I put on this, I never had a good way of doing that with the cheap 9g servos. Smart servos tend to be much bigger and heavier and much more expensive, and various schemes for reading the position/force by modifying the cheap servos never worked reliably for me. But recently I found those small smart servos that should be straight replacements.

@ekaitz_zarraga how about LS044Q7DH01?

@ekaitz_zarraga they come in different sizes, the smallest is about half of a credit card, iirc, but there are bigger ones with proportionally higher resolutions

@ekaitz_zarraga have you looked at the sharp memory displays? they do that

@ekaitz_zarraga but then you have to waste your memory and processing power on all those pixels, that's worse. There are plenty of lcds with uselessly high resolutions out there already.

@ekaitz_zarraga define better resolution

Question to the makers out there. What would you say about a traditional LCD display (the kind you have in pocket calculators), square,, about 4.7" diagonal (the side being the length of a credit card), black and white, with 64x64 resolution (that's four stacked Mario sprites each direction), SPI interface and crazy low power consumption (days on a coin cell)? Would you use it? How much would you pay for one?

@ekaitz_zarraga This is why I always liked love2d. They organized their binaries in such a way, that you can just append a zip file with your game to the end of it, and you have a working game. And since they provide binaries for Windows, you can do it relatively easily. I tried to do a similar thing with pygame and py2exe, but since py2exe no longer supports the single-binary mode, it no longer works.

@jacqueline @mntmn @ekaitz_zarraga I can recommend EVQ-Q2B03W – they are low force, but clicky, I really like their feel.

@mntmn @ekaitz_zarraga I agree with Ekaitz here, just basic mp3 and trrs is fine, my requirements pertain more to the size, connectors and user interface: small, built-in usb-c so no cables needed, display optional, tactile buttons that let you use it without seeing the screen, basically just volume, next song, and next directory (could even use the buttons that are built into the smartphone headphones these days).