Stephen Holdaway

Software Developer at Qamcom NZ. Breaker of things. Hardware & microcontrollers. Linux and security. General stuff enthusiast.

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@fullmoon6661 @matthewvenn Yeah, it's done with sand paper (sand flat, then in uniform directions). Gets harder to do by hand as the stock gets bigger though - worked better on the tiny piece from my last post

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

Just missed the Hackaday odd inputs contest deadline by ...uh... 12 months, but I stand by the result:

A human interface device to enter all of Unicode, with character previews rendered onboard the Pi Pico.

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

Project details and a detail write-up are here:

https://t.co/hEiKXYVs9Z

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

It's rough as guts and needs work, but this is so much fun to play with

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

Prototype H-pattern shifter mod for an Xbox controller 🎮

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@PeterQuirk Yeah I used WT up until a few weeks ago - always found it had some weird behaviours around rendering and copying blocks of text, particularly using vim over ssh. I spend a ton of time in native Linux, so inconsistencies really stick out

WSLg sounds like a big improvement!

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

Got tired of waiting to select which OS to boot, so I made a physical switch

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@goretsky Just looked it up - neat. It'd be possible to apply the same idea to SATA, but M.2 would be taking that to a whole other level of pain 😄

Did you ever find out what happens if you change the drive selection while the system is running?

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@NashPL Code updated to build for the stm32f103 by default 👍

There are no external parts - any switch and any STM32 F0 or F1 chip with USB support should work. Other STM32 series will work with some code additions

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@heinz_hjo @geoObserver_ You could achieve the same thing by physically switching between two flash drives with different values in the files - no firmware required 😀

Only caveat is the switch would need to be in the desired position when the bios does it's drive detection and not changed

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@nicolas_noble I used a spare custom board from another project, but any STM32* or SAMD* with USB support should work with minor tweaks to the firmware, since this uses libopencm3. I'm adding stm32f103 ("blue pill") support in the next few hours

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@saltless_pickle I did compile a custom Grub module early on, but building ad-hoc and dumping in the modules seemed like a recipe for future ABI issues. In-source build would mean maintaining my own Grub install 🤔

Love the idea of rebooting gracefully when the switch is changed inside each OS

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@Codenamegamma There's no actual storage media behind this, so writes are ignored by the custom USB device. The switch is connected to an input that's tested when the fake/virtual files are read, so you can flip to your heart's content without any adverse affects

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@NashPL It's using libopencm3, so should be compatible with a large number of chips with a minor modifications in main.c. I'm planning to add stm32f103 (blue pill) build support in the next 24h, which should make it a bit more accessible

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@mudumat A big, clunking rotary switch would be nice for more than two options - the input can really be anything you like with some tweaks to the device code

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@DAXimusTT @Foone Laser etched would be awesome! I've also had some luck doing toner transfer onto aluminium, though alignment is challenging

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@booldown My X570 motherboard does have an serial port header for some reason, which I haven't put to use yet ..I did consider using it for this, but the USB storage trick worked out to be a cleaner solution

[Stephen Holdaway @stecman]

@bast__scho @Foone Yeah I've had that happen in the past a few times, but not for 2 or 3 years now. Probably depends on the particular hardware configuration though