Im new here! Go gently! I want to send text - over serial USB from a PC to the tufty 2040. Is this possible? Anyone got a pointer. I’d love really to do it over ble - but I feel that’s going to be a big battery drain to do that.
Welcome to the community Willwade!!
As for your question, I guess I’ll begin with a question: What is your ultimate goal? - (what do you envision the scope to be)
Look at Badger Home - Badger by Satellite Display Closed Captions
What does it do? It has an app - and takes Speech, converts it to text and shows it on the badge. What I’d love is a way of just “typing” on any old keyboard to the tufty. Speech to Text isn’t that hard on an app - as long as we can figure out how to send data to it wirelessly. (NB: I’d love it to be as simple as Pairing a BLE keyboard with a tufty - but a) I cant see how I’d connect somekind of BLE board to tufty and b) (the bigger problem) - nobody has really made a BLE host HID library for circuitPython or C++. Doing it over USB is more achievable - but gah. Wires)
So - what I was wondering as a halfway house is to use the Badger as a serial receiver that we do the translation of keystrokes already and send it to the device (NB: We’ve done some work in this area before - see RelayKeys which uses a adafruit nrf52840 feather as a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse relay from a PC/Mac)
NB: It’s worth pointing out I work for a charity in Manchester supporting people with complex disabilities to communicate
Will
Wow… now that is a project!! - And something that I am reading up on, now. As to be honest, you stepped out of my league.
But based on my research, using your RelayKeys link, it lead me to this webpage (Adafruit ItsyBitsy nRF52840 Express - Bluetooth LE : ID 4481 : $19.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits). Which notes the following specs: “Hardware SPI, UART, I2C and I2S on any pins” something I believe Tufty 2040 will support. Though like I noted before… I am no expert.
Maybe someone in the community could help you, and correct me if I am totally off base on the above comments. Either way I am looking forward to where this goes. Hopefully there is a working solution and it helps you with the charity. All the best Will!!
NB: It turns out the esp32 - does have a demo of being a BLE Keyboard host… well kind of - at least receiving a ble Keyboard - not doing the fun work of working out the keys