The Orange Garage Logo

Tag: Epaper

  • What Scout Was Doing While I Was Cutting Dice

    Last post here was July 31, 2025. The work didn’t stop. The writing about it did. Here’s where things are.

    Quick version: my dice business at dicemakers.com had a busier holiday season than I expected. Late November through early spring I was downstairs in the workshop most days, running the dice machines and packing orders. Working on Scout firmware was about all I could do while babysitting the dice machines. The blog went quiet. Scout didn’t.

    The biggest thing that changed is power. Scout now sleeps when you stop moving and wakes up when you start. The battery life is looking very promising.

    There’s also a safety screen. Hold any button for ten seconds and Scout shows your emergency contact info, full-screen, even from deep sleep. The idea: if something happens to you and someone picks up your Scout, the first thing they see is who to call. GPS keeps recording your track in the background while the screen is up, in case search and rescue ever needs it.

    You can drop pins on the map now. You can load images onto the SD card and read them on the e-paper. I’ve been carrying the Red Cross First Aid guide on mine. Freely redistributable, I converted it for Scout, and it’ll probably ship with Scout. Useful in places where I don’t want a phone. Let me know if you have links to other PDFs or freely redistributable info that should be included with Scout.

    About battery life: it’s looking like a 6,000 mAh lithium gets about a week of trail life right now, and the device is becoming something I actually want to carry this summer. The GPS is the biggest power draw on Scout, and the new one going into the shipping product is more capable and pulls dramatically less. With it, I’m calculating closer to two weeks under the same use pattern. Not yet field-tested, but close.

    Indiegogo this fall. Aiming for late October. I’ll be uploading a run of videos demoing everything Scout can do. The blog stays for longer write-ups like this one. Newsletter sign-up here gets you trail footage and launch updates, about once a month.

    Thanks for being patient with the silence. Gotta keep the lights on 🙂

    Verne

  • Scout Power Savings

    Been working on power usage this week with excellent progress. Was able to get consumption low enough for 10ish days with a 6000 mah lithium battery.

    Tested with a paging app that displays .bmp files in order. I put a freely distributable first aid pdf that I converted on the sdcard to view. It works great. I’ll do some better processing of the pdf to bmp prices, but it’s going to be included on Scout. I’ll publish my conversion process and you can put your own stuff on there too

  • Testing partial refresh at Mogadore Reservoir

    The GPS location reticle now updates via distance traveled (3m atm). If the reticle will be drawn too close to the edge of the screen, the entire screen will be redrawn with the location in the center. Also it was a beautiful day 🙂

  • Saving location between power outages

    Scout can save your most recent location between power interruptions or off there is no gps signal. Scout displays your last known location centered on the map until you have gps signal again.

    There are new “Mobile Atlas” maps to test as well as the 1st case draft.

    More soon!

  • Refined breadcrumbs over a test map

    Making breadcrumbs with random motion. If the random trail gets too close to an edge, it resets in the center of the screen.

  • More partial refresh with breadcrumbs

    Testing what will become the breadcrumbs functionality over the map.

  • Early Scout Display Tests

    Early Scout Display Tests

    The Scout Mapping Device Prototype

    Static Map Concept

    Early Clock Look

    Boot Screen

    Concept

    Testing Full Image Display

    Concept Art

    Adventure Awaits

    Paths

    Breadcrumbs concept

    Initial Screen Tests

    Here’s a selection of concept art for the Scout mapping computer. This was mostly to test some graphic design elements I was kicking around and see what they look like on the new display.

    I’m very happy with the breadcrumbs and the general “crispness” of the display. I’m settling on the “Toner” map tiles for development. The simple, high-contrast looks real nice.

    I plan to use OSM mapping data to create custom maps with information that is helpful to offgrid biking/hiking and other outdoor adventurers.

    I’m omitting the “Boot Screen” – it isn’t necessary. I plan to display the last location on boot while waiting for GPS (which is quick).

    Next on the todo list: hook up GPS and read data!