Hello!

You may remember me from my post about 2 weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/tomodachilife/comments/1sr32v1/i_have_no_artistic_abilities_but_i_am_a_nerd_with/

Well its now in a more user friendly and releasable form.

There is still a handful of improvements to make but it is in a functional and practical form now.

All you need is a single RP2040-Zero micro-controller which can be found for about $5 (although on amazon and such you'll often find that price... but you have to buy packs of 2 or three. The "official" RP2040-Zero is from WaveShare, but I developed this using a bootleg that I could get for cheaper and it worked fine. So long as it calls itself as an RP2040-Zero it should work)

No soldering or custom PCB's are needed, and you do not need to order one with headers.

The tutorial covers the overall setup, at the moment you do need a Windows PC but I do intend to get a cross-platform (Mac/Linux) UI working soon™

Tutorial (Warning: Flashy lights at 3 points in video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIaiw3gzabo

GitHub: https://github.com/Lucas7yoshi/TomodachiDrawer

Apologies for the delay from the old version, I will be honest, it was a bit of a mess of AI assisted code that rendered it completely unmaintainable by me. In the past 11 days I have recreated it from scratch, as well as wrote the firmware that runs on the micro controller so that it can be used on its own without needing any soldering or jumpers or a second Pi or anything like that. (The firmware was a bit of a learning curve to write). The new version is without any AI assisted code. And the fun bit? Its already faster than the old version in some cases :p

I will be working on more optimizations as time goes on, but it is in a functional state already.

If you have any questions feel free to ask, I will try and reply to any comments here or on the YouTube video. I will note I have been made aware of someone doing something similar, also using RP2040's, so when that comes out you will have the choice of which you'd like to use (or if mine doesnt work for you or something like that).

If you are familiar with C#, I would love it if you contributed! I will be trying to clean up some of the messier bits in the code as well.

Important Update

There is now a Avalonia UI build, this has builds for linux (x64 and arm64) as well as mac (x64 and arm64). I do not have a Mac so I do not know how you would run the binary out of it, but it should work... im just not sure how nice apple will be with a random executable. I have tested the linux one to work.

For windows users, please use the winforms one for maximum chance of success.