Hug a giant pom pom to send esoteric messages to an e-ink display

See what esoteric art & messages it displays on the mastodon bot:

https://mastodon.social/@giantpompom

Ever wanted to spend days winding a ton of yarn to make a giant pom pom? What that pom pom to be able to react to hugging to send cryptic ASCII art and a short esoteric message to multiple e-ink displays? Don't have the latest PI due to the shortages but have an old RPI lying around?

Well, here ya go!

Materials:

Pom pom:

• Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2
• Conductive thread
• Ridiculous amount of yarn
• Cardboard (to make a pom pom template)
• 400mAh LiPo battery (optional)
• Adafruit QT PY ESP32-S2 BFF Lipo backpack (optional)

Create the giant pom pom (this took ~20 x 50g bundles of yarn):

Make sure to put in a small container to hold the microcontroller (& battery inside):

RPi + E-ink:

• Waveshare 7.5 e-ink screen w/ Pi HAT
• Raspberry Pi (Works with multiple, but I used an old RPi 3)
• Picture frame (there's one that works from ikea or this one from modulor)

Mount e-ink display & pi into a picture frame:

RPi Setup:

• format sd card w/ raspberry pi imager
• install nvm (curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash)
• install node using nvm (nvm install --lts)
• npm i
• npm start
• Add a .env file with secrets:

  OPENAI_API_KEY
  MQTT_HOST  # broker url
  MQTT_USER
  MQTT_PASSWORD
  CLIENT_ID
  TOUCH_TOPIC
  OPENAI_CONTENT # your prompt

QT PY ESP-32 Setup:

• Download .uf2 file: CircuitPython 8.2.0-beta (Necessary for touchalarm functionality!)
• Put in bootmode and drag/drop circuitpython to drive in finder view
• Using MU editor, create a settings.toml file with following secrets:

  ssid=""
  wifi_pw=""
  broker=""
  port=
  user=""
  pw=""
  client_id=""
  topic=""

• Add necessary dependencies to lib folder from Adafruit circuitpython bundle:
  • [adafruit_minimqtt](https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_MiniMQTT) (copy entire folder)

Optional:

To launch on boot using systemd:

• Make sure node and npm are symlink since we use nvm:

  sudo ln -s "$(which node)" /usr/bin/node
  sudo ln -s "$(which npm)" /usr/bin/npm
  

• Setup a eink.service file:

  sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/eink.service

  with:

  [Unit]
  Description=chatgpt ascii art displayer
  After=network-online.target
  Wants=network-online.target
  
  [Service]
  Type=simple
  User=pi
  WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/love-notes-chatgpt
  ExecStart=/usr/bin/npm start
  Restart=on-failure
  RestartSec=30
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target
  

• Test the config:

  sudo systemctl start eink

• Check for errors in log:

  sudo journalctl -xfu eink

• If need to edit, restart it with:

  sudo systemctl daemon-reload

• Restart it:

  sudo systemctl restart eink

• To stop:

  sudo systemctl stop eink

• To enable it once it looks good:

  sudo systemctl enable eink and sudo reboot