So I’ve made a few changes from my initial build of my adjunct/sidecar Pi to get some connectivity into my Psion MC400 – now running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W in a flirc case with Zero4U 4-port USB hub underneath and pimoroni inky pHAT e-ink display on top… It looks super-cute and all the fonts/icons shown on the display are captured bitmaps from the MC’s GUI – I wanted to make it look as “original” as possible.
(PSION logo bitmap is actually from the original Series 3 😉 )
I love the crispness of the e-ink display 😍 😎
Say hello to the “inky sidecar”….
I created a service “inky_update” on the Pi to monitor the status of a few Psion-connectivity options and update the bitmap on the e-ink display only when something changes
The “Modem” and telephone icon are just a visual proxy for ‘Internet connectedness’ – back in the MC’s day there was no notion of networking on the machine so “modem” and telephone are as close to “Internet” as we can get in original MC400-speak 😉
Who knew watching mono bitmaps appear/disappear and get sync’d to Gdrive was so thrilling 🙂
(And sincere apologies for my lack of videoing skills; talking/typing at the same time whilst waving the phone around 😬 😬 😬 )
Another service “inky_shutdown” displays the Psion logo just before shutdown of the Pi, because why not? 😎 😎 😎
Room 7609 
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