A small meetup this week, in more ways than one! Andy had seen some articles about using an ESP32-powered LCD as a miniature monitor but he had not been able to get the exact model of devboard mentioned, and ended up with a slightly larger 1.9" screen instead of the 1.14" model. It turns out that the original code was (probably?) written for Windows, as well, so he had to jump through some hoops with Python, Wayland, and desktop portals to get things to work.

Last year, the venerable Arduino - one of the OG Open Source maker companies of the past 20 years - was acquired by Qualcomm, and we were pretty uncertain what to expect. There’s certainly been a lot of discussion about the drawbacks, and changes to the terms and conditions and such.

Nevertheless, we were intrigued by the Arduino UNO Q board(s) that were announced at the same time - the classic Arduino UNO board form factor, with microcontroller, but paired up with a Qualcomm processor capable of running full Debian Linux. They announced 2Gb and 4Gb versions, and Andy held off on getting one until the larger memory option was available.

We had a bit of an unexpected interruption in service last year. More to come on that. For now - we’re back!

The first meetup of the year is on Sunday 11th January, between 12pm and 4pm at Wimbletech.

If you’re planning to come along, please sign up on our lu.ma event page so that we know to expect you. You can also join our Discord server to chat with us ahead of time (or afterwards, or during - we try to run a stream during the session so that folks can join in remotely). You can drop us an email if you need to do so.