Stephen Holdaway

@fullmoon6661 @matthewvenn Yeah, it's done with sand paper (sand flat, then in uniform directions). Gets harder to do by hand as the stock gets bigger though - worked better on the tiny piece from my last post

Just missed the Hackaday odd inputs contest deadline by ...uh... 12 months, but I stand by the result: A human interface device to enter all of Unicode, with character previews rendered onboard the Pi Pico.

Project details and a detail write-up are here: hackaday.io/project/192644…

It's rough as guts and needs work, but this is so much fun to play with

Prototype H-pattern shifter mod for an Xbox controller 🎮

@PeterQuirk Yeah I used WT up until a few weeks ago - always found it had some weird behaviours around rendering and copying blocks of text, particularly using vim over ssh. I spend a ton of time in native Linux, so inconsistencies really stick out WSLg sounds like a big improvement!

Got tired of waiting to select which OS to boot, so I made a physical switch

@goretsky Just looked it up - neat. It'd be possible to apply the same idea to SATA, but M.2 would be taking that to a whole other level of pain 😄 Did you ever find out what happens if you change the drive selection while the system is running?

@stecman Did you ever use a Trios IDE hard disk selector from Romtec? Not sure if they ever made a SATA version.

@NashPL Code updated to build for the stm32f103 by default 👍 There are no external parts - any switch and any STM32 F0 or F1 chip with USB support should work. Other STM32 series will work with some code additions

@stecman Nice if you could list all the components you used that be awesome. Great work !

@heinz_hjo @geoObserver_ You could achieve the same thing by physically switching between two flash drives with different values in the files - no firmware required 😀 Only caveat is the switch would need to be in the desired position when the bios does it's drive detection and not changed

@stecman @geoObserver_ You will need a small #STM32 board. Not as easy as I thought.

@nicolas_noble I used a spare custom board from another project, but any STM32* or SAMD* with USB support should work with minor tweaks to the firmware, since this uses libopencm3. I'm adding stm32f103 ("blue pill") support in the next few hours

@stecman What board is this? I couldn't find a reference to it in the hackaday log nor github repo.

@saltless_pickle I did compile a custom Grub module early on, but building ad-hoc and dumping in the modules seemed like a recipe for future ABI issues. In-source build would mean maintaining my own Grub install 🤔 Love the idea of rebooting gracefully when the switch is changed inside each OS

@Codenamegamma There's no actual storage media behind this, so writes are ignored by the custom USB device. The switch is connected to an input that's tested when the fake/virtual files are read, so you can flip to your heart's content without any adverse affects

@NashPL It's using libopencm3, so should be compatible with a large number of chips with a minor modifications in main.c. I'm planning to add stm32f103 (blue pill) build support in the next 24h, which should make it a bit more accessible

@stecman Amazing idea ! can I just ask where i can get the same STM32 you used and I think i give it a go :D

@mudumat A big, clunking rotary switch would be nice for more than two options - the input can really be anything you like with some tweaks to the device code

@stecman brilliant, what about tripple boot.

@DAXimusTT @Foone Laser etched would be awesome! I've also had some luck doing toner transfer onto aluminium, though alignment is challenging

@stecman @Foone Neat AF! Laser etch the OS labels and it's perfect.

@booldown My X570 motherboard does have an serial port header for some reason, which I haven't put to use yet ..I did consider using it for this, but the USB storage trick worked out to be a cleaner solution

@stecman I mean I do understand why, GPIO pins are just not something any consumer usually needs, but it feels so wrong that something as simple as a general I/O line requires jumping through so many hoops on a Desktop PC.

@bast__scho @Foone Yeah I've had that happen in the past a few times, but not for 2 or 3 years now. Probably depends on the particular hardware configuration though