Show HN: Raspberry Pi 400 with a $2 IPS 240x240 micro display

Edit for the BT labs injoke

Two small kids here, I’ll try to explain my experience.

First off, there was very little time for socializing before the pandemic. One evening a week to grab dinner with a friend was the gold standard and achieved at the cost of putting more childcare on my partner. My partner also got an evening a week for friends, so I’d have extra kid duty that day.

The pandemic has made life harder for me and my family in many ways. School closure is the obvious one. My oldest had about a year in preschool before the shutdown. They miss their school community and have backslid developmentally. My partner was already a full-time care giver, but making preschool means the younger child gets very little one on one attention, while the older one loses socializing experience.

We also lost secondary childcare. No more babysitters for date night. No more weekend play dates. Much more limited access to grandparents and other relatives.

And then there’s all the marginal stuff that surprised us. We used to take the kids to the grocery store. You could kill an hour and show them the world a bit. No longer. We used to take them to the playground and encourage them to play with other kids. Now best case my kid wears a mask and plays at a distance with a small number of kids.

I’ve found that we’re losing a lot more time to home maintenance. The kids use the house all day, we have to clean it up after they go to bed. I’m trying to get the kids to help more with that, and to move more cleaning before bedtime.

All that taken into account, I find that I can get maybe 90 minutes per day, after the kids are done, that I have some personal choice about. I can spend that time with my partner, pushing work forwards, larger chores/home projects, professional development, hobbies, socializing, or resting. There is no other time for those things.

In practice I’ve found myself avoiding large hobby and professional development projects. I love them too much. I get very frustrated when they’re started but I can’t devote any time to them. I love hitting flow State on a project, and it’s simply not possible at this point in my life.

I don’t expect this to last forever. The pandemic will break eventually. The kids will get older and need less intense supervision. I do my best to be present and focused on them during these early years. Everyone tells me they go by fast in retrospect.

PS this comment took me over two hours to write because of these circumstances

It was fun developing a little algorithm to stream out full rendered frames in real time, bit-banging 16-bit colour over SPI at its max frequency, while rendering and compositing from an object tree with fonts, textures, gradients, blending etc without ever storing more than a few scan lines worth of pixels. Intermediate pixels and blending states were stored in an ever-moving queue to account for multi-pass rendering and the different timing between the rendering thread, which blended in each item at whatever speed could be done, and the bit-banging SPI thread which formatted the pixels into the strange bit order needed by the display. The bit-banging thread needed perfect, sustained timing as a single glitch would crash the display.

When all the complications were working perfectly, it just looked like a mundane but smoothly animating display, as if it had a boring GPU and framebuffer and some kind of clean GUI.