A number of years in the past, Apple launched the “Digital Contact” characteristic into iMessage for iOS units. Digital Contact lets folks draw little doodles inside iMessage and ship the animated sketches to different iOS customers. It’s a neat characteristic, however not one thing that many individuals appear to make use of. Possibly that’s as a result of iPhones have so many different options and distractions. Eradicating these distractions, a maker named “J” constructed devoted “2D-Pager” units that relay drawings in actual time.
2D-Pager units work in pairs, so folks want two of them to do something. Every gadget resembles a small pill or smartphone. At boot, the gadget shows a whiteboard-style drawing program. Utilizing a stylus, a consumer can draw little photos or write messages on their 2D-Pager. As they do, their doodles will routinely present up on the sister 2D-Pager gadget—and vice-versa. Collectively, a pair of 2D-Pager units work like a form of shared sketchpad. So long as they’re inside vary, customers can share no matter they’ll draw. That could possibly be an amusing scribble, a love notice, a recreation of tic-tac-toe, or solutions to the massive examination.
A single 2D-Pager gadget comprises an ESP32 growth board, an HC-05 Bluetooth module, a 4” TFT LCD touchscreen with an ILI9341 driver, a latching on/off push button, a small LiPo battery pack, and a 5V enhance converter for the battery. J’s prototype enclosure design is product of cardboard, however it might be a easy matter to design a extra polished 3D-printable case.
The 2 units talk with one another over a Bluetooth serial connection and ship/obtain coordinates for the drawings. ESP32 microcontrollers do have their very own built-in Bluetooth adapters, however J selected to make use of the exterior HC-05 Bluetooth modules as a result of he was extra aware of them. Anybody replicating this challenge might tweak the code to chop down on the part prices by using the onboard Bluetooth adapters.
The communication vary is sort of brief, since these units make the most of Bluetooth. However as J notes, it might be presumably to increase that vary as much as kilometers with using LoRa modules. With that improve, associates might draw collectively from throughout a whole campus. However because it stands with Bluetooth, they’d be restricted to the identical classroom.