Installing Atkinson Hyperlegible reminded me to clear out the Noto font clutter in this (relatively nerecentw) Manjaro installation. Of course fonts now appear in slightly different locations with slightly different names, so this remains just a serving suggestion:
For unknown reasons, we now have two font cache updaters:
sudo fc-cache -v -f
sudo fc-cache-32 -v -f
Now font selection in, say, LibreOffice doesn’t involve paging through a myriad fonts in languages I cannot recognize, let alone read. Admittedly, Inconsolatadoes have more variations than I’ll ever use.
In mostly reverse chronological order, here are various commands I’ve puzzled out:
#xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP1-8"
xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1-8"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "HUION Huion Tablet Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen stylus" MapToOutput "HEAD-0"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "DP-1"
#xsetwacom --verbose set "Wacom Graphire3 6x8 Pen eraser" MapToOutput "HEAD-0"
Over the last two years, the display name changed from DP-1 to DP-1-8 to DP1-8, and back to DP-1-8. I grew accustomed to this with the Wacom tablet (HEAD-0‽)and now know where to look, but I still have no idea of the motivation.
Aaaand the tablet’s stylus name? The Wacom names were stable, but the Huion names apparently come from the Department of Redundancy Department.
It stands slightly proud of the surface plate so I can extract it without dismantling the whole keyboard again:
Atreus keyboard – LED diffuser installed
I’ll eventually make a better-looking diffuser from a recently arrived translucent acrylic rod, but this will reduce the accumulation of fuzz inside the keyboard until the matching Round Tuit arrives.
Reattaching the plate to the PCB with only three screws allows marking the hole position on the PCB, which is much easier than pretending to derive the position from first principles:
Atreus keyboard – LED marking
Despite appearances, I traced the hole with a mechanical pencil: black graphite turns shiny silvery gray against matte black soldermask. Also, the PCB trace is off-center, not the hole.
Overlay the neighborhood with Kapton tape to protect the PCB from what comes next:
Snip a WS2812 RGB LED from a strip, stick it in place with eyeballometric alignment over the target, and wire it up:
Having a customizable keyboard like the KeyboardIO Atreus means one must customize it. As it turns out, I wanted to use some features of the underlying QMKKaleidoscope firmware that aren’t exposed by Chrysalis, KeyboardIO’s otherwise competent keymap configuration utility, so what you see below runs on hard mode.
Start by installing QMK, compiling the default Atreus layout, and flashing the keyboard just to confirm all the steps work:
Atreus keyboard – overview
With all that working, add (or create) two lines to the rules.mk file in the keymap directory you’re tweaking:
Enabling Auto-Shift lets you generate shifted characters (like Z) by briefly holding down the unshifted key (like z). This requires unlearning an entire lifetime of touch typing practice, but is definitely worthwhile; if a thumb still reaches for the shift key, there’s no harm done. There are, of course, a myriad options, all of which I left unchanged.
Complex passwords suffer, as you must blind-type carefully while tapping each key rapidly.
Enabling Tap Dance lets a key generate one character when tapped and another when double-tapped; you can go crazy with more taps. An enum{} in the keymap.c file generates indexes for the keys and an array holds the action definitions:
After about a year of streaming music, the music died over the course of a month, producing progressively bizarre symptoms on all the local Icecast stations. Killing the streaming server and yanking all the USB memory sticks produced this tableau:
USB Memory – streamer failures
The USB 2.0 32 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit (tiny, black, upper left) holds images from various network cameras and is not involved with music. It’s nigh onto seven years old and, apparently, still going strong.
The USB 2.0 Centron (gray-and-retroreflective, upper right) was forgotten from the last time I set up a drive for our Forester’s player. There’s another one just like it in the car; they’re impossibly old, as you’d expect from their minuscule size.
The USB 3.0 64 GB Samsung Fit (small, white, lower left) is totally dead, to the extent it doesn’t even announce its presence when plugged into a USB socket. It’s 2.5 years into a five year warranty, but their new USB 3.1 version is twelve bucks; Samsung wins. It formerly contained an extensive selection of public-domain music.
The 64 GB Sandisk Cruzer (huge, black, lower right) suffered some serious damage:
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdg1 /mnt/part
ll /mnt/part
ls: cannot access '/mnt/part/PILZ': Input/output error
total 384K
drwxr-xr-x 6 ed users 4.0K Nov 28 2019 ./
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4.0K Jun 7 2019 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 215K Mar 9 2019 CDClassical.m3u
drwxrwxr-x 56 ed ed 4.0K Mar 9 2019 Classical/
drwx------ 2 root root 16K Mar 9 2019 lost+found/
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? PILZ/
drwxrwxr-x 116 ed ed 12K Mar 9 2019 Pop/
-rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 117K Nov 28 2019 Pop.m3u
It still contains a fair amount of music ripped from the CDs we’ve collected over the decades, but it’s obviously unusable. Just for fun, I tried reformatting and copying some files to it, but it eventually hard-crashed with I/O errors:
[37787.872410] usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[37788.013027] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0781, idProduct=5530, bcdDevice= 1.00
[37788.013030] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[37788.013032] usb 2-1: Product: Cruzer
[37788.013034] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: SanDisk
[37788.013036] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 4C530001151215101233
[37788.013604] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[37788.014778] scsi host9: usb-storage 2-1:1.0
[37789.033409] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access SanDisk Cruzer 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[37789.034569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 120225792 512-byte logical blocks: (61.6 GB/57.3 GiB)
[37789.035820] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
[37789.035825] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[37789.036137] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[37789.086533] sdf: sdf1
[37789.089418] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
[38035.071013] EXT4-fs (sdf1): mounting ext3 file system using the ext4 subsystem
[38035.183172] EXT4-fs (sdf1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[38485.302549] usb 2-1: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[38490.622285] usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[38506.195617] usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[38506.425616] usb 2-1: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[38511.742339] usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
<<< snippage >>>
[38548.845743] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
[38548.858925] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 99556320 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4800 phys_seg 30 prio class 0
[38548.858933] EXT4-fs warning (device sdf1): ext4_end_bio:309: I/O error 10 writing to inode 1531939 (offset 0 size 0 starting block 12444541
)
[38548.858937] Buffer I/O error on device sdf1, logical block 12444284
[38548.858944] EXT4-fs warning (device sdf1): ext4_end_bio:309: I/O error 10 writing to inode 1531939 (offset 0 size 0 starting block 12444542
)
<<< snippage >>>
[38548.858984] Buffer I/O error on device sdf1, logical block 12444293
[38548.859034] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 99017520 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4000 phys_seg 3 prio class 0
[38548.859158] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 99556560 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4800 phys_seg 30 prio class 0
[38548.859224] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 99017760 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4000 phys_seg 2 prio class 0
[38548.859237] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 99018000 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4000 phys_seg 2 prio class 0
>>
[38549.230765] JBD2: Detected IO errors while flushing file data on sdf1-8
[38549.230920] Aborting journal on device sdf1-8.
[38549.231008] Buffer I/O error on dev sdf1, logical block 1545, lost sync page write
[38549.231011] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sdf1-8.
[38549.231325] Buffer I/O error on dev sdf1, logical block 0, lost sync page write
[38549.231332] EXT4-fs (sdf1): I/O error while writing superblock
[38549.231333] EXT4-fs error (device sdf1): ext4_journal_check_start:61: Detected aborted journal
[38549.231334] EXT4-fs (sdf1): Remounting filesystem read-only
<<< and so forth and so on >>>
The Icecast streaming server reads data continuously from the USB sticks and, given that I set up half a dozen “stations”, there’s plenty of reading going on. The drives are formatted as ext3 and mounted with the noatime option, so there shouldn’t be any writing going on, but it seems a year of constant reading can kill a USB drive.
Fortunately, the original data lives elsewhere, with scripts to copy the appropriate files to the right places, so rebuilding the drives on a pair of new USB sticks wasn’t a big deal.
Having helped grossly over-fund the Atreus Kickstarter earlier this year, a small box arrived pretty much on-time:
Atreus keyboard – overview
I did get the blank keycap set, but have yet to screw up sufficient courage to install them. The caps sit atop the stock Kailh (pronounced, I think, kale) BOX Brown soft tactile switches; they’re clicky, yet not offensively loud.
Removing a dozen screws lets you take it apart, revealing all the electronics on the underside of the PCB:
Atreus keyboard – PCB overview
The central section holds most of the active ingredients:
Of interest is the JTAG header at the front center of the PCB:
Atreus keyboard – JTAG header
I have yet to delve into the code, but I think those signals aren’t involved with the key matrix and one might be available to drive an addressable RGB LED.
For future reference, they’re tucked into the lower left corner of the chip (the mauled format comes from the original PDF):
Atmel 32U4 – JTAG pins
The alternate functions:
SCK = PB1
MOSI = PB2
MISO = PB3
I don’t need exotic lighting, but indicating which key layer is active would be helpful.
Love the key feel, even though I still haven’t hit the B key more than 25% of the time.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 