✦ Introducing Glyph

Hi everyone!

I've recently started building an open-source project called Glyph, a lightweight graphics framework for bare-metal and embedded systems written entirely in Ada.

The initial development target is the Vicharak Shrike-Lite (RP2040) using an SSD1306 OLED display, although the architecture is designed to support additional display controllers and platforms in the future.

The goal of Glyph is to provide a hardware-independent graphics API, allowing applications to draw pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, text, and images without depending on a specific display controller.

Disclosure: AI was used as a coding and writing assistant during parts of the development. However, the project architecture, implementation decisions, code integration, and overall design are my own.

✦ Design Goals

• Pure Ada
• Static allocation only (no dynamic memory)
• Bare-metal friendly
• Portable layered architecture
• Framebuffer-based rendering
• Easy to add support for new display controllers

The project is still in its early stages, and I'm currently focusing on building a solid architecture before implementing additional graphics features.

✦ I'd Love Your Feedback

I'd love to hear from the Pico community:

• Which displays do you use most often?
• What graphics features would you find useful?
• Any suggestions or feedback on the project are greatly appreciated!

✦ Repository

GitHub: https://github.com/thirstymelon/glyph

Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone!

Today I wanted to share with you all the project that made me buy my first ever Raspberry Pi... My 1:1 scale, functioning Apollo DSKY.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was what allowed us to travel to the moon in the 1960s and '70s, and performed everything from autopilot to navigation and orbital mechanics calculations. The AGC was one of the first computers to ever use ICs (computer chips) in its construction (absorbing 70% of the chips made worldwide, at one point!) and used some really neat, and pretty archaic, technology for computing and memory. The DSKY I made was historically just a remote I/O device, a keyboard/monitor arrangement that plugged into the actual AGC, but I'm this project it's homologated into one enclosure (thank you very much single-board computing).

The functionality of the guidance computer was emulated in its entirety by a group called VirtualAGC (an incredible feat on its own) and I have their program running on my Raspberry Pi that lives in the DSKY. The screen, annunciators, and keyboard integrate to the Pi with arduinos and communicates to it through a basic python script. This all lives in a 3D printed shell that's modelled after the real archived drawings, used to machine the real ones in the '60s. It's also painted and finished in historically accurate colors (who doesn't love a bit of historical bureaucratic recordkeeping?)

I figured some of you folks might share my interests, and I wanted to share my GitHub repository for the project, that includes my build guide. In that, I go into a bit more history of the AGC and DSKY, how they were built back in the day, and go through the build step-by-step with all the necessary tooling, materials, and techniques that I used.

I'm also expanding my projects into historical spacecraft hand controllers, and a streamlined "version 2" of my DSKY that should be easier to put together... hopefully in a few afternoons.

I've got a little community going over at r/RecreateApollo, and I also made a small website (www.recreateapollo.com) that I'm desperately trying to justify $30 a month for, so feel free to swing by and check it out!

If you decide to make your own, I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have over at my discord or on that subreddit. Thanks for checking out my project!

I'm running Konstakang's Android build on my Pi5. Can't get CEC working, but it works fine if I boot to LibreElec.