decker

This is Decker: Not me, nor the facemask - which was a Covid Thing (more about that another time) - but that little collection of electronics and wires strapped to the side of my head. Decker is my longest-lived project by a mile. I started it in the fall of 2017 and I still tinker with it in an on-again, off-again fashion. It consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero W literally taped to a Vufine+ display and wired together with ribbon cable and a few thousand lines of Rust code. [Read More]

I’ve been writing software for Decker for about 4 years. During that time I’ve experimented a bit with what what works for having a display constantly in my line of sight. Rule 1: Make it Useful First People (including yours truly) will put up with bad UX if the program solves a need. But useless software never gets run. There are whole books to be written about how to write useful software, but one good technique is to start from a problem. [Read More]

I get the same set of questions about Decker… a lot. Frequently, even. So let’s just knock them all out here: Why? I’ve wanted a head-mounted computer since I was just a wee nerdlet. I thought it was cool and have pursued making one off and on for years. Unfortunately, I’m really not much of an electronics guy, so for most of that time I would run up against the necessity of soldering a video input board from a VCR onto a display unit from a camcorder and decide it just wasn’t worth it. [Read More]