Rick's b.log - entry 2017/04/02

Girl's school uniforms, Яџѕѕіди Ѕтчlе?

Let's start with a reasonably pretty blonde girl wearing an outfit that might have been inspired by Playmobil...

(original picture)

It is a site called http://www.papilio-kids.ru/, where papilio appears to be similar to the French papillon, or a butterfly. This photo comes from the "school uniform collection".

Next up, these two. They were in The Shining, weren't they?

(original picture)

This one. Let's be honest. It's the tie. It just screams "in sohvyet rrrrussia" (the tie wears you?), a style of joke popularised by Yakov Smirnoff a decade or two ago.

(original picture)

For my final example, we'll go right back to the orphanage for this identikit (can you tell them apart?) girl.

(original picture)

You can find all of these in the the 2014-2015 collection. Some of the other years are less freaky. You'll note if you look at the "glamour" section that it's mostly a bunch of over-the-top dresses in white, pastel, or stark primary colours. Except the 2014-2015 collection. Whoever designed that must have been having a bit of a crisis. Either that or monochrome clothes in a monochrome world was the "in" style that year.
For reference, this would have shortly followed when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed (Russia) / shot down (everybody else) apparently by Ukrainian separatists using Russian missiles - though conflicting opinions and reports may mean that the actual truth of what happened might never be known. Certainly, it casts a light on the sanity of carriers flying commercial aircraft over known areas of conflict.

I don't think these are actual school uniforms, more outfits for parents who like their little girls to look like they are in the military wearing something non-descript akin to a school uniform.

But that tie. Bloody hell. Who would choose to dress their child like KGB-lite?

Crash, bang, wallop

E-ink price labels

The Swedish company Pricer AG, which seems to actually have a winking smiley as its logo, manufactures a range of electronic shelf-mounted price labels using e-ink technology. The most common are ones like that shown here, there are also larger ones (akin to a small ebook reader) typically used in the fruit and veg sections.
I am hoping that as the technology becomes more prevalent, the prices will start to drop, so that one will be able to buy inexpensive e-ink modules to connect to the Raspberry Pi. Cheaper, at least, than the PaPiRus that comes in at around fifty dollars from Adafruit for a 2.7" 264×176 display. Kubii (France) doesn't stock this, but given that they want over fifty euros for the smaller PaPiRus Zero ($35 at Adafruit), I think we can discount them.
The displays are available from Pimoroni for a more pleasing £35(ish). At least this is a sensible dollar-sterling conversion.

I can also buy a three-colour (smaller) e-ink display from AliExpress for something like €12. The difference here is in the amount of work necessary. The PaPiRus has a controller board that speaks some sort of SPI. A raw display needs data to be bit-banged into place. While that isn't a bit issue, and the display uses 3.3V signals so would interface with the Pi's GPIO, there is an issue in that in order to force a transition from white to black or black to white, one must also provide +20V and -22V to facilitate a change of state. It would be cool to buy a cheap ebook off eBay to hook a nice six inch e-ink to my Pi, but it's starting to get complicated with the tiny pitch of the interface ribbon cable, and the weird voltages. In the end I'll probably favour simplicity and get myself a PaPiRus.
For those with more patience and/or a larger toolkit, somebody has already done this: http://spritesmods.com/?art=einkdisplay&page=1

Why? Well, I've had a small OLED on my Pi for a while now, and while it is limited resolution (128×64), it is useful for displaying status without the need to turn a proper monitor on. I could get hold of an SPI TFT LCD panel (and that's always a possibility too), that and e-ink are attractive due to their low power consumption. Both have positives and negatives - the LCD would need a backlight (more power) which would need a way to disable (or dim right down) at night to reduce room illumination, but the resolutions are usually higher and colour is available. On the other hand, an e-ink display uses practically no power at all (only when changing). It may or may not have a backlight (doesn't need one in normal use), and doesn't support colour (some panels can do black/red). On the other hand, the display remains constant even in the absence of power, so in terms of debugging there is a potential use in having the system's exception handler spit out a register/stack dump to the display so that status can be seen in the moments leading up to a crash, even if the machine has gotten itself into a tizzy.

One should think of these as additional display options. In that case, some interesting possibilities arise.

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Dr Dave Johnson , 4th April 2017, 22:46

What do you think of playmobil?

Rick, 4th April 2017, 23:11

https://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20141226 ☺️

Christopher, 8th July 2020, 23:49

Nothing

Christopher , 8th July 2020, 23:49

Nothing

Christopher , 8th July 2020, 23:50

Nothing

Christopher , 8th July 2020, 23:50

Nothing

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