Kuensa - A Handy Music Sequencer

After getting a bit tired of the routine of coding, uploading and resetting when updating the GUI, I decided to rig up a quick simulator.

This is a quick and dirty hack using GTK. It allows me to run the stock GUI code from Waveshare (or pretty much any other GUI) on my computer before deploying.

The Waveshare Pico is now fully up and running as a prototype. The holder PCB is somewhat complete and it's much smaller and sleeker than previous versions. 

What now remains is to put some work into the display fonts and general GUI. It wasn't such an issue with the character display, but the graphical one brings in new possibilities and opportunities. 

Ran preliminary tests on the Waveshare pico display and it looks good so far. Only issue is the example code uses a ~50k buffer which is a big chunk of RAM. Will check through the STM32 examples for slimmer code.

The board design based on this pico is much smaller and simpler and that's nearly complete. Will see how that shapes up.

I've been busy designing a more compact and self contained PCB for the project and that is coming along pretty well and is virtually complete. In the meantime I happened upon a Pico with a screen i.e :

This could be an interesting device to use as a base, it's already got a screen and a charger. That would drastically reduce parts count. The screen is rather small though, but for now it would be a great proof of concept.