Follow the development of Velogatchi - a project that combines cycling metrics with a Tamagothci-inspired virtual companion.
Velogatchi is a fusion of "velo" and "Tamagotchi". It stems from an idea of making cycling accessories fun. Like, how cool would it be to have a little pet on your bike computer that gives you another reason to keep riding. As someone who is relatively ok with programming, I thought, "Yeah, I can build that."
Hardware: for now Velogatchi lives as an ESP32 dev board while I build and test it.
Software: Velogatchi is written in Rust, using bindings to Espressif's ESP-IDF framework to communicate with the board's sensors and other components.
I’m currently working on rendering PMTiles on the device. It can already use latitude and longitude coordinates to select tiles and draw their map features on the screen. Rendering is slow, though, due to the ESP32’s limited processing power. To speed things up, I’m building a preprocessor that prepares drawing instructions for each map tile ahead of time, reducing the work the device needs to do.