Unicode Binary Input Terminal
9 days ago
- #USB HID
- #Raspberry Pi Pico
- #Unicode
- A physical interface for entering any Unicode character over USB, with a Raspberry Pi Pico rendering glyph previews and codepoint details.
- Features include a large glyph preview on a 280 x 240 display, support for color emoji, and modes for entering codepoints, UTF-8 encoding, and hex literals.
- Acts as a USB HID keyboard to input OS-specific sequences for codepoints, with ~200 MB of TTF font files accessed from an SD card for fast search.
- Unicode block and codepoint names are embedded in the firmware, refined from unicode.org text files.
- The build includes a brushed aluminum front panel with legends applied by toner-transfer.
- Originally started for Hackaday's contest but delayed to improve technical satisfaction, now complete with a full write-up available.
- Supports rendering from true-type fonts for a wide range of characters, including ASCII, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and color emoji.
- Software can be built in 'host' mode for quick iteration and debugging using SDL2.
- Future improvements may include handling substitutions and ligatures from font GSUB tables and developing drivers for direct UTF-8 input.
- Acknowledgements to open-source projects like FreeType, libpng, zlib, and the Noto fonts project, among others.