🦾 comma three Faux-Touch keyboard

Long arms for those of us with short arms from birth or those who can’t afford arm extension surgery!

Built a faux-touch keyboard for the comma three using a CH552G microcontroller. The keyboard is off the shelf and reprogrammed to emulat a touchscreen.

It’s a bit of a hack but it certainly beats gorilla arm syndrome while driving.

For $5 of hardware, it’s very hard to beat.

The journey started in January 2024 and ended in May 2024. Though it, I had to struggle with:

• CH552G programming
• Linux USB HID Touchscreen protocol
• Instructions and documentation

It’s also been through that period of unintended usage. The Frogpilot project has had users who were surprisingly interested in using it as an alternative for some GM vehicles where there is no ACC button. They use the keyboard to touch the screen where ACC would be.

Part of the work also meant upstreaming to the the CH552G community. While I doubt it’ll have any users, it’s nice to give back to the community. There is now a touchscreen library for the CH552G.

The project is open source and can be found at:

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/c3-faux-touch-keyboard

There’s a nice readme that explains how to build and flash the firmware.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/nelsonjchen/Colorized-Project

Remember your projects by color! Colorize the window somehow to differentiate your open projects. Updated and maintained fork of Project-Color.

Working on multiple projects simultaneously with Jetbrains products based on IntelliJ can be difficult, since they all look the same at a glance. This plugin solves that by giving the user the option to colorize each project’s window in a noticeable way.

Replicate: https://replicate.com/nelsonjchen/op-replay-clipper

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/op-replay-clipper/

📽 Capture short ~30 second route clips with the openpilot UI included, and the route, seconds marker branded into it.

Designed to try to encourage more interesting clips to be shared, especially with newer functionality such as “end to end longitudinal control”.

Originally a bit heavy, so instructions were made for others to run it on services like DigitalOcean/GitHub Codespaces. Since then, the clipper has been ported to Replicate which provides GPUs and a nice WebUI.

The UI rendering is composed of a shell script and a Docker setup that fires up a bunch of processes and then kills them all when done. On Replicate, it is wrapped by a Python script that handles the UI and non-UI processing of video and downloads.

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/gtr

Gargantuan Takeout Rocket (GTR) is a toolkit of guides and software to help you take out your data from Google Takeout and put it somewhere else safe easily, periodically, and fast to make it easy to do the right thing of backing up your Google account and related services such as your YouTube account or Google Photos periodically.

Used to do this with a VPS. It was still too slow to backup 1.25TB. TOOK HOURS! Built a Rocket.

It is comprised of a two major components:

• A “GTR Proxy” Cloudflare Worker that HTTP3-izes the the Azure API and is capable of proxying base64 URLs to Google Takeout URLs.
• A browser extension that coordinates all this and constructs a job plan to execute.

These two components are infinitely scaleable and can be used to backup Google Takeout at breathtaking, unprecedented speeds.

The GTR repo contains a guide on how to setup all of this.

A future revision or successor may target S3 or S3-like APIs. In particular, can we target Cloudflare’s R2 when it comes out?

https://github-wiki-see.page/

A project to get GitHub Wikis indexed by Google Search.

Explanation is right on the front page.

If a search engine can’t see it, it may as well be invisible.

Long-term project involving Rust, BigQuery, Cloudflare Workers, and lots of random hosting.

Probably one more the more visited sites on the internet and a continous effort to keep costs low.

Has caused GitHub to revisit their policy on a limited subset of Wikis meeting some criteria.

Will continue until all Wikis are indexed even if they are publically editable or don’t meet some star count criteria.

Personally, I just got really dismayed all this documentation I was doing on a Wiki wasn’t visible to Google. Then I realized it was a good idea to make it visible. Then I realized others don’t realize it was invisible at all. This was a problem.

Links

• Azure Pipelines Build View: https://dev.azure.com/nelsonjchen/NC%20QEMU/_build
• GitHub Repo: https://github.com/nelsonjchen/nc-qemu/
• Releases Download Link: https://github.com/nelsonjchen/nc-qemu/releases
  • Is this outdated and not matching the latest release of QEMU? Contact me.

Changes

• Azure Pipeline to build x86_x64 target QEMU in MSYS2 on Windows
• Upgraded to Capstone with fixes that allow building in MSYS2.

About

“NC QEMU” is a very lightly augmented and experimental fork of QEMU to build on Azure Pipelines and with Windows Hypervisor Platform (WHPX) support for users who care the most about running the x86_64 target fast. This build only cares about the x86_64 target and other targets are not built.

The output is a zip file with some DLLs and qemu-system-x86_64.exe. This QEMU distribution can be run from a folder by itself. Alternatively, qemu-system-x86_64.exe can be dropped into QEMU for Window’s installation directory at C:\Program Files\qemu, replacing the existing version. Some features like USB network redirection might be missing though.

The pipeline provides a differently compiled QEMU compared to QEMU for Windows’s own build instructions which are cross-compiled on Linux. Notably, NC QEMU is built on a Microsoft-provided copy of Windows in MSYS2 with access to the Windows SDK headers for WHPX distributed by Microsoft. The MingW64 Toolkit which QEMU for Windows is built with has unfortunately currently not reproduced the WHPX headers in a free software manner. Users who want a QEMU for Windows with WHPX support but aren’t licensed nor want to accept the terms of installing the Windows 10 SDK are out of luck.

Another benefit is that this project provides a declaratively made and executable pipeline that builds QEMU for Windows. Fork, setup an Azure Pipeline, and adjust if needed. This can be considered a bit “executable documentation” for building a QEMU x86_64 target of this nature. The build logs are public and can be used as reference. For users having trouble building or configuring their systems to build QEMU, this reproducible setup can be quite useful.

Why QEMU+WHPX for x86_64

Absolutely not exhaustive:

• Acceleration is great. You can reach near-native speeds with acceleration.
• WHPX is native to the OS. No foreign kernel drivers/modules/extensions needed.
• It’s great for users who don’t have access to Intel’s HAX because they either want Hyper-V and/or AMD support. With AMD CPUs being multi-core bargain monsters, developers and power users on AMD are becoming more numerous.
• QEMU+WHPX boots Windows ISOs. HAX currently does not.
• QEMU is easier to hack on, script, and developed by many organizations, not one. WHPX support was contributed by Microsoft but is probably most useful for Google’s QEMU-based Android emulators!
• Users hacking on or working with QEMU in Windows can bring their work to Linux KVM accelerated systems easier. And vice-versa.

Packer WHPX workaround

The executables provided here do work for Packer. Simply add the directory with qemu-system-x86_64.exe to the PATH. Packer does not currently recognize whpx as a valid argument for the acceleration key. The workaround is to add it to qemu-args as a manual argument.

Additionally, the cpu argument of QEMU does not support cpu=host for whpx. Specify something supported manually.

References

• Orbital (PS4 Emulator) Build instructions: https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital/wiki/Building