This is a quality-of-life and bug-fix release. No big new feature — it fixes the rough edges that showed up once people started using the last two releases for real: a board that would not boot, touches that landed off target, and a keyboard that sometimes doubled a letter. The point is making sure the everyday experience is good. There are a few new Squachy animations too.
If your board boot-loops on a laptop or a phone charger, this is the fix. Some boards — the capacitive JC2432W328C in particular — restarted every three seconds unless they were plugged into a powered hub. Details below.
The boot loop
The serial log said last reset: brownout, every time, right after the touch calibration loaded. That is the moment WiFi and then Bluetooth start up and calibrate their radios, which is the most current the board ever draws, and it was happening with the backlight already at full brightness. On a weak USB port the 5 V rail sagged far enough that the chip reset itself, and then did it all again.
The backlight now waits at about 10% until both radios are up, and the two radios start 150 ms apart instead of back to back. The board that could not boot off a laptop port now boots off one, and off a battery.
The brownout detector is still on. Switching it off would hide the sag, not fix it, and a chip running below its voltage fails in stranger ways than a clean restart.
Touch on resistive boards
Every touch on a resistive screen was landing a little further from the centre than your finger. The calibration crosshairs are drawn 9 pixels in from each edge, and the calibration treated them as if they were the edges, which stretched the whole screen outwards. In the middle you would never notice; out at the edges it was about 10 pixels, which on the QWERTY keyboard is half a key.
Measured on a real board, typing with a serial trace: before, touches landed 6.5% further out than the finger; after, 1.5% across and effectively exact up and down.
You do not need to recalibrate. A calibration saved by an older version is corrected once, the first time this version boots, and saved again. New calibrations are right from the start.
A resistive panel also sometimes loses contact for a single frame in the middle of a press, which arrived as a second press on the same key 35 ms later — a doubled letter on the QWERTY board, or a letter that skipped ahead on the payphone keypad. A second press on the same key that soon is now treated as the same touch. Nobody taps a key twice that fast on purpose.
Two Squachys
When two SquachWatches meet, the visit has more going on.
They high five when the visitor arrives. A board that has already visited since this one booted gets the secret handshake instead: high, low, fist bump.
Every minute or two they do something together. A dance-off, or rock-paper-scissors — with a real result, and each of them reacting to it. On the SNOWFALL background every other one is a snowball fight, and on SYNTHWAVE they get up to something twice as often, mostly dancing.
They get scared together. When a detection goes off mid-visit, the visitor jumps with your Squachy and says something about it.
They nap. Leave them alone for four minutes — no detections, nobody touching the screen — and the two of them doze off. A tap, a detection or a message wakes them, and they stretch together.
Also in this release
On THE GIBSON background, the searchlight beams are see-through over the moon now instead of cutting a solid wedge out of it.
The web emulator has all of the above, including the new visits: bring the virtual SquachWatch nearby and leave it there.