2D-Pager Is the Perfect Device for Love Notes and Cheating
A pair of Jayzon Oeve's 2D-Pager devices work a bit like a shared sketchpad.
A few years ago, Apple introduced the “Digital Touch” feature into iMessage for iOS devices. Digital Touch lets people draw little doodles within iMessage and send the animated sketches to other iOS users. It is a neat feature, but not something that many people seem to use. Maybe that is because iPhones have so many other features and distractions. Removing those distractions, Jayzon Oeve built dedicated “2D-Pager” devices that relay drawings in real time.
2D-Pager devices work in pairs, so people need two of them to do anything. Each device resembles a small tablet or smartphone. At boot, the device displays a whiteboard-style drawing program. Using a stylus, a user can draw little pictures or write messages on their 2D-Pager. As they do, their doodles will automatically show up on the sister 2D-Pager device — and vice-versa. Together, a pair of 2D-Pager devices work like a sort of shared sketchpad. As long as they’re within range, users can share whatever they can draw. That could be an amusing scribble, a love note, a game of tic-tac-toe, or answers to the big exam.
A single 2D-Pager device contains an ESP32 development board, an HC-05 Bluetooth module, a 4” TFT LCD touchscreen with an ILI9341 driver, a latching on/off push button, a small LiPo battery pack, and a 5V boost converter for the battery. J’s prototype enclosure design is 3D-printed and then covered in a layer of foil.
The two devices communicate with each other over a Bluetooth serial connection and send/receive coordinates for the drawings. ESP32 microcontrollers do have their own built-in Bluetooth adapters, but Oeve chose to use the external HC-05 Bluetooth modules because he was more familiar with them. Anyone replicating this project could tweak the code to cut down on the component costs by utilizing the onboard Bluetooth adapters.
The communication range is quite short, since these devices utilize Bluetooth. But as Oeve notes, it would be possibly to extend that range up to kilometers with the use of LoRa modules. With that upgrade, friends could draw together from across an entire campus. But as it stands with Bluetooth, they would be limited to the same classroom.