I started a fun little project the other day that I thought some folks here might be interested in: I got a small e-paper display that would work with my old Raspberry Pi 3, and I thought it would be neat to have a display of all the WaniKani reviews I’ve gotten wrong most often to help me catch up on the 600+ mountain that’s built up. (Yes, this is procrastination. Shhh.)
The way it works is as follows: about once an hour it pulls the list of review summaries for which my percent correct is under 70%, and collates an array of IDs. Then it makes a call to the subjects endpoint to get the details for those IDs. Then every few minutes it selects a random subject from that list, figures out whether it’s a radical, kanji, or vocabulary, and lays it out on the e-paper display.
Since I can’t use colors to distinguish, and because the vocab can be a longer string, I use orientation and shading to visually indicate what I’m looking at. Most of the work actually went into making that look nice, and having it dynamically figure out how to lay it out (balancing word wrapping and font size to make sure it fits). I print the onyomi in katakana to distinguish from the kunyomi.
I’ve still got some work to do on it; the board has some buttons that I’m not doing anything with yet. The refresh on the display is too slow for much interaction, but I thought maybe switching between showing and hiding the answer might be doable. Plus I’d eventually like to build or print a case for it.
Anyway, if there’s interest I can probably clean up the code enough to share. (I was going to put it up on github, but I’m not sure what the licenses are on the fonts I’m using)
