Dad Jokes Keychain

The Dad Jokes keychain was a project I did as a Christmas gift for a dear friend of mine who, thankfully for me, loves dad jokes. I have since added a motivational quotes mode.

Preparations

To assemble, you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi Zero with Headers (you can solder your own headers on, too)
• A Waveshare 2.13 v2 e-Paper screen
• A UPS-Lite v1.2 battery module. You could use a different battery, but then you will have to modify the case and you would lose the battery life indicator
• A fast micro SD card (8GB or larger recommended)
• A 3D printer or use of a 3D printing service to print the case
• A keyring. I printed an origami carabiner but any keyring will work
• A soldering iron and solder
• Superglue
• A pushbutton switch
• A 220 Ohm resistor
• ~10cm of 22AWG solid wire

If you want or need to debug/log into the system, you will also need a micro USB cable that supports data transfer.

Build

You can either download the latest release from GitHub or build the image manually.

Download

Download the latest release with hash and signature, then verify the download before flashing the SD card:

$ cd /path/to/download/folder
$ gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.sig # Public key is on Keybase or https://www.micah.soy/pgp-key.txt
$ sha256sum --check SHA256SUMS
# Assuming all is valid, flash your SD card
$ xzcat dadjokes.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/disk4 bs=4096

Build Manually

This project uses HashiCorp Vagrant to create a build environment for building the Raspberry Pi image. The build environment is based on Ubuntu Focal and the Raspberry Pi image is based on Raspbian Lite and is built using HashiCorp Packer.

1. Install Vagrant
2. Build: $ vagrant up
3. Write to SD card: $ sudo dd if=dadjokes.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=4096. Don't forget to replace /dev/disk4 with the proper block device for your micro SD card

The default mode is Dad Jokes, but this project supports other modes, too. To set a default mode during build, execute:

$ DADJOKES_MODE=jokes vagrant up

Currently, these modes are available:

• jokes (default)
• quotes

Developing

By default all networking and video output services and interfaces are disabled to conserve battery life. There is a debug mode available during vagrant provision that will leave these interfaces enabled so you can SSH into the device via the data microUSB interface.

# When provisioning
$ PI_DEBUG=true vagrant provision
# Configure your RNDIS interface with IPv4 address 10.0.0.1/24
$ ssh pi@10.0.0.2 # password is raspberry
# This project uses a systemd service
$ sudo systemctl status jokes
# View logs
$ sudo journalctl -u jokes

Cleanup

When you're done you can free up disk space by destroying the vagrant environment and removing the temporary files.

$ vagrant destroy
$ rm -rf dadjokes.img packer-builder-arm packer_cache .vagrant

License

The fonts included in this project are Indie Flower by Kimberly Geswein (Dad Jokes) and Allura (Quotes) by Robert Leuschke. They are both released under the Open Font License.

The Dad Jokes content comes mostly from @DadJokes. Some have been rewritten to better fit the display, and to add variety to pronouns and minimize gender roles where they don't add value to the joke. Most of the quotes are from well-known celebrities, authors, politicians, athletes, and other notable people. Quote attribution has been left out in the interest of conserving screen space. An Internet search will easily reveal the source of each quote.

All other content ©2020 Micah Henning. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International