A chronological log of every phase, milestone, and detour in the Dilder project.
Posts go up when something meaningful happens — a component arrives, a display flickers to life, a design gets scrapped, or a phase wraps up. No fluff, no filler.
This project exists because of a plush octopus named Jamal, found in a TEDi discount bin during a random shopping trip. On the walk home, my wife Emma and I gave him a name, a personality, and an entire fictional inner life — sassy, opinionated, suspiciously comfortable in our armchair. The natural next question: what would it take to actually build a living, responsive, digital version of this guy? That question became Dilder. Read the full origin story on the home page.
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The Dilder firmware grew up this month. It moved off a single bare-metal super-loop and onto FreeRTOS running on both cores of the RP2350, learned how to wave hello to other Dilders in the wild, got a proper emote system, and — along the way — taught us to read a board's health from a single line of serial output while chasing down three "dead" units that turned out to be very much alive.
The custom Dilder Board is off the bench and running the real firmware — and it has grown up a lot. The octopus now rotates with the device, counts your steps, remembers your WiFi, flashes itself over the air, and as of this week, pairs to your phone over Bluetooth LE. Here's the milestone, start to finish.
After two months of breadboards, flying wires, hot-glued battery clips, and a stack of off-the-shelf modules taped to the inside of a 3D-printed case, the Dilder is finally a single board. One PCB. One green rectangle the size of a chocolate bar. Everything the octopus needs to live, lives on it.
This is a huge milestone, so this post is the friendly tour — what got built, what got learned, and why the silkscreen says "The Dildafication Begins" on the front.
Three days. 31 commits. The Dilder DevTool grew from 8 tabs to 11, the V4 e-ink display stopped flashing, and the Pico 2 W can now be flashed over WiFi — or over USB without ever touching the BOOTSEL button.
This is the story of a sprint that started with "I'm tired of plugging in USB" and ended with a complete development workflow overhaul.
Two big milestones today: the hand-routed joystick breakout boards arrived from JLCPCB, and the display driver was rewritten four times to solve the V4 partial refresh problem. Along the way, a pin assignment error in the KiCad symbol was discovered and fixed — a lesson in trusting community component libraries.
The Dilder has a new look. The Mk2 translucent case is printed, assembled, and running the Conspiratorial Octopus personality on battery power. This is the first revision where the internals are deliberately visible through the case walls — the Pico W, 10440 battery, TP4056 charger, piezo speaker ring, and wiring are all part of the aesthetic.
Today's design session went deep on a question that's been simmering since the peer discovery research: what actually happens when two Dilders meet? The answer turned into a three-layer system — proximity encounters with unique audio signatures, riddle-based geocaching challenges with physical electronic prizes, and a collectible ecosystem that naturally markets the device to new people.
The Dilder has a second enclosure option now: the NoSolar variant — a slimmer build that drops the solar panel cutout from the base plate and shaves 2 mm off the total height. Today it powered on for the first time running entirely off a 10440 Li-ion battery, with USB charging confirmed working through the TP4056 board.
Built an interactive CLI render pipeline for FreeCAD models and wrote a complete component-by-component design document for the Rev 2 Mk2 enclosure.
After two weeks of daily CAD iterations, I had 13 FCStd files with names like "Dilder_Rev2_Mk2Full parts so far with joystick model with battery assembly even closer joystick and pit refined and cradle curvature fixed pcbjoystick anchor.FCStd". I couldn't tell which one I'd actually printed, what changed between versions, or which iteration had that one tweak that worked really well three days ago.
Sound familiar? Here's how I fixed it.