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.
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.
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.
The Design Tracker started as a simple CLI menu for taking snapshots and logging prints. After a few weeks of daily use, the friction was clear: switching between terminal commands to check render images, flipping to a file manager to find the right 3MF, and trying to remember which camera photo went with which print. So I rebuilt it as a full Tkinter GUI with six tabs, a render gallery, camera photo attachment, and a package system that bundles everything together.
Added the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350) as a third target board alongside the original Pico W and ESP32-S3. The Pico 2 W is now the default development board for Dilder. Also captured photos of the current Rev 2 build running Sassy Octopus.
Dilder's visual world expanded massively today. A complete Python rendering pipeline now generates every combination of octopus + emotion + environment + outfit + decor prop — all at 1-bit monochrome resolution matching the 250x122 e-ink display.
The User Engagement Plan was 1,380 lines of game design. Today it became 11 structured documents of pseudocode, data structures, and module interfaces that define exactly how the Dilder gameplay firmware will be built.
What makes a virtual pet worth carrying around? Not the hardware. Not the display. It's the feeling that something in your pocket needs you — and that it notices when you're there. The user engagement plan is the design document for that feeling.
What if your virtual pet could detect other Dilders nearby? What if they could interact, exchange data, and even produce offspring with inherited traits? That's the peer discovery system.