The Playwrite Dock Turns Panic's Hand-Crank Playdate Console Into a Standalone Text Editor
Designed to work around a lack of support for USB peripherals, the 3D-printable Playwrite dock adds a keyboard or game pad to the Playdate.
The unusual Panic Playdate, a black-and-white pocket-sized games console with a hand-crank, has a new feature courtesy of maker Tom Granger: a surprisingly functional text editor, complete with clever dock.
"Playwrite is a simple text editor for Playdate," Granger explains of the project. "This console doesn't normally support keyboards or any kind of USB accessory, but the Playwrite project uses a bespoke dock relying on USB serial to proxy the input commands to the Playdate."
It's the dock that is the real magic to the Playwrite: Unveiled three years ago, with a delayed launch owing to last-minute battery issues, the Playdate was designed as a deliberately-limited handheld console. Its display is a black-and-white memory LCD, built for low power draw and wholly reliant on ambient lighting, and its only controls are the two face buttons, a direction pad, and an eye-catching crank that pops out of the side.
The Playdate was designed to be accessible for those looking to create their own games and applications, with a Lua software development kit (SDK). Hardware, though, is trickier. There's nothing in the Playdate to allow it to connect to external peripherals, which is where Granger had to get clever in order to hook an external keyboard up to the gadget.
"The dock is powered by a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller," Granger explains. "The USB Host port of the Teensy is used to connect to both a Playdate console and a USB HID keyboard (or game pad). It reads user inputs from these devices and uses USB Serial to communicate with the Playdate, leveraging a few of the available USB commands to emulate native inputs, and listening to messages from the Playdate and Playwrite app. Key presses are encoded as crank-change angles in the dock (and decoded back to chars in the Playwrite app on the Playdate)."
In addition to turning the Playdate into a text editor, complete with the ability to export files for later use on a different device, Granger's Playwrite dock has a second feature — which, he admits, "might arguably be the most generally useful:" the ability to connect a USB game pad, successfully tested with "a couple of 8bitdo devices." At the time of writing, however, there was no way to have a game pad act as the crank input, making many Playdate games inaccessible.
Instructions for 3D-printing and building the dock are available on Granger's GitHub repository under the permissive MIT license, with the Playwrite application on its own dedicated repository. Those looking to buy a Playdate, meanwhile, will need to join the queue: a purchase today isn't expected to ship until early 2023.
