(was trying to finish the last devlog but i needed 15 minutes of logging time lol)

In the settings menu, check out the screenshot below and you’ll see a new Bluetooth clicker option!! So this one is actually insanely cool - when I did a talk at Linuxfest Northwest at Bellingham Tech in april 2026, I bought this small and simple bluetooth clicker with two buttons. And it worked great, but what if I can also use it for reading? The device has bluetooth, so I made a nice option for hardcoding a MAC address so it can connect to my clicker in just one press. Then, with the landscape option, I can leave the device on the ceiling or on a spot away (magnetically attached on to something) from my eyes and just use the page turning buttons. UNFORTUNATELY, I did not get this fully finished right now so it has errors and doesn’t connect reliably, and crashes the firmware so this is not finished as of now!!! :(

To make matters worse, I tried to get rid of the serial communication since we didn’t really need it and I had never used it, so it was kinda just bloating up the codebase and now I can’t really debug this very well.

I added the sync button in a convenient and sensible spot, but it is not functional yet. I hope for my next devlog to be my last, since I will finish the features here and make a nice video about it! Anyways, there was a ton of other stuff that I did as well but i kinda forgot, so maybe I’ll cover them in the next journal! And again, sorry for not devlogging in a bit!

— end conituation of last devlog —

ALRIGHT so i know i went over the 10 hour devlog thing and i did so much here that i dont know if i can fit it all in one devlog, but pretty much the firmware is done.

I managed to get bluetooth working perfectly! It has zero memory leaks now (this took me so many hours 😭) AND it supports queued page turns! And now you can hold the previous page button to go back, and hold the next page to open the quickmenu/select something! And connections are faster & consistent now.

The device struggled with a lot of crashes, but I’m happy to say that I’ve fixed it completely with another book format refactor!! So we can keep page caches for speedy page turns AND we get bluetooth support. Lots of safety checks to ensure memory safety!

Sync got a major rework, so now it works to disable your bluetooth device when you run a sync to preserve memory! And it disables the bluetooth option so you can’t glitch the system out. Now it’s only used for getting/removing books, and positional sync has been removed since it was kinda jank. Also fixed a bunch of stuff with the homelab so its more reliable now!

Lots of QoL stuff, like a low battery bar when you’re low on battery while reading (so it’s not distracting), better label names, removing unnecessary text like CHAPTER from the chapters selection, and faster button holding! More things like faster wakeups, refusing to boot when there’s no more SD card, and a massive cleanup because I had a really long debug session to fix the crashes with bluetooth. And I made the screen full-size vertically, for some reason we were missing some rows on the top which are now filled properly!

And the thing I’m most proud of: theres a new splash screen that I made myself!! Spent several hours perfecting it and I’m very proud of how it came out. Check it out!!!

Anyways, gonna make a vid and submit this project since I’m done!!