The A of ITA had lost its diagonal: at 260px the hairlines of a Didone
fall below a pixel, downscaling averages them into grey, and the
panel's mid-grey cut then discarded them. What reached the shop window
was a detached serif and something closer to a lambda.
Letting more grey count as ink keeps them whole. 165 was not enough —
the diagonal came back dotted — and 195 holds it solid without
thickening the stems into mud. The number belongs to this particular
drawing, so `npm run brand:variants` renders the grid of widths and
thresholds it was chosen from, magnified, for the day the logo changes.
Width stays at 260: the header shares its line with the date, and the
main block is narrower now the week runs down the right-hand side.
The panel will redraw once when it next wakes, since the image and
therefore its content hash have changed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012cSY9pVhZmJUKNN7wf1Myd
A bottom strip gave each day a 114px column, and that width was what
capped the type size. A side band gives 142px of usable width and a 68px
row, so the hours go from 19pt to 22pt, the day labels from 20 to 23,
and each day fits on one line — "Mar 11:00–18:00" reads at a glance
where a column had to be read downwards.
Right rather than left, for two reasons the renders make plain: on the
left the logo is pushed into the middle and loses its place as a
signature, and the eye meets the week before the day's status. OUVERT is
what has to be read first from the pavement.
The times stay whole. Only the spaces around the dash go, which is
enough to hold 22pt without abbreviating anything: a shop's opening hour
is not a detail to shorten.
The idea came from the shop owner, and testing it surfaced a defect that
had been in production all along. Rendering the worst case the data
model allows — three periods in a day, none on a round hour — showed the
day's hours wrapping, pushing the layout down, and the English line of
the banner falling off the bottom edge. A panel does not scroll and does
not reflow: what does not fit is lost.
Type size is now fitted to the space available, with a floor below which
it will not go, and nothing may leave its box. The width estimate is
deliberately crude: measuring glyphs would mean loading the font in that
module and would still be an estimate, since the renderer applies its
own kerning. Erring small costs a point of type, erring large costs a
broken screen.
Three periods a day will reportedly never happen. The protection stays
anyway — it costs nothing and removes the need to remember.
`npm run screen:fonts` renders every arrangement and both alternative
typefaces, including the worst case, because choosing type for a 1-bit
panel is done by looking at it thresholded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012cSY9pVhZmJUKNN7wf1Myd
With the move to BYOS there is no TRMNL cloud to interpret a Liquid
template, so the application draws the screen itself.
The pipeline is satori (flexbox to SVG) then resvg (SVG to pixels) then
a hand-written 1-bit encoder. Chromium was the alternative and was
rejected: half a gigabyte and a real memory appetite in the runtime
image, for a screen of eight blocks. Playwright still handles the E2E
tests, in its own pinned image, never in the application one.
The payoff is testability. The layout is asserted on the element tree
and the geometry on the SVG text, so a rendering regression shows up as
a readable diff instead of a pixel comparison. The BMP and PNG encoders
are verified field by field against their specifications, including an
independent CRC-32 for the PNG: a device rejecting a malformed image is
expensive to debug from a shop window.
Two properties are pinned because the battery depends on them: the same
payload must produce byte-identical output, and changed hours must
produce different output. The filename handed to the device is a hash of
these bytes, and the firmware skips the redraw when it is unchanged.
The fonts are vendored into public/fonts and the logo into public/brand,
both committed. Rendering must not depend on an install tree, a CDN or
the network, or the bytes drift and the panel wakes for nothing.
`npm run screen:preview` writes a real 1-bit image plus a magnified view,
which is where clipping and thin strokes give themselves up. That is how
the week strip was caught clipping and condensed.
`npm run brand` rebuilds the assets: it locates the wordmark band in the
shop logo rather than hard-coding offsets a future revision would break,
and thresholds it with the panel's own encoder. sharp is a devDependency
used only there; nothing at runtime needs it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012cSY9pVhZmJUKNN7wf1Myd
vliaudatandClaude Opus 5