I really enjoy coming up with new ways to combine my appreciation for Science Fiction linguistics with Adafruit products (especially the neotrinkey!) and CircuitPython. For this project I combined a classic tool "FIGlet" with the Aurebesh, the alphabet from the Galaxy Far, Far Away... (GFFA).

I started with FIGlet, the  computer program that generates text banners, in a variety of typefaces, composed of letters made up of conglomerations of smaller ASCII characters. I modified an existing font file (standard.flf), replacing the letters a-z with my handmade versions of the letters seen above (note: anyone know of a good editor for FIGlet fonts? I'd love to improve the above).

That file was rather big for the neotrinkey - so I just extracted the Aurebesh and made it into an array for aure.py, a module to convert alphabetic English into Aurebesh. Then I made a program, aurebesh.py which could call aure.py's function doAure() for displaying different sayings or the alphabet, character by character - a useful training tool to become familiar with the alphabet. That's an important skill if you come across warnings like this:

All of this work went into a Github repository "Aurebesh" - from the Readme file:

• Using a modified Figlet font ("standard.flf") I created aurebesh.flf, replacing a-z in the font with Aurebesh symbols.

• I extracted the text for the a-z from Aurebesh.flf and made them into an array of texts for aure.py

• aure.py has a function doAure(text,delay,REPL) - text = the text to display in Aurebesh, delay is how long between each letter, and REPL indicates if the output is to go to the REPL or, via HID, out as keyboard input.

• aurebesh.py is a CircuitPython program that uses prt.py and ncount.py. Touching pad#1 will deliver one-by-one the alphabet, touching #2 will choose a random saying from sayings[] and print the English version, then the Aurebesh letters, one-by-one.

  Notes:

Edit the variable REPL in aurebesh.py to True for text to show up in the REPL; make it False for text to be delivered as if typed. Edit the variable "sayings" to the list of sayings you want to display in Aurebesh.

Files (copy these all to your neotrinkey)

• ncount.py
• aure.py
• prt.py
• aurebesh.py -- copy this to "code.py"

If output is going out as if typed, the program will pause when started, blinking red till you touch one of the pads - this gives you a chance to move the cursor to the window you wish to receive the output.

Info:

Figlet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIGlet Aurebesh: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aurebesh