knickknack

Knickknack turns your Playdate into a tiny photo frame for your desk. It shows pictures you took, dithered down to black and white. (Short videos work too!)

Crank it and the picture fades back so the clock comes forward. Crank the other way and the clock gets out of the way again. That's the whole toy.

How it works

Load your photos via https://knickknackpd.com. Nothing to install and nothing gets uploaded: plug the Playdate into your computer, drag some pictures into the tab, and they get converted right there in your browser and written straight to the device. 

- Three clock faces, five spots to put them.  Ⓐ cycles the time and date: corner, two centered sizes, split across the top, or off completely if you just want pictures. Ⓑ restyles them, with a white panel behind the numbers, a soft halo, or nothing. You can hide the date on its own too.

- Wipes between pictures. Dissolve, curtain, grow, a plain cut, or random, which picks a different one every time so it doesn't get predictable.

- It knows when to quit.  Pick a battery level and it hands things back to the Playdate's own clock instead of draining the thing to look nice.

Full Blown Editor (knickknackpd.com)

- Converts your photos and videos. JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, MP4 and MOV off your phone, WebM, whatever. If Chrome can open it, Knickknack can convert it.

- Five looks. Soft grey, Newsprint, Hard ink, Xerox and Bayer, each a different way of turning grey into dots. Brightness and contrast are there too.

- Crop and reframe. Drag the picture around and zoom up to 5x. Portrait shots stay portrait unless you flip them to landscape yourself.

- Trim it visually. A filmstrip of the whole video with a window over it. Drag the ends to change the length, or grab the middle and slide the whole thing later in the shot if you want those same few seconds but from further in.

- The preview is the real thing. Hit play and you're watching the actual dithered 1-bit frames that will end up on the Playdate, looping at the speed they'll run at.

- Loop or boomerang. Restart from the beginning, or run forwards then backwards forever. The preview does whichever you picked so you can see it before committing.

Requirements

- A Playdate

- Chrome, Edge or Opera on desktop for https://knickknackpd.com.

- A USB cable