7
votes
Are ditto projectors worth it?
Right now in the US Joann is going out of business and Ditto pattern projectors are ultra-cheap. That being said I don’t have much hobby money these days so I can’t just impulse buy. I have done some research and they have some very mixed reviews since it’s a very closed ecosystem. So I was hoping to get some opinions and see if it’s worth it at ~$75. Right now I want it primarily from FOMO because of tariffs on Chinese goods.
Honestly half of me wants to buy it just because it comes with a cutting wheel and board.
Hi there, I just bought 2 for $50 each. They're now adding 30% off total if you buy any 20 items. It is 100% worth it at that price for the included extras....the mat alone would go for $75.
Under the hood it's a horribly insecure Android phone connected to a really crappy projector (150lumen 1280x720). Which is actually kind of great! It means it's trivially hackable.
You pop off the 4 screws to reveal the SoC, which there is a convenient MicroUSB. Plug that into a PC with Android tools installed. It reports as a Nexus 7. If this is true (or close enough to it), postmarketOS should run on it, giving a full Linux distro.
Bonus: If you connect it to your WiFi via the app first, you don't even need to open it. Just know it's IP and type
adb connect <IP>and you can do this remotely. Did I mention this is horrifically insecure?Type 'adb shell' to open a shell it. Type 'su' and voila, you've got root. You can sideload other apks. I put Terminus on there, launched it via adb commands until I had an SSH server running. Then I installed python and played around with that.... and I'm just an amateur at this stuff, not even anything significantly risky. I got the second to experiment with flashing.
With a little help from our friends, we could probably cobble together a full distro for it that could be controlled via KDE Connect,and make it trivial to use your own pictures.
That’s actually great! I heard bad things about the “bring your own pattern” feature so knowing I can just install another app on it really makes it seem more useful since I was afraid it would be junk after Singer decides to give up on it (which might happen sooner rather than later since it seems to have originally been a collab with Joann!).
Oh yea the app is terrible. Do not reccomend.