Note ·
What came back when the old path disappeared
What EquilBridge brings back from stored receiver notes, and what one offline-memory and viewer sync does and does not prove.
More than ten years ago, I received an Equil Smartpen as a graduation gift. The hardware remained after the original service and path into its notes disappeared. I still had the receiver and its stored notes, but I no longer had a local route to them that I controlled.
EquilBridge brings back that local path. It gives me a route from the receiver's stored notes to evidence I control: raw note and wire bytes, replayable decoding, traceable SVG pages, and a local viewer and library. The project does not recreate the old cloud service or redistribute historical binaries. Its scope is a local recovery path around the hardware that remains.
The receiver speaks Bluetooth RFCOMM, so EquilBridge captures raw RFCOMM chunks and keeps them authoritative on disk. The 16-byte framing, decoded frames, events, strokes and text are derived from a saved capture and can be replayed. SVG pages and the local viewer and library sit after that record. If the decoder changes, I can run it again against the same bytes.
One 912-byte note decoded to 9 strokes and 126 points, spelling Test 123 as the page text. I also tested the offline-memory and viewer sync once with an intentionally empty library on one paired model-3 receiver. It synced 13 notes without duplicates, producing 13 pages and 39 local artifacts.
The evidence has a narrow boundary. Live dot, line, pen-up, page-button, disconnect and recovery checks remain pending. The one sync run shows a clean pass on one receiver. The core package has no runtime dependencies beyond the Python standard library, while the live hardware path is Linux plus BlueZ.
Receiver erase is unsupported. Local removal is recoverable and leaves the receiver unchanged.
This project is dedicated to the friend behind that graduation gift, and to a friendship that has lasted longer than the service built around the pen.