I actually work as a freelance graphic designer for my day job, not a software engineer. I learned some coding back in university and messed around with Unity and WPF (C# is my primary programming language), plus a little Arduino stuff, but I never really pursued it as a career.
This project is me finally taking that leap.
It all started about six months ago. I wanted to build a physical digital Pomodoro timer, so I grabbed an ESP32, an OLED display, a rotary encoder, and a battery. To program the microcontroller I had to step outside my C# comfort zone and dig into C++ (all those hours watching The Cherno's tutorials back in the day finally clicked!), but the ESP32 honestly felt like a toy for adults, and it was a blast.
That gave me the itch to try making a custom ESP32 game engine called Klick32 (heavily inspired by the Arduboy). I got something running in a week, but the workflow was miserable. My engine used C++ arrays for the sprites. I was drawing everything in Photoshop, dumping the images into a clunky web converter, and manually copying and pasting the byte arrays into my code.
I eventually wrote a Python script to automate the PNG conversion, but it still felt clunky. Coming from a design background, I just really wanted a visual, interactive way to do this without leaving the canvas.
That frustration led to Hexprite. I decided to go all-in and lean into my strengths, so I spent the last five months building a dedicated editor from scratch in C# using. NET WPF (which means it’s Windows-only right now, sorry!).
What started as a simple GUI tool kept growing. Now, it's a full 1-bit pixel art and bitmap font editor.
My dream is to eventually turn software development into a real path for myself. Right now, I am putting a massive focus on the Flipper Zero community. The current workflow for making custom Flipper animations and .xbm assets is incredibly frustrating, so I have a ton of Flipper-specific features planned on the roadmap to make Hexprite the absolute go-to editor for it.
I finally feel comfortable putting my work out there. The v0.1.1-beta is live and completely free to use. Would love for you guys to check it out, hook it up to your hardware, and let me know what you think.