NeTV2 – An open video development board | Hacker News Reader

NeTV2 – An open video development board

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53 pointsAceJohnny28 comments

Bunnie is among a few people that I look up to a lot as not just being innovative as an inventor and engineer, but also a practical and fearless one at that. The "sue the US government" was a crazy and genius move.

I have hacked on his hardware -- the Chumby. I had a lot of fun working that was the inspiration for me to do many things that I do now.

In the past job working for the IT department in a small state university right after graduating, I convinced the administration to buy a truck of overstock Best Buy-rebranded Chumbies. I converted those little boxs to an economical audio/visual/projector control system for our classrooms in 2012 (they are still used until today, I think!). If I recall correctly, that's even after the Chumby as a company dissolved. The software was largely abandoned at that point, yet it didn't stop great things like that to happen. I wrote quite a bit about hacking and putting weird software for the Chumby on my blog, but the highlight was that specific experience [1]. I hope the link I posted doesn't come out as self promotion, because the intention here is to celebrate the spirit that bunnie put into ordinary people like me. Honestly, I am pretty proud and every time I talk about that experience, it puts a smile on my face. All of that wouldn't have been possible without open hardware and free software.

I wish this world have more people like him, so we can all inspire people to make hardware and have fun with technology.

1: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/crankshaft-chumby-do-you-believe-i...

I bought the first NeTV back in ~2011, via Adafruit. I am not saying that any promises were breached, but I did feel that the platform was abandondoned pretty soon after the boards were made available for sale.

So, I guess what I'm saying is: don't buy this board for thinking they'll continue to develop the software after you buy it. If you buy it, make sure it is for what the software is today.

I'll add a little context from my own experience. I have two NeTVs, one I use on occasion for a particular project, and one in case that one breaks. I spent a lot of time figuring out working with the platform.

I got the impression, not that it was abandoned, but that bunnie and whomever else involved were hardware people, not software people. It had all the hallmarks of a hardware development kit without any serious software people on the core team. Software folks without experience working on underdocumented and undersupported hardware platforms had no place to go, no paths laid out, no real documentation for making the NeTV do things with just the built-in browser or kernel, like "what fonts are available out of the box" or "what is the equivalent WebKit/Chrome versions and how do I debug errors". The hardware folks expected the software folks to also be hardware folks, and they usually aren't.

There was however a relatively large software effort taking place before the launch. At least in terms of software velocity. Perhaps I was naive, but I expected that to continue. Instead it just stopped and Bunnie moved over to some other project iirc.

I'm on board! I used the first NeTV to experiment with 10-foot UI design using web technologies. I would rather have a dumb panel television and roll my own interface but I very much remember running into the HDCP issue Bunnie is fighting against which prevented me from doing that.

I hope the new hardware will support HDMI 2.1.

It would be interesting to connect something like this to different News outlets and conduct a sentiment analysis to determine objective bias.

It would, though it'd be a tricky research design to pull off well: too many moving parts (it turns out to be difficult even to partition video by speaker automatically, let alone everything else).

On a more conceptual note, sentiment analysis detects (linguistic markers of) sentiment, not bias. Pretty much every news source will have positive sentiment for heartwarming human interest stories, and negative sentiment about atrocities. That's as you'd expect; we don't produce or consume news in a vacuum.

I'm thinking you could compile a list of commonly used words in positive or negative articles and count their frequency as a starting point. Also, you could search for nouns of importance like Trump or Obama and hone your bias detection.

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