Show HN: Tidbyt – A connected, programmable LED matrix display [KS]

Buying the individual components to make this at consumer retail price from "reputable" local suppliers still comes to less than half the $199 RRP, so the value clearly comes from the software, which looks nice. But it's a bit disappointing to see that there is no support commitment on that front for such an expensive product.

> While we hope that our company will be around for a long time, we are committed to keeping Tidbyts useful and out of the landfill, long into the future. [...] So even if we're not around, you can upgrade your Tidbyt to keep it from being reliant on Tidbyt, Inc. or our servers.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tidbyt/retro-display?re...

> I could see a future in which we have a standalone version of the Tidbyt backend that you can run on your server or premises, but that’s not on the current roadmap.

https://discuss.tidbyt.com/t/self-hosted-tidbyt-server/330

Allowing customers to create their own firmware is better than nothing, but it's not great to rely on this as a fallback from launch. Wasn't there a very early Philips device like this that never found a market and relied on community firmware after the manufacturer lost interest?

Nice! I like how developed the software is. Hooking rgb matrices to esp32 is a simple project, but making it display something useful and have nice, documented API is the hardest part.