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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

I would have bought so many devices like this, Vestaboard, etc. if they had a hardware local control option with completely open docs. I refuse to spend time engineering a data pipeline that’s dependent on someone else’s cloud service.

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I bought the KRUSH Flip Clock after seeing it at CES2016 and pulled out its silly cloud-controlled innards so I can write whatever I want to the display over rs485.

https://github.com/dmd/clack

That clock looks really cool sitting on your desk :)

I've been playing a little with the pyflipdot library recently to interface with a 20x14 flipdot display, which also uses RS485

Your flipdot display looks like it has a higher dpi, I guess there must be different diameter flipdots made.

Adafruit offers a starter kit with a microcontroller, 64x32 led matrix, and some other doodads for ~$70 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4812). It's really easy to tinker with. I made a clock that does some crappy visualizations and open sourced it here: https://github.com/kruffin/matrix_portal_gol It actually looks a lot like this Tidbyt (a box with a dot matrix).

The only thing it doesn't have is a RTC, so I just polled a time server every so often.

Also bought a Matrix Portal and have had a lot of fun with it! Dabbled in writing a raytracer for it, but I don’t know enough about ARM nor C++ to optimize it for decent frame rates. Now the thing runs a newton’s cradle simulator using Box2D, and that’s been a fun desk toy.

Neat. I'd love to see what that looks like (raytracer or cradle). Found an old Hack a Day from 2014 (https://hackaday.com/2014/11/25/ray-tracing-on-an-arduino/) where someone is raytracing on a 16Mhz micro. Should be faster on the 120Mhz portal, but it took almost 3 days :P

In case you weren't aware of it, this watch[1] might interest you. Open-source hardware and software. I'll probably end up getting one for Christmas this year.

[1] https://watchy.sqfmi.com/

If anyone has one of these watches I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!

While I don't have one, I went down the pathway to replace almost a decade of using Pebbles , looking at PineTime, Bangle.js, Amazfit, Watchy, etc...and I just settled on buying a replacement housing for my Pebble, pushing the problem off to be dealt with in another 5 years.

The battery life on Watchy leaves a lot to be desired, as does the lack of a water-resistant sealed case, but the full featured hardware is a real contender.

The Bangle.js 2 is my second choice in the line up of open source smartwatches.

There are plenty of ESP32 watches around now; eg: https://au.banggood.com/LILYGO-TTGO-T-Watch-2020-ESP32-Main-...

or (round face!):

https://au.banggood.com/Open-Smartwatch-Light-V3_3plus-ESP32...

I feel similarly, that's why I use a smart home hub with local control (Hubitat).

With Tidbyt our default pipeline uses our cloud, but the hardware is fully unlocked for you to flash your own firmware.

Is there a replacement firmware already available that allows local control?

I feel like for all these connected hardware products, they should ship with an open source server and the phone apps that control them should have an "Server IP address" field in their iOS settings. Your company goes under? I just run your software locally and point my app to my local IP.

We're working on an example open source firmware. In reality though, it's not something the majority of our customers are asking for so with a 3-person team it hasn't been at the top of the list.

Yeah, I know I'm not really in the target market. Like, I would absolutely spring for a locally controlled Vestaboard, but I know that most of these are probably sold to businesses.

Adafruit is particularly egregious with their cloud service integration and marketing. It just seems to be the way they're heading.

It does seem that way, however, in none of the AdaBoxes I've gotten from them have I had to sign up for their cloud services. That's where you think they would push it hard, but it just hasn't happened and I'm glad for that. There are usually a few samples that make use, but you always have the option to roll your own code on it and use their base libraries for interfacing with the hardware. It will be a sad (and probably disastrous) day when they bind their code to require cloud services especially considering some micros don't have wifi.

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