DeskHog, an open-source developer toy

It's not my place to go into details as to what it is at this time, and there are other people involved on here!

The build is neither cheap nor fast, though the proof of concept was. If you are aiming at a dev/maker audience telling them to configure things with ESP Flasher will work. If it's for some random person then it won't, and the complexity explodes.

I would caution anyone going into this because almost everyone you speak to will radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product, even a giveaway one, with the consequence that most people respond as if it's a high school science project and not real work.

> you must be using methodologies we could learn from

Not necessarily. You usually just need to know where to/what to buy.

e.g., someone on Reddit posted about being able to automate taking a photograph every time someone walked by. Turns out that I had an unused Raspberry Pi and a cheap webcam AND a passive-IR sensor. Half an hour of research into Linux command line webcam control and an hour later I had a proof of concept. Just lucked out that I have a well-stocked junk box.

But for most quick hardware things I'd turn to Arduino. I'm a professional embedded systems engineer. Arduino makes prototyping stuff that would have taken weeks or months just 10 years ago, doable in hours.

If for some reason, Arduino wasn't around, then I could use the "dev boards" that all microcontroller manufacturers provide to let you learn about their systems. Generally, they're below a $20 price point and come with enough I/O to do something useful and tooling is free.

I could probably go on, but there's enough stuff here to google if you're really interested :-)

They're right too. "Let's install random drivers to get the USB serial to work" etc.

Working on it was one of the motivations for https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella where I'm basically trying to control more from the access point since I believe these devices need strict separation from everything else. (That code also is essentially a golang superset of the C++ on the device).

We had a "smart display" that was a wall-projector that someone was throwing out, a raspi zero and some python code that used SDL to display some numbers (in a huge font) from a requests fetch of a csv file. Once we moved out of incubator space and into a real office, we duplicated it so that it was visible in more places (at the time, terribly under-spec projectors were $150ish and melted/burned within a year of 24/7 operation; after a couple of iterations of that we'd grown enough to have an actual analytics team that got a big screen and a dashboard up in the kitchen - but noone really looked at it, the thing about the projector version was that it had One Big Number that Went Up and so it was easy to care about.)

Since it was widely visible it occasionally got augmented with "N days to <critical deadline>", usually conference appearances.

Also, originally it was unfunded (free raspis, trashpicked projectors) but when it first went away due to projector meltdown, the legendarily cheap CEO showed up with a replacement, because he really liked having The Number on display.

(Didn't have build status, but it did change from green to red on certain kinds of infrastructure failure, which wasn't as useful as it sounds.)

> the infrastructure is apparently terrible

This is unsurprising. LED displays/arrays/strips involve using enough power that a software specialist is unlikely to manage it safely without getting decent at electronics. Conversely, the hardware people can throw just enough software together to make the happy path work, but not scale it up let alone reliably.

There are some people genuinely superb at both domains, but at some point they sucked at one or the other. The trick is to be ready to absorb information from both sides, but many will simply go "hey, it works on the happy path" and move on. My personal cutoff is whenever it goes over 12v or 500mA I know I'll be getting a second opinion.

> It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things.

... less well.

In the meantime we’ve lost pretty much any innovation in the physical space.

I have a great illustration with a simple product I cannot find : a _modern_ … alarm clock.

I’ve been searching for the ultimate alarm clock in a while with the following list of must have :

- FM/AM and DAB+

- Decent sound/speaker

- Nice ringtones (with decent sound) and not just beep beep beep or a radio station …

- A brightness suitable for an alarm clock (that’s something we aren’t able to make anymore it seems or nobody cares anymore)

- Physical buttons that you can use in the dark

- Good build quality

And that’s all.

It’s not an unreasonable list of features. In fact, most alarm clocks on the market have most of those features, nothing in this list is exceptional. Yet, I totally fail to find one that have it all.

It just feels like objects are all the same now and that nobody cares.

Sure, you can use your smartphone as an alarm clock. But even if you wanted (I don’t) it doesn’t check all those requirements.

Mh, this sparked an interesting thought.

For my phone, I'm happy, because it replaced about 6 things without losing much quality. I could get myself a better camera (my parents in fact have one). I in fact have a more compact and repairable MP3 player that runs off SD cards and batteries and it still works wonderfully. With the death of the 3.5mm audio port that thing can actually drive the good headphones better than my phone, heh. But that's just more stuff to lug around.

On the other hand, for my hobby music, I by now prefer single-purpose things. My audio interface has the job of digitalizing audio. These three pedals each have their own unique job and function, and I own them for that purpose. There is a bunch of very dedicated stuff around, a good tuner, a good metronome with googly eyes.

I'm kinda observing the same at work: Sometimes, I just want to get rid of a problem. Just throw a magic zero-config box at it and have it be gone. And in other contexts you want or need to have control over many parameters, and then having small, little single purpose things is very, very useful.

Some monitoring box very likely would want to err on the zero-config magic box I guess?

It was a good question! Thanks for asking.

But then there'd be no one for you to be condescending towards!

I don’t think that’s the full answer. Post Hog is internet parlance for “upload a picture of your penis”. Someone had a sense of humor when they picked that name.

I used chatGPT to ask this question at first and it spat out nonsense so I just decided to pose the question here haha. I guess I should've just RTFM'd as they say.

TIL highlights work perfectly in Firefox.

> The parallel is by auto-capturing event data, we can help you draw meanings after your users are long gone.

That’s kinda dark?

After hoc, therefore something else hoc...

I stand corrected. Sorry for cynical take

The page says it plays games.