sephalon

The driver supports alternate keycode mappings specifically for that reason, but before reading your comment I was unaware of the motivation behind reversing the pulse order. Thanks!

Nice one! Using an ESP32 is a much more economical choice these days, but well, I really wanted to write a Linux kernel driver ;-)

Unfortunately only a handful of subystem APIs have Rust bindings right now, so I did not get far enough to write up anything meaningful. Maybe next year support has matured to make a reimplementation in Rust feasible; then I will happily write about my experiences :-)

Yes, noise is a problem, which unfortunately makes the lamp quite unpopular with my girlfriend ;-) Some is indeed coming from the folding mechanism itself, but the majority of noise is actually caused by the stepper motor, despite limiting the current to the necessary minimum. One could try to switch to a more advanced (i.e. silent) stepper motor driver than the A4988 (I mainly picked that one because ESPHome already has a driver for it), or use a servo motor instead.

The firmware is based on ESPHome, which integrates particularly well into Home Assistant, a popular home automation software; therefore I would recommend to implement such features on a higher layer than the firmware. See here how to e.g. implement a "sundial" function: https://gitlab.com/sephalon/deathstar_lamp#home-assistant-in...

Part of the reason for automating it was that I wanted to integrate the lamp into my home theater setup: When the movie starts, the lamp slowly closes and synchronously dims out (guests always react with a smile to this). Pressing the pause button dims it up again and gives one just enough light to find the bathroom ;-)

I have converted the timelapse to H.264/AAC, hope this plays everywhere now.

Thanks for letting me know about the video playback issue, I used the following script to create the timelapse:

  ffmpeg \
   -pattern_type glob \
   -framerate 30 \
   -i "img/*.JPG" \
   -i "star_wars_style_march.mp3" \
   -s:v 1920x1080 \
   -c:a libopus \
   -c:v vp9 \
   -shortest \
   deathstar_timelapse.webm

I actually thought that VP9 and Opus are well supported everywhere by now, but maybe that is not the case…

Regarding GitLab, as a general rule, I try to avoid products dominating the market, and I quite like their OSS policy…

A German film crew shot a documentary onboard a Typhoon class submarine (the TK-20 Severstal) in 2001, showing many aspects of daily life onboard, including the launch of a RSM-52 ICBM [1] (unfortunately awful video quality).

In hindsight, they catched a brief window in recent history where a western film crew would be allowed on board of a Russian ballistic missile submarine – remember that 2001 was the year when Putin gave a speech in the German parliament (in German language!) speculating about a new common safety architecture eventually succeeding NATO.

[1] https://youtu.be/cVWBhpjwXxo?si=IQkR6Pbx4dh86y0F&t=1172

I wish more of these government-baked payment systems would just use GNU Taler [1] instead of implementing their own walled gardens.

GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous while the merchant is identified and taxable. This is great for privacy, but not very attractive for commercial companies as your revenue has to be fully based on fees instead of making extra money by selling your customers data. The Swiss National Bank showed interest in adopting it some years ago, but I haven't heard much anymore since…

[1] https://www.taler.net

I have to admit, I’d be curious to visit one of these restaurants myself. However, one has to be aware of the fact that these restaurants are reportedly linked to the secretive North Korean party organization, Room 39 [1], which means that all revenue flows directly into the hands of the Kim dynasty, so in the best case you'll help financing their next BMW or much worse, the nuclear arms program—neither of these I'm very comfortable with…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_39