Hardware is becoming more accessible, so more software companies are going to release hardware products or build hardware products for internal purposes. The future of physical world innovation isn't going to come from legacy hardware corpos, but from software companies that run hardware experiments that become real hardware products. Hats off to Posthog for making it cool!
The reason hardware has sucked in the past is poor tooling. But now open-source solutions are getting pretty good, and AI is covering many knowledge gaps.
This is the truth - my recent work has dragged me into doing exactly this, building hardware "giveaways" to promote SaaS in niche industries, and enabling the backend devs to have an API they can understand to control it.
It has made me wonder why such things haven't been more popular attached to Grafana. For example, take a LED strip and use that as a gauge or similar. Many devs seem to fetishize screens and enjoy extra displays in their environments, while normies (at least the feedback from the recent work) have been telling me they actively want to get away from any screens. OTOH using LED strips rapidly turns anywhere into a vape shop.
These do exist but they're remarkably expensive and the infrastructure is apparently terrible. Several companies sell "smart led displays" that people use to show their follower counts while streaming. There's no reason you couldn't make one and have it subscribe to ntfy or something like that. But adoption seems ropey because the use cases are always clocks and $200 for a screen is a big ask for most people.
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.)
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.
I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. 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. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.
I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.
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?
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.
At this point I'd settle for one where the button on top just lights up the numbers without playing awful compressed babbling brook sounds at full volume.
I like to use the TM1640 and RGB LEDs. It's cheap, works well, requires a minimum of external components, and can convey a fair amount of information. It can also drive a 16x8 LED matrix if I do want something screen-like.
Usually I'll control it with a Wi-Fi MCU like the ESP8266 or Pi Pico W. Total component cost, including board, sits around 5$ each with a minimum quantity of 5.
When someone mentions smart devices without screens, I’m always reminded of David Rose’s work on what he called “Enchanted Objects”. If you look on YouTube, you should be able to find some talks he did at TED and Google highlighting his work.
Could you elaborate on these hardware projects? They sound cool.
If your workflow lets you crank out hardware quickly and cheaply enough for just a marketing stunt, you must be using methodologies we could learn from.
I’m not convinced developers just like normal screens though, tactile/analogue widgets are always cool and welcome!
> 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 :-)
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.
> radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product
LOL. I had my boss call me out on this once. I made an offhand comment about doing something "in a few days" while on a customer call (yeah, I should have known better), leaving him to patiently explain to the customer that I meant a basic PoC and that would actually take us quite a few weeks to productize after we got it working :-)
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).
This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].
Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it directly from codeBoot.
BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!
the options for hobby electronics these days are incredible, you can get a microcontroller for under 20 bucks and attach it to almost any sensor, light, or display you can imagine — add a little beginner python and it's connected to your smart home
(note: the picture with the hand is way off scale. Thing is slightly larger than a MagSafe phone charging ring (since one way to power it is to put it over such a ring)
$25
Unfortunately I have no experience on how to mod it and after searching for 10-15 mins it seemed like more work than I wanted to deal with. Seems like you need to build your own firmware and re-flash it. I found someone had used it to build a nest like control for Home Assistant
This looks really cool, but I'm not really sure why they made it. PostHog is primarily web analytics software from what I understand. Why build hardware?
Here's the truth: it was a weird idea from our Slack – build a tamagotchi! – that I took too seriously. In a couple of evenings, I had a prototype working. Then everyone was so excited we just ran with it.
Our audience is developers: we make you happy, you'll love us and make us the first part of every project you do, on your own and at the workplace.
Meanwhile, man, hardware is just so much fun. But most folks have no idea how much easier it is to build now. Basically, if you can use open source software, you already know how to hack on microcontroller.
So this foray into developer toys is about helping you have fun with something that maybe you wouldn't have played with otherwise.
But you can also display real-time PostHog data on it, out of the box. Which means you can expense it. A merch win-win.
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.
Ah, "spotted hog", as my English teacher (6th grade or so?, ESL) had said: for some reason this is one term most pupils will remember, no matter how unimportant.
Guess he was right, or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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.
Brainstory was trying to do something similar, but using AI to kind of prompt you using Socratic questioning. Seemed like a neat idea, but unfortunately it got shut down.
Looks like it got turned into a VSCode extension by one of the people working on it though, so that's something. Might be interesting to try if you already use Copilot:
That's a fun idea, just have it ask questions like the little IQ toys and have a yes/no button. Turns out this works reasonably well if you only allow binary responses. If you also had an "I'm not sure" or "I don't know how" button it might work even better.
Seriously though, can a ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather[1] (dual-core Xtensa @ 240 MHz, 512KB built-in RAM, 2MB external PSRAM, 4MB Flash) play Doom? As usual with these microcontroller-type things, it looks like storage poses a harder limit than compute, but maybe just a bit of Doom could be crammed in?
I like the idea of this enough to search a bit for similar projects. The deal breaker on this for me is the 1.14-inch screen. Middle age has made it much less pleasant to look at things that small.
Goodness, my watch has a bigger screen (my watch has a higher resolution, too). But I’m about to be eligible for a lot of senior discounts this year, so perhaps it isn’t built for the likes of you and me.
Don't get me wrong, this seems like a fun thing to play with. But it feels very weird to see so much marketing and branding poured into something that's literally just a plastic enclosure and software for an off-the-shelf dev board made by somebody else.
Like, the page says:
> Want more hardware? We included an I²C expansion port, just for people like you.
No you didn't! Adafruit did! You didn't even add a connector.
I'm no expert, but it seems like the value add is the firmware they wrote to turn this into a more accessible platform. Hardware is always composed of other hardware, so "included" is not inherently the wrong word, though it maybe takes too much credit. In general, the intent feels wholesome to me. As a software guy, I had no idea that hardware could be so approachable, and I'm suddenly excited about the possibilities.
In general I agree, but there is absolutely no composition at all happening here. (Unless you count buying a dev board that's designed to run on a battery, and plugging a battery into it.)
I truly think it's great that they've made software that people find approachable. It's the branding of someone else's hardware product as their own that rubs me the wrong way. They aren't saying things that are technically false, but it still feels misleading.
Enjoyed the joke in the cookie banner! Have been mildly surprised how people controlling larger websites haven't been casually poking fun at this before.
If you want something with ESP32-S3 and a bigger touch screen to hack on (the current software is very young), there's the UM squixl. https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop.html#!/SQUiXL/p/743870537. They also make a WOPR kit that can tie into home assistant.
i would buy it if the screen looked a bit better. based on this website it looks really small and not super useful for the "keep analytics up on screen" usecase
i still wish i had a small keyboard with like 9 configurable keys that can execute what ever i want like "start debug" or "open tty at a specific folder" or "git status a specific repository" and so on...
Again, just options if you feel like this would be a cool project and you're cool with doing some soldering. Other people have suggested good pre-built solutions, and many macropads can do what you're looking for.
Hardware is becoming more accessible, so more software companies are going to release hardware products or build hardware products for internal purposes. The future of physical world innovation isn't going to come from legacy hardware corpos, but from software companies that run hardware experiments that become real hardware products. Hats off to Posthog for making it cool!
The reason hardware has sucked in the past is poor tooling. But now open-source solutions are getting pretty good, and AI is covering many knowledge gaps.
This is the truth - my recent work has dragged me into doing exactly this, building hardware "giveaways" to promote SaaS in niche industries, and enabling the backend devs to have an API they can understand to control it.
It has made me wonder why such things haven't been more popular attached to Grafana. For example, take a LED strip and use that as a gauge or similar. Many devs seem to fetishize screens and enjoy extra displays in their environments, while normies (at least the feedback from the recent work) have been telling me they actively want to get away from any screens. OTOH using LED strips rapidly turns anywhere into a vape shop.
These do exist but they're remarkably expensive and the infrastructure is apparently terrible. Several companies sell "smart led displays" that people use to show their follower counts while streaming. There's no reason you couldn't make one and have it subscribe to ntfy or something like that. But adoption seems ropey because the use cases are always clocks and $200 for a screen is a big ask for most people.
See the "tidybyt" https://www.theverge.com/23303371/tidbyt-review-desk-accesso...
There are anecdotes about offices having a "build status" LED and you would get shamed if your commit broke the CI.
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.
I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. 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. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.
I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.
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'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.
At this point I'd settle for one where the button on top just lights up the numbers without playing awful compressed babbling brook sounds at full volume.
I agree wholeheartedly!
I like to use the TM1640 and RGB LEDs. It's cheap, works well, requires a minimum of external components, and can convey a fair amount of information. It can also drive a 16x8 LED matrix if I do want something screen-like.
Usually I'll control it with a Wi-Fi MCU like the ESP8266 or Pi Pico W. Total component cost, including board, sits around 5$ each with a minimum quantity of 5.
When someone mentions smart devices without screens, I’m always reminded of David Rose’s work on what he called “Enchanted Objects”. If you look on YouTube, you should be able to find some talks he did at TED and Google highlighting his work.
Could you elaborate on these hardware projects? They sound cool.
If your workflow lets you crank out hardware quickly and cheaply enough for just a marketing stunt, you must be using methodologies we could learn from.
I’m not convinced developers just like normal screens though, tactile/analogue widgets are always cool and welcome!
> 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 :-)
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.
> radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product
LOL. I had my boss call me out on this once. I made an offhand comment about doing something "in a few days" while on a customer call (yeah, I should have known better), leaving him to patiently explain to the customer that I meant a basic PoC and that would actually take us quite a few weeks to productize after we got it working :-)
I’d love to set up stuff like this, but our IT security guys would really not like the risk with everything else on their plate!
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).
This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].
Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it directly from codeBoot.
BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blinxinc (working on a landing page)
[2]: https://codeboot.org (also working on a landing page)
the options for hobby electronics these days are incredible, you can get a microcontroller for under 20 bucks and attach it to almost any sensor, light, or display you can imagine — add a little beginner python and it's connected to your smart home
It's a amazing to me what can be made / sold for so cheap. A friend recently got one of these
https://www.surenoo.com/products/23280116
(note: the picture with the hand is way off scale. Thing is slightly larger than a MagSafe phone charging ring (since one way to power it is to put it over such a ring)
$25
Unfortunately I have no experience on how to mod it and after searching for 10-15 mins it seemed like more work than I wanted to deal with. Seems like you need to build your own firmware and re-flash it. I found someone had used it to build a nest like control for Home Assistant
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guition-1-8-360x360-es...
If I'd found an easier way to just write some python or JavaScript I might have spent a few hours/days making some round games or demos.
Sounds like you can make your own software (firmware) for it with micropython:
https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/esp32/tutorial/intro....
This looks really cool, but I'm not really sure why they made it. PostHog is primarily web analytics software from what I understand. Why build hardware?
Here's the truth: it was a weird idea from our Slack – build a tamagotchi! – that I took too seriously. In a couple of evenings, I had a prototype working. Then everyone was so excited we just ran with it.
Our audience is developers: we make you happy, you'll love us and make us the first part of every project you do, on your own and at the workplace.
Meanwhile, man, hardware is just so much fun. But most folks have no idea how much easier it is to build now. Basically, if you can use open source software, you already know how to hack on microcontroller.
So this foray into developer toys is about helping you have fun with something that maybe you wouldn't have played with otherwise.
But you can also display real-time PostHog data on it, out of the box. Which means you can expense it. A merch win-win.
Did you make an HN account just to reply to this? If so, I think that was really cool of you to do!
It was a good question! Thanks for asking.
From the looks of it, for fun.
I was expecting them to display posthog metrics on it, but not even
There’s a walking little toy on my posthog dashboard already. I have no idea why they made it, but I sure do appreciate it.
I still can't believe this company is named "post hog."
Post hog ergo propter hog
27 lawyers in the room, anyone know...?
After hoc, therefore something else hoc...
Judging by the amount of free publicity it generates, I think it was the right choice.
Why is it called PostHog anyways?
If only there was a tool for finding answers to our questions:
https://posthog.com/docs/posthog-direction#:~:text=PostHog%2...
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’m unfamiliar with the slang but even without it the name is weird.
The “hog” alone would never make me think of a hedgehog instead of a regular hog.
> a domesticated pig, especially a castrated male reared for slaughter
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hog
Ah, "spotted hog", as my English teacher (6th grade or so?, ESL) had said: for some reason this is one term most pupils will remember, no matter how unimportant.
Guess he was right, or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.
TIL highlights work perfectly in Firefox.
But then there'd be no one for you to be condescending towards!
You underestimate my ability to be annoying.
What a blissful prospect.
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.
I copy pasted your comment onto Google and it was the first result.
I instantly pictured this being a rubber duck. And then I started thinking, how could a virtual rubber duck help you deduce things?
Mostly you'd want it to listen and be supportive I guess.
But maybe, just maybe, could AI somehow summarize a very short suggestion or response based on what you say.
That is something I'd buy. Tactile, can be thrown around a bit, listens at the press of a button, responds with a random short suggestion or idea.
Brainstory was trying to do something similar, but using AI to kind of prompt you using Socratic questioning. Seemed like a neat idea, but unfortunately it got shut down.
https://github.com/brainstory
Looks like it got turned into a VSCode extension by one of the people working on it though, so that's something. Might be interesting to try if you already use Copilot:
https://github.com/cassidoo/brainstorm-buddy-extension
That's a fun idea, just have it ask questions like the little IQ toys and have a yes/no button. Turns out this works reasonably well if you only allow binary responses. If you also had an "I'm not sure" or "I don't know how" button it might work even better.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6849eb45-6700-800d-ad3b-57458eb5c7...
(Asking chatgpt how to put up shelves without it knowing what the task is and only allowing yes/no responses)
The beauty of the rubber duck is that that’s all it is.
That being said, I’d buy your “live” rubber duck as well. Even if it gives mild Furby vibes.
> Can it play Doom?
>...We're working on it.
Seriously though, can a ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather[1] (dual-core Xtensa @ 240 MHz, 512KB built-in RAM, 2MB external PSRAM, 4MB Flash) play Doom? As usual with these microcontroller-type things, it looks like storage poses a harder limit than compute, but maybe just a bit of Doom could be crammed in?
[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/5691
Espressif do publish one [0] themselves, but that requires extra RAM - 4MB, not the two this seems to have.
So its probably doable, but may require a few modifications.
[0] https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom
Seems like you can do it using Retro-Go, that's using a port of PrBoom 2.5.0. (No sound, though)
https://www.hackster.io/naveenbskumar/yes-arduino-nano-esp32...
I like the idea of this enough to search a bit for similar projects. The deal breaker on this for me is the 1.14-inch screen. Middle age has made it much less pleasant to look at things that small.
Goodness, my watch has a bigger screen (my watch has a higher resolution, too). But I’m about to be eligible for a lot of senior discounts this year, so perhaps it isn’t built for the likes of you and me.
Don't get me wrong, this seems like a fun thing to play with. But it feels very weird to see so much marketing and branding poured into something that's literally just a plastic enclosure and software for an off-the-shelf dev board made by somebody else.
Like, the page says:
> Want more hardware? We included an I²C expansion port, just for people like you.
No you didn't! Adafruit did! You didn't even add a connector.
I'm no expert, but it seems like the value add is the firmware they wrote to turn this into a more accessible platform. Hardware is always composed of other hardware, so "included" is not inherently the wrong word, though it maybe takes too much credit. In general, the intent feels wholesome to me. As a software guy, I had no idea that hardware could be so approachable, and I'm suddenly excited about the possibilities.
> Hardware is always composed of other hardware
In general I agree, but there is absolutely no composition at all happening here. (Unless you count buying a dev board that's designed to run on a battery, and plugging a battery into it.)
I truly think it's great that they've made software that people find approachable. It's the branding of someone else's hardware product as their own that rubs me the wrong way. They aren't saying things that are technically false, but it still feels misleading.
Enjoyed the joke in the cookie banner! Have been mildly surprised how people controlling larger websites haven't been casually poking fun at this before.
For internal session cookie, do we actually need the cookie banner at all ?
They either use the cookie for something other than a session, or they just want to be better safe than sorry. (Or for the sake of humour)
While cool, instead of buying this, I wonder if anyone has tried to used their Flipper for this use case.
If you want something with ESP32-S3 and a bigger touch screen to hack on (the current software is very young), there's the UM squixl. https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop.html#!/SQUiXL/p/743870537. They also make a WOPR kit that can tie into home assistant.
It looks way to small to be of any practical use. To small to display useful information, to small to play games on it?
What's the use of this?
> toy
Toy still needs fun activity you can do on it.
The page says it plays games.
Working at Posthog must be fun
Developers: "Ha I don't fall for silly marketing"
Also, devs: "They are shipping a toy, must be a fun place to work"
It may be a fun place to work fwiw, but this is just marketing not something a team of engineers decided to ship between jira tickets!
This was literally something someone did on the side between other stuff. We don't use Jira.
I stand corrected. Sorry for cynical take
It is :3 It's exactly how you think it would be like working here.
And we are hiring. Come join us! https://posthog.com/careers
you saying that is probably the reason they did this.
Ive had a project a lot like this on my infinite todo list for a while now
This thing is rad.
So many props on the Series D fundraise. Well deserved. (Best company ever.)
how many are you buying?
Well that’s certainly one way to make me want to work at your company.
i would buy it if the screen looked a bit better. based on this website it looks really small and not super useful for the "keep analytics up on screen" usecase
Sounds like something that might show up on a DeskHog Pro
but what is it for?
i still wish i had a small keyboard with like 9 configurable keys that can execute what ever i want like "start debug" or "open tty at a specific folder" or "git status a specific repository" and so on...
There are lots of keyboards like that. I use an eight-key version that I found on Amazon. Works just fine, no complaints.
Have you heard of, or considered, a elgato stream deck?
Couple other people suggesting some great options, I'll throw a hat in the ring for building your own!
This May Pad kit is great (https://keyhive.xyz/shop/may-pad)
Also great options from keebio (https://keeb.io/collections/macropads)
The tidbit is also really cool! (https://nullbits.co/tidbit/)
Again, just options if you feel like this would be a cool project and you're cool with doing some soldering. Other people have suggested good pre-built solutions, and many macropads can do what you're looking for.
Adafruit makes a keyboard kit that you can assemble and write your own macros in Python: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128
Hey, the website on your profile is broken.
Btw I did exactly that! I cut (literally) a cheap keyboard at the numpad boundary. Installed AHK (Windows) which runs macros on button click.
Postits to label each button.
Now I have one of those fancy few-button keyboards that do my bidding.
I've been meaning to post it. Would that be interesting?
Yes, please do!
This is probably the one I would get - https://protadesigns.com/ It looks great, and also I appreciate that it's a one man operation
Something like this https://www.mylocalbytes.com/products/localdeck?
Macropad keyboarda exist, just need to do the software configuration for your particular use case.
I have one with a rotary knob that I hooked up to my debugger so that I can step forwards and into fluidly.
Brilliant usage of the rotary knob!
Look up "macropads" on the Internetz.
epaper version would be cool
FYI, my Pihole is blocking this domain.
They do web analytics so definitely end up on block lists for people who don’t want to be tracked.
(I’ve used PostHog on several projects and feel that they are better for privacy than, say, GA, but understand why people would block them)
You can't fit posthog in your pihole?
Try more ClotdMilk-Fat.
Hog Speed. You're a hedgehog that runs fast. Sounds like a lame game concept with niche appeal at best.
This thing looks seriously cute and next to useless. Like a mini Chumby. A perfect gadget for "the street to find its own uses for".
The hardware is UGLY.
Chuckles in M5stack
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