Month: October 2024

Magic Poi first test board arrived!

Good news, the Magic Poi “Alpha” first test board arrived at the EnterAction factory! We are currently testing it with an LED strip and have already found some areas we can improve on.

The next version will address the issues we encounter here, then there will be another version which adds embedded LED’s (the “full” version) and so on, refining and testing as we go.

Thanks to my supporters on Patreon, I have made some strides in the online part of the software, deploying the first version. This is not publicly available yet – my upgrade to PostgreSQL didn’t go as planned in production (it “works on my laptop” though) so there is a lot to do to make it usable.

If you haven’t already, come support the work on Patreon (funds go towards virtual server costs and AI development assistance). Once we start selling Magic Poi the project will hopefully fund itself but until then, every dollar counts!

More SmartPoi news

In other news, I added a page for “The History of SmartPoi“, as well as instructions for making the charger and installing software (firmware and web/Android controls)

UPDATES:

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MagicPoi is going online soon

The magicpoi.com website I set up was fun but it was only ever a placeholder for the real thing – a place where people can share poi images for instant deployment on their MagicPoi hardware.

Now the time has almost arrived to switch it over. Right now, thanks to my Patreon supporters I am in the process of setting up a brand new server – with the latest Ubuntu Server OS. This will be the base of many things, which I need to port over from the old one (currently 2020 version).

Things which I host on my “Experimental Server” include: LED Website Indicator, Monkey Detector api, AI Website Generation, LED Juggling simulator, the old test MagicPoi site, and a lot more. Soon the main magicpoi.com will live here too, with improved specs so hopefully it can handle the cool stuff it’s going to be doing (like image classification on upload and streaming direct to the poi).

Look out for updates on the blog – my Patreon supporters will hear about it first, though. Did you know you can support someone on Patreon without paying anything? “Free supporter” is a thing – check it out: come support me on patreon!

Don’t forget to yield

I had a fun few hours last week troubleshooting my “finished” SmartPoi firmware – which somehow decided to not do the one thing it really needs to do, connect to WiFi.

Turns out that in an effort to make everything more efficient I removed all of the delay() statements and gave the WiFi part of the microcontroller software no time to execute!

A simple yield(); in the main FastLED display loop sending image data to the LED’s solved the problem. So remember, don’t forget to yield.

Wireless Streaming to your phone from LibreElec Kodi

  1. Install the Snapcast Server addon from Kodi addons and enable it.
  2. Install the Snapcast Client app (find it in the in F-Droid store, search for “snapcast”).
  3. Later versions of LibreElec have PulseAudio disabled – but it’s needed by Snapcast, so you have to force enable PulseAudio (Link) for it to work.
  4. Select Snapcast audio in Settings -> System -> Audio
  5. When playing video sound over WiFi you have to put the audio offset to +1 second (+1000) then it syncs up.

SmartPoi and Magic Poi updates again

Just a quick note about some updates – some done and some to come.

I really like the SmartPoi Downloader idea, so I am going to be upgrading this to include downloads of the Smartpoi-js-utilities and associated Android app as well as automatically updating the data folder with the right size compressed images (currently they are 72px by default). Soon it will be a one-click affair to get up and running with Smart Poi!

Speaking of Smartpoi-js-utilities, I am making this more user-friendly, now the number of pixels is fetched from the poi you are connected to. I also added some UI updates, check out the github for changes, more to come soon (give it a star while you are there, why not?). Please make sure to get the latest SmartPoi firmware at the same time – from github or the new SmartPoi Downloader webapp (you can tell I like it because it’s got https).

Magic Poi has a new feature – Timelines! I went a bit overboard with the css – check out the video below:

Obligatory plug of my patreon:

Support me on patreon

SmartPoi AI Podcast Episode 1

The Overview episode:

This episode was generated by AI!

How To:

I used Google NotebookLM for this, and uploaded all of my blog posts and web pages relating to the SmartPoi and Magic Poi projects. Check out this link to learn more (it’s free and really easy to do) https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2024/10/04/how-to-create-an-ai-podcast-about-anything-in-seconds-with-notebooklm/

Is it any good?

Well.. It kind of mixed everything up and confused some things but that is possibly not helped by the input. I did like the format, though, and I’m used to robot voices – check out the hacker news recap for a great example.

Also, who doesn’t like flattery? These guys went on for +10 mins about how cool my project is!