Smart Poi

Boost Your Online Reach: How Multiple Related Websites Can Grow Your Business

Use your industry specific knowledge to create a related website and fill it with your own ADS. Create your own referrals with much less cost than paying for ads. I could go on, but let me start with

An Example

My own business is in the Entertainment Industry. We do high value entertainment which can run to thousands of rands invoiced for a single booking, and our customers often convert to returning customers (we get 50% returning customers on average) – so a single lead can be very valuable, long term. That is why we advertise on Google.

Many years ago we set up a page on our main site, which was in response to all of the enquiries regarding Party Venues. This was a simple service to our customers with our recommendations regarding our favorite venues in the Durban area. This quickly became the most popular page on our site, according to Analytics. Soon after I decided to branch out and create a full website using the initial list – and now this site durbanpartyvenues.co.za is getting up to 2000 visitors per month. We get 10-20 referrals from this site which converts to an estimated extra R1000-R10000 per month (guesstimate according to converstion statistics).

Since we were already paying for a web server the actual extra cost is R100 per year for the domain fee (!). Of course I spent a lot of time on the website development – first in WordPress and later Flask (Python) which made it easier to add new venues using a simple spreadsheet which makes it easier for my non-technical partner to do it.

Expanding

Last year we added capetownpartyvenues.co.za since we occasionally do entertainment in that city. This year I am working on another related services website, durbanpartyhub.co.za which will cover related entertainment services. This time we are planning on allowing our friends in the entertainment industry to pay a small fee for preferential placement (once the site gets traction).

Does this apply to your industry?

I am sure you can think of related products and services that you have inside knowledge of which can

  1. Provide informative content for potential customers
  2. Be made into a website which you create and control with your own brand front and foremost

Shameless plug

The years I spent refining this “Related Services” template has given me an unique insight into efficiently building out an effective marketing vehicle for my company – while at the same time offering a valuable service for our customers. At DevSoft, we use AI development tools to speed up, refine and enhance the website creation process. Perhaps the ideas in this blog make sense to you? If so, get in touch!

Changing times

I recently read an article on ZDNet which was talking about the new ChatGPT search and how Google Ads is going to be less relevant in future. The takeaway from that is that your organic web presence is going to be even more relevant, if paying for search placement becomes less effective. I did a test with the new ChatGPT search and “Magician for Kids parties in Durban” and “Top 10 Outdoor Party Venues in Durban” both return sites that I own at the top, organically – thankfully due to our SEO.

The article didn’t mention it in but I think social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, etc) are going to be even more important in the future – but you don’t have control over those. Owning your own content and related content is the most important thing in my opinion.

PS: check out the AI Enhanced super commercial version of this blog post here: https://devsoft.co.za/blog

Using the SmartPoi WebApp

Hello fellow SmartPoi users.

As you may know I am a professional circus performer and during the holidays I get very busy with shows. Just pointing this out in case you wonder why you don’t see any development on the project in December and January (January is holiday time for me after much hard work).

I made a quick video demonstrating the Desktop WebApp to upload images – see it here:

I might do another showing the Android app at some point, although it’s basically the same JavaScript in a web container.

And finally here is a happy holidays present – lots of 100px poi images I scraped from the Visual Poi site http://circusscientist.com/Pics_100px_5000.zip– all credits to their respective authors, originals are from https://visualpoi.zone/

Enjoy! And see you next year for the continuation of improving SmartPoi and building Magic Poi for affordable DIY POV spinning.

Best wishes

Tom

Setting up Smart Poi

Just follow the steps.

1. Go to smartpoifirmware.circusscientist.com

2. download (after changing values) – downloads a file blink.zip

3. extract blink.zip

4. open extracted main.ino in Arduino ide (I am using 1.8.19

5. Settings for Arduino:

6. Upload ->

7. Tools -> ESP8266 LittleFS Data Upload

8. Open Serial Ouput in Arduino IDE (Tools -> Serial Monitor)

9. Press Reset button on D1 Mini

10. It should say “Started, some stuff about files a.bin etc, Changed to image 1 Pattern 1..”

11. Open WiFi settings (I am using Linux, Windows should be similar?) and look for AP

12. Connect to AP (Default name is Smart_Poi7)

13. Once connected to Smart_Poi_7, open the browser (tested on FireFox and Chrome)

14. In Firefox open a new tab – you should see this: 

Clicking on “Open Network Login page” takes you to the built-in controls. 

In Chrome you have to manually type in the Main poi IP address, In Chrome it looks like this:

This is just a basic web page which is on the poi already.

15. Test the built-in control page by changing the Pattern to 2. The Serial output should reflect this..

pattern change requested: 2
Changed to image: 0 Pattern: 2

16. Now you are ready to try the smartpoi-js-utilities or Android app. https://www.circusscientist.com/smartpoi-8-0-software/

If you got this far it really should work!

Try and try again

The verdict after having the new MagicPoi test board for two weeks:

We learned a lot from our first test board!

What worked

  • ESP32 breakout.
  • Power circuit
  • Charging
  • APA102 strip breakout
  • WiFi connection to server (code)
  • POV (yes the poi images look good!)

What needs work

  • Buttons (we got the wrong component)
  • Small routing error, needed soldering, quick fix
  • Charger (inside the poi, outside?)

what’s next?

  • Fix the problems we found and add LED’s!
  • Maybe we do one at a time, 2 more prototypes?

Progress on the server

Just a bit of UI improvements, slow progress! Many thanks to my Patreon Supporters, who now have access to the new test server to try it out. Join them here!

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!