I'm working on setting up an overly complex method of watching my 3D printer's progress through my media platform of choice (Emby).
The webcam stream from my 3D printer uses MJPG, which is great for viewing from a web browser, but not very friendly for many other video decoders, etc. Emby does not support MJPG for streaming purposes (Live TV, or even plugins like IPTV), so a direct stream is out.
There's a restreaming software called MediaMTX, but that also doesn't work (directly) with MJPG.
So what I've decided to do is use Neko, a VNC-esque software with broadcast capabilities, to show the Fluidd webpage from my 3D printer (which will also include current progress, temps, etc.) and convert it to an RTMP stream. I will then use MediaMTX to parse that stream into an Emby-compatible format (TBD), and access it via an M3U file published by MediaMTX. This will create a "Live TV" channel for my 3D printer!
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears, but this is the way I've come up with to show a webpage as a video stream.
i have been thinking about setting up a camera for my printer (it doesn't have one itself) manually using a usb webcam, a raspberry pi, and some software to turn the webcam into an video stream on my network, where i could view it through VLC or maybe some web interface
haven't done so yet, though. but i think it will be fairly simple and using my own camera and server means more control over the video
though it also means it's completely passive unless i do some fancy stuff with the rpi and the printer firmware and all that. but i don't really need that, just want a way to monitor from other rooms
yeah it's tough that your printer's camera forces that format which other things aren't playing well with... nice job working around the problem though!
You might look into octoprint. I ran it with a raspberry pi 3 and a pi cam for years on my Prusa MK3. It streams the camera and gives you control.
I set mine up with HA proxy, Lets Encrypt certificates, and http auth, and with those extra layers, I felt comfortable exposing it to the Internet. It has been super useful to be able to monitor a long print when I'm away and stop it if I get a bad failure before I get the blob of death. I really liked being able to preheat the bed or the nozzle before going down to change the filament, although the hot ends are so fast these days it barely matters anymore
These days I just use Prusa Connect since it's securely hosted and integrated with my mk4 and prusa one. They have the buddy cam which is also integrated into the service. I bought one for my prusa one, but on the mk4 I use an ESP32 camera board with their firmware. I actually contributed the firmware build for the Freenove rover and designed this case to mount. It doesn't do video, but it was super cheap.
Yeah I've considered octoprint but also thought maybe i just want video only and not to go as deep as having control. Not sure yet. Might start with one and then go deeper. I have a Ender 3 V3 SE and most prints, even long ones, I do, I'm usually around for most of it, and I also don't feel like doing any proxies or exposing any bit of my internal network to the internet (even if securely so), so a camera would suffice in most cases. I suppose it could be neat to have some control via octoprint though, but that might end up being overkill for my needs.
Last Thursday I had a sudden spark of inspiration while at work, went home to realize I don’t have it in me to make an app from scratch, and decided to try out bolt.new’s AI tools to spin it up.
I’ve spent the better part of the last week working through issues but think I’ve got most of the kinks worked out. Admittedly, this is still largely a black box that I’m unsure how it functions exactly, but it’s only logging an email so I feel it’s low stakes.
So now for the idea: what if you could post a status that shows you’re available to socialize so that friends, families, groups, social circles in general could see that status and have less friction to reach out? Or maybe even post a block of time that you’ll be available in the next couple of weeks, so that others that may be available at the same time cools reach out and coordinate a group hang.
Add friends, quickly post a status that automatically expires after a set time, and allow the connections to flow more naturally/passively.
Admittedly, it may never take off because who needs another social app? I truly just wish this functionality existed so I could utilize it myself.
I am also open to hearing a critique of the methods used to make this project, I’m certainly not pro AI generally, but it was interesting/cool to be able to take an idea and manifest something so quickly.
I greatly appreciate anyone willing to try it out, provide feedback, even share it with your circle of you find it valuable
One thing that I tried to think about a lot was any potential for "harassment", in the sense that I want to avoid some of the perils of networking: cliques, ostracism, etc. The feeling that you are being left out. I'm skeptical that I thought of all the ways people can be mean to each other, but I'm hopeful that my app (and pretty much your app since it's so similar) is so simple in features that I don't have to worry about it. Is that something you were thinking about, too?
Do your friend requests have to be approved by the receiver?
One thing I wanted to avoid was handling any messaging directly in the app. I see you have it in yours. That felt like something I could leave to normal channels of communication, otherwise I'd have to worry about user to user interaction and the social problems that can come up, as well as additional technical debt. Did you consider leaving it out but decide that it was important enough to keep, or did it just feel natural to have it?
I like that your app has future scheduling. I considered it, but ultimately I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Generally if I'm future planning I am not as bothered about reaching out directly to people to ask if they want to come. If I am scheduling 3 days in advance to go to the zoo, I don't necessarily want to say "anyone is invited" and then get 3 people inviting themselves along, bringing all of their concerns about timing and logistics into it. Future plans are usually more targeted, pre-meditated. Immediate plans, for right now or a few hours in advance, calls for more of a 'hail mary' announcement. There is no time for targeted planning, we are walking out the door now, show up if you want.
Do you see it differently, or given it a lot of thought? I only know how I operate, so it's great to see someone else's perspective.
EDIT: Also, you should try installing your app to your phone home screen. I just did it on my iphone, and the top navigation gets hidden behind the "notch". If you go down this PWA route, you can also add a graphic icon into the PWA manifest so it gets a nice icon when installed.
Continuing on my convoluted journey of changing the layout of my smart TV remote. I went to my local hackrrspace and found the correct pads on the back that correspond to the buttons I want to change. I now need to work on soldering wires to these pads so I can then connect buttons to them. Unfortunately I don't have time for that this week as I'm traveling. In the meantime, I got some measurements for the existing buttons and case and now I just need to learn some basic 3D modeling to get a remote shell ready.
Really cool project, and glad to hear you were able to figure out the basics of it. I would suggest before soldering on wires, to plan out the enclosure and the necessary buttons. Do the soldering as the final assembling process. Then, you know how long of wires you need and can also batch all of the soldering in one go. On smaller jobs I find that I am waiting longer for the iron to heat up than I spend actually soldering, so I try and batch my soldering jobs.
Finally got copyparty set upon my Mac mini to use as a file server for my local network, and got a custom skin/theme working with it (Catppuccin).
It apparently has OPDS support so I was hoping I could also use it to serve books to my kobo via KoReader (instead of also running the Calibre OPDS content server), but I was getting errors when trying to download to my kobo (of course, the error message didn’t render properly on the Kobo so I’m not exactly sure what the issue was). Might spend some time debugging, or just get Calibre also running on the Mac mini.
My text game journey continues. For those keeping track, I started learning ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language so I could build my own text game based off of one of my novels. Not to be outdone, I decided that just making a text game was not enough, I need a fun way to display it at my next author event. So it was time to make a cyberdeck.
One Nanuk 910 case later and a LOT of 3d printing failures, I now have a complete screen and keyboard deck in a bright red case. The whole thing runs off a FabGL board (LilyTTGO). It's basically an ESP32 that has VGA and PS2 (keyboard + mouse) with an SDcard running CP/M.
Yes. CP/M.
It's... old.
But the machine boots instantly and I have this great CP/M program for running Z-Code text games called Vezza (shout out to Shawn Sijnstra!) that runs all my games and the old Infocom standbys like Zork and Enchanter, etc.
I'm ready for my next author show with something decidedly different. Will it bring attention to the table? Who knows? Did I have fun making it? Yes.
I've also installed Word Star on it so worst case I can swivel it around and write.
There's a blast from the past! In the fifth grade, I wrote a "novel" in Word Star, printed on a daisy wheel printer, and hand illustrated. It was called The Great Fungus Escape. Doubtless you have read it, or seen one of its many adaptations for film, television, and theater, so I won't bore you with the details.
I've just pushed some small updates to my very hobbyist progressive web app Collider. Originally it was "Bat Signal", then "Kid Collider", now just "Collider".
My real life problem is this: I have a kid who wants to go to the park. They want friends to be there, too. I could spend 30 minutes texting various parents in the neighborhood to see if anyone is free and wants to come over, one at a time, wait for responses, haggling on details like arrival time or exact playground or whatever. Finally get something worked out, but now my kid is tired and ready to go home, etc.
What I really want: As i walk to playground I broadcast some signal to friends that "we are going to this park in 10 minutes" and then just go. If another parent is thinking they want to go to a park, too, they can look at this app and see "hey, someone else is going to this particular park, lets meet them there".
If further communication is needed, use your normal texting/messaging app or just call.
No push notifications, just notification badges on the app icon (Which can also be disabled).
No scheduling: only one "signal" per user in a feed, only up to 24 hours in advance (which I might dial back to "current day").
No info collection besides email/password. Locations can be saved, but locations don't need to have addresses or anything, it's freeform entry.
All signals are deleted after the user set expiration time.
Can be set up as a progressive web app, installed on your phone home screen.
Wow, i didn't read yours before posting. I made this at the start of the summer but when i shared with friends I hedged a lot, saying "maybe not totally finished, don't use it if you don't want" etc. So not a lot of uptake, and I regret that because all summer there has been this big group text of like 10 people, and only 3 of them are sending out invites etc. A lot of back and forth.
I kept thinking of the old "Check ins" on facebook. I'm not sure if that is still a thing or not, I haven't had facebook in 10 years.
But yeah, we have a lot of the same ideas. I'll sign up for yours and see what else is in there.
My real life problem is this: I have a kid who wants to go to the park. They want friends to be there, too. I could spend 30 minutes texting various parents in the neighborhood to see if anyone is free and wants to come over, one at a time, wait for responses
Any reason why a "Cool Parents of Gazookville" group chat wouldn't work?
That's what I do and it seems to work pretty well. No one really chats in it, it's just for co-ordination and the occasional meme.
There is a group text of maybe 10 parents that has been the default for the summer.
Some things that fall short:
is limited to those 10 people, who are one cohort (preschool parents, and not all of them). I know LOTs of parents across different areas. I also know people in non-parent contexts.
if someone wants to drop out of that text, they can’t do so inconspicuously. It tells everyone “John left the chat”.
communication about plans can drown out everything else, even when only 3 people are getting together.
In my mind, my app is less “loud”…I’m not interjecting with my days plans to a hostage audience. I’m putting a pin on a bulletin board that others can see if they want.
Yea all of that is totally fair. I guess I’m lucky my kids’ play date groups are pretty homogenous. I should have realized that is probably not very common. Good luck with the project!
Working on my farming game off and on. I'm now on week 3.
I've worked on implementing buildings: they have a model (that fades if you go behind them), a foundation, a hitbox, and a number of interactable points (for e.g. doors, noticeboards, etc.). Currently this is setup as a Godot scene for each building, but I'd like to later on move it to the data file loading system eventually. I'll do that when I have more than one building though :) I am quite happy with the pixel art house I've made for the T1 farmhouse.
Previously a lot of this interactable stuff was hardcoded ("Press Y to water", "Press E to harvest", "Press Space to open NPC shop interface") style, and it was all tied to the Player class, but this was going to quickly get messy when I had more than 4 actions, and actions that depend on context like building zones. It also was a horribly unintuitive UI but it worked for testing the functionality. Obviously wasn't intended to be permanent but needed to get the foundations in place for context dependent actions.
I'm thinking of dividing actions into three categories: Primary actions (e.g. "talk to an NPC", "open a chest", "read a sign"), Secondary actions ("Open NPC shop UI", "Chest Settings"), and Item Actions ("use the tool you're currently holding", "plant the seed you're currently holding"). I've set up a proper hotbar system to enable this. The other ways games handle it are either like Stardew shops where they split the interactable for the NPC and their other roles (e.g. the "NPC" shop is actually the shop counter), or where the "primary" interaction just opens a menu if there's multiple options. Maybe overthinking what I want the code interface to be for calling that. I don't want it reaching into a bunch of globals for easier implementation of future multiplayer and save/load.
The other next step is save/restore of zone state (e.g. crops placement) which is needed for save/load obviously, but also for zone transitions (like entering buildings). I may throw a main menu and load/save interface in while touching on this anyway.
I'm currently getting up to speed on modern web security from the server side and all the proper headers to set as it's been a while since I've had to explicitly think about such things. If anyone has a convenient overview or other resources for what current best practices are I'd welcome it, sometimes it's hard to tell when something's outdated.
ShroudedScribe | 11 hours ago
I'm working on setting up an overly complex method of watching my 3D printer's progress through my media platform of choice (Emby).
The webcam stream from my 3D printer uses MJPG, which is great for viewing from a web browser, but not very friendly for many other video decoders, etc. Emby does not support MJPG for streaming purposes (Live TV, or even plugins like IPTV), so a direct stream is out.
There's a restreaming software called MediaMTX, but that also doesn't work (directly) with MJPG.
So what I've decided to do is use Neko, a VNC-esque software with broadcast capabilities, to show the Fluidd webpage from my 3D printer (which will also include current progress, temps, etc.) and convert it to an RTMP stream. I will then use MediaMTX to parse that stream into an Emby-compatible format (TBD), and access it via an M3U file published by MediaMTX. This will create a "Live TV" channel for my 3D printer!
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears, but this is the way I've come up with to show a webpage as a video stream.
0x29A | 11 hours ago
i have been thinking about setting up a camera for my printer (it doesn't have one itself) manually using a usb webcam, a raspberry pi, and some software to turn the webcam into an video stream on my network, where i could view it through VLC or maybe some web interface
haven't done so yet, though. but i think it will be fairly simple and using my own camera and server means more control over the video
though it also means it's completely passive unless i do some fancy stuff with the rpi and the printer firmware and all that. but i don't really need that, just want a way to monitor from other rooms
yeah it's tough that your printer's camera forces that format which other things aren't playing well with... nice job working around the problem though!
first-must-burn | 3 hours ago
You might look into octoprint. I ran it with a raspberry pi 3 and a pi cam for years on my Prusa MK3. It streams the camera and gives you control.
I set mine up with HA proxy, Lets Encrypt certificates, and http auth, and with those extra layers, I felt comfortable exposing it to the Internet. It has been super useful to be able to monitor a long print when I'm away and stop it if I get a bad failure before I get the blob of death. I really liked being able to preheat the bed or the nozzle before going down to change the filament, although the hot ends are so fast these days it barely matters anymore
These days I just use Prusa Connect since it's securely hosted and integrated with my mk4 and prusa one. They have the buddy cam which is also integrated into the service. I bought one for my prusa one, but on the mk4 I use an ESP32 camera board with their firmware. I actually contributed the firmware build for the Freenove rover and designed this case to mount. It doesn't do video, but it was super cheap.
(@ShroudedScribe)
0x29A | 2 hours ago
Yeah I've considered octoprint but also thought maybe i just want video only and not to go as deep as having control. Not sure yet. Might start with one and then go deeper. I have a Ender 3 V3 SE and most prints, even long ones, I do, I'm usually around for most of it, and I also don't feel like doing any proxies or exposing any bit of my internal network to the internet (even if securely so), so a camera would suffice in most cases. I suppose it could be neat to have some control via octoprint though, but that might end up being overkill for my needs.
kayelcio | 11 hours ago
Last Thursday I had a sudden spark of inspiration while at work, went home to realize I don’t have it in me to make an app from scratch, and decided to try out bolt.new’s AI tools to spin it up.
I’ve spent the better part of the last week working through issues but think I’ve got most of the kinks worked out. Admittedly, this is still largely a black box that I’m unsure how it functions exactly, but it’s only logging an email so I feel it’s low stakes.
So now for the idea: what if you could post a status that shows you’re available to socialize so that friends, families, groups, social circles in general could see that status and have less friction to reach out? Or maybe even post a block of time that you’ll be available in the next couple of weeks, so that others that may be available at the same time cools reach out and coordinate a group hang.
That’s the basic premise behind Sitch
Add friends, quickly post a status that automatically expires after a set time, and allow the connections to flow more naturally/passively.
Admittedly, it may never take off because who needs another social app? I truly just wish this functionality existed so I could utilize it myself.
I am also open to hearing a critique of the methods used to make this project, I’m certainly not pro AI generally, but it was interesting/cool to be able to take an idea and manifest something so quickly.
I greatly appreciate anyone willing to try it out, provide feedback, even share it with your circle of you find it valuable
Thank you
Gazook89 | 9 hours ago
Collider guy from elsewhere in the thread here.
One thing that I tried to think about a lot was any potential for "harassment", in the sense that I want to avoid some of the perils of networking: cliques, ostracism, etc. The feeling that you are being left out. I'm skeptical that I thought of all the ways people can be mean to each other, but I'm hopeful that my app (and pretty much your app since it's so similar) is so simple in features that I don't have to worry about it. Is that something you were thinking about, too?
Do your friend requests have to be approved by the receiver?
One thing I wanted to avoid was handling any messaging directly in the app. I see you have it in yours. That felt like something I could leave to normal channels of communication, otherwise I'd have to worry about user to user interaction and the social problems that can come up, as well as additional technical debt. Did you consider leaving it out but decide that it was important enough to keep, or did it just feel natural to have it?
I like that your app has future scheduling. I considered it, but ultimately I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Generally if I'm future planning I am not as bothered about reaching out directly to people to ask if they want to come. If I am scheduling 3 days in advance to go to the zoo, I don't necessarily want to say "anyone is invited" and then get 3 people inviting themselves along, bringing all of their concerns about timing and logistics into it. Future plans are usually more targeted, pre-meditated. Immediate plans, for right now or a few hours in advance, calls for more of a 'hail mary' announcement. There is no time for targeted planning, we are walking out the door now, show up if you want.
Do you see it differently, or given it a lot of thought? I only know how I operate, so it's great to see someone else's perspective.
EDIT: Also, you should try installing your app to your phone home screen. I just did it on my iphone, and the top navigation gets hidden behind the "notch". If you go down this PWA route, you can also add a graphic icon into the PWA manifest so it gets a nice icon when installed.
artvandelay | 10 hours ago
Continuing on my convoluted journey of changing the layout of my smart TV remote. I went to my local hackrrspace and found the correct pads on the back that correspond to the buttons I want to change. I now need to work on soldering wires to these pads so I can then connect buttons to them. Unfortunately I don't have time for that this week as I'm traveling. In the meantime, I got some measurements for the existing buttons and case and now I just need to learn some basic 3D modeling to get a remote shell ready.
IsildursBane | 9 hours ago
Really cool project, and glad to hear you were able to figure out the basics of it. I would suggest before soldering on wires, to plan out the enclosure and the necessary buttons. Do the soldering as the final assembling process. Then, you know how long of wires you need and can also batch all of the soldering in one go. On smaller jobs I find that I am waiting longer for the iron to heat up than I spend actually soldering, so I try and batch my soldering jobs.
artvandelay | 8 hours ago
Good point, since I've got a lot of time before I can even head back to the hackerspace I'll definitely figure out the enclosure first.
Zorind | 11 hours ago
Finally got copyparty set upon my Mac mini to use as a file server for my local network, and got a custom skin/theme working with it (Catppuccin).
It apparently has OPDS support so I was hoping I could also use it to serve books to my kobo via KoReader (instead of also running the Calibre OPDS content server), but I was getting errors when trying to download to my kobo (of course, the error message didn’t render properly on the Kobo so I’m not exactly sure what the issue was). Might spend some time debugging, or just get Calibre also running on the Mac mini.
talesofweirdfl | 11 hours ago
My text game journey continues. For those keeping track, I started learning ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language so I could build my own text game based off of one of my novels. Not to be outdone, I decided that just making a text game was not enough, I need a fun way to display it at my next author event. So it was time to make a cyberdeck.
One Nanuk 910 case later and a LOT of 3d printing failures, I now have a complete screen and keyboard deck in a bright red case. The whole thing runs off a FabGL board (LilyTTGO). It's basically an ESP32 that has VGA and PS2 (keyboard + mouse) with an SDcard running CP/M.
Yes. CP/M.
It's... old.
But the machine boots instantly and I have this great CP/M program for running Z-Code text games called Vezza (shout out to Shawn Sijnstra!) that runs all my games and the old Infocom standbys like Zork and Enchanter, etc.
I'm ready for my next author show with something decidedly different. Will it bring attention to the table? Who knows? Did I have fun making it? Yes.
I've also installed Word Star on it so worst case I can swivel it around and write.
Just Nerdy Author Things. :)
first-must-burn | 3 hours ago
There's a blast from the past! In the fifth grade, I wrote a "novel" in Word Star, printed on a daisy wheel printer, and hand illustrated. It was called The Great Fungus Escape. Doubtless you have read it, or seen one of its many adaptations for film, television, and theater, so I won't bore you with the details.
Gazook89 | 10 hours ago
I've just pushed some small updates to my very hobbyist progressive web app Collider. Originally it was "Bat Signal", then "Kid Collider", now just "Collider".
My real life problem is this: I have a kid who wants to go to the park. They want friends to be there, too. I could spend 30 minutes texting various parents in the neighborhood to see if anyone is free and wants to come over, one at a time, wait for responses, haggling on details like arrival time or exact playground or whatever. Finally get something worked out, but now my kid is tired and ready to go home, etc.
What I really want: As i walk to playground I broadcast some signal to friends that "we are going to this park in 10 minutes" and then just go. If another parent is thinking they want to go to a park, too, they can look at this app and see "hey, someone else is going to this particular park, lets meet them there".
kayelcio | 10 hours ago
Wow, it’s kinda crazy how similar in premise this is to the project I posted. Great minds or something
Gazook89 | 9 hours ago
Wow, i didn't read yours before posting. I made this at the start of the summer but when i shared with friends I hedged a lot, saying "maybe not totally finished, don't use it if you don't want" etc. So not a lot of uptake, and I regret that because all summer there has been this big group text of like 10 people, and only 3 of them are sending out invites etc. A lot of back and forth.
I kept thinking of the old "Check ins" on facebook. I'm not sure if that is still a thing or not, I haven't had facebook in 10 years.
But yeah, we have a lot of the same ideas. I'll sign up for yours and see what else is in there.
kayelcio | 9 hours ago
The cold start problem is real. And funnily enough the inspiration for mine was born out of old aol instant messenger away messages, but inverted.
streblo | 9 hours ago
Any reason why a "Cool Parents of Gazookville" group chat wouldn't work?
That's what I do and it seems to work pretty well. No one really chats in it, it's just for co-ordination and the occasional meme.
Gazook89 | 9 hours ago
There is a group text of maybe 10 parents that has been the default for the summer.
Some things that fall short:
In my mind, my app is less “loud”…I’m not interjecting with my days plans to a hostage audience. I’m putting a pin on a bulletin board that others can see if they want.
streblo | 9 hours ago
Yea all of that is totally fair. I guess I’m lucky my kids’ play date groups are pretty homogenous. I should have realized that is probably not very common. Good luck with the project!
Macha | 9 hours ago
Working on my farming game off and on. I'm now on week 3.
I've worked on implementing buildings: they have a model (that fades if you go behind them), a foundation, a hitbox, and a number of interactable points (for e.g. doors, noticeboards, etc.). Currently this is setup as a Godot scene for each building, but I'd like to later on move it to the data file loading system eventually. I'll do that when I have more than one building though :) I am quite happy with the pixel art house I've made for the T1 farmhouse.
Previously a lot of this interactable stuff was hardcoded ("Press Y to water", "Press E to harvest", "Press Space to open NPC shop interface") style, and it was all tied to the Player class, but this was going to quickly get messy when I had more than 4 actions, and actions that depend on context like building zones. It also was a horribly unintuitive UI but it worked for testing the functionality. Obviously wasn't intended to be permanent but needed to get the foundations in place for context dependent actions.
I'm thinking of dividing actions into three categories: Primary actions (e.g. "talk to an NPC", "open a chest", "read a sign"), Secondary actions ("Open NPC shop UI", "Chest Settings"), and Item Actions ("use the tool you're currently holding", "plant the seed you're currently holding"). I've set up a proper hotbar system to enable this. The other ways games handle it are either like Stardew shops where they split the interactable for the NPC and their other roles (e.g. the "NPC" shop is actually the shop counter), or where the "primary" interaction just opens a menu if there's multiple options. Maybe overthinking what I want the code interface to be for calling that. I don't want it reaching into a bunch of globals for easier implementation of future multiplayer and save/load.
The other next step is save/restore of zone state (e.g. crops placement) which is needed for save/load obviously, but also for zone transitions (like entering buildings). I may throw a main menu and load/save interface in while touching on this anyway.
Durinthal | 9 hours ago
I'm currently getting up to speed on modern web security from the server side and all the proper headers to set as it's been a while since I've had to explicitly think about such things. If anyone has a convenient overview or other resources for what current best practices are I'd welcome it, sometimes it's hard to tell when something's outdated.