Category: Projects

Hello, computer-1

Post author By Tanner
Post date March 26, 2022

Much like the first time I laid eyes on flip dots, when I learned of the computer-1 Mini-ITX case by Teenage Engineering I knew I had to get my hands on it. Maybe I have a thing for bright orange objects.

It’s been a few years since I built my previous PC and the Mini-ITX form factor has always been appealing to me for a workstation, so the hankering to do a new build was strong.

Though I’m a long time nerd it may be surprising that I’ve really only built one custom PC until now. This is mostly due to living in Mac-land and not being a hardcore gamer. My Linux servers have either been in the cloud or a leftover prebuilt that was “good enough” because Linux will pretty much run on anything (and that’s part of the fun).

Specs

The parts I went with are modest and didn’t need to be the latest and greatest. The goal for this build was a dependable workbench machine that won’t be my daily driver (iOS development pays the bills), nor replacing my gaming PC.

Projects

Augmented Airality

Post author By Tanner
Post date March 18, 2022

A project from a few months ago:

I wrote a macOS app that put particles on the screen to show air quality levels. A few floaters? You’re fine.

But if your screen looks like this, get out. 😂 pic.twitter.com/r5tniUZzK6
— Tanner Stokes (@TannerStokes) March 18, 2022

Arduino Fun Projects

A not-quite-Retina external screen

Post author By Tanner
Post date February 11, 2022

The 64×32 @adafruit Matrix Portal is a great device, just possibly a little too low res for an external macOS screen. #notquiteretina 😆 pic.twitter.com/MUzGMQQ3Xi
— Tanner Stokes (@TannerStokes) February 11, 2022

iOS Projects Thoughts

Happy New Year!

Post author By Tanner
Post date January 7, 2022

I gotta get to blogging this year. Just one of my many projects from the holiday break – this obviously isn’t done but it’s a pretty neat stack using Protobuf, RF24 (Arduino to Arduino) to serial on macOS with SwiftUI+SceneKit. pic.twitter.com/P62KpM69Z2
— Tanner Stokes (@TannerStokes) January 6, 2022

Projects Raspberry Pi

Snake Eyes + Servos

Post author By Tanner
Post date October 29, 2021

pic.twitter.com/FdQR7pd0Ut
— Tanner Stokes (@TannerStokes) October 29, 2021

iOS Projects Swift SwiftUI

Wyze Cam in iOS

Post author By Tanner
Post date June 9, 2021

Rapid prototype time! Wyze Cam -> iOS app.

1. Wyze RTSP firmware installed
2. FFmpeg running in Docker to convert RTSP -> HLS
3. Python3 SimpleHTTPServer serving HLS data
3. AVFoundation configured to point to the HLS stream
4. SwiftUI wrapping AVFoundation VC pic.twitter.com/RuSehm11ON
— Tanner Stokes (@TannerStokes) June 9, 2021

Arduino Coding iOS Projects Swift SwiftUI

Flip Dots!

Post author By Tanner
Post date March 31, 2021

I saw flip dots (also called flip discs) last year for the first time and instantly knew I needed some in my life. If you’re not familiar with them, check out how they work!

The particular model I have is the ALFAZETA XY5, which may be the easiest way to get up and running, but certainly not the least expensive.

After getting the board, all you need is:

24V power supply
Something that talks over RS485 (in my case I used an ESP8266 connected to a MAX3485 board)
Their documentation that defines the controller data protocol

I plan to write in more detail how it all works, but for this demo the stack is:

SwiftUI app that runs SwiftGFXWrapper (which is mainly Adafruit’s GFX Library under the hood)
The app sends the entire pixel buffer over UDP to the ESP8266
The ESP8266 sends data to the XY5 over RS485 using their controller’s protocol

Update: Here’s more info on how it all works!

Projects Swift SwiftUI

Playground support for SwiftGFXWrapper

Post author By Tanner
Post date March 29, 2021

For even easier prototyping, I’ve added Swift Playground support to my SwiftGFXWrapper project!

Coding Projects Scripts

Scraping an Arris cable modem status page

Post author By Tanner
Post date March 22, 2021

Screenshot of the modem status page with arrows pointing to a screenshot of the data's final form in Grafana. — This project’s purpose is to start with a status page and end with Grafana graphs and alerts.

It felt good to complete this project that’s been on my list for quite some time. The main goal was to scrape the values from my modem’s status page and pipe them into InfluxDB, which feeds Grafana. Not only could I look at data trends, but I could receive alerts if certain values exceeded an acceptable threshold.

Overall this is a straightforward process:

Pull in the HTML from the status page (which happens to not need any authentication, making it even easier)
Parse the tables we care about (Downstream and Upstream) using XPaths
Munge the data into something suitable for InfluxDB
Insert the data into InfluxDB
Query the InfluxDB data from Grafana

I knew I wanted to use Python for the project, so I first looked into Scrapy. After wrapping my mind around it (somewhat) I gave it a go and actually had a working solution… but it felt way over engineered and at times inflexible for what I wanted. I threw 90% of that solution away and went with a simpler script.

What I landed on was something that’s custom and lightweight, but extendable in case someone has a different status page or wants to use an alternative to InfluxDB.

I’ve had it running for a day and I’m already seeing interesting data!

See the repo on GitHub!

Projects Swift SwiftUI

Adafruit GFX -> Swift

Post author By Tanner
Post date February 15, 2021

Another fun project from a few weekends ago: Wrapping the Adafruit GFX in Objective C and bridging to Swift for some neat 8-bit effects!

The most interesting component of this project so far has been building a Swift closure that is executed in C as a const void *. This was new territory for me and a lot of fun to figure out!

This (work in progress) repo has been open sourced!