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1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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niccl ◴[] No.35737795[source]
Not sure if this counts:

A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons I like doing live control along with the music (known as busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I built my own

It has 36 motorised faders and a bunch of other boards with buttons, that each ave their own AtTiny to run the function, they talk to a BeagleBone Black which runs the main code loop and uses its on board realtime processors to generate DMX, and a raspberry Pi to run the GUI for configuration.

Worked a treat most of the time, and I've done hundreds of shows with it, with crowds of up to 400 people, Sadly, I made a dumb decision on the protocol for the fader and button boards to talk to the BeagleBone and every now and then it causes a kernel panic on the Beaglebone, which means at best you lose control of the lights and at worst it goes dark on stage.

I started a redesign using a more sensible protocol but got hit by a double whammy of Covid killing the live music scene for a couple of years, plus the all the supply chain issues, so it's on hold now.

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loansindi ◴[] No.35747206[source]
If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).

I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even without anything approaching build documentation.

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1. rafamvc ◴[] No.35748078[source]
I'm interested in this as well. Would love to collaborate.