Nice! I like how developed the software is. Hooking rgb matrices to esp32 is a simple project, but making it display something useful and have nice, documented API is the hardest part.
Thanks! Yup, the hardware has been relatively straightforward compared to the having a reliable, performant backend and good UX for configuring devices. While we've done several hardware revisions, most of the past year has been spent on software.
Buying the individual components to make this at consumer retail price from "reputable" local suppliers still comes to less than half the $199 RRP, so the value clearly comes from the software, which looks nice. But it's a bit disappointing to see that there is no support commitment on that front for such an expensive product.
> While we hope that our company will be around for a long time, we are committed to keeping Tidbyts useful and out of the landfill, long into the future. [...] So even if we're not around, you can upgrade your Tidbyt to keep it from being reliant on Tidbyt, Inc. or our servers.
> I could see a future in which we have a standalone version of the Tidbyt backend that you can run on your server or premises, but that’s not on the current roadmap.
Allowing customers to create their own firmware is better than nothing, but it's not great to rely on this as a fallback from launch. Wasn't there a very early Philips device like this that never found a market and relied on community firmware after the manufacturer lost interest?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] thread> While we hope that our company will be around for a long time, we are committed to keeping Tidbyts useful and out of the landfill, long into the future. [...] So even if we're not around, you can upgrade your Tidbyt to keep it from being reliant on Tidbyt, Inc. or our servers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tidbyt/retro-display?re...
> I could see a future in which we have a standalone version of the Tidbyt backend that you can run on your server or premises, but that’s not on the current roadmap.
https://discuss.tidbyt.com/t/self-hosted-tidbyt-server/330
Allowing customers to create their own firmware is better than nothing, but it's not great to rely on this as a fallback from launch. Wasn't there a very early Philips device like this that never found a market and relied on community firmware after the manufacturer lost interest?