I use opnsense with an aliexpress n100 router. It works very well and I enjoy it. But upgrades scare the crap out of me. I've only had 1 upgrade where things went bad. I have zfs snapshots and everything, but just because its a headless unit, I get super anxiety upgrading the system waiting for the beeps for it to come back online.
I thought it would be cool to make some VJ-style visualizations to go along with music on a matrix LED sign. I finally got a quote for one from Aliexpress that can take HDMI input and it was like $900 before shipping. It seems these are a bit more costly than I was expecting because there is a "sending box" that takes HDMI and converts it to some Ethernet protocol. That goes to a bespoke card, and that card is what all the smaller matrix modules plug into to make one big display. Those components apparently are quite expensive.
So I made this little tool with the help of AI to play videos with the look and feel of the real thing so I can start making my visualizations right now until I figure out a cheaper solution. I got some advice to check into neopixel matrix displays. Haven't dug into that but maybe I can get video to play on those from a raspberry pi or something directly, avoiding the need for a sending box.
The soundtouch web api which is what was "open sourced" was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don't think anything actually happened here. I'm so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.
> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: SoundTouch API Documentation (https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...).
AFAIK, the soundtouch web API was already accessible via some bose developer portal. It doesn't seem like they are open sourcing anything. This API just allows you to make basic requests to do things like change volume on the speaker.
To support the smart features of the SoundTouch speakers, we would the soundtouch user management service. Speakers connect to this very frequently and its where refresh tokens for music services and presets are stored. The speaker firmware itself has lots of source code, including the bit to handle music services and playback. There is an abstraction layer for music service APIs. There is a process on the speaker that reaches out to a music service registry, which is an index of bose music service adapters. Each of these adapters essentially proxies a music service like tunein, spotify, and even the "stream a custom station" feature.
If bose open-sourced the speaker firmware, we could make a firmware build which talks to a 3rd party user management service, and reaches out to a 3rd party music service registry. Then we could add and maintain music service playback for the community. But there is no open sourcing of any actual code here and this soundtouch web api cannot change the URLs on the existing firmware of the user management service or the music service registry.
So to my eye this story seems misleading and just some PR nonsense. It's a little frustrating reading all of the "great job, Bose!" comments here like anything was actually done... Disclaimer: I used to work at Bose.
Thanks for this link. Opening reddit links on mobile is very frustrating for me because it opens the app and messes with the browser back button for me. Not sure if others have that problem too.
For the last few years, I've mainly used reddit as a way of sifting through search engine results to a better answer more quickly: e.g. "what is the answer to x reddit". I've been sick of overly SEO-optimized websites that are full of fluff and ads and don't easily surface information. I'm curious, if people do move from reddit, what my new search term will be.