You don't need a crazy product like this, you just need a bolt-on bike computer mount, then.
This is e-waste. This could just be a decent bike computer and a light that you could slap on to any bike, but they had to go and make a thing that forces me to replace the handlebars that I picked to match my body and riding style? An expensive electronic thing that i can't remove from my bike? No thanks.
I've started using Thumb-Key recently. I'm still very slow on it, but it is interesting, so I'm trying to give it a fair shake.
I think you have some fundamental confusion.
First, the ESP32 only has firmware because it is a microcontroller and does not have an operating system. It is also primarily a network client that requests data from a service running on a network host. And it also acts as a server on initial boot to host a web UI for configuring WiFi credentials.
Second, Home Assistant is a whole can of worms, but big parts of that are services that run continuously on the machine you install it on that are listening for requests over the network. This is how you access the web UI from a browser. This is how you access the UI from a Home Assistant app on your phone. This is how networked IoT devices send data to Home Assistant. Home Assistant is fairly useless without these services running continuously and doing that makes the machine you run it on what we would colloquially call a "server" or "host".
That's it. That's what self-hosting is. Yes, sometimes you could be also serving data over the internet or have something to do with "the cloud", but that's not necessarily the case, and with the stuff that I host at home, often not.
Your laptop could be a server, depending on what you install on it, but this dichotomy you laid out of "either hosting is only for cloud stuff or, if you have any computer, you are always self-hosting" is just not based in reality. There are fuzzy edges to what it means to be a server, but they're not anywhere close to that fuzzy.
Also, you're making "modify the firmware" into this big monster that it is just not. You don't have to learn a programming language. You don't have to maintain a fork. You're changing one line and running a few commands. They have a tutorial that walks you through it. It's really easy.
On top of that, like I said in another comment responding to you, the need to modify firmware is temporary.
This laptop certainly isn't for everyone. I currently have a Framework as my daily, and it's nice. I won't be getting this because I just can't justify the cost. I did, however, order a Pocket Reform, which I am very excited for. My goal is to eventually go from android phone to dumbphone for emergencies + pocket reform.
Even if you don't have external access to Home Assistant, you're still hosting it to your local network by yourself
You're right, they could. This issue was opened 2 days ago.
EDIT: From this comment, it looks like they're working on it
I'm pretty sure the older version of their keyboard had fewer key sizes, but they moved away from that to make the stagger between the rows closer to what people are used to.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the implementation, but my understanding from the very brief information available is that you get on your device, connect to their server to pay a fee, and then a key is created for you and then you can access the endpoints running on the device either through the server or directly with REST calls.
There are no endpoints running on the device. The API endpoints are hosted on their server. The device just sends requests to their server (or yours if you change one line in the firmware) for a bitmap image and a time it should wait until the next refresh. Then it goes to sleep until the response said it should make it's next request.
The alternative is to teardown the device and build your own custom firmware that uses different authentication mechanisms. I don’t really have the interest to mod the firmware and then have to maintain a fork for getting official updates.
No teardown necessary. Just plug in a usb cable and connect it to your pc.
No, with home assistant they have a cloud server that has additional functionality that you can use or not. Home Assistant doesn’t restrict access to the software on device it’s running on.
That is also the case here. Both require self-hosting your own server that is open-source for free use. Both have paid cloud services with extended functionality. The differences are that Home Assistant always requires self-hosting, and is not set up with cloud services by default, while TRMNL is set up with (free as in beer) cloud services by default which can be extended with more functionality for a fee, and doesn't require self-hosting if you use their cloud services.
You’re allowed to modify the firmware to use a self hosted server for that functionality without violating the license, which is better than nothing, but then it’s up to you to maintain your fork of the firmware.
Sure, maintaining a fork is a bit of overhead, but it likely could just be a simple git patch that you apply on top of the most recent release to change the URL.
Why not just only require the key if you’re connecting to their server and allow you to select your own server without needing to modify and maintain a fork of the firmware?
Because it's an ESP32, they want it to be plug-and-play for those who want that, and they want the battery to last as long as possible.
A few friends asked for me to walk through how I set up the dashboard I have in my kitchen, so I figured I'd share it here, too. Here is a barebones walkthrough with config files.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/4506191
I've used sleek as my primary todo.txt UI for a while now, and I'm really happy with it. If you are interested in a simple, but useful way to put together a todo list in plaintext, the todo.txt spec is a great way to handle it, and sleek is by far the nicest GUI I've found.
About a week ago, I ran into a minor annoyance with an edge use-case that I have, and I wrote about it in the sleek github discussion page. Within 4 days, the maintainer of the project had a new build ready that fixed my issue. Nobody else said they needed it, but they took the time to add the feature I requested and now my workflow is that much easier.
I know not every project is like this, or can be like this, but there's no way that something like this would get added at anywhere near this pace in proprietary software. I, for one, am super grateful that software like this and the people that maintain it exist. Thank you.
Please check out sleek!
I've used sleek as my primary todo.txt UI for a while now, and I'm really happy with it. If you are interested in a simple, but useful way to put together a todo list in plaintext, the todo.txt spec is a great way to handle it, and sleek is by far the nicest GUI I've found.
About a week ago, I ran into a minor annoyance with an edge use-case that I have, and I wrote about it in the sleek github discussion page. Within 4 days, the maintainer of the project had a new build ready that fixed my issue. Nobody else said they needed it, but they took the time to add the feature I requested and now my workflow is that much easier.
I know not every project is like this, or can be like this, but there's no way that something like this would get added at anywhere near this pace in proprietary software. I, for one, am super grateful that software like this and the people that maintain it exist. Thank you.
Please check out sleek!
Oh, I'm definitely upset about ebikes with motors and batteries integrated in the frames, with no replacement parts available. Often you can't even install used parts because the firmware needs to be flashed by a dealer for your specific bike.
I own an ebike now and I've built one in the past. The one I built had a powerful mid-drive motor and could easily have been reverted to a normal bike (I got hit by a car before I ever got to think about that) and the ebike I have now has a basic bafang hub motor with a bolt-on battery, all of which I could easily replace if they failed.
The motor controllers on both bikes are/were also able to be reflashed or replaced without going to a specific dealer.
There is no reason that companies could not design ebikes and their components to be repairable, replaceable, and reprogrammed by users except for profit, and it's gross as hell.