Somehow I spend half this month reviving dead laptops that are required for live productions. In the free moments I've made a bit of progress in Megapixels and dealt with a lot of the general busywork of having a lot of random open source repositories and still haven't managed to get to all of them. Hopefully I'll manage to fix up a few more things now we've entered the last month of the year already :)

Megapixels

It's nice to see a few people trying to bring up libmegapixels on their devices. It's a great way to find more edge-cases that haven't been dealt with and things that need better documentation.

  • Written new documentation for the libmegapixels config files since people are trying to port devices now and I've realized the only reference for the config format is the blog post.
  • Fixed up the license for the libmegapixels repository
  • Kristian fixed up the color matrices in libdng so this can get passed through nicely from Megapixels

RackCat

I had to build a audio projection rack this month and ran into the issue I've ran into many times before when designing racks for events. It's annoying to visualize the rack beforehand and figure out where everything will fit. It would also be nice to have a quick and visual way to see how things will match together in a rack that's loaded from both sides.

I've spend a weekend making the initial version of RackCat: a WebGL based 19" rack design tool.

It has a view to see the rack cut in half to visualize the depth of equipment and two perspective views for the front and back. It has a lot of rough edges in the procedurally generated rack case and the equipment is only blank plates with thickness for now.

The plan is to add a database to this with hardware dimensions of various popular rackmounted devices and also have preset dimensions of common rack cases. Pasting frontpanel pictures on the devices should also technically be pretty easy but I've not figured out the UX for it yet.

You can play around with the tool at https://brixitcdn.net/rackcat/

Other projects

  • The OSHW thermometer project I mentioned in the previous post is coming along nicely. The first hardware revision is nearly perfect but the display isn't working. It does allow pushing readings to MQTT now though and has SNMP support. The firmware is at https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/bbq-firmware
  • Modelled a few entities for betamine to help that project get closer to a perfect recreation of Minecraft 1.7.3 beta.
  • Made a new firmware revision for the audio mixers for FOSDEM, looks like the hardware is still on track for FOSDEM 2025. The new revision adds dynamics and EQ controls for the inputs to help with microhone handling noise.
  • Received the breakout boards for the Teranex frontpanel project. I've mapped out most pins on the propriatary connector but am now stuck at figuring out the controller type for the display. The buttons, leds and rotary encoder are functional though.
  • Fixed up a few installation issues with Miniseries and made a second production setup mirroring an installation with InfluxDB and all the glue scripts I've previously written for that. It seems to keep up nicely but lacks a few calculation options I require for that setup.