Week #807
Our WebRTC project has somewhat stalled. We meet normally on Fridays, and the consensus is that it’s moving too slowly between bug reports and fixes. We proposed to meet on Wednesdays for a short time, then Fridays to organize priorities. This week, they cancelled the Wednesday meeting (not sure why), then last minute cancelled the Friday meeting. Which is annoying because we spent some time over the previous weekend and Tuesday night to fix the immediate issues for review. Now we’re another week to two weeks behind.
This week we’ve flashed the firmware on more devices, more times than we’ve done in the last few years combined. Two projects needed to update hardware. One being some security cameras, the other is an ESP32 to control some LEDs.
The LED project continues, we’re trying to get any sort of feedback from the model builder about how they have installed the LEDs and what we can expect. We need some sort of ballpark on how many LEDs are installed, which impacts the power consumption and how many lines/universes were created, which affects the software an the pin connections to the ESP32.
As part of the survey research company our current CEO is taking a leave of absences for health reasons. The rest of the team will setup and we’ll shuffle some responsibilities around, but it does mean both some extra work for us and also no new developments for the next school year.
On Thursday we published an article about another internal app Rest Music. We’ve made it public, it is our music app for the rest of our collection.
As another late-night side project, we attempted to make a new camera app. We have a really good framework for experimenting with camera apps for the iPhone. In photography there is a concept of “Color Splash” where only 1 part of the image is in color and the rest is in black and white. It is completely possible todo this in post-production, but we really like the idea of producing these effects in camera so you can better frame your shot.
Color Splash Camera was born. You can select a color hue range and in real-time, remove the saturation from all the pixels not in that range. It isn’t perfect, but as a first pass it works incredibly well.
Week #808
Monday was a public holiday in Iceland.
On Tuesday, we had a few meetings and started more planning. One project is now “un-officially” wrapped-up. The fixed we’re doing on the front-end are very minor.
We also got an update on our LED project. We’ve spec’ed out some hardware and software with our 300 LED test. Today we got an updated on roughly the number of LEDs to expect and it is 1.4-1.5 orders of magnitude more. It’s not unconceivable we can handle that on the software side, but we need to go back to the drawing board on how we’re going to power and connect all these lines/universes. On Friday morning, the LED count was back down to only 1 order of magnitude more. Still no idea how many lines, but we’ll get those answers soon.
It is August now and we’re oiling the machine and starting to turn the cranks to get the school survey system back up and running. Over the summer we added a few new features, updated the libraries and conducted general maintenance. Now it is time to deploy these changes and start to lockdown the releases before customers start using it.
Along with our regular bank of surveys, we have an extra one we’re adding for a customer. This is very basic, but unique in that instead of test months, they need test weeks. It will be highly compressed schedule for the whole school year.
On Friday we had a meeting about another project we’re trying to wrap-up. The client is hung-up on one tiny aspect, it is an important part of the product, but it is solvable in the long term. We convinced them to table that issue so we can work through all the rest in the meantime. That seemed to work and we’ll continue testing.
Bric-à-brac
We were outside the office in downtown Reykjavik this week. We’re right under the flight path for the downtown airport. We got buzzed by the Red Bull Flying Bulls P-38!
The P-38 is a very rare WWII plane worth millions of dollars. There are exhibitions to Greenland to try to dig out the ones that crash landed. No matter what the cost of the salvage it’s worth it.