um... we've had this posthog-foss repo for years now. No idea why it made front page. This is not news.
Source: I was there
To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.
Can't really complain cause there's nothing better right now.
Compared to the previous gen e-ink (7-color ACeP), the contrast and the colors are so much better. I also have a bunch of 3-color (black/white/red) panels - video and more pictures on https://frameos.net/ ) - and the contrast is similar, but the colors are obviously limited.
The math didn't add up for us (I work at PostHog). At the rate we were scaling, we would have needed an entire call center's worth of highly trained Kubernetes support engineers to debug everyone's "my pods just died" / "Kafka just stopped" / "what is Zookeeper" problems.
This stack isn't straightforward to manage, and we couldn't crack the code of doing it at scale for other people without even having access to their systems. There was no malicious intent.
Re-reading, my tone in the first sentence sounds rather hostile. I apologise for that. I have no ill intent, the joke was likely funnier in my head.
FrameOS is also targeting 60+FPS LCD and other screens, which will be hard for ESP to run. Thus it's for the raspberry. I'd love to scale it down though, and deliberately chose Nim so that it would at least be theoretically possible.
I believe in such places the cost of service and maintenance is many multiples the cost of the initial installation. A $20 "720p hdmi stick" from aliexpress vs a $300 mac mini is a no brainer. 100 mac minis will work reliably and predictably for years to come, whereas 100 random $20-$50 sticks sounds like something that needs constant supervision and maintenance.
That said, a RPi might be enough, depends on the software. That's why FrameOS has HDMI support, to work for such cases. It's still pretty far from being a turnkey solution today, but we could easily get there with some focus at the right time.
I believe the OP here is not playing 1999s music formats on a TV, but referring to MK4 and similar _video_ formats that a portable music player definitely can't play.
I apologize for the confusion, but you do not need to run FrameOS at all. You can just go about your merry day, and either just not use FrameOS, not post this comment, or, if you prefer, not read any of the comments addressing this question before posting yours.
On a serious note, yes, it's planned. The ESP is a very limited chip. If you want to display a BMP from a HTTP source, or a quick calendar, it's great. Try doing HTTPS, image downscaling or any serious processing though. Forget about things like browser screenshots, which you can't even do on 32bit linux anymore. Forget the 60fps mode over HDMI we can now do.
I'll try to get it working regardless, but it's but not a personal priority today over the other items in the todo list. You're free to lend a helping hand of course.
I always say "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid". Your approach to get the dithering right sounds brilliant to me :D.
The current inky driver works great, and that fact that it's in Python is what made me develop the original FrameOS software in Python. However now that I rewrote it in Nim, the Python driver is a bit of a crutch. While I could use the C drivers for the Waveshare displays, I'm forced to install a python wrapper on the Pi as a workaround to get the Inky drivers working.
Do you have any idea if there are any C, or even Nim drivers available for the Inky Impression boards? The Python workaround works, but isn't really elegant. If not, I'm considering porting them myself at some point...
I'm also lurking on the Pimoroni discord, and was meaning to ask there about it as well.
Absolutely! Just hook up your display with a HDMI port to a raspberry, and you're good to go.
If you're fine with just displaying an image from an URL, it'll work today. If you want nicer slideshows or rotating images, you'd have to write some code to make it work, but it's all possible today.
A nicer interface tailored specifically for shop windows slideshows is something that could come at a later date.
I have gotten the new Nim-based FrameOS working with two different Waveshare displays. I have two other ones waiting to be tested. Check this folder [1] for the currently enabled drivers.
One of the next items on my todo list [2] is to add back support for all the different waveshare drivers out there. They all follow a similar pattern, so I should be able to generate "best guess" drivers for most of them.
I was quite shocked at the amount of tiny and large display options out there. I might even make a YouTube video titled "Home dashboards have gotten cheap and easy" with everything I've learned so far.
Take a $15 Pi Zero W 2, and a screen costing anywhere between $50 to $200. 3d-print a case around them both, and for a third of the price of a new iPad, you'll have a simple and secure single function screen in your house...
Oh it's real. When coding an app inside the web editor, you can click a button that effectively sends your code to the GPT4 API, along with some instructions on what it should be. It then displays back the response.
I used to have an iPad (3rd gen) on the wall, then it died. I bought the cheapest new one to replace it, but the old Android tablet I had around had better bluetooth reach, so it went on the wall instead.
Old android tablets are notoriously unpatched against all kinds of things. It's easy to be paranoid that some passing foot traffic will infect it with a bluetooth worm, and you'll be none the wiser.
I'm accepting the risk for now, as I do enjoy configuring Home Assistant on it, and looking at the rainmap, but there are times when when a full tablet is overkill. FrameOS is for those cases.
You're technically right (the best kind?), but there's some nuance to the question.
FrameOS is a compiled binary that runs on top of Linux. At present you need to install the "Raspberry Pi OS Lite" (without the desktop environment) on a SD card before you can install FrameOS itself on top of that. So it's "just an application".
However, this is mostly because it's an early project, and this was the fastest way to get going. The next step is to see how much can be removed. Since FrameOS is a statically compiled single binary, it shouldn't need that much more than the Linux kernel? Will FrameOS be a true OS then? Android seems to be considered its own OS despite using the Linux kernel.
Once activated, FrameOS takes over your entire system, has its own `apps/` and `drivers/` folders, and in many ways already behaves like an Operating System. I'm also pondering about getting it running on an ESP32 (will need to add `drivers/wifi/`?). Without any OS below it, will it then be worthy of being called an OS? You all tell me. :shrug:
Thus is it an Operating System? It is to me, but you can choose to disagree.
At my actual job (PostHog), we sometimes call ourselves the "Product OS". This annoys me more, as a suite of webapps definitely isn't an "Operating System" in its traditional sense. I've seen -OS at the end of other things as well that aren't pure Operating Systems. It slightly bothers me, but mostly because I was around when "what OS you're using" was a defining question. Language is evolving, and "operating system" seems to describe more things to different people, than it does to you and me.
Source: I was there
To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.