It was a relatively minor project too, like under $75. People get angry fast over relatively low amounts of money. I get that’s not nothing and kind of a lot to a lot of people but I had spent at least 3x that prototyping it so I was not really sympathetic, given I barely any profit at all (I made a $100 profit on the group buy given how I priced it but this mainly got me my unit for free plus about $20-30 extra, which didn’t even begin to offset prototyping costs)

If I ever do it again I will do it with full transparency. I don’t know if that will work any better but I will say look, this is what I spent making this thing both in raw dollars and hours, I would appreciate some return on that, and then see what happens. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed

One guy I knew had a picture of himself giving finger guns as his background and whenever he unlocked his phone he would smirk at it like “oh you”

It wasn’t his lock screen either, just the home screen, so he knew it looked sketch

as someone who has done a (much less ambitious and smaller) project like this with a group buy I can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be for the project to be picked up and promoted by a huge tech blog in the planning stage

Here was my experience:

Post my project Like 125 posts of questions, people saying “oh that’s cool”, “that’s dumb, why didn’t you do it like this you stupid idiot”, etc Open form for interest in group buy 200ish people apply Get quote from mfr based on rate Send price out

About 20 people reply “go for it”, about 20 reply “sorry I can’t afford that”, about 10 reply “that’s fucking ridiculous you thief” (I am literally only charging them cost plus less than $10 to cover my unit to help offset prototyping costs), and 150 ghost

After waiting a week or so I have to get a new quote because now the run will be 20 units, 1/10th the volume, so we lose bulk discount. Price goes up considerably. I email/post to let everyone know what’s up, they’re basically all mad, several more drop out, I get an email telling me to kill myself and refund their money immediately (I do refund their money but I stay alive). The thread now has a person who is posting often about how I’m a cheat who is stealing everyone’s money

I finally can order and do. I send out confirmation and let everyone know units are ordered. I post in the thread and that guy says I’m lying. Manufacturing boards takes a bit of time. The guy in the thread posts that jlcpcb can manufacture a board in 24 hours but doesn’t get queues, or that they don’t stock literally every single part in the world and sometimes you have to ship them parts, we didn’t do this priority because it’s a vanity project and we’re doing it cheap, etc. my mental health is worsening and I get emails from people who have been nice that are clearly getting impatient, and I have to explain that it’s coming from china and stuff from china can take a while

It finally shows up, I test them, and I ship them out with insured tracking numbers, thankfully they all arrive, and then the tone of the thread quickly changes to how great I am. People immediately post about how cool the thing I made is, which raises my ego quite a bit. However it is dashed quickly by people asking for a second group buy because they couldn’t get in on the first. I am frustrated because I can see that some of these people are ones who absolutely did get in on the first. I decline to do another and post the plans on github, deciding that I don’t have the chutzpah to monetize it

My project was dumb niche nerd shit. I mean, this is too, but this is way more high level than what I did. And a google form posted on Tom’s hardware? My dude is gonna get hundreds, if not thousands of replies. Some of those are gonna be in different languages. I weep for them.

This is an exciting development. I hope they or someone eventually expands the line once it moves out of preview

For all the shit they deservedly get amazon, google, apple have kind of got the form factor down on this. I don’t want to have to connect an atom pc or home assistant box. I don’t want to have to connect speakers. I want a puck that has the requisite processing power and moderately okay sound quality so there’s not a bunch of garbage and cables shitting up my living room

Plus if I have a house with multiple rooms (which I do) I want to have the flexibility to buy a couple of these for coverage across areas. And in some of those areas it’s even less acceptable for all that mess. Voice control is most helpful in the kitchen; I can set timers, play music, increase lighting, etc while my hands are busy cooking. While I don’t mind that plastic box on my counter (or even something a bit larger) I very much mind a rats nest of cables connecting 2 boxes that don’t look alike and some computer speakers that don’t match at all or some bluetooth speaker or whatever

I’m sure that greatly increases the engineering burden though so we will see. It’s certainly beyond my pay grade to design such a thing but I would absolutely financially support them if they brought such a product to market

Ridiculous tv that probably has a 5 figure price tag

Can’t be bothered to write an os, puts one of the most ad laden garbage tv os’ on it

“Check out my $23,000 116” tv! The menu ads that pop up over the content you’re watching are so big!”

Hisense makes shit TVs too, poor qc and cut corners on build quality. When they work they can look good but they are built as cheap as humanly possible in a product sector defined by manufacturers cutting corners everywhere

No front light means the pen nib is closer to the actual panel which is meaningful to some people

That said I would hesitate to buy a $650 device from boox. Their customer support is absolutely atrocious from a hardware standpoint. If you have issues with software they’re pretty great as long as the device is current; they’ll generally respond (relatively) quickly and if the device is newish it’s not crazy to see suggestions and concerns rolled into software updates

But hardware problems? Absolute nightmare. If the damage is your fault be prepared for extremely hefty repair fees. Then on top of that expensive shipping, lengthy repair times, and poor quality repairs. My boox tab cost $350 to repair (plus $35 shipping) for a cracked panel. The new panel came back with at least 10 dead or stuck pixels (three clusters brightly stuck on in the top left of the screen being the most annoying), frontlight bleed around the edges of the glass because they reinstalled it poorly, the wifi signal is noticeably weaker, and the fingerprint reader doesn’t work at all.

Their solution was that I could pay another $30-40 and wait another 3-4 weeks so they could fix the fingerprint reader but the screen is what it is because dead/stuck pixels only count if they’re in the center 30% of the screen. They did not acknowledge any of the other issues because their support is also just not very good

The fingerprint reader was useful but not worth them potentially fucking it up worse so I just use it as is now. Someday I’ll probably open it myself. I have a sneaking suspicion either a ribbon for the reader needs to just be reseated or they tore it during the repair. If it’s the former easy fix, if it’s the latter then it’s screwed anyway

So I guess if you buy this thing baby the hell out of it and hope they actually warranty it if something does go wrong

Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)

I will try this out, thanks!

Any idea if playlists can directly work in external but non Jellyfin apps like finamp or kodi with Jellyfin for kodi? If not can playlists be saved/exported for use in those contexts?

Theoretically possible but someone would have to reverse engineer the protocol and write a new service that works based on that

There are some projects but all that I’ve seen are open source head units that either: are terrible and aren’t android auto/carplay (eg they only have the most basic of integration, can show notifications and play music via Bluetooth) or they emulate android auto/carplay without the necessary licensing/hardware (so you still ultimately rely on google/apple)