this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Would that it were that easy to matter as member of the "voting public".
Imagine thinking that sitting on your ass commenting on lemmy is gonna make you matter.
Try going door to door convincing people or something or just stop fucking complaining all the time holy shit.
I love this site. I love the political landscape of it for the most part, but seeing all of this bullshit is starting to get to me bc I know people just like this. People that listen to rage against the machine and say death to all nations but have never done charity work in their life, nor tried to actually push the political agenda they believe in in a meaningful way (commenting online and consuming socialist media doesn't count, sowwy.)
Frankly, it's pitiful.
I spend dozens and dozens of unpaid hours a month in my free time developing open source hardware and software and give the schematics away for free. That dedicated enough for you? You have no idea what goes on in the personal lives of each and every member of a forum, and you're painting us all with a broad brush right now.
I encourage others to reply to this comment on what it is they contribute to their cause. Because I'd be interested to hear that. On the Internet, we're just words on a screen that are easily categorized onto groups of people. But people are individuals, everybody has a story.
Hey! Another open source developer. What are some things you’ve been working on?
I have a completed project up on my Tindie page in my profile, it's an ESP32 based input/output control board powered by PoE that was designed for ESPHome software.
Lately I've been working on a fully featured modern MP3 player with tiny OLED screen and a PCB the size of a credit card. I've been frustrated with every project on the web that has anything to do with playing MP3s, they all kinda suck and most don't go beyond the "hello world" equivalent of playing an MP3 file. So I'm making sort of a "core" base firmware that will include all the basics, like browsing for a file to play, creating/editing playlists, non-blocking interrupt driven playback, internet streaming, and an alarm clock. Others would then be able to extend the functionally of this core system by just directly using its documented libraries and classes. It's all based around an ESP8266 and the VS1053 decoder chip.
As a layman, I don't understand most of what you just said but it sounds like it's a small, cheap, elegant mp3 player for the modern time and that's surprisingly exciting. As enshittification spreads more and more, I wouldn't be surprised to see an upcoming exodus from music streaming subscription platforms and a return to a napster-like boom of music piracy as we collectively realize that we really only like listening to like 200 songs anymore anyway, and storage is absurdly cheap compared to 20ish years ago.
What is the best pitch for why somebody should use your device over the phones most of us have within reach? My hunch is that it's related to privacy or maybe for kids whose parents won't let them have a phone? Or is this purely a personal project that you're not looking to monetize?
It's just something for people to tinker with and modify if they wish, and learn from. Kinda like Arduino microcontroller kits. My goal isn't to produce the next iPod. My goal is to open up the iPod and let anyone build one.
That's really cool! My knowledge and experience only goes about as far as building a desktop PC. I'm playing with duplo blocks and you're over there figuratively the director of R&D at Lego. Best of luck!