Making the Lefant LS1 a good citizen with LocalTuya Following on from lamps doing strange things, the next device I noticed that was being noisy on the network was our robot vacuum. It also phones home very regularly, but only at about 1 request per second, much more sensible (not). The vacuum we bought is the Lefant LS1. It
Lightbulbs behaving badly As many houses surely do, we have a few 'smart' lightbulbs dotted around the place. For the most part, they work as intended. They can do all the pretty colors, the can do dimming, and they don't do things unless you ask them to. There's one tiny issue with them
Arguing with audio processors There's quite a long chain of moving parts that takes sound from sources on stage through to the speakers. One of the last parts is the audio processor, or sometimes the crossover. At Hex, we use processors by Void, specifically the DigiDrive v2. They're great little boxes, taking 4 inputs
Rust VBAN to Rust to XCtrl and back again I found another X-Touch quirk. If you give it too much to think about, too often, it'll just fall over. Hats off to the little board inside, it keeps trying to reconnect back out, but never seems to make it. Probably an interesting overflow case going on there somewhere! Turns
XCtrl XCtrl quirks While working with the XCtrl protocol (and the X-Touch), I found myself throwing shedloads of packets at it whenever any state changed. These packets could be as little as four bytes long (in the case of a meter update). A bit of experimentation though, and it turns out you can
VBAN Spouting VBAN into Ruby The VBAN protocol is what drives the best parts of VoiceMeeter. It has a pretty friendly spec document, and a brief implementation on GitHub by the original author. Outside of this, it's pretty much a best-guess with experimentation on speaking the language. There's a very helpful Python implementation too that
XCtrl The XCtrl story There's a brilliant document written by 'FK' that basically reverse-engineered the XCtrl protocol for when talking over a USB connection. I've been building on that work to speak to the desk over the network directly. The main communication takes place on UDP port 10111, and uses the same messages as
VBAN The wonderful world of digital audio I've always been fascinated by digital audio. How is it that hundreds of channels of extremely high quality audio can be shuffled around a stadium in near real-time, processed, mixed, and broadcast? I've made a few attempts at playing with networked audio, none very successful. There seems to be a
