Tom MacWright Prepares Tidbyt Owners for a Future Without Tidbyt's Servers

Developer Tom MacWright is freeing the Tidbyt Internet of Things (IoT) display from its ties to the company that created it, after it was "acquihired" by a serverless AI compute company — planning ahead for when Tidbyt's own servers are switched off for the final time.

"I don’t hold anything against the Tidbyt team: in fact, our Val Town office was coincidentally right next to theirs in a WeWork, and we met in real life! They’re very nice folks, and were doing so much with a small team," MacWright says of the company and its founders. "But realistically, it’s time to make sure my device doesn’t become e-waste. Tidbyt’s stock firmware routes all of its requests through the Tidbyt company’s servers. I want to eliminate that hop."

Tidbyt launched its eponymous smart display four years ago, blowing past its modest $40,000 funding goal in days with the promise of a 64×32 RGB LED matrix you can control from the company's companion app. "One of the biggest critiques of the Tidbyt was that it was just an LED matrix and an [Espressif] ESP[32] chip," MacWright explains. "But that’s also a strength. The Tidbyt is not some custom SoC [System-on-Chip] with an exotic custom software stack and boutique hardware. It is what it looks like: a neat combination of commonplace parts. That makes it kind of future-proof and flexible."

While many off-the-shelf IoT devices are heavily locked down, even those built on general-purpose modules like the Espressif ESP32, the Tidbyt was not: the company released what it described as a "Hardware Development Kit," a pared-down version of the stock firmware, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license — though discouraged its use with a warning that "flashing your Tidbyt with this firmware or derivatives could fatally damage your device," as well as voiding its warranty. It gave MacWright a starting point, though — and a pointer to a more-functional fork.

Using this fork on the Tidbyt hardware, dubbed "tronbyt," MacWright set about creating a custom server, replacing Tidbyt's custom pixlet pixel graphics framework with an alternative of his own. "It’s called indiepixel and it's a Python reimplementation of pixlet. It supports almost the entire pixlet API [Application Programming Interface]," MacWright explains, "and comes with the added benefit of being Python."

MacWright's full write-up is available on his website, while indiepixel has been published on GitHub under an unspecified open source license; the framework is, however, as a work-in-progress, and not all pixlet features are implemented nor compatible with outputting to the Tidbyt.