qdot76367

I have a pile of phones on my desk going back several generations because I've wanted to build exactly this but it's been a constant "soon" project.

Thank you for accelerating "soon". This is wonderful.

Same thing we work on every night, pinky

https://buttplug.io

Been using this the past week and damn it's nice.

Furries would like to have a word.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/kDYf9

Awww shucks, thanks :D

Woah! Hi!

I'm qDot, creator and project lead of https://buttplug.io!

We're already well off the front page but feel free to AMA. :)

Ugh, continuing the dialog of Levy, Pearson, and Realbotix, all of whom are violently overquoted at this point. Levy’s original thesis was boring and heteronormative when it was published almost 20 years ago, and is worse while not having been redeveloped at all now. Pearson is also well know for “women will implant ipods in their breasts” and what not, he’s the futurist you can get to say anything for a good daily mail quote. Realbotix basically exists to get press at CES and that’s about it.

Glad that the article does take the whole subject to task but I’m just kinda ready to move on to something more useful. It’s a continued media engagement over things that were vacuous to begin with.

(Granted I work in the industry so this is also a case of massive overexposure heh.)

There’s interesting stuff happening in sex tech, but sex with robots sure ain’t it.

Hi fox.

Akili Interactive, who made the product this 2020 report is about, eventually SPAC’d their way public but ended up being sold off to private equity in March 2024.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/adhd-game-developer-ak...

ahk, the ultimate cheat tool

I mod games to add buttplug.io support.

Most of my users seem to agree that yes, it is more reward than just playing the game.

Ah, it's good to see you continuing your work with types of robots that start with f.

With repos titled "buttplug-rs-ffi" and “buttplug-xamarin-apps,” it seems like you're trying to make sure every platform knows just how much you care about "intimate hardware control," but really, are you just trying to make it impossible for anyone to look you in the eye?

Keep doing you, Buttplug; just remember, the internet is forever, and so is that awkward curiosity about your profile!

This isn’t a roast, it’s just correct

I spend a nontrivial portion of my life crying.

Android Bluetooth is a constant nightmare for me as a basically solo open source developer. I really don't want to buy a bunch of phones to test, and remote hardware testing is $$$.

Yup, exactly this. There's a certain level of confidence/stupidity required to put "maintainer of a sex toy control library" on your resume, and I'm interested in talking to people who are willing to take a risk on figuring out which one of those I am.

Searched for "Buttplugs".

My name pops up.

Hell yeah. A++++ completely accurate would use again.

Oh my god this is amazing. There is so much to dig through here. Thanks!

Also fantastic github account names.

I really wish more headsets had eye tracking available, I've wanted to play with UX for multi-video/image gooning interfaces with gaze direction. Unfortunately headsets with that available built-in aren't cheap and the DIY solutions are still somewhat tedious.

Would love to discuss these use cases more though, feel free to contact me via one of the methods in my HN bio!

Also, if you're curious about web focused solutions to these issues, this is the perfect time to bring up a friend of our project, XToys: https://xtoys.app.

It's a fully web based (though closed source) toy control application that supports about as many devices as I do, plus a bunch of others that I don't, and has Blockly scripting and WebRTC for remote sessions.

It's neat as hell.

Oh lord do I have some stories there. Way back in the nascent Quantified Self days, I ran http://openyou.org, which was basically "Buttplug for consumer health devices" (I mean I guess Buttplug is Buttplug for a specific type of consumer health device but, well, you get the idea).

There's a god damned heart rate profile standard in the bluetooth spec AND YET I'm not sure I ever actually worked on a device that used it. :|

it also really feels like you use 1000 lines of code where 10 will do.

Ok. Let's break this down.

The library currently handles support for 523 different devices from at least 40-50 manufacturers. (https://iostindex.com/?filter0Availability=Available,DIY&fil...).

These devices can connect over bluetooth le, usb (both raw and HID), serial, or one of several network protocols. We support windows, mac, linux, android, iOS, and WASM/web, each having their own HW APIs (or in the case of the mac/iOS crossover, specializations within the API). On several of these platforms there are also massive variations in bluetooth radios, which can cause a huge array of issues.

Each device may have variable actuators, or may also have sensors to take input. They may also require their own keepalives or other specializations specific to their protocol or brand to manage connections.

We then have to generalize commands to make life easier on developers. They send us those generalized commands, from whatever language they like since we abstract into an IPC system and provide a language-agnostic protocol spec, from whatever interconnect they want to use because our connector system is also violently flexible, and we have to convert them into the correct protocol and ship that over the correct bus.

So, since you're curious about why your solution for one device from one brand running through a web browser differs from my library, there you go. It's just a matter of different goals.

Now, if you can do all that in 10 lines, fantastic, I look forward to your library as competition in the future. :3

While I'm glad you've found a solution that works for your case, I can't tell you why you were seeing latency in our library that wasn't also in the browser. I'm well aware of the JS-to-IPC-to-hardware chain in the browser (I'm the ex-device interfaces lead on firefox, worked with some of the chrome engineers on the development of the hardware focused WebAPIs too) and it's even more complicated than ours.

Depends on where I'm sending the CV! It's always on there in some form, but I can recontextualize the library as a "haptic device management system" if necessary. I've also just basically repeated the design of the system verbatim in architecture focused interviews before.

You're absolutely correct! I mention this elsewhere in the documentation even. Buttplug really is just a userland HID manager at its core. The only specialized part is the context of commands we send to devices.

The original plan (and it may still happen, who knows) was to figure out a way to chop off that top message layer and create a generalized system for doing exactly what you've said. That was going to be called 'deviceplug', and it's why btleplug is under the 'deviceplug' org on github (https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug). I've just never gotten around to it because I'm not quite ready for the additional support burden yet.

All that said, Buttplug is also a haptics experimentation project aimed at finding out what it's like to create a way to communicate about a very specific type of touch via technology and programming. There are specific goals within the project related to that, but the amount of tech required to actually pull that off means I end up with what basically amounts of a fleet management framework. :)

I used to work in self-driving cars waaaay back when (2008-2011, the early days of the current era) and I did pick up some of these ideas from there. :)

Wow, that's awesome! Super curious what project it is you run. (If you don't want to link it to your HN account, feel free to poke me directly, my contact info is in my HN account bio :) )

I don’t really have a ton of interest in maintaining a ble library, it’s just required for my main library. Theres a lot of weirdness around Bluetooth implementations between platforms and now I’m on the hook to either support them or tell users nope. I’d rather be doing neither and just be the user or someone else’s nice cross platform Bluetooth rust library. (Luckily we do have some fantastic contributors)

1000s at least. We don’t have any detailed metrics because the data privacy issues there are… a lot, but going by download numbers and knowledge of platforms and some of the larger applications, it’s a decent number.

Bluetooth is bad at a spiritual level