tonelord

After some frustrating attempts to prototype my ideas with electronics, I wondered how I could get a tangible interface with something like paper. OpenCV is surprisingly effective and delightfully experimental and glitchy, with much less compute than modern AI tools. From the README opening:

This project is a demonstration of how to communicate with and control an app from another app. Features the use of a novel OpenCV-based tangible user interface (TUI), mDNS-SD for automatic device discovery and connection over local network, websockets for inter-device messaging and rust-based android development via the NDK.

I wanted to encapsulate a few things I've learned over the years and then recently for this project. So hopefully this inspires someone stumbling across this project.

Beyond that, there are lots of very capable, cheap, usable old Android devices. Building with electronics and Raspberry Pi is cool but maybe we are overlooking what is capable with these phones. There are many directions I want to take this thought.

I've migrated this to codeberg and have now released rev-1:

https://codeberg.org/ohmstone/useful

Also on codeberg:

https://ohmstone.codeberg.page/audiogram/

https://codeberg.org/ohmstone/audiogram

Other projects: https://codeberg.org/ohmstone

I like it too. But I think the training is to realize that human brains are already far behind detecting AI generated content as of 2025/26, and our brains probably won't ever catch up.

While building some software tools for my bass guitar I wanted to create some kind of video series or whatever to share it with others.

I have been using online courses and youtube forever and they all have converged on a similar format. Basically, adapt a textbook to slides and add voiceover. Sometimes they'll be animated. Not for everyone but I like it for passive learning.

Being a web developer I always thought video was a strange way to deliver this information - you can't even copy the text! Videos are also hard to make and heavy on bandwidth. So after iterating on different approaches to this over the last few years, I finally started on a new iteration called useful.

Currently on rev1, so early days: https://github.com/ohmstone/useful/tree/rev-1

There are a few more things I want to add to it but I want to get back to what I was doing (the bass guitar stuff). So I will make few of these website-as-video courses based on my projects to try and prove the concept.

Some of the nerdier features useful has:

- Uses state of the art CPU-based TTS with voice cloning, realistic enough to not be distracting

- Very simple markup language to create the visuals

- Extensible slide content with simple plugin system

- Full website export with complete SEO/social metadata

- Export is a PWA, so it caches nicely and can work offline

- Self-hostable

- Export is optimized for low bandwidth, so it loads way faster than a video and uses <1/10th of the data when served with brotli

- Minimal dependencies

Beyond my own use-case I figured it might be useful for others creating courses. One stretch-goal would be for people to turn what they are learning via LLMs into low-bandwidth courses like this so we don't have people burning energy asking the same questions and watching the same 4K videos.