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🕑 Added 2023-12-14 07:27:52 +0000 UTCWow. I went out on a holiday vacation with my family, and while I was gone SO much happened, or is happening. Here's the latest on the project, the next few months, some recent issues and more!
First up...this month:
This month we had 3 image packs released to the store. "Lighthouses" are some nice photos for those that enjoy the guardians of the sea, "Middle of a Journey" is some new AI artwork, and "Holiday Image pack" are some with some nice images that were generated or found on sites like Pixabay. I'm working on finishing up the unsplash plugin still and hope to have it out by months end.
We've had some amazing feedback this month in the Discord for both issues to fix, features to add, but also some areas where we just aren't handling things well. On our side this creates a ton of investigations to find out what's going on, some planning on how to fix it, and some thoughts on how to design things better overall. In the end we'll be doing work in the next few months which will improve quite a few things...some are small things, but others will take much more work to fix correctly, but will result in quite a bit better system overall. More about that in the 'future' portion below.
Also, Video performance broke recently. We take the latest VLC builds (or we used to...we're going to stop doing that after this break :) ). if your videos are jerky or look incorrect we'll have a code out soon to update to to fix that. We narrowed that one down and it was a VLC release that just put us on the floor. We're going to lock to a certain known working version for the future.
We are working on a bugfix update that will hopefully resolve some of the bugs that have been found this month . Some things like the infobar not correclty going away, the initial page not being able to be clicked on and some other issues are being worked on. We're also working on a better test process to catch these issues earlier.
One major issue we discovered is our overlay engine is not reliable and is taking down the system after a bit. I've tried some fixes and don't have a solution yet, this will be some work for January.
So what's next?
Well, on one hand I'm incredibly excited for what's next, on the other....it's going to take alot of work. The project has reached a point where to move forward, we're going to have to break some major things, and it may even look like we move backwards at first. So let's lay out what major changes we're looking at and why they'll be amazing down the line:
1 - OS Update
Right now we're 2 OS version back (we're on Raspbian buster) from what the 'current' OS is. This doesn't include patches and such..this is 2 Major versions back. The current version of Raspbian which the Raspberry pi uses is called Bookworm. We need to move to this for so many reasons...security is a major one, Pi5 support is another. But also support....there's a ton of performance and features in the OS that we're not getting currently because we're on an old version, so we need to do this. The hard part is it breaks...SO much. Rotation, window layering, turning the screen on/off, wifi and more all were broken when we tried to move. The good news...we have MOST of it figured out and are working on fixing it. We've made a ton of progress and in the new year we'll attack this in a big way. The REALLY good news....overlays work on top of videos with these fixes and that's something we've wanted for a very long time. It opens up some very cool uses in the long term.
2 - Avalonia update
Avalonia is the name of the 'middleware' or platform that we build on. We're an entire version out of date, and that means that things like the overaly issue I'm working on may actually be fixed, but until we get this updated and current we wont know. There's alot of work to get this to happen, but we'll get it working. This may enable some nice features down the road, for now I'll take the performance and stability bump we're hoping for :)
3- Web engine update
Many of you have noticed that the webpages that configure Dynaframe are getting a bit long in the tooth. Things like the upload page will fail if too many images are thrown at it. Sometimes the web page hangs for quite a bit while the system is busy. HTTPS doesn't work. We built a web host from the ground up, and when it was a simpel config page that was...usable. Now that we're doing so much more with the system and wanting to add even more, plus we want to modernize the web page experiences...we need a proper engine with REST support. This means moving to a proper web engine (ASP.net). I've been investigating what that looks like and will meet with the team in January to understand if we are looking at doing all three of these changes as one big one, or if we try to take them one at a time.
A new, proper web engine will allow us to use technologies which will make updating the web pages MUCH easier and more powerful. What we use now is called 'client side' web pages..we can't do much server side stuff so interactivity that you may see on other webistes just isn't as posible. When we take the update here we'll be able to redo the web pages and redesign them to be faster, responsive, provide feedback and much more.
One thing to prepare for...when we take the OS change...we will have to release it as a brand new image (no update code will be possible). This is true of raspberry pi's in general, not just Dynaframe ones. To prepare for this we'll give instructions on how to backup your images and settings files to make it as seamless as possible.
So that's the latest. We see the issues/bugs coming in, the requests, and so on. We're discussing the best path forward to balance getting features to everyone, but also taking the time to make these big architecture bets and really make this thing the next level of awesome that we know it can be!
Thankyou for the support, the belief in us, the comments and passion. We're seeing some cool builds in the discord, and some great conversations going on. We see plugins starting to get some usage and we're going to take the feedback on those and start getting those updated alongside the rest!
But first, we'll take some time with families for the holidays. Happy Holidays everyone!
