RGBMatrixEmulator VS exhibitor

https://github.com/ty-porter/RGBMatrixEmulator

One of the side projects I work on is a scoreboard that displays MLB scores. It's highly configurable -- you buy the size panel you want and a Raspberry Pi, install the software, and you can configure it to display games, standings, and news headlines for your favorite team or division.

The problem is that the hardware is purchased by the end user, so it can come in many different sizes. I think we officially support 6 or 7 sizes right now, and each panel can be a chunk of change if you get a nice one. If we wanted to test on every device that means I need to shell out 50 bucks x 7 sizes, plus Raspberry Pi and wiring adapter, so not insignificant for a hobby project. Instead, I wrote a drop-in replacement emulator that makes it super simple to emulate any size panel across a variety of display types.

The most advanced display adapter spins up a minimal webserver and serves emulated images over a websocket, meaning you can display your panel over the network on pretty much any device with a web browser.

I write about it quite a bit, if further interested: https://blog.ty-porter.dev/categories.html#emulation-ref

Hi guys, I'm the developer behind RGBMatrixEmulator, a Python library to emulate LED matrices that run on Raspberry Pi via rpi-rgb-led-matrix driver library by Henner Zeller.

I maintain RGBMatrixEmulator, a Raspberry Pi LED matrix emulator written in Python. It emulates the Python bindings provided by rpi-rgb-led-matrix, the most common LED matrix driver beginners choose when writing code for LED displays.

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling like it's a 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable than Ladle, but something much simpler and less intrusive than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

Exhibitor, a snappy & delightful React component workshop, is GA. My aim is for Exhibitor to be an extremely fast, easy to use, and delightful tool for creating front-end component libraries.

It's been around 2 months since my last mention and quite a tonne has changed.

Wiki: https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/wiki

Looks interesting. Coincidentally, I've just completed the bulk of work on a distributed Websocket network system to synchronize certain bits of state between multiple clients for my own kind of Storybook tool [0]. How interesting!

This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy, grass-roots, novice-like, etc.

Good work :)

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/pull/22

I was a bit deflated when my submission about https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor fell through the HN floor-boards.

Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.

...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.