Clarity, at a glance.

I just wanted to shout out TRMNL.

They have an interesting product, and they’re trying to build a business that includes a lot of open source aspects.

The device that they sell is proprietary, but it’s also just an ESP32, screen, enclosure, and battery, with a custom PCB for convenience. They plan to add instructions to build your own device, and their firmware is open source under a GPLv3 license.

By default, their device connects to their servers, and they have a slick web configuration tool for people who don’t care about having smart devices call home, but you can easily modify the firmware to connect to your own self-hosted server instead. As of this evening, both the Phoenix and Sinatra server implementations are open source under an MIT license after I pointed out that they had no license in an issue, and they pretty much immediately updated the repositories.

There are two other repositories that they have not added a license to, but given their swift response, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and I would expect them to be updated shortly.

They have not shared all of the plugins that are available on their hosted service for use on a self-hosted instance, but a few are available for use and there are many plugins made by others available as well!

As soon as they update those last two repositories, I plan to pre-order one (unlike the conceptually cool VU Dials who’s creators still have not added a license even after being called out by the co-creator of Rocky Linux).

    • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      11·
      7 months ago

      But were talking about firmware here. My computer also has firmware and an OS. I never have to touch that. Home Assistant is an application that I run on a computer. And I don’t have to modify the code in Home Assistant to get it to connect to another device. I just configure it.

      I also install Linux on my laptop. Is that self hosting, too? We’re not talking about a server or a “host” other than the hardware device itself that lives in the house. If I want the server functionality, sure that’s self hosting the server software. Firmware and operating systems are generally not referred to as self-hosting since all devices need those things. Self-hosting refers generally to cloud-based applications, not standalone hardware firmware/OS.

      This is a hardware device that is hard coded to connect only to a specific server that you have to pay to access if you want any API functionality. If I want to use my own I have to learn the programming language, figure out how to modify the Firmware, and then maintain a fork of that firmware indefinitely including making sure that there are no automatic updates since that would overwrite the modifications.