Devlog 2

Prototype 2

This is my second prototype.
I looked at my feedback from the first one. The first prototype went well. There were definitely some slicing issues related to the Hilbert curve that I use on top. I don’t think my printer managed to fully capture how cool it looks, so I switched to a bit more of a simple pattern.

I chose another, nicer geometric pattern. I added some screw holes, and I decided to design some arms. It’s like a four-piece arm with some screws, which allow it to stay in place.
I added a little notch on one of the arms, which allows it to stay stable.
I’ll be attaching some photos of P2.

Testing

I tested it, and in terms of stability, it’s much better.
However, there were a couple of issues. Assembling it is still very annoying, simply because of the way I placed the screw holes. It was a little annoying to align the screws.
I don’t think I made the chamfers to guide the screws in very nicely. I probably could have gotten away with larger holes on the arms, just so that they align a bit easier.
I’ happy with how the arms came out. I probably could have gotten away with just a simple shell instead of all that fancy ribbing, but, you know, it’s okay.
Slicing was definitely a pain, but I think I managed to get that done.
It’s looking good, and I would make a P3 if I had the time, but unfortunately, I just don’t have the time. So this is the end of the project.

Future Improvements

In terms of the future, in terms of what I would love to do next, I got some much stronger 8 × 3 magnets, which I would like to use, and definitely figure out some better mounting system.
Unfortunately, my summer vacation is over, so I don’t have the time. Also, I ran out of filament, so I couldn’t print the other three arms.

Ciao!

Devlog 2

First Prototype

This is my first prototype for fieldPlate.I’ll be attaching a picture of the prototype below, but I jumped into Fusion 360 and, based on my notes, came up with P1, or Prototype 1. There were a couple of things I did not foresee that I had to work around when prototyping. Surprisingly, the screws are rather big compared to the magnets that I’m using, so I had to come up with a weird cutout arrangement. When I started testing the prototype, I discovered that my magnets really aren’t all that strong. So that might be an issue that I have to fix by buying some new and stronger magnets for future prototypes.

Testing

In terms of stability, it’s okay. The small framework, especially the 42 × 42 frame, isn’t very stable. It’s just balancing at this point. However, it seems to work all right, and it’s honestly not too bad. I was able to hold a speaker directly offset from the frame so it was just hanging, and it managed to keep it in place.

Next Steps

Definitely, I’m going to have to work on the side mounts and also the puck which actually attaches to the screw holes.But that’s what I’m going to work on next.I’ll be attaching some pictures of what I built and what it’s looking like right now.

Devlog 1: Tricking a PEI Plate into holding Coffee

The Idea

All right, so this is the start of my new project, fieldPlate. fieldPlate is a funny little idea I had when sitting down to read a book. What if you attached a table onto a tripod?The premise is really very simple. I was thinking of ways that you could make a tripod more comfortable to rest your hand on for an armrest, as one does on a perfectly normal Saturday night. However, I realized that a PEI plate that you find on most common 3D printers is made out of metal, is magnetic, and is roughly the size of a table, which makes it quite portable. Thus I had the wonderful idea to try and create a project that could take a 3D printer printing plate, which is normally made out of metal, and convert that into a table which you can attach onto a tripod. And that’s basically what this project is going to be like.

Prototyping

In this session, all we did was jump into a notes app and spend about an hour prototyping by drawing a couple of ideas and designs.The final product will be about maybe 40 to 50 millimeters tall. It’ll be around 42 by 42 and 43 by 43 millimeters on both ends, respectively. The top end will be magnetic with a little bit of a dock or puck, which you can screw in. So if you have a different kind of magnet, you can remove the existing design and replace it with a remix of your own. (pls remix) There will also be four arms which connect to the corners of the field to prevent slipping or sheering. Finally, the arms can be screwed into place via three screws per side.

Practicality

Now, I will admit that this idea is not exactly the most practical, as most people don’t exactly go running around with extra PEI plates on their person. But I have a solution for that. I will also be releasing a plastic version of the plate so that you can simply screw it in and use it. Again, this idea is still not practical because there are more useful prototypes and products out there.But I think this is a funny idea, and it’s a good design challenge for me to try and apply some skills that I’ve been learning in Fusion 360 to this. I’ve never really worked with so many components before, and since this is a very hardware-focused product, and I already have a 3D printer, I think this will be a very interesting challenge for me.
Comment any ideas pls. Maybe gridfinity?

Devlog 5!

This session was mostly about polishing Glancer rather than adding new features.I started by improving how text overflow is handled, especially on the music and French dictionary cards. Long titles now scroll much more smoothly instead of being abruptly cut off.I also fixed a bug where portrait photos weren’t displaying correctly in the photo carousel, and spent some time stress testing the dashboard. Leaving it running for a while exposed a few bugs with cards cycling over time, which I was able to fix.The last big improvement was setting up a launchd service for the Flask server. Instead of manually starting it from Terminal every time, it now launches automatically in the background when my Mac starts, making Glancer feel much more like a proper application.No major new features this time, but a lot of small improvements that make the dashboard much nicer to use every day.

Devlog 5:

Glancer is done, and it was fun! i touched up some fo the read-me, added the demo, and just polished a couple of things. Overall, it was really great

View it Here!: https://vismaysjayaram.github.io/glancer-desktop-view/

Comment your thoughts please!

I’ll add more dog photos to the demo if you comment!

Devlog 4!

It’s finally done.
After a lot of work, Glancer is finally feature complete. Before finishing everything off though, I decided to test it on an actual iPad instead of just my desktop browser. I’m really glad I did, because it immediately exposed a bunch of bugs caused by deprecated CSS. After a bit of trial and error (and Googling), I managed to iron them out.
The first new feature I tackled was the photo carousel. Originally my plan was to have the iPad handle everything locally, but I quickly realised that wasn’t a great idea. Since I already had a Flask server running, it made much more sense to let it serve the photos as well.
I ended up using what I’ve affectionately named the YOLO (You Only Load Once) method. The browser loads a photo, keeps displaying it until it eventually errors, then simply requests the next one from the server. It’s surprisingly simple, but it works really well. I also added photo shuffling and a photo counter, which rounded out the card nicely.
After that I moved onto the French card, my mot du jour. That one was pretty straightforward. The hardest part was actually finding a good word list. After spending way too long looking, I gave up and had AI generate one that I could use instead.
The final boss was the calendar.
Compared to what I expected, the frontend was easy. The backend definitely wasn’t. There were plenty of Python bugs, Apple Calendar quirks and recurring event weirdness to work through, but eventually everything clicked into place and I finally got today’s events showing correctly.
And with that…
Glancer is done.
There are still a few things I’d like to polish and test, but as far as the original vision goes, it’s complete. It’s honestly really satisfying seeing it all come together. What started as a simple dashboard idea is now something I actually use, and that’s a pretty cool feeling. Sure, i had to cut a lot of features, but i think what i lost, i gained thrice more.

Devlog 3! Return of the killer Adblocker!

This session was basically split into two parts: the weather card and the media card. The weather card was pretty simple, the media card absolutely was not.
I started with the weather card as a bit of a warm up. I used the OpenWeather API to grab the data and then spent most of my time getting everything to display nicely. The one thing I wasn’t expecting was how annoying SVGs are in plain HTML. I ended up making one massive lookup table full of SVG markup so I could swap icons depending on the weather. Is it elegant? No. Did it work? Yep.
After that I moved onto the main boss fight of this devlog: the media card.
Unlike the weather card, this one actually needed the frontend and backend to communicate. That meant learning Flask for the first time. Surprisingly, Flask was really enjoyable to work with. Setting up routes and returning JSON was much easier than I expected.
Then came AppleScript.
Honestly, AppleScript wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d heard. It’s probably one of the most readable programming languages I’ve used. I used it to grab information from the Music app like the current song, artist, duration and playback position, then passed all of that through Flask so the browser could fetch it as JSON.
Of course, nothing ever works the first time.
One thing that really annoyed me was discovering that my ad blocker was blocking the HTTP requests to my own local Flask server. Good on it for doing its job, but it made debugging miserable. I downloaded another browser to test it… only to realise it also had a built-in ad blocker. In the end I gave up and switched to Safari. I didn’t even know Safari had DevTools, but they’re actually pretty decent.
Once the backend was working I started designing the actual card. I tried a bunch of layouts before settling on one with the song title, artist, progress bar and a little animated equalizer. I also wanted playback controls and album art, but they just made the card feel cramped, so I scrapped both ideas.
The JavaScript was honestly the hardest part. Nothing was particularly difficult, it was just lots of connecting everything together and trying not to confuse myself with variable names. I split everything into smaller functions so I could update different parts of the card independently, and I also got to experiment with try and catch for error handling.
The rest of the session was mostly bug fixing, CSS animations and fighting JavaScript every step of the way.
Overall this felt like a pretty big milestone. Glancer isn’t just displaying static information anymore. It’s actually talking to my Mac in real time, which makes it feel a lot more like a real application than just another webpage.

Devlog 2!

Just got to work on the actual HTML progress. Eight hours later here’s what I’ve got.I started by quickly laying out the grid with CSS and HTML. I was going through my last devlog and decided to get straight into the first card the clock.The clock is running on Bebas Neue, centered and it uses a simple JS setup. I had no idea you could animate things with CSS like that, which was actually pretty fun to figure out.After that I moved on to the calendar since I hadn’t really planned it out properly. That kicked off what I’m calling the calendar arc and yeah it was painful.The calendar itself is pretty simple. It shows your next event, how much time is left, and the event details etc etc. But it ended up taking a lot of JavaScript work. Nothing complex just really annoying to deal with.What really got me was how JavaScript handles constants. How assigning something to a const doesn’t always create a fresh copy it just links back to the original reference. I had no idea about that.Eventually I got the calendar working, added a bit of styling and that was basically the full eight hours.

Devlog 1:

Hey there, excited to start my project Glancer. It’s an ambient desk display that will show the time, weather, my 3d printer status, maybe a media player, my calendar, and a selected photo that I plan to keep.
I’m designing the system to run on an iPad Mini 2 (d original) , which makes CSS and HTML much easier since I only need to define a single area.
I spent a crazy amount of time trying to understand how to define CSS headings and grids. Even though I only have to work with a single display resolution, it didn’t save me from going through way too many Web3Schools pages. who designed css? Who hurt you?
Overall, it looks like it will turn into a great project. I also plan to add a Mac side screen acting as a pseudo-server-thingie, which could provide the iPad with data about the printer, weather, and more; though I might also just have the iPad handle everything directly.
I spent a couple of hours designing and sketching before moving into Figma to prototype it. I’m now working on the actual code and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Overall, a solid amount of work done before starting development.