🦾 comma three Faux-Touch keyboard

Long arms for those of us with short arms from birth or those who can’t afford arm extension surgery!

Built a faux-touch keyboard for the comma three using a CH552G microcontroller. The keyboard is off the shelf and reprogrammed to emulat a touchscreen.

It’s a bit of a hack but it certainly beats gorilla arm syndrome while driving.

For $5 of hardware, it’s very hard to beat.

The journey started in January 2024 and ended in May 2024. Though it, I had to struggle with:

• CH552G programming
• Linux USB HID Touchscreen protocol
• Instructions and documentation

It’s also been through that period of unintended usage. The Frogpilot project has had users who were surprisingly interested in using it as an alternative for some GM vehicles where there is no ACC button. They use the keyboard to touch the screen where ACC would be.

Part of the work also meant upstreaming to the the CH552G community. While I doubt it’ll have any users, it’s nice to give back to the community. There is now a touchscreen library for the CH552G.

The project is open source and can be found at:

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/c3-faux-touch-keyboard

There’s a nice readme that explains how to build and flash the firmware.

The replay clipper has been ported to Replicate.com!

https://replicate.com/nelsonjchen/op-replay-clipper

Along with it comes a slew of upgrades and updates:

• GPU accelerated decoding, rendering, and encoding. NVIDIA GPUs are provided to the Replicate environment and greatly speed up the clipper.
• Rapid fast downloading of clips. Instead of relying on replay to handle downloads sequentially in a non-parallel manner, we use the parfive library to download underlying data in parallel.
• Comma Connect URL Input. No need to mentally calculate the starting time and length. Just copy and paste the URL from Comma Connect.
• Video/UI-less mode. Don’t want UI? You can have it.
• 360 mode. Render 360 clips
• Forward Upon Wide. Render clips with the forward clip upon the wide clip
• Richer error messages to help pinpoint issues.
• No more having to manage GitHub Codespaces. Replicate handles all the setup and cleanup for you.

Unfortunately, there is a cost. It’s a very small cost but technically Replicate.com is not free. Expect to drop a cent per render. Thankfully, you have a lot a trial credits to burn through and the clipper can run on a free-ish tier.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/nelsonjchen/Colorized-Project

On IntelliJ IDEs, I’ve been using Project-Color to set a color for each project. This is useful for me because I have a lot of projects open at once, and it’s nice to be able to quickly identify which project is which.

Unfortunately, Project-Color hasn’t been updated in a while, and it doesn’t work with the latest versions of IntelliJ.

After a few months of using IntelliJ without Project-Color, I decided to try to fix it. I’ve released the result as Colorized-Project.

Thre are a few rough edges, but it’s mostly functional. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it’s been working well. I’ve also submitted it to the JetBrains plugin repository as well.

It still needs some polish like a nicer icon, and I’d like to add a few more features.

It’s been near a year since I supercharged GitHub Wiki SEE with dynamically generating sitemaps.

Since then a few things have changed:

• GitHub has started to permit a select set of wikis to be indexed.
• They have not budged on letting un-publically editable wikis be indexed.
• There is now a star requirement of about 500, and it appears to be steadily decreasing.
• Many projects have reacted by moving or configuring their wikis to indexable platforms.

As a result, traffic to GitHub Wiki SEE has dropped off dramatically.

This is a good thing, as it means that GitHub is moving in the right direction.

I’m still going to keep the service up, as it’s still useful for wikis that are not yet indexed and there are still about 400,000 wikis that aren’t indexed.

Hopefully GitHub will continue to move in the right direction and allow all wikis to be indexed.

End to End Longitudinal Control is currently an “extremely alpha” feature in openpilot that is the gateway to future functionality such as stopping for traffic lights and stop signs.

Problem is, it’s hard to describe its current deficiencies without a video.

So I made a tool to help make it easier to share clips of this functionality with a view into what openpilot is seeing, and thinking.

GitHub repository

It’s a bit heavy in resource use though. I was thinking of making it into a web service but I simply do not have enough time. So I made instructions for others to run it on services like DigitalOcean, where it is cheap.

It is composed of a shell script and a Docker setup that fires up a bunch of processes and then kills them all when done.

Hopefully this leads to more interesting clips being shared, and more feedback on the models that comma.ai can use.

I later also ported this to Replicate here.

There’s a web browser version of datasette called datasette-lite which runs on Python ported to WASM with Pyodide which can load SQLite databases. I grafted the enhanced lazyFile implementation from emscripten and then from this implementation to datasette-lite relatively recently as a curious test. Threw in a 18GB CSV from CA’s unclaimed property records here

https://www.sco.ca.gov/upd_download_property_records.html

into a FTS5 Sqlite Database which came out to about 28GB after processing:

POC, non-merging Log/Draft PR for the hack:

https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite/pull/49

You can run queries through to datasette-lite if you URL hack into it and just get to the query dialog, browsing is kind of a dud at the moment since datasette runs a count(*) which downloads everything.

Elon Musk’s CA Unclaimed Property

Still, not bad for a $0.42/mo hostable cached CDN’d read-only database. It’s on Cloudflare R2, so there’s no BW costs.

Celebrity gawking is one thing, but the real, useful thing that this can do is search by address. If you aren’t sure of the names, such as people having multiple names or nicknames, you can search by address and get a list of properties at a location. This is one thing that the California Unclaimed Property site can’t do.

I am thinking of making this more proper when R2 introduces lifecycle rules to delete old dumps. I could automate the process of dumping with GitHub Actions but I would like R2 to handle cleanup.

Finally released GTR or Gargantuan Takeout Rocket.

GitHub repository

Gargantuan Takeout Rocket (GTR) is a toolkit of guides and software to help you take out your data from Google Takeout and put it somewhere else safe easily, periodically, and fast to make it easy to do the right thing of backing up your Google account and related services such as your YouTube account or Google Photos periodically.

It took a lot of time to research and to workaround the issues I found in Azure.

I also needed to take apart browser extensions and implement my own browser extension to facilitate the transfers.

Cloudflare Workers was also used to work around issues with Azure’s API.

All this combined, I was able to takeout 1.25TB of data in 3 minutes.

Now I’m showing it around on Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and more to users who have used VPSes to backup Google Takeout or have expressed dismay at the lack of options for users who are looking to store archives on the cheap. The response from people who’ve opted to stay on Google has been good!

There is also a project page with additional details here.

I built https://cellshield.info to scratch an itch. Why can’t I embed a spreadsheet cell?

You can click on that badge and see the sheet that is the data backing the badge.

It is useful for embedding a cell from an informal database that is a Google Spreadsheet atop of some README, wiki, forum post, or web page. Spreadsheets are still how many projects are managed and this can be used to embed a small preview of important or attention grabbing data.

It is a simple Go server that uses Google’s API to output JSON that https://shields.io can read. Mix it in with some simple VueJS generator front-end to take public spreadsheet URLS and tada.

I picked to base my implementation on shields.io’s as they make really pretty badges and have a lot of nice documentation and options.

I run it on Cloud Run to keep the costs low and availability high. It also utilizes Google’s implementation of authorization to get access to the Sheets API.

The badge generator web UI can also make BBCode for embedding (along with modern Markdown and so on).

I’ve already used it for this and that. The former outputs a running bounty total and the latter is community annotation progress.

A major Game Boy development contest is using it labels to display the prize pool amount: https://itch.io/jam/gbcompo21

Why I built this?

I built it for the Comma10K annotation project. I contributed the original badge which attempted to use a script that was used in the repo to analyze the completion progress. Unfortunately, this kept on diverging from the actual progress because the human elements kept changing the structure and organization and I had the badge removed. The only truth is what was on the spreadsheet.

Popularity

Compared to my other projects, I don’t think the popularity will be too good for this project though. I think it might have a chance to spread via word of mouth but it’s not everyday that a large public collaborative project is born with a Google Spreadsheet managing it. The name isn’t that great either as it probably conflicts with anti-wireless hysteria. Also, it’s not like there’s an agreed upon community of Google Spreadsheet users to share this knowledge with.

I also shamelessly plugged it here but I think the question asker might be deceased:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57962813/how-to-embed-a-single-google-sheets-cells-text-content-into-a-web-page/68505801#68505801

At least it was viewed 2,000 times over the last two years.

Maintenance

It’s on Cloud Run. The cost to keep it running is low as it sometimes isn’t even running and the Sheets V4 API it uses was recently declared “enterprise-stable”. Because of this, it will be super easy to maintain and cheap to run. I don’t expect any more than $2 a month.

I built this in March, but I figure I’ll write about this project better late than never. I supercharged it in June out of curiosity to see how it would perform. It’s just a ramble. I am not a good writer but I just wanted to write stuff down.

TLDR: I mirrored all of GitHub’s wiki with my own service to get the content on Google and other search engines.

If you’ve used a search engine to search up something that could appear on GitHub, you are using my service.

https://github-wiki-see.page/

Did you know that GitHub wikis aren’t search engine optimized? In fact, GitHub excluded their own wiki pages from the search results with their robots.txt. “robots.txt” is the mechanism that sites can use to indicate to search engines whether or not to index certain sections of the site. If you search on Google or Bing, you won’t find any results unless your search query terms are directly inside the URL.

The situation with search engines is currently this. For example, if you wanted to search for information relating to Nissan Leaf support of the openpilot self-driving car project in their wiki, you could search for “nissan leaf openpilot wiki”. Unfortunately, the search results would be empty and would contain no results. If you searched for “nissan openpilot wiki”, “https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/wiki/Nissan" would show up correctly because it has all the terms in it. The content of the GitHub wiki page is not used for returning good results.

With the pandemic happening, it’s been tough for many organizations to adapt. We’re all supposed to be together! One way organizations have been staying together is by using Zoom Meetings.

At work, we’ve been using a knock-off reseller version called RingCentral Meetings. From looking at their competitors, Zoom has pulled out all the stops to make their meeting experience the most efficient, resiliant, rather cheapest, and reliable experience.

One of these features is “Breakout Rooms”. With breakout rooms, users can subdivide their meetings to make mini-meetings from a bigger meeting. For most of the year, there has been an odd restriction on Breakout Meetings though.

You cannot go to another breakout room as an attendee without the host reassigning you unless you are a Host or a Co-Host.

Obviously, this can result in a lot of load upon the poor user who is desginated the host. Even the Co-Hosts can’t assign users to another breakout room.

So I made a bot:

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/BreakoutRoomsBotForZoomMeetings

It’s quite a hack, but it basically controls a web client that is a Host and assigns users based on chat commands and on attendees renaming themselves.

Last night, I just finished finally optimizing the bot. It should be able to handle hundreds of users and piles of chat commands.