ormakers-tronbyt/README.md

Oak Ridge Makers Group — Tronbyt app

Loops (~17-18s per run, depending on the slot): zoom into the org logo → crossfade into the org name → QR code to https://ormakers.org/ → one rotating craft slot, each with a text label at the top. Eight slots cycle across runs via a cache counter: 3D Printing, Woodworking, Fiber Craft, Electronics, Homelab, Laser Engraving, LoRa Radio (60 frames/~6.0s each — a real optical zoom for LoRa, direct variable-size crops from the source photo, not a digital Scale transform — smoothly pushing in and back out to a wide resting view), and Battle Bots (76 frames/~7.6s, the org's own combat-robot CAD-reveal + build footage, the full ~9.5s source clip, not a Pexels stock asset). All craft-slot media is cropped and downscaled to 64x32 — see CREDITS.md for sources. Woodworking uses a slightly wider (zoomed-out) crop than the others to show more of the table saw surface.

Device payload limit: the Tidbyt/Tronbyt firmware rejects any single rendered frame whose Content-Length exceeds ~460,000 bytes and shows a built-in "oversize" fallback graphic instead (confirmed from tronbyt/firmware-esp32's main/remote.c and Kconfig.projbuild, HTTP_BUFFER_SIZE_MAX default 460000). A first draft of the LoRa scene used a continuous live animation.Transformation zoom (100 distinct interpolated frames of a busy full-color photo) that rendered to ~504KB and tripped this — switched it to the same discrete pre-rendered frame technique as the other five slots. Current per-scene sizes (measured via pixlet render --format webp on each slot in isolation, all at 60 frames): ~191-228KB for the five video slots, ~313KB for LoRa (real photo detail compresses worse than video) — all under the 460KB limit, but LoRa has the least headroom (~147KB vs. ~230-270KB for the others). If future edits push any slot close to it again, isolate-render and check stat -c%s on the output before assuming it's fine.

Dev/test

pixlet render ormakers.star -o preview.gif
pixlet serve ormakers.star   # live reload while tuning

Note: pixlet render's cache resets every invocation, so it always shows the first craft slot (3D Printing). To preview a different slot, temporarily swap the _next_craft_scene() call in main() for e.g. _video_scene(HOMELAB_ASSETS, "Homelab") directly.

Rebuilding assets

• scripts/crop_logo.py — crops/pads the org logo into images/logo.png.
• scripts/fetch_icons.sh — downloads the (now-unused) game-icons.net craft icons; kept for reference only.
• The *_clip/ folders under images/ are frame sequences extracted from source video with ffmpeg (crop to the desired region, fps=8, scale to 64x32, contrast/saturation boost) or, for lora_clip, generated with Pillow directly from the full-resolution source photo — each frame crops a different-sized box (interpolated wide→tight→wide, ease-in-out) out of the original image and resizes that crop to 64x32, giving a real optical zoom rather than digitally scaling a single fixed crop (which either does nothing past 1.0x scale on a fixed-size widget, or pads with black instead of revealing more of the photo). No script currently automates this — see CREDITS.md for sources and chat history for the exact crop windows/timestamps used per clip.
• images/fade_clip/ is generated by blending the resting-state logo frame into the name-text frame with Pillow (Image.blend), not from video.

Deploy

On the Tronbyt server, go to the device's Add App page → Upload app, and upload a zip of this directory's contents (ormakers.star + images/, zipped at the root, no extra parent folder). It appears under Custom Apps — add it to the device's schedule from there. Fully private to your own server; nothing is published anywhere public.

Credits

See CREDITS.md for the source of every craft-slot video/photo.