Over the weekend, three of my sort-of hobbies came together in a nice package, and it's all thanks to OpenAI's latest model Astra.
Like so many, I run a Home Assitant server which has many IoT devices connected to it. Many months ago, I built a transit board application using open data and I have an old iPad that displays my closest stations. I have been looking for a replacement for my iPad for some time now because it's about to die. So I came across these little CYDs or "Cheap Yellow Display boards" (here's an example) which cost anywhere from USD 15 to USD 40. They have Wi-fi, Bluetooth and an SD card slot (usually) and you need to program them in C++ (which I haven't done in 25 years).
Well, Astra to the rescue - but first a fun story, when I got the board and turned it on, it was just black, no image - I figured I had picked up a lemon but then I ran it through a power meter and realized that it was consuming power, so I connected it to my Mac and from then on, I worked in Astra and I basically told Astra that the device is connected but there is no display. Astra did the troubleshooting, replaced the firmware and tada we had a working display.
I then proceeded and asked Astra if it could create a dashboard like the one from Star Trek: The Next Generation (it's called LCARS, and it's a cult thing) so I could turn my lights on and off. It did that fairly quickly because LCARS libraries already exist and Home Assistant access simply requires generating a token and connecting to Home Assistant via wifi. I did several rounds to correct some smaller things and I also wanted to have the hail sound from Star Trek play when a "button" is pressed.
Then I needed a case, and for some reason the dimensions of the board were not available online, so I had to measure it by hand. I provided Astra with screenshots and all the measurements, and we went through three iterations because we had to figure out where to place the speaker (the image above shows the final idea). And so Astra created a case as an STL file, which I then printed in about four hours on my 3D printer.
Final iteration on the case
The final piece of the puzzle was the transit board, so Astra added that in about 20 minutes. I already had an API for my transit board, so that was fairly straightforward, and now it looks like the image you see at the top.
All in all, I spent about 1.5 hours working in Astra—printing took the longest.
I wrote this article because I still see people who don’t realise what is happening right now: I can do tasks like these in something like two hours that would previously have taken me many weekends. I think we’re past the hallucination debate because the case was millimetre-perfect, and so was the code. Take that in.
What do you think?
PS: I put the project up on https://github.com/ugubser/esp32
(I wrote this by hand—no AI, only machine assisted corrections)
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