Very cute that there's a one click deployment using some semi-magic third party service, but it feels kinda disingenuous to not link to the repo that's doing the actual heavy lifting.[] The repo submitted to HN is just a bunch of config files.
This is the problem with open source, anytime someone tries to submit a finished solution - someone will come out of the woodwork and blame them for not attributing enough. In this case the link exists, but it isn't in the favorable order.
The only thing they added was a dependency on a closed source 3rd party """cloud""" service. This is basically the open source equivalent to blog spam and should be rightfully put down.
And the post you're replying to isn't even trying to do that! Its just suggesting that hacker news would find more benefit out of the original repo over some closed source cloud bait made by an employee of said proprietary cloud service.
This is a little aggressive. Sure, Balena offers a proprietary licensing to make money for their cloud software, but all of the technology is built with open source first. You can self host OpenBalena (the open source parts of Balena) and do your own deployments locally. I'm not sure if going after open source projects that can make money is the best way to promote open source software.
> I'm not sure if going after open source projects that can make money is the best way to promote open source software.
but im not doing that.
I'm going after open source projects that can make money (by building closed source infrastructure) taking other peoples open source projects and moneifying them into a new """open source""" project (where 99% of the meat is in closed source cloud infrastructure) as a way to piggy back off of the work of other people so that they can advertise on hacker news.
Like, if the repo actually added something substantial and new to the project, that would be one thing.
If this was an article that explained how to do the gluing/config work this github repo does, also, another thing. even if hosted/made by the cloud company. That at least appeals to the intellectual pursuit.
RPiPlay is itself composed of many great OSS projects (e.g. GStreamer). Maybe we should somehow be able to publish the shole "tree" of contributions to a particular project (including build-time tools) ?
Yeah, personally my view is that if an OSS project contributes something new to the existing tool then it should be acknowledged on a place like hackernews.
Also, because acknowledging the project you built on top off recursively references other tools, there is no need to publish the whole tree. That exploration is left as an exercise to the viewer of the repo.
If we had a reliable way to identify contributors there might be nice ways to build on top of that. Like semi automatic donation services that uses id keys of the list of contributors.
Never going to work. Someone will cheat the system by creating multiple identities in order to get more than their fair share. Besides, how do you even measure what’s fair automatically.
And likewise, automatically distributing money per dependency will just make people split projects into multiple parts to get more of the money, or to add fake dependencies.
Donations need humans in the loop to decide where the money should go.
That's why I said semi automatic. It should always be up to a human to decide exactly who gets the money and how much. But there could be systems that makes it easier for that human to make such decision and worry about the important parts of it.
The automatic parts can consist of listing candidates, link to their contributions and handling of the transactions, not selection.
We already have put cash into the equation. There are donation buttons on many repos nowadays. Should we fight against that or should we try to make better use of it?
That should mitigate against fake dependencies, but not splitting important projects into multiple equally important projects, unless this engine also incorporated something like SLOC or number of commits (either of which would make splitting a net zero) but those are non-metrics as well...even more readily abused.
Not following what your point is here? I'm not promoting metrics. I'm just saying we should allow lifting up the whole software supply chain for donation driven projects.
Just saying how any tooling to automate the process would be easy to game all the way down, so the due diligence toward donating has really got to be a manual human effort.
So like an attribution manifest that contains direct contributions and links to other OSS manifests? Then you could just have a project walk the manifests and generate an output of everyone who contributed?
Yeah, I saw that. My point is: considering the title of this submission, I'd rather see it linking to the people that actually built the software that does this airplay mirroring.
As it stands, this is a submission of "a one click deployment of rpiplay to balenacloud" or something like that.
Exactly. This is more interesting as an example of how to use the balenaCloud software to deploy code across a RPi fleet. It isn’t very exciting for an airplay server as that code is provided by rpiplay.
It’s all about setting expectations. I saw this title and was excited because I thought there might be a new airplay server available (airplay 2 even). Then I saw what the project really was and I was disappointed.
There's so much technical debt and conflicting versioning with AirPlay it's unreal. It's amazing it works at all at this point. It's also why the developer documentation is awful.
It seems like the original project is easy enough and does not need a wrapper. Building a wrapper this thin reminds me of the Hacktoberfest "contributions" to projects.
Maybe the problem with posting this instead of the original project is akin to posting a homebrew formula github repo instead of the actual tool. However many projects now use github as a way to have canonical paths to stuff so here we are. You need to host the wrappers somewhere right?
I think what people are complaining about is the fact that the linked project is not the project that actually solves the problem stated in the title. This linked project did not enable “using a raspberry pi as an airplay server,” it just packaged someone’s project that already did that.
Having someone smoothing over the out of box experience for a lot of OSS is of value to me. A lot of projects I undertake get bogged down or stymied by setup instructions that trivialize or one-line non-trivial tasks (e.g. setup OpenCV, configure a reverse proxy in Nginx, etc).
A lot of this comes down to the fact that software moves quickly and instructions are written for a given piece of hardware on a specific version of a distro.
One of the benefits of having a common platform like the Raspberry Pi or shipping Docker Images is that you can ship a MVP that anyone can easily setup like Hassio, Pi-Hole, or PiWebcam.
If open source maintainers or producers don't owe anything to their users then I don't see why people building projects with open source material/code should do more than the bare minimum required by the license.
It's good to see Balena getting some attention - it's a really nice way of deploying containerised software to embedded devices, and managing them in the field. I've been using the free tier for managing a couple of rpis I have round the house in a reproducible way.
It's basically a whole platform built around docker-compose, so you write a compose file for your different applications and then can deploy it to any embedded Linux computer running the Balena OS. Balena manage all the complicated stuff around rolling out updates, keeping the OS up to date, logging etc, and give some nice debug tooling. The other nice thing about the platform is that it's almost all open source - so if Balena the organisation goes bust or changes strategy, Balena the IoT management service could be self hosted.
I could see how this would be super helpful for the world of IoT.
I am not sure if this is helpful for this community (Except as a proof concept for deploying other IoT devices, which is valuable) as I think most people could deploy RpiPlay fairly easily. Maybe I am reading it wrong though.
Related: If you use Home Assistant and have Chromecast devices, the AirCast addon will allow you to use AirPlay to send something to a Chromecast device.
I'm confused as to what "server" means in this context. Does this sit in the middle and mirror other devices (e.g. your Windows or Linux laptop) to a TV/monitor or does it just mirror the RPi itself? Or does it just act as a "sink" for already-AirPlay-compatible devices and let you mirror your phone to a TV without having an AppleTV?
Chromecasts used to have a free kiosk mode that could boot up to a full screen webpage, then Google gated it behind a monthly device management fee. :(
It was cool because you didn't even need another device to run the browser, everything ran on the chromebit/chromebox.
If you want something that is more of a static kiosk setup, there is a different Balena supported project that supports more of this style use case. Without the need of casting or connecting with Airplay
I'll never touch Balena anything since they put phone-home in Etcher (a simple tool for writing a local file to a local
flash blockdev, essentially just a GUI front end to dd). I can't spend the time to audit their software for spying, and they already burned up whatever default level of trustworthiness they had.
I'd really like some kind of architecture picture describing what runs where. Regardless of whether it's promoting the cloud service why would I want that to run a rPi service?
A picture might explain that.
there's a tiny link at the bottom of the readme that points to the project that is actually doing the work (this appears to be deploy scripts for a company's cloud project): https://github.com/FD-/RPiPlay
in the actual project's readme, they note:
>
Screen mirroring and audio works for iOS 9 or newer. Recent macOS versions also seem to be compatible.
As I understand it, this allows you to screencast from an Apple device via airplay to an rPi. Is anyone aware of a project that allows you to do the reverse? That is, to airplay from an rPi to some compatible device (like a HomePod)?
Ive been looking for a way to use airplay for my Zwift set up. I have an old raspberry pi so maybe i can set this up to solve it. I am unwilling to buy another apple tv.
Great, I'm so glad it's possible! What's the app that you installed? I've been looking for this for my iPhone 4S on iOS 6.1.3 to receive video, and output HDMI.
Please can you contact me by email so we can find another way to distribute the app so I can actually run it? I'd be happy to pay, but when I emailed AirServer Support on 2021-05-29, Alessandro replied on 2021-06-16 and said "Unfortunately we are unable to fulfil your request."
The nuts and bolts of AirPrint are CUPS (linux printer server) plus Avahi (mDNS infrastructure, known in Apple land as Rendevous). My recollection is that to get my USB printer to AirPrint, I only needed to install the CUPS and Avahi packages, and then things magically worked. YMMV.
I have it running right now. My old school LaserJet 1320 is wireless on my home network. It's connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
As someone mentioned, it's basically CUPS and Avahi. I've set it up years ago and it just runs.
The only thing that sucks is that printing from an iPhone takes about 5 minutes because of all the processing on the RPi. I suppose using a higher end RPi would fix that, but I like the small form factor. Printing from a PC is instant.
Not quite Chromecast functionality, but there is a similar project from Balena that adds Spotify Connect, Airplay, and Bluetooth to a speaker using a Raspberry Pi
[] https://github.com/FD-/RPiPlay