The first picture on the page is the editor, and dammmnnnm wowwww. From it's bullet point:
> Diagram Editor: A drag-and-drop interface to combine Nim apps into scenes. Fork and edit existing apps like "OpenAI image", and "Text overlay" to suit your needs. Overwrite all fields with inline code snippets.
This looks really slick. It feels like it must be a huge effort! I wonder what they used to build this. Is the editor written in Nim?
What do you run once you write a scene: a runtime similar-ish to the editor but with a presentation mode, or does it spit out a new Nim program to run the other nim programs? Do apps get once-off invoked or is there persistent communication for apps to keep running? What triggers a frame to start, how does composting happen?
I feel like they've built a very cool generic flow-based programming system here, that happens to be used for smart frames.
The editor/controller itself is just a React+Kea app using React Flow for the diagramming part, and Flask for the backend.
For now to test that the app you built works, you must deploy it on a frame. I have a fast RPi 5 for testing, and the feedback loop is typically ~30sec. It's about a minute with a Zero W2, and about 2min with a Zero W. This is not ideal, and I'd like to improve that.
Ideally I'd like to use Nim's JS backend to build a "frame" that can be run directly in the browser for testing.
As for the other questions, the FrameOS system runs at boot, and all the apps are compiled in to that one binary and run as the scene dictates. New frames get rendered when a render event is dispatched, which can happen automatically on an interval, or as requested. Frames send logs back to their controller, but can otherwise operate completely independently.
> Diagram Editor: A drag-and-drop interface to combine Nim apps into scenes. Fork and edit existing apps like "OpenAI image", and "Text overlay" to suit your needs. Overwrite all fields with inline code snippets.
This looks really slick. It feels like it must be a huge effort! I wonder what they used to build this. Is the editor written in Nim?
What do you run once you write a scene: a runtime similar-ish to the editor but with a presentation mode, or does it spit out a new Nim program to run the other nim programs? Do apps get once-off invoked or is there persistent communication for apps to keep running? What triggers a frame to start, how does composting happen?
I feel like they've built a very cool generic flow-based programming system here, that happens to be used for smart frames.