WannaDo – Public Beta

Well, I slowed down a bit this month. Work got busy again, so I had to put a few things on hold… plus I started a new map on Oxygen Not Included, and it kind of sucked me in.

The good news is that I’ve unofficially launched the beta — woot! 🎉
That was my “end of September” goal, and I just about made it. All my MVP features are in and seem to be working pretty well.

Ironically, Meetup.com just launched a big redesign. One thing I know about people is that they usually hate drastic changes—especially full product overhauls. I think that actually helps me on the marketing side, along with the other reasons I mentioned in my first post (like how ridiculously expensive Meetup has become).

Branding

I got a bit bogged down trying to make a logo. Usually, I find a friend or hire someone for branding, but this time I decided to experiment with the new generation of AI logo and image generators.

I tried about a dozen different ones before finding something halfway decent—most of them were absolute trash. After a week or two of tinkering and revisiting my saved options, I finally settled on one I liked the most. The logo is done! It’s not perfect, but I can always tweak it later.

Features and Progress

I wrapped up most of the user and auth system in August, and this month I finished the event system. The geo search was especially fun to build, and I also got the attendance feature working.

On top of that, I integrated a user feedback system using Userback. I wanted an easy way to capture user ideas and issues without sinking a ton of time into custom tooling. AI has really made these integrations faster than ever—I got it set up and linked to my GitLab in a single day. Not bad!

Next Steps: Users and Feedback

Now that the beta’s live, it’s time to get some users. This month is all about recruiting—I’m planning to reach out to people on Meetup and see who’s interested in testing things out and giving feedback. I’m super curious to hear what they’ll say.

I’ve already got several features in the backlog, but I want to focus on the ones users actually need first. While I wait for feedback, I might work on some behind-the-scenes improvements—things users might not notice directly but will definitely appreciate.

What’s Next: Groups

I’m torn between tackling the category system or the group system next, but I think I’ll go with groups.

Even though users can already post their own events, I think a lot of Meetup organizers will appreciate being able to create groups, assign managers, and build a following.

Oh, and I should definitely add a follow system, similar to what social platforms use. I don’t want to replicate Meetup’s “member” model—it was misleading. You’re not really a “member” if you’ve never been to an event.

Instead, I like the idea of groups having managers and followers, which could scale well for both businesses and nonprofits. Later on, maybe we’ll add a special “member” role that group managers can promote followers into.

Yup—next up, I’m adding groups.

Wish me luck with recruiting new users! I’ll post another update next month.

WannaDo – Project Launch

This is my first entry for the WannaDo dev blog. I’ve been working on WannaDo for almost a month now. It’s the first personal project I’ve stuck with this long, so I’m kind of proud of myself.

I used to really like Meetup, but it’s gotten so bad over the last few years. Between the ads and the ever-increasing price, I just don’t see it as a viable way for people to actually do what the site was built for anymore.

The group I started over 10 years ago now has 1,244 members—though realistically, maybe 100 have ever shown up to anything. In practice, the group is about 25 active members, but Meetup holds me to the 1,200+ number when billing. People can’t actually meet up if fake or inactive accounts count toward your “pay-for-it” tier.

When I started, Meetup was about $100 every six months, or ~$16/month. Now it’s $178 every six months, or about $30/month. On top of nearly doubling the price, they’ve put more features behind the “Meetup Pro” paywall. And to twist the knife, they advertise to everyone attending events.

On top of that, their systems are broken—a problem they admitted to last year (source). Features don’t work, they run two different mobile apps (one for users, one for organizers), and four servers are doing the work one app should handle. It’s pretty clear Meetup is drowning in tech debt. I get it—I’m an engineer, I know the pain—but forcing users to pay for bad management? That’s just shitty.

So to summarize: charge organizers more, remove features, and force ads on end users.

So I said: FUCK MEETUP.

That’s why I started WannaDo. I think I can improve on Meetup’s core concept—and with the help of AI, I can move fast. Right now, I’m focused on the MVP (minimum viable product): the basics, just enough to get the app in people’s hands.

MVP Features (in progress):

Basic branding
Users & Auth
Create, Edit, Find, and Attend events
User feedback system

I started on Aug 8th, and I’m already close to my MVP goal. At this rate, I think I could start advertising the MVP by the end of September. A lot of features are still “vaporware,” but:

Users & auth = done (a big pain, glad it’s out of the way)
Event create & edit = done
Event find screen = nearly done (enough for MVP)
Next up: attendance system

I also need to rope in my graphic designer friend, because the lack of a logo and color scheme is a problem. Before launch, I want some kind of user feedback system too. I’m not putting in heavy testing right now—this is very much a “build the plane mid-flight” project until there are enough users to justify otherwise. Everything also needs to be mobile-friendly, since the mobile app will come later, after the web app is stable.

Roadmap

MVP – Users & Events (September)

Event categories system
Organizations (groups, businesses, nonprofits)
More event features (repeatable events, RSVP deadlines, attendee limits, guests, additional hosts/speakers, attendee questions)
User interests system
Credits system (for users & groups)
Subscription system (for businesses & nonprofits)

Unlike Meetup, WannaDo will use a credit/token system for users and groups.

How it works:

Credits can be earned (by verifying email, attending an event, reviewing reports, etc.—basically proving you’re human and helping the community).
Credits can also be bought (but affordably—e.g., $1 per credit). If you just want to post one event a year, you shouldn’t have to pay $30 for a monthly subscription and remember to cancel auto-renew.
Credits can’t be sold, but can be donated to groups.

Credits will also shape user behavior. If you sign up and do nothing, you’ll be treated as nothing. That should help solve the “1,200 members, 25 active” problem Meetup has.

Examples:

Posting an event costs a credit.
Reporting content costs a credit (which gets held until the community reviews the report).
If others agree with the report, the reporter gets the credit back, the offender loses a credit, and the event is removed. Reviewers who help validate get fractional credits.

I want the mechanics to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior.

On top of credits, I also want to add badges. Some would be penalties:

Ghost badge for no-shows (penalties stack over time—ghost enough events and you’re blocked).
Gaslighter badge for jerks who stir up trouble.
Troll badge for spammers/offensive posts.
Karen badge for chronic false reports.
Bot badge for… bots.

Likewise, reviewers could earn positive levels—your credibility increases if you consistently align with consensus, decreases if you don’t.

Beyond users, groups, and tokens, I’ll also offer subscription tiers for nonprofits and businesses.

Nonprofits: heavily discounted, since they’re the backbone of real communities.
Businesses: they’ll get listed regardless, but if they want control over listings, they’ll need a subscription. (Similar to Google Maps’ “Is this your business?” feature.)

Eventually, I may add new user restrictions (e.g., can’t post until you attend an event or verify ID), but that’s a “later” problem.

Lots of ideas, but the focus right now is MVP and first users. Once people are using it, I can prioritize their needs alongside my roadmap.

TNMT Arcade 1-Up Cabinet RetroPie/EmulationStation Mod

I was going to post a video but I finished the project so long ago that posted it. The main goal of the mods to the image was to prioritize 4-player games since the it’s dedicated to a 4 play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade 1-Up cabinet.

This image is based on the Wolfanoz 128GB RasPi3BPlus 4.4.8 image (its the most recent I could find). Here the changes I’ve made:

4.4.9

Fixed the “out of space” issue by deleting some games. This issue prevents controllers from working consistently.
Turned off bezels (overlays) in the RetroArch options since I’m still using the original Arcade 1-up monitor.
Added theme from 90’s TNMT cartoon for the intro splash screen.
Created a temp list of 4-play games (need to create a custom main list icon for it yet…) (update 2-19-2021 downloaded a nice list of 4-player/multiplayer games from here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4336/list-of-retro-games-for-4-players/4 – planning to use it to update my main multiplayer list in the image)

4.4.10

Added some of the The 100 Greatest Video Game Soundtracks to the background music playlist… and a few hundred of my favorite chiptunes.

Notes:

Though fruitbox (RetroPie Jukebox) is installed it is not the background music player. Keep this in mind if you want to update the background music playlist.

When you wire the joysticks and buttons to the controller circuit board make sure they are all wired the same. While EmulationStation supports multiple controllers that are the same (e.g. “Generic USB Gaming Device” or “DragonRise Inc Generic USB joystick”) RetroArch does not. If you have different button layouts it will get messed up in game and once you exit game. RetroArch is the Frontend for the Libretro API and makes a up a large portion of the emulators included in RetroPie so if each controller has a different wiring configuration on the board or one of your joysticks is upside down your controllers won’t work properly.

Streams, Promises and Throttles

Recently in my journey I came across a nice little challenge to read a really large csv, pull data from it and then call a couple of APIs IOT to get some data then output a CSV after processing was complete. The file I was provided basically contained a long list if IDs which I needed to use to get information from one API then use that information to call Watson. I hadn’t flexed my muscles with the stream API for a while so it was fun. I just wanted to share this example in case other are looking for a way to solve a similar problem.

Minecraft on Ubuntu – Forge Upgrade

To upgrade your Minecraft Server on Ubuntu to a more recent version of forge:

Download the installer and universal package for the version of forge you want.
Transfer them to the server.
Run the installer: `java –jar forge-X.X.X-X.X.X.XXX–installer.jar —installServer`
Restart the server: `java -Xms1024M -Xmx8192M -jar ~/minecraft/forge-1.12.2-14.23.3.2675-universal.jar noguiadsls`

Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 on a Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm – Part 4

And now for the thrilling conclusion to… HLv1_RPiDS! (<— a what now?)

In this section we’ll go over the steps I take to launch the network and talk through some of the configuration sections to watch out for as you setup your own.

But first a quick proof of work demonstration:

Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 on a Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm – Part 3

As I said in my last post this step is fairly easy and overall gave me the least amount of trouble.

Before we dive in I want to mention some prerequisite equipment you’ll need. You should have at least 3 Raspberry Pis (<– this looks so wrong to me… Pies?) to setup up a true Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm. This means you’ll need SD card for each and a way to power them, I recommend a USB power hub like this (something with 60 watts and 6 ports).

Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 on a Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm – Part 2

I want to thank all of the people who commented on my first post about this project, I can’t believe how much time has passed since I first wrote about this. I actually did get it running but ran out of time to document it all while getting it working… I planned show it at a conference for work and ran into significant hurdles along the way so my documentation slipped a bit. I’m going to finish this out thanks to the extra motivation I received from everyones interest. So let’s get to it!

Mastering the build step is a pretty decent challenge. In this article I’ll pass along some tips and hints on how I pulled it off.

Hyperledger Fabric v1.0 on a Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm – Part 1

There have already been articles published on the use cases for using IoT with a private Blockchain. The possibilities are really exciting but what if we could run the blockchain ON our IoT network. That sounds like a fun project to me!

With that goal in mind and a bit of research I was led to Hyperledger Fabric. To learn more about it check this out: Hyperledger Overview. Getting Hyperledger Fabric to run on Raspberry Pi presented several major hurdles:

No one had compiled the project for the ARM architecture before.
There wasn’t any documentation on how to run the Hyperledger on a Docker Swarm.

But hurdles are what make projects fun right? So lets go through the steps so that you can setup your own.

Lets get started!

Putting a newer version of Node.js on LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

Today I’m going to step you through putting a newer version of Node JS on your LinkIt Smart 7688. The default version of node available is 0.12.7 which, let’s face it, is completely outdated and essentially useless for to any serious Node.js developers. Now there are some ongoing challenges with putting a completely up to date version of Node on the MIPS architecture. This is because there are key libraries needed to build Node JS that are not updated on MIPS yet… so since those libraries out out of date we can only get so far.

Setup your linux machine.

I use Ubuntu server 16.04.2 LTS at the time of writing this tutorial. Get Virtual Box, download an Ubunut 16 .ISO, create a new VM, make sure your disk is around 50GB (5GB is not enough… found this out the hard way), select the ISO you downloaded, install the operating system (be sure to add SSH for convenience).

I alway use SSH for copy paste commands. To setup you VM so you can ssh to it:

Open the setting for the VM (you can do this while its running)
Go to Network > Adapter 1 > Advanced > Port Forwarding
Forward 127.0.0.1:2200 to 10.0.2.15:22
- Check your ifconfig to verify your VMs IP address

SSH to it from your host with this:

ssh usename@127.0.0.1 -p 2200

Alternatively you can put the adapter in Bridge mode… then check ifconfig for the VMs IP.

Setup for the build

Following for guide here with modified instruction for things they forgot:

https://docs.labs.mediatek.com/resource/linkit-smart-7688/en/tutorials/firmware-and-bootloader/build-the-firmware-from-source-codes

and with help from the nxhack who is running this repo:

https://github.com/nxhack/openwrt-node-packages/tree/for-15.05

Add the python package (if you didn’t install during Ubuntu OS install)
```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes
sudo apt-get update
```

Install prerequisite packages to build the firmware:

sudo apt-get install git g++ libncurses5-dev subversion libssl-dev gawk libxml-parser-perl unzip wget build-essential python2.7

Download the OpenWrt CC source codes:

git clone git://git.openwrt.org/15.05/openwrt.git

Prepare the default configuration file for feeds:
cd openwrt cp feeds.conf.default feeds.conf
Add the LinkIt Smart 7688 development board’s and NodeJS to the builds feed:
```
sudo nano ./feeds.conf
```
Add the following lines to the bottom of the file:
src-git linkit https://github.com/MediaTek-Labs/linkit-smart-7688-feed.git src-git node https://github.com/nxhack/openwrt-node-packages.git;for-15.05
Update the feed information for all available packages to build the firmware:
./scripts/feeds update

Change the packages installed as default:

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/nxhack/7ced4d866a59ebc72737589b49a220f8/raw/1bebfe9f6091f55a5856bc4af00da456a4995b09/mtk-linkit.patch
patch -p1 < mtk-linkit.patch

Fix build error of depend on node.js version:

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/nxhack/4357d51918ba8f3cb5cc00080ad0815c/raw/e96758224ade8cb224523aedf5ea3249a6a59425/MRAA.patch
patch -p1 < MRAA.patch

Hack for wifi driver so build completes
Copy kernel objects for support kernel 3.18.45:
see : MediaTek-Labs/linkit-smart-7688-feed#37

cp ./feeds/linkit/mtk-sdk-wifi/wifi_binary/mt_wifi.ko_3.18.44 ./feeds/linkit/mtk-sdk-wifi/wifi_binary/mt_wifi.ko_3.18.45
cp ./feeds/linkit/mtk-sdk-wifi/wifi_binary/mt_wifi.ko_3.18.44_all ./feeds/linkit/mtk-sdk-wifi/wifi_binary/mt_wifi.ko_3.18.45_all

Install all packages:
./scripts/feeds install -a

Use node.js custom packages:

rm ./package/feeds/packages/node
rm ./package/feeds/packages/node-arduino-firmata
rm ./package/feeds/packages/node-cylon
rm ./package/feeds/packages/node-hid
rm ./package/feeds/packages/node-serialport
./scripts/feeds install -a -p node

Prepare the kernel configuration:
make menuconfig
- Select the following options:
  - Target System: Ralink RT288x/RT3xxx
  - Subtarget: MT7688 based boards
  - Target Profile: LinkIt7688
- (Optional) GO into Languages > Node.js > Configuration (under the node package) > Select your desired version.
- (Optional) Enable modules you want (Caution there is a 30MB limit so not all will fit)
  - (Recommended) node-npm (it is a separate module in v6)
- Save and exit (use the default configuration file without any modification)
!!!BEFORE YOU START!!!
RUN THIS FROM YOUR VM NOT OVER SSH
This command will take a while and if your ssh pipe breaks so will your build
Start the compilation process:
```
make
```
There are several options you can use with the make command that are helpful.
– V=99 (gives verbose output during build) or
– V=1 (shows error, warnings, and notes “less verbose”)
– &> output.log ( on the end – stores output in a log for later viewing)

A Few Hours Later…

After the build process is finished successfully, the resulted firmware file will be under “bin/ramips/openwrt-ramips-mt7688-LinkIt7688-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin”. If its’ not there check the output in your log file or on your screen. Depending on the hardware resources of the host environment, the build process may take more than 2 hours.
You can use this file to update the firmware through Web UI or rename it to lks7688.img to update through a USB drive.

A big thanks to nxhack for making this build possible!

Download images for the version of Node you want:

lks7688-node-v4.img

MD5: d7f724da93a1d916bf777f80516a0f33

SHASUM: f74182c70b937909ad1cba6f97e40b5dd3891962

lks7688-node-v6.img

Includes NPM.

MD5: a17c672f87c4b8fa49a253d5534a9229

SHASUM: 8b19b20d23f1faa94c9dd084ca0271904d1dfa5e