I recently received my Gen2 Tidbyt but I don’t see any Gen2-specific apps available for deploy to the new device.
Also, is there any documentation that shows how to write apps to use the new button and speaker on the new device?
Thanks!
The developer documentation is at Tidbyt | Dev, but sadly it still hasn’t been updated to reflect the new components like the button and speaker. 
That is truly disappointing. I really only purchased the Gen2 device so I could do cool things with the button and the speaker (like make an alarm clock app, etc.) . Yes, I know I can set an alarm via the app.
The Tidbyt is a neat device but I think it really misses the mark because it could be so much more. Like why in the world does it need a trip to a server to generate a display file? It would be so much better if the processing occurred on the device.
My Gen2 device isn’t even plugged in right now because really it’s of no use to me. And the blurry display is also a huge disappointment.
Yeah, it’s really a shame that the team can’t find the time to work on improving the app store or even updating the developer documentation before a new product launch.
They launched Tidbyt Widgets and most of the apps are still not available there, it already seems abandoned.
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yes! Honestly Tidbyt Widget was a novel idea. Last week I was like “you know what, i’ll pay and subscribe to it” However it no longer had an option to subscribe, instead it was plastered with banner ADs at the bottom. It was that and also a full screen Ad any time you added a widget. I mean i don’t really care although it was annoying. My biggest takeaway tho was of worry. Like they released something that was supposed to be subscription based, then do a 180 immediately and make it ad-based just gives off the vibe of them being financially desperate and also a lack of direction and cohesiveness.
Maybe someone in the know will let us know when or if we will be able to write our own code to work with the button and the speaker.
I was also really looking forward to making apps with the new components…One month later and still no sign of anything Gen2 in the docs…
Recently I sent an email to support and was told the only way to access the new button and speaker was to write custom device firmware using the HDK located here.
Thinking about it now, it does make some sense since the Tidbyt is “just” a display.
The app code runs on the Tidbyt servers and the output is a WebP image, which is then sent to the device.
It wouldn’t matter if the app code had an instruction to play a sound using the speaker, because the code doesn’t run on the device. They would need to somehow encode this instruction inside the WebP image and the device would need to recognize it to play the sound.
In the end it’s kind of frustrating because it only works for the alarm feature.
Sounds like something that should have given a bit more thought before launching, I feel. Like, if Gen 1 was very programmer friendly and sometimes marketed as it heavily, there’s no doubt people we’re going to expect the same with Gen and wanted to tinker with the new set of features
Ok, I take back what I said!
Looking at Pixlet’s source code, it seems they’re adding a schema.Notification and schema.Sound fields to the configuration, along with things like load("ding.mp3", "file"). This is where the app probably specifies the types of notifications it will suport and sounds it will play.
It looks incomplete, but I’m guessing there will be an accompanying module like notification.star that the code uses to trigger a notification, and this in turn makes the server send a command to the device so it plays a sound.
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