I built a web-based Pixlet API

I built a web-based implementation of Pixlet that I call Axilla: https://axilla.netlify.app/

This runs a serverless function that renders an image with Pixlet and returns it. You can pass it number of parameters:

  • applet - the url for the applet you want to run
  • format - image file format (webp or gif)
  • output - how you want to receive the rendered image (html, image, or base64)

So you can do things like run the example pixlet clock

Or you could fetch the clock output as a raw gif

More details and all the code is on github. Would love any feedback folks might have!

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Wow!!
This is pretty cool! I will need to get some of my star files out there on github so I can try this out.

Giving option to render as GIF is great as it allows me to view on iOS Safari.

I’ll try this soon and let you know if I can see any room for improving. Overall; this eliminates the need for a server to be used in order to render Pixlets to serve.

I’ll try to incorporate this into an iOS shortcut - then I can send it to tidbyt :slight_smile:

Very neat

iOS shortcuts are a great idea - I hadn’t considered that before. I’d love to see any details about that once you build something.

Definitely. I actually have built several Shortcuts to tidbyt api

Including:
Set tidbyt brightness
Show random photo from internet api
Take photo w/ camera, send to tidbyt
Draw a photo on iOS, then send to tidbyt
Call API, parse out value, render to image using web service, then send to tidbyt
Call SSH script on Linux host to run pixlet and display custom app.

These are great but a lot of hard coding due to the name/apikey specific to my tidbyt.

I may try to clean these up and modularize them so the shortcuts can be shared. :slight_smile:

What’s so powerful is iOS shortcuts has the ability to do web requests, POST, GET, PATCH etc, so it can be used with many API.
Additionally you can parse jsons easily in the shortcuts. Make your own variables and more.

Here is a screen shot of my brightness shortcut, as well as the one where I display text off a value



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I have been trying to utilize this and I can’t seem to get it working. I want to use an update pixlet binary. I can’t seem to get a fork working, nor can I get it to run in netlify dev. Any help is appreciated