For anyone who wants to jump ship early or just be prepared I present Tronbyt. Here are my two repos for managing your tidbyt without the tidbyt backend. They consist of the custom firmware and a web app.
The custom firmware must be flashed to your tidbyt with platformio. The wifi creds and image_url are hard coded into the firmware before flashing. GitHub - tavdog/tronbyt-firmware-http: A community supported firmware for the Tidbyt hardware 🤓
The web app is designed to be run with docker compose on a local server but will also run happily on the internet although HTTPS is NOT supported. GitHub - tavdog/tronbyt-server
This is a pull only system. The Tronbyt device will pull the webp from the server and the server will render the app if needed before delivering the webp to the device. After the devices waits the app cycle interval it will pull again and the server will deliver the next app in the app list.
The web app has a web insterface for the user to add devices and apps and configure them with the build in web interface of pixlet. The reason docker is used here is to ensure pixlet is installed and working properly.
When an app is added to a device in the web app it is the responsibility of the user to pick a sane app refresh interval. The app will be rendered on this interval so be careful not to set it too short or you might max out some api limits or get your ip blocked.
Any apps using the secrets module will not work on this system. Tidbyt authored apps are not available either. I have ported the xscreensaver app over not need secrets module.
If there is interest I may stand up a publicly available instance of the web app for people who don’t want to mess with docker.