Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

Nothing fancy about this project, but I seem to use it as a bookmarking service where I tend to share things I find interesting. I use it also as a blogging platform where I sometimes post random thoughts as well as articles on how I solved a problem in IT which is otherwise undocumented.

Its still under dev mode and wont support a production load, but feel free to play :)

Last April, being holed up in the lockdown made me rediscover the fascinating world of flight simulators, and was encouraged enough that I bought a throttle and joystick and quickly ran into a massive barrier to entry: understanding and setting up the controls to fly the damn things.

Two popular offerings in this space (IL-2 and DCS) have inadequate defaults and tedious and complicated control mappers. It's very hard currently to know if you'll enjoy flying if your initial experience is being forced to assign a spreadsheet of controls when you don't know what value any input has. It's exacerbated if you do this in VR because you can't see what you're holding and the games often don't indicate to you if your actions have any effect. There are public config files, but they are often incompatible because they are out of date or mapped to equipment you don't have.

I set out to make a browser-based tool that:

- Presented a more welcoming visualization for making assignments

- Cross-controller sensible defaults for these two games

- Let you import, export and share with others

I feel happy that I've reached these goals but I have yet to get much attention for it. Admittedly it does not quite yet reduce much of the burden on new players.

Ultimately the development time-cost of supporting the fractal of combinations of joysticks and config formats was higher than I expected (and I expected it to be very high). I reached out to the game developers and accessory manufacturers for funding and had some interest but nothing came through. My day job and a relocation bled the hours away that I'd have available to keep moving on it, so it's very slow going now but I hope to keep plugging along.

Short-term upcoming milestones:

- MS Flight Simulator support (where the heck do they store their configs?)

- Printable PDF's of where controls are on your joystick

- Custom controllers and Joystick Gremlin support

Long term milestones:

- Building a community of user submitted profiles

- An Electron app to...

- Copy your profiles into wherever a game expects them to be

- Provide pop-up notifications as you take actions that describe what's occurring (particularly in VR I would think this would be valuable)

The project is React-based with a lambda-based 'backend' and runs on a free Netlify tier. I'd be open to bringing in help if someone's passionate about it.

The "download template" button doesn't work right now, but it just replaces the colors from the "preview" image with numbers and a white background that you print and color in. Similar to a paint by numbers craft.

Right now I'm working on the backend before making the frontend minimally-less-ugly.

It resizes the image, then uses k-means quantization (scikit-learn) to map the pixel colors to the color set you choose. Right now the options are a few crayola marker packs. Would love to add something where you can upload your own colors, or provide my own markers.

The idea is that you can create a simple custom paint by numbers craft and get started right away using stuff you already have. I have a few other ideas, but trying to make a product cheaper than some existing custom paint by numbers kits.

Would love thoughts or feedback on the idea.

https://d3gmwd8ku7h7jh.cloudfront.net/

Connect your Spotify account and listen synchronously with someone, either by sending them a link or by joining a queue to be randomly paired up.

I basically had no idea what I was doing while developing both the react app and the the node back end so it's a little buggy.