Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I'm trying to make it easier for Blind people to get into electronics as a hobby. There are many fascinating hardware, software, and UX challenges here that almost nobody is working on. Things like reading circuit diagrams, identifying pins on components, debugging circuits, laying out things on a breadboard, identifying wires, identifying resistors, testing components, and much more are largely unsolved Despite all the barriers, there are some Blind people who build electronics projects, sometimes including soldering, but they usually have to develop their own tools and workflows almost from scratch.

Since I'm just one guy with 100 ideas, I have to try to apply my skills where they can have the most impact. My current project is converting existing circuits from Fritzing format (which is usually displayed graphically) into a textual format. I wrote about it in these three blog posts:

1. Premise, ways to represent circuits: https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-1/

2. Why Fritzing? https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-2/

3. Actual output examples: https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-3/

I'm also working on a 3D printed single character Braille cell that can be added to any Arduino project, and has only 3 simple parts to assemble. Unfortunately I haven't posted about that yet.

I'm working on writing a sort of code and data playground from scratch - with currently only CodeMirror, ProseMirror, and some icons as dependencies - so that everything in it can be edited live. Everything is web components with the shadow DOM. It is sandboxed both as a whole and at the notebook level. The overall sandboxing uses a Content Security Policy that allows inspecting the URL for following a link, to enable using untrusted code (from humans or an AI) and private data without it easily being leaked. I've built a resizable split view, draggable tabs with multiple panes, and a color picker. It's a few dozen Markdown files with code in fenced code blocks and a Deno and Docker-based build process. There is a hybrid notebook/playground editor with the fenced code blocks changed into links that open the files in tabs. It's open source and at https://ristretto.codeberg.page/

I have been working on two projects:

- https://formlick.com : A typeform alternative with lifetime deal

- https://aye.so : Create your link in bio in bento style using the widgets

When the hype was focused on chatbots, I joined a startup that built one focused on ecommerce. It turned into a useful product that actually help real customers.

Looking back, there wasn't any material to actually build a useful chat agent that resolved real-world problems. So I'm writing the guide that I wish I had when getting started.

I'll publish it on github and post here as more progress is made. I've created three parts. Part One is a non dev focused which explains how each of the moving parts work, what is Ai and what isn't. Part two gets technical and explains the tech stack. Part three is a bonus section that looks at how Ai assistants like google and Siri work and can be improved.

The working title is Automated Agents.

Edit: adding a link for those who want to follow along.

https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book

A video game.