Roman Garms' Blog

  The Goal Ever wish you could remotely control every light in your house? Control a PS3 from your iPhone? Create schedules to automatically turn on and off devices in your house in the most complex way possible? No? Hmmm.  It's a little more useful than that I promise. I was introduced to the world of Apple Homekit when my dad wanted his espresso machine to start in the morning before he gets out of bed. Nice little quality-of-life thing. But he went further than just a timer, he got an outlet plug that could be controlled by his phone. And I thought that was soooo cool.  We bought some more smart plugs, a smart light switch, and a couple of other things. Pretty cool to have all the lights in a room come on with a single switch, without any complex and annoying-to-undo-later wiring. Also a nice bonus that I could control them without getting up. But smart home equipment is *expensive*. And I already have a server computer. What if some of these devices could be smartifie...

  What is 1isle? Back in early 2020, pre-pandemic and all of that, I had been making music with one of my close friends for several years, and we got curious about what it really takes to put music on Spotify. We found out that if you're willing to let a distributor take a cut of the profit, you can even upload for free. Otherwise, you can also find a distributor where you pay a $20 fee and they take no cut of the profit. Given that we expected to make basically no money off of this, we chose the free route.  We started assembling songs, making album art, artist icons, social media accounts, and so much more. We chose our name a little randomly, we were playing around with a band name generator, and one of the generated names got messed up. They weren't supposed to include numbers or special characters. Thinking that was kind of funny, we stuck with it. Also it sounded kinda cool to us at the time.  Making the Music The two of us had been making music for years and years....

  The Game Why We Made It In the CS Projects class at my high school, we were given a challenge: create a vertical slice of a game from the SNES era.  I was in a group with my fellow student Tobin ( GitHub here ), and while we could have absolutely chosen something simpler, like one of the various 2D platformers of the time, we decided to recreate what was the most graphically complex game for the SNES, with 3D.  Now while a game like this might've been challenging to develop back when StarFox for the SNES was created, it's quite simple in the present day. Make or grab some models you can find, make an infinite scrolling backdrop with some obstacles, create a flying ship, add a couple enemies, add weapons, and the game is mostly complete! We made this game in about a week. It's simple, but it's fun to play around with. The Project You can find the Unity project on GitHub here . Play the Game Play it fullscreen here .

  Back in 2018 I bought a terrible drone manufactured by GoPro, called the "GoPro Karma." The idea behind it was really clever, a drone that worked with the GoPro ecosystem you have already been purchasing from over the years. Slap a camera you already own into a drone, fly it, and when you get back, you can remove the gimbal from the drone and use it handheld.  Truly a good idea, but it felt a little hacked together on the software side. The GoPro didn't always want to enter the drone mode, the controller refused to connect to Google WiFi networks, etc. My favorite part, is the controller actually runs Android, and the software for controlling the drone is just an Android launcher and app.  What I Did In 2021, 3 years after the GoPro Karma was discontinued, a youtuber found out you could install a different version of Android to the controller . There was a hidden recovery/reflash mode on the controller, accessible via a button combination, and with a custom driver on th...

  The Game The Nautilus is a game a friend of mine, Eden (found here on GitHub), started back over a year ago. It's gone through many revisions, eventually winding up as a web-based game that involves controlling a spaceship, navigating obstacles, and avoiding enemies.  Features Contains custom audio, perfectly looping music and background sounds, visual effects, a momentum storing and releasing mechanic, and more. Playable with WASD for movement, and the space bar to store, then subsequently release your momentum later for ultimate speed control.  The Project The source code can be found on GtiHub here , and is playable at the following link:  https://eden-annora.github.io/TheNautilus/ . Have fun! Please star the project, and report issues if you find some. Note that the game is early in development, so there will be some bugs.

The Game Making It By now,  I'm certain you're aware of how to play tic tac toe. But what if, every single one of those 9 squares, was another tic tac toe game? Also, depending on where you last played, you can only play in that same square in the big full-size game. This is a project my friend (found on github at AlteredNode ) was working on, that I got involved in. Together, we built a game that was simple enough to make, but entertaining enough to keep a group focused for a while. We ported it to Windows, Mac,  Android, and iOS, though it is not in any of the app stores yet. It still has to be sideloaded for now.  The Project You can find the source code for the Unity project here , the XCode project for porting to iOS here , and download the game here . Play the Game Play it fullscreen here .

Background In 2020, slightly before the pandemic, I purchased a small synthesizer called the OP-Z, manufactured by Teenage Engineering . It's little gray rectangle, about the size of a tv remote, with full synthesizer and sampler capabilities. It's a very nice, capable little device, but it lacks a screen, or any kind of display save for a bunch of RGB LEDS inside most of the buttons. Now, no display whatsoever is a little tricky on such a complicated device, so the solution to this was to use your phone or tablet as a display to show what's going on inside the synthesizer. The best part, is the app allows you to create your own visuals to sync up with your music. What I Made I'm not the best artist out there, so I looked for how to make a tool rather than just art with this platform called "Videolab." I wound up creating two different tools. The first one was a spinning drum, where each note you play on the synthesizer would create a ball, playing a sound eac...