I love these things! I have been consulting for a San Diego museum and I just used wixels for wireless control of relays/lighting. I’d like to share the app that I created and also buy another pair of wixels to write more apps that I think people could make use of. It’s a shame that there isn’t a better, more friendly repository for apps (than posting a file to the forum) - I really think a lot of artists, not-so-techy tinkerers, regular people who want to accomplish something simple but wireless, would really like this product if there was an easy way for them to buy the wixel and zap a general-purpose app onto it that will likely satisfy their needs. The fact that newbies have to install the sdk and sort through the sample apps (which are a great resource for developers to base their own apps on, but not so much for people who want to plug and play) seems like a shame and a lost opportunity. Given that the wxl file has the description and license metadata built into it, it seems like it would be trivial to make a Wixel Apps website that mostly takes care of itself and is pretty, simple and friendly. I really think that something like that would help ensure the success of the Wixel - it’s such a great product, but I think its potential is being wasted by not appealing to a wider audience. For example, I’d love to write an app that does something as simple a motion detection app that just requires a PIR sensor and allows a newbie to just set the options in the Wixel software, zap it onto the board and have 90% of their Halloween project’s techy requirement taken care of. I know the product is really for “us”, but the fact that this system (a) exposes parameters and (b) has the ability to package up wxl “apps” really could appeal to another audience of less nerdy people with great ideas.
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It is great to hear that you are happy with the Wixels. We would be interested to hear more about your project and your Wixel app, and we are not going to have a site just for the Wixel any time soon, so why don’t you go ahead and post it in the forum? While a forum might not be the best way to share apps, it does at least allow you to post diagrams and pictures along with the description of your app, and you will be able to receive comments from the community right away.
By the way, all of the apps that we are currently aware of are available in our User’s Guide, so a newbie should not have to install the SDK to get started.
True, I guess new apps could also appear in the User’s Guide if they’re really that useful. I’m going to be posting the project as soon as I have a chance. Once I get a couple more wixels I plan to create more - it’ll help me justify the fact that I went out and bought a used Windows machine just for this project… MacOS version of the wixel software please please!
That is true. The example apps are intended for developers, so there is no reason to make them available for download outside of the SDK. The radio_sniffer and wireless_adc apps are ones that are potentially useful for non-developers, but we have not finished writing up documentation for them. Unfortunately, I do not think that a community site for sharing apps would help us get around to doing that!
All you really need to do is make apps easy to find in this forum system. Can you keep a locked pinned posting which you edit whenever somebody posts an app, and links to that post?
Hey, wait, if we’re going to share apps under an open source license, why not just throw them into the apps folder of the wixel-sdk package? Once you pull my documentation fix, I’ll post my One-Wire code.
Sorry that I did not respond to you earlier. We could put some apps in a forum post, but until now we did not have any to put in that post. Thanks for posting your code on GitHub - I think David is looking at it right now, and we will figure out what to do with it!
Thanks for spotting the broken link! I have merged your commit into our version of the Wixel-SDK, updated the online docs, and closed the issue on github.
Also, I’ve started a forum topic with a list of all the Wixel Apps we know about, including yours:
