Interact with each other through emojis displayed on the blinkenlight.
It's an emoji "chat" web app where you can send any emoji to whoever is in the chat room (currently only one chat room per local network supported) - it'll display that emoji on their blinkenlight device.
What is Blinkenlight?
Check out fheinz@'s https://github.com/fheinz/Blinkenlights project. Blinkenlight is a LED display for pixel art animations.
This repo forks that project (specifically the blinken.js file).
The machine on which the web server is running has two main requirements to work properly:
Make sure you install (https://imagemagick.org/index.php) on the host machine.
server.js relies on the convert tool to convert the given emoji to a 16x16 gif.
Your host machine needs to have the Noto Color Emoji emoji fonts installed.
On Arch Linux (it works for me) I used:
sudo pacman -S noto-fonts-emoji
On ubuntu this should work:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji
Assuming you followed the steps from the Requirements section above, run: node server.js and go to localhost:3000 on Chrome (Firefox doesn't support Web Serial API).
This is slightly more tricky, because Web Serial API requires the connection to be secure.
After you follow the guide below you should be able to access the https://blinkmoji.com website from your local network and connect multiple blinkenlights devices to send messages to each other.
For this setup you need to host the Blinkmoji web app on Nginx. Make sure it's installed on your host machine.
Create a self-signed key and certificate pair with OpenSSL in a single command
$ sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/ssl/private/nginx-selfsigned.key -out /etc/ssl/certs/nginx-selfsigned.crt
Copy the repo file from nginx/sites-available to your nginx configuration /etc/nginx/sites-available/.
Enable the setup via a symbolic lin
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/blinkmoji.com blinkmoji.com
Cope the repo file from nginx/snippets/self-signed.conf to your nginx configuration /etc/nginx/snippets/.
Test your nginx configuration with sudo nginx -t.
Restart nginx with sudo systemctl restart nginx.service.
Every computer that wants to open blinkmoji.com needs to trust the certificate you generated from the previous step.
On mac, run sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain" <path-to-nginx-selfsigned.cer>
To access Blinkmoji via https://blinkmoji.com add the ip of your device that hosts the web app to /etc/hosts:
# /etc/hosts
...
<blinkmoji-host-ip> blinkmoji.com