Toying With This Week (Sep 5 - Sep 11)

Alright I actually set up the Handy and the Keon this week and properly tested how they both were performing with XToys. They both weren't handling positional patterns very well so I made a ton of changes.

Keon

The Keon wasn't always getting to the target position (because of hitting against your body), which then caused XToys to just stop sending commands because it was still waiting for it to get to the target. Should be fixed now.

The Handy

Commands were getting sent too fast to the Handy in position mode over wifi. I've added some checks to prevent that, and also a pattern that is running too fast for the Handy to keep up now pops up a message informing the user.

Position controls over wifi still aren't great though so I gave in and added bluetooth support for the Handy. Finally!

OSSM

The Arduino code and XToys integration is largely complete and working. I ended up switching to T-Code for the command format which also means I'm probably ready to add T-Code support for custom toys.

I still don't actually have an OSSM built and have just been testing against the stepper motor on it's own. So I probably won't release the code til I can test with a full set up and confirm.

Dialog Opening Speed

The New Block dialog and the Pattern Select dialog open extremely slowly because XToys has been recreating the dialog from scratch every time it's opened. Which just makes the entire site feel slow. So I spent some time re-writing those dialogs to get pre-loaded and cached properly. It's much better now.

There's some issues as a result, namely that the back button/esc key no longer close those dialogs. But hopefully I can fix that soon.

Upcoming Plans

There's still some stroker improvements left to do. The Stroke Length sliders aren't working consistently in Position mode. And I'd like to add support for manually adjusting the position when no pattern is running.

There's a growing list of little bugs and annoyances I'd like to tackle.

• Changing the button when no pattern is active to say 'No Pattern' instead of 'On', so that it's more clear that that's the pattern selector
• Drawn patterns don't have any compatibility by default and thus can't even be played after being saved.
• The sign in page breaks if you just finished resetting your password.
• Users don't get removed when they get disconnected

I also want to work on cleaning up the Guides and at least add info on how to use the new pattern creator.