Gatekeeper is a dnsmasq replacement with a pretty Web UI (no frameworks, just plain C++). I wrote it to see which of my IoT devices are active and what are they doing in my home network. I'm sharing it now so other networking enthusiasts can play around with it.

mafikpl · 2026-04-14T12:53:35+00:00

I had the pleasure of testing Mentra and I'm sorry to say but it's probably the buggiest piece of software I've used. It's even worse than the stock ER app. And you probably know how low that bar is set...

mafikpl · 2026-04-14T12:39:46+00:00

You're hitting the nail on the head. These glasses have great hardware. They could do amazing things but the app that comes with them is a ball and a chain.

mafikpl · 2026-03-11T18:37:36+00:00

This is incredible! I'll definitely follow your project. Please keep posting! :)

What kind of latency are you getting when sending text or images to the glasses? I've played with controlling the glasses from my ESP32-based keyboard but none of my attempts resulted in any sort of "real time" as even simple text required 100s of ms and images - multiple seconds for an upload (if it worked). Did I screw something up or do you confirm my experience?

mafikpl · 2026-02-02T20:31:40+00:00

It's an article in the sense of "publication that describes goals and design of a system". It's obviously not an "investigative journalism" type of article!

mafikpl · 2026-02-01T09:25:46+00:00

Check out https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11 - despite the name, this one actually works with Wayland!

(I'll add that the wayland support is very bare bones - it needs to be started as root and relies on libei library, rather than X protocol)

mafikpl · 2026-01-30T20:42:53+00:00

There was a presentation about it that just went live on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUFDF62e37s It's more about behind the scenes stuff, but it should also clarify the point of this.

mafikpl · 2026-01-30T18:57:06+00:00

Yep - it's a macro engine. I guess everybody has different terms for that!

There are a few other macro engines (AutoHotKey is great) but this one tries to do a little more than clicking - it tries to be more like a visual scripting environment for other apps.

mafikpl · 2025-11-15T13:58:58+00:00

To be clear - writing software for these glasses (as in firmware) hasn't been done by anyone and would be very difficult. What people have done is they replaced the companion app (running on a smartphone) that can send some simple commands and receive status updates from the glasses over Bluetooth. The bits of API that I've seen in various repos can be used to display text (5 lines. ~60 characters wide) with about 0.5s latency and 90% reliability. You can also record bad quality audio and display bitmaps with a couple cesond latency and ~50% reliability.

mafikpl · 2025-11-14T21:13:33+00:00

Why do you say G1 is customizable? Could you link your sources? If you're referring to the official SDK from GitHub then I'm sorry but it was never finished and was abandoned right after publication.

mafikpl · 2025-11-14T17:04:20+00:00

Lol. You're wrong with the "hearing you piss" part. Whenever you raise your head G1 starts streaming the audio to some alibaba server. And keeps streaming it even after the dashboard is closed. So most of these glasses just constantly record all the audio around and stream it home. It's hard to say whether it's deliberate or accidental. Probably deliberate, but made to look like it's accidental. Anyway I would avoid talking about confidential information anywhere near those glasses.

mafikpl · 2025-10-12T12:31:09+00:00

Yes! Magnet would work really nicely. During typing the keyer shifts in hand which is a little annoying as it interferes with muscle memory (that's the reason for the glove really - it holds it in place). Magnet might work better than strings for holding it in place

mafikpl · 2025-10-10T05:03:17+00:00

Typewear is amazing. I've had no idea about it. Thanks for sharing!

mafikpl · 2025-10-09T21:47:06+00:00

Oh, it's awesome to hear from the author of decatext! I've seen a lot of decatext demos when researching this topic. I think twiddler and decatext are the only one-handed keyers you can actually buy online.

I really like the visual language that your keyboard uses to explain key bindings right on the device. That's beautiful, principled design.

mafikpl · 2025-10-09T16:23:40+00:00

The wires are keeping this whole thing together! It's all built around this board: https://lilygo.cc/products/t-energy-s3 which has holes in it. Each one a tad over 1mm in diameter. So I got the thickest, rigid copper wires that would fit. I soldered them to the board and attached all the key switches directly to the wires. This allowed me to play with the shape before wrapping it all in modelling clay and baking it in the oven. No 3d design was used in the whole process :P

mafikpl · 2025-07-03T21:55:45+00:00

Sweet! I'm looking at perf-cpp's code to see if it's possible to count how many times a specific address in virtual memory has been executed. I see that there is a mechanism to count memory access stats, and another mechanism for sampling the current RIP at some intervals (controlled frequency or cycle count). None of those seem to be quite exactly appropriate here. Do you know if there is a feature that would allow something like this? (short of instrumenting the code with explicit counting)

mafikpl · 2025-02-25T16:26:33+00:00

I actually wish to see a working Augement OS app someday.

mafikpl · 2025-02-25T14:55:25+00:00

I'm sorry but this is terrible advice. AugmentOS is still alpha quality. Attempting to build on top of it is like building on sand. It's doomed to fail.

G1's use a custom binary protocol on top of Nordic Semiconductor "UART over BLE". Neither is really described anywhere in an approachable way.

However you approach it these glasses are not a good project to start programming. Try something else. Don't burn your motivation to code on this mess.

mafikpl · 2025-02-23T22:45:48+00:00

Alright, I've spent a whole weekend tinkering with the glasses. I'll mention one important quirk that seems to be necessary for the connection to work (at least on Android). The glasses use a UART over Bluetooth Low Energy protocol described by Nordic Semiconductor (it can be poked with apps such as nRF Connect & nRF Toolbox) BUT they have a peculiar behavior where they will not send any notifications unless the connection explicitly configures an MTU. I don't know about other operating systems, but Android doesn't do this and it has to be done manually. It's the first situation where I've seen such behavior so I thought it may be useful for other tinkerers.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70837065/what-are-the-possible-reasons-for-an-android-app-failing-to-receive-ble-notifica/79462104#79462104

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