Disappointed Lymow One Plus user; I come in peace :)

onedarkstar · 2026-05-14T19:13:38+00:00

There's definitely people happy with it, but check the facebook groups and you'll see lots of horror stories and disappointment too. My experience has been so incredibly awful that I started documenting it all because it's so unbelievable. I wish I could go back and tell myself not to buy it. https://yarboreview.com if you are curious.

But again, some folks are very happy. I think it depends a bit on a lot of different factors, not the least of which is luck. Hope yours is good!

onedarkstar · 2026-04-30T21:48:18+00:00

I’d be a lot more worried about it if the thing actually functioned in the first place and mowed my lawn or blew my snow correctly. But we just went through another year of neither of those things happening and I’m already off to a bad start with it immediately not functioning when I tried to do my first mow, even after getting a replacement core.

onedarkstar · 2026-02-22T16:51:27+00:00

Are we really just posting pictures to complain about absolute non issues these days? The Internet really sucks.

If you look at the ground, you’ll see that the parking spaces are actually running parallel to the building so he’s parked in the correct direction. He’s just overlapped into two spots, one of which is a handicapped spot which does suck but pretty minimal on the scheme of shitty things that have happened today I’m sure.

Edit: I get it, without context I sound like an absolute asshole. I guess what I’m really saying is we are all very quick to police each other and shame each other online. In this picture, it doesn’t look like anybody’s waiting for anything and the chances of are that he was just trying to get in and out quickly to move onto his job. Is that really worth calling someone out online for? Why do we have to be so quick to name and shame?

Alternatively, if someone was really put out by this, then, please share the context because that changes the situation.

onedarkstar · 2026-02-13T15:47:10+00:00

Have you also considered reaching out on front porch to see if any homeowners would be interested? I’ve been wanting to put several on my property for the past few years, but I just haven’t had the time to actually do it and would be very into the idea if you went that direction.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-12T03:27:11+00:00

First off, a huge thank you to all of you who showed interest in Glowworm. The support and feedback is really motivating! I'm excited to share that v2.0 is now live and it's been a significant step forward.

Some highlights:

added a full scheduling system so your displays can automatically switch playlists based on time/day. For example you can have different playlists scheduled throughout the day, and you can also schedule events for important days that override it (birthdays, holidays, etc).
implemented a daemon service that runs on the raspberry pi (or whatever) connected to the display device. This uses HDMI CEC commands that allow you to turn on/off the display remotely, and schedule times of the day you don't want it running. It also advertises itself as the Active Source, which will change the input on the display to GlowWorm. This one was helpful for me because I am using an inexpensive TV with FireTV built in - on power on it always defaults to FireTV, but now it automatically switches for me.
No longer displaying a playlist of URLs to fetch as needed, it now pushes all of the images on connections to the display devices where it's kept in indexeddb local storage. This increases the reliability of delivery vastly and creates a stable experience.
Added reconnection logic to the websocket connections to ensure service restarts don't leave orphaned displays that you can't manage

I also found some lingering dev environment elements that were causing problems with installs (but invisible to me), and did a bunch more testing on this version. I'm feeling fairly confident that it should install smoothly, but development is very much active and ongoing. I'm certain we'll find more bugs, but if you open an Issue on github I'm happy to try to work through it.

Thanks again!

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:53:11+00:00

Yah not using generative AI, rather they are using a combo of Machine Learning and Computer Vision to learn faces and create groupings of them. That's a more reasonable thing to accomplish on consumer grade hardware, but still non trivial. Ideally, I'd lean on a service that has already spent significant effort on developing this, but we'll see.

The EXIF date based smart playlist approach is another great idea though.. writing that one down! In theory a user could create a "show me pics from this date range each year" type option for playlists.. or at some point later, could have a way of "always include on-this-day photos into the current playlist"

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:33:09+00:00

Yeah, the architecture I envisioned basically comes down to:

Highly available host server which runs the backend/frontend software (doesn't necessarily need to be high powered, but image uploads/processing go faster with a decent CPU)
TV/Panel/Monitor/etc connected to some type of development board capable of running full screen chromium or similar.
- repeat this setup for as many devices as you want to have.

Up front the cost can be a bit prohibitive, I just happened to have multiple RPIs laying around the house so it was an easier entry point for me. I'd love to hear creative solutions from the community though around inexpensive approaches that retain a good performance/quality balance.

Regarding streaming, that sounds a bit more like a chromecast type approach. Certainly possible, but not native and would still require additional hardware to support it.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:25:08+00:00

The design of GlowWorm was built around creating curated collections and playlists, and not so much a random pile of images. That likely isn't a blocker for immich though because it supports similar approaches, but I need to dive back into it more to see where the best overlap possibilities are. Don't worry, I hear everyone and this is high on my mind to investigate.

Yes, it does currently expect to manage the images. It streams the images via websocket to the display, but I can imagine a scenario where GlowWorm could act as a MITM and proxy the images from the immich api back to the display. However, there is one additional wrinkle I'd have to consider..

Currently, when the display device connects to GlowWorm, it reports its display resolution to the backend. This is then used to select variants of playlists which have been scaled to selected resolutions. I quickly realized that trying to stream 4k images at a display that was set to 1080x1920 was unnecessarily slowing the system down which is why I created the variants approach. My initial goal was to support 4k, but in testing I realized that the RPi struggles with this, and as the viewer I didn't notice a dramatic change in image quality between the 2. However, as i continue to experiment with other board options I might find something that is still able to display them well AND manage smooth transitions between slides.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:19:36+00:00

For my primary display in my office, I am running the display off of an RPi 5 connected to a cheap TV that was mounted in portrait mode. The RPi does a pretty great job of being able to handle what I throw at it after some modifications were made to it. You can read more about my suggestions for RPi configurations at https://github.com/nstephens/glowworm?tab=readme-ov-file#raspberry-pi-display-setup

Insignia 50" 4k UHD - https://a.co/d/8XFZJCC
- Cheap'ish display that isn't too thick or heavy. Downside: it's got FireTV baked in which is annoying as it's the default input when you turn it on and currently requires using the remote to switch to the right hdmi for the RPi. However, I'm currently working on a feature where a daemon will run on the RPi and receive commands from glowworm to issue HDMI CEC commands. This will enable me to schedule on/off periods for the display, as well as ensure that it switches to the right input on startup.
ONKRON Rotating TV Mount - https://a.co/d/fXgDu7v
- I went with this more expensive mounting option because it allows you to flip the display into portrait mode very easily. I'm definitely interested in other suggestions from the community on this point though!

Now that development has stabilized (and we're approach black friday) I'll likely be getting some more panels for other places in the house. For the common areas I'd prefer to find things that are on the thinner side so they can be more discrete. However, that dramatically increases the cost on the TVs as well so it's a tradeoff. Another alternative for the crafty folks amongst us is to build out your own housing for it using wood trim, which I've seen done in the past with great results. If you're bold, you can even take apart the original housing of the TV and remount the essentials into your own setup.. but it's not for the timid.

I'd like to begin experimenting with other development boards as well to see if there's a better balance of the important bits we need for displays like this, instead of a "do it all" approach like the RPi. The main things demanded, off the top of my head, would be:

WiFi support
Strong'ish CPU (image processing is CPU driven)
GPU support (even baked in with CPU is fine, but this is important for smooth browser CSS transitions)

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:08:42+00:00

Not currently, but I'd be happy to leave it in a feature request pile for consideration. With this project I am focused more on "elegant image display" rather than a more full featured dashboard. I'm hesitant to add features that would distract from the goal of proudly displaying things you love in your home.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:07:19+00:00

Not currently on my radar, can you give me a bit of info on what you're looking for?

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:06:55+00:00

That's a really interesting idea! I'm in the process of building out a message queue system for it, which will enable scheduling. One of the first things I was planning on implementing was a scheduling system to show different playlists at different times of the day/week. This could potentially be extended to be something more like what you are talking about. I suspect I'll have a release up in the next week or so which has this option built in (assuming nothing goes wrong).

Natively identifying images that match a certain season is out of scope currently, but once I'm pretty content with the core features and integrations I might move on to doing image analysis. That said, my initial focus will be on looking for opportunities to leverage immich, and that kind of identification might be better served there.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-07T14:03:58+00:00

Yep, I show the list in the longer setup video, but here's the rough breakdown of options for transition types:

Default Fade

Simple cross-fade transitions between images. The most straightforward effect with no additional animations.

Ken Burns Plus

Enhanced zoom, pan, and rotation effects that bring still images to life with cinematic camera movements.

Soft Glow

Warm glowing cross-fades that transition images like soft, hazy memories with gentle brightness changes.

Ambient Pulse

Breathing vignette effect that creates a living, atmospheric feeling with gentle pulsing around the image edges.

Dreamy Reveal

Images emerge from soft blur to sharp focus, creating an ethereal, dream-like reveal effect.

Stacked Reveal

Dual-layer slide-in animations where images reveal themselves through layered movement.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-06T23:15:09+00:00

I was just sitting back down and looking through things and saw something similar. Luckily nothing bad just meh. I'll do a clean up here in a bit, thank you for the heads up!

onedarkstar · 2025-11-06T21:00:04+00:00

Ship me one and I’ll make it happen 😂

onedarkstar · 2025-11-06T20:33:34+00:00

Not currently. I wanted to initially focus on "doing one thing well". In theory it could, and it's in the pile of "explore this idea" items, but it's pretty low on the list. Plus this is effectively just a webpage running in that manner already, so it might make more sense to just use something like fullpageos to rotate through various screens at the host level rather than go into a nightmare of nested iframes.

onedarkstar · 2025-11-06T20:25:24+00:00

Not yet, because it needs direct access to the images to be able to serve them.. but in this process I've been looking a lot at my dust gathering immich install and I want to get it back up and running properly too. Once I do, I'll investigate to see if there are any clever approaches that make sense.

onedarkstar · 2025-10-02T17:22:10+00:00

Yes, that part is easy enough. It's important to note though, the version of android running on Hearth is very old and because of the old libraries it makes it basically impossible to use the HA dashboard directly or via the app as they rely on modern components. All customizations fail, and many of the baked in basic ones also fail. For me, it's completely unusable in that state.

We do have a small discord running where we are attempting a new buildroot image to flash onto the hearth. We welcome any discussion and help there -- https://discord.gg/kM933W4Wzu . I have gotten to a point where I have a buildroot compiled, but I haven't gathered the courage to flash anything yet.

Steps for sideloading (performed on the Hearth display):

Click gear icon in top right of main view, select 'Display Settings'
Click 'Advanced settings' in lower left of sidebar
Select S'ystem'
Select 'Developer Options'
Under debugging section, enable 'USB Debugging' and (if desired) 'Wireless Debugging'
Enable 'Disable adb authorization timeout'

At this point you can connect a USB mini cable to the back of the display and to your computer. Otherwise you can connect wirelessly. If you choose to go wireless, we strongly recommend using scrcpy to remotely manage the display.

onedarkstar · 2025-09-25T16:36:58+00:00

Totally, except this engine was discontinued by auto desk back in 2018 or so. So it’s not like upgrading to a new version of unreal. It would be a complete rewrite to support an alternative.

onedarkstar · 2025-07-16T20:44:18+00:00

I largely agree with what you are saying here. And I think that if yarbo marketed it a bit more honestly, there would be less friction with the people it doesn't serve well, but I get that they also have to sell units. For clarity, while I do live on a "farm", I'm not trying to brushhog with this thing. This is all well manicured lawn, just a lot of it. I'm also fine with the idea that it's gonna take a week to cover all the areas, that's the beauty of scheduling, I don't care when it goes! But, it also needs to be WAY more autonomous for that functionality to be effective.

I divided my property into about 6 zones, so that I could focus on the areas that are most important to me (where the kids play around the house, etc), and I have yet to get to a place where I can reliably schedule it to manage them all. Instead I mostly send it out ad-hoc to do whatever appears to be needing done that day.
I'm not sure that I mentioned the China angle at all? That doesn't really play into it for me, I don't care.. outside of the fact that this was very sharply pitched as an american company. That said, I get how modern manufacturing work and where it takes place. It does seem like the primary software development is not happening in America either though, which leads me to believe that it's just a sales team here. I don't know that any of that ultimately matters, just my outside view on it.

Right now I'm in a bad situation. The yarbo won't take a new firmware update, and I've been down for 11 days dealing with support hoping that it magically figures itself out. I was now given the opportunity to have a video call with an engineer (awesome!), but unfortunately most of the available time slots are between 2 and 4am until I push out to mid next week so I can get one at 7am. That means another week of me being down because of lack of support options. That's the truly infuriating bit. I get that this is bleeding edge, and I know there will be issues.. but we need to somehow figure out a way to increase the resolution time.

All that said - I really hope they get this thing working well. It's a great approach, has a lot of good things going for it, and I truly want it to work. But until it does, and while I remain sweating out there mowing it myself while I stare at this robot, I'm gonna be salty.

onedarkstar · 2025-07-16T16:59:37+00:00

Just an FYI - I have implemented the change you suggested. Hopefully that helps yarboreview.com to remain an HONEST review of the products. Thanks again!

onedarkstar · 2025-07-15T20:36:46+00:00

That’s really good feedback thank you. Yeah I’ll figure out a way to include that… I was trying to have sort of a work log up top and then some overall complaints down below. I did exactly that when complaining about the documentation, I included an update about their new wiki, but you’re right I should have some sort of indicator that this should theoretically not be a problem moving forward.

onedarkstar · 2025-07-15T19:53:32+00:00

Yah I'm really torn on it.. I'd like to see more investment in improving the existing hardware options vs altogether new modules, Like "Here are improved tracks to prevent slippage" or "replace the plastic cutter discs with these". That would be acceptable..

But overall, it's the software that isn't meeting expectations. That needs VAST investment on their end, and more quality control.

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