Speaker 1: Welcome to The Bootloader. I'm Tod Kurt.
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Speaker 1: And I'm Paul Cutler. The show works like this. Tod and I have each brought three things to share,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about each one for about five minutes. We're glad you're here. Tod, what's your first one for us?
Speaker 2: My first one is Bambu Helper. Bambu Helper is a tiny ESP32 powered desk friend that tells you how your 3D printer's doing.
Speaker 2: uses MQTT either in lan mode or cloud mode to get your Bambu labs printer stats.
Speaker 2: It shows percent progress, ETA when the print will be finished,
Speaker 2: temps on the bed, nozzle, and chamber if you've got a chamber,
Speaker 2: and even what type of filament it's using.
Speaker 2: I finally got a Bambu printer a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2: The same week, a member on the R-ESP32 subreddit
Speaker 2: post about using an ESP32 super mini board
Speaker 2: and a little 1.5 inch square TFT display
Speaker 2: to pull data from their Bambu P1S print.
Speaker 2: over MQTT.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know this was possible.
Speaker 2: I knew that they were kind of on the net,
Speaker 2: but I thought it was a purely proprietary protocol.
Speaker 2: And the build he ended up making was pretty slick.
Speaker 2: It was like this nice little enclosure thing
Speaker 2: that looked kind of like it would properly set on your desk
Speaker 2: like a little product.
Speaker 2: So I bookmarked it and I thought, okay, maybe I'll get this something,
Speaker 2: get this to work on my H2 printer, like after some time.
Speaker 2: But then a few days later he posted an update.
Speaker 2: Surprise, Bambu helper now works for all 3D printers.
Speaker 2: And it can work in either lan mode, talking directly
Speaker 2: to your printer, if you've got one of the printers that can do that, which unfortunately mine is not,
Speaker 2: or in cloud mode where it talks to Bambu servers over a secure TLS MQTT.
Speaker 2: It's even got a web interface once you've got it all set up to configure various settings,
Speaker 2: like what information you want to just be displayed and like if you want the screen rotated or not,
Speaker 2: depending on how you build a setup.
Speaker 2: And if it's not doing anything at all, like if your printer is just stationary, then it becomes a clock.
Speaker 2: So that's pretty handy.
Speaker 2: And if you want to build one of these, it's pretty easy.
Speaker 2: It's just eight wires to solder between the, you.
Speaker 2: ESP 32 in the display.
Speaker 2: There's an optional touch button you can wire up if you want, but I don't think it's
Speaker 2: really that needed.
Speaker 2: I think it just switches between a couple of different sort of status screens.
Speaker 2: The maker included a nice 3D printed enclosure that's got a really clean, minimal aesthetic,
Speaker 2: almost retrocomputer inspired.
Speaker 2: And I thought it was very thoughtfully designed because it assumes that your little ESP32
Speaker 2: board already has headers soldered down, which is the way I always operate.
Speaker 2: I prototype stuff on a breadboard and then move it to an enclosure.
Speaker 2: And a lot of builds assume that like, oh, you're taking this pristine board and soldering wires to it.
Speaker 2: It's like, I don't want that.
Speaker 2: I want something that I can kind of undo and put it back on the breadboard if I need to.
Speaker 2: So it's nice that his 3D printed design kind of assumes that you've got headers already installed.
Speaker 2: The end result looks kind of like a finished product, which is pretty great.
Speaker 2: I've breadboarded this running right now, and it seems pretty useful.
Speaker 2: I think I might actually build it.
Speaker 2: You can get all the information from the Bambu handy app.
Speaker 2: on your phone if you have that installed or from Bambu studio if you use that but i'm a big fan
Speaker 2: of ambient displays and so i think i'm going to build this and put it in the house where i can
Speaker 2: tell a glance what the printer's doing that's in my workshop which uh they're they're distinct
Speaker 2: they're separate and but i think my case i'm going to make a little alternate case it's going to be
Speaker 2: more vertically oriented and wall mounted so i can mount it to our cork board where like little
Speaker 2: notes go up but an outstanding question i have is
Speaker 2: for Bambu helper is how does it deal with error or warning conditions,
Speaker 2: you know, like jammed filament, opened door chamber or chamber door.
Speaker 2: I've not tested that yet because it's hard to get these Bambu printers to fail so far as far as I can tell.
Speaker 2: But, you know, I come from a decade of 3D printing where I'm used to printers failing as much as them working.
Speaker 2: So this is one of the first things I key on.
Speaker 2: And all of the while I've been pondering this, our Paul here writes two incredible CircuitPython tools.
Speaker 2: First, circuit Bambu, a CircuitPython take on Bambu helper, and it looks great.
Speaker 2: And it's written in like CircuitPython with display I.O.
Speaker 2: So you can port it to other platforms, I think, pretty easily.
Speaker 2: And more generally, a Bambu Lab CircuitPython library for anyone to get info and interact
Speaker 2: with the Bambo Labs printer.
Speaker 2: This is super neat.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to play with it.
Speaker 2: I'm honestly more interested in modding circuit Bambu to work with one of my favorite ESP32 boards
Speaker 2: that I've mentioned in previous episodes
Speaker 2: since those all have built-in displays,
Speaker 2: no wiring needed.
Speaker 2: So thanks, Paul.
Speaker 1: Yeah, since I stalk you on GitHub,
Speaker 1: or I mean, follow you on GitHub.
Speaker 1: I saw you Star Bambu Helper,
Speaker 1: and I went through and looked at it.
Speaker 1: And after a day or two, I'm like,
Speaker 1: if they can do it in Arduino,
Speaker 1: you should be able to do it in CircuitPython.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't worked on a CircuitPython project,
Speaker 1: a big project in a couple of years.
Speaker 1: And I have to admit,
Speaker 1: This is the first time I've ever used Claude to help me bootstrap it.
Speaker 1: So I did use Claude to do some of it.
Speaker 1: But it only works in cloud mode right now.
Speaker 1: Local mode doesn't work yet.
Speaker 1: And that's because CircuitPython only uses MQTT 3.1.1.
Speaker 1: And the cloud mode can use either 3 or MQTT5.
Speaker 1: But the local mode, supposedly local mode only works in 3.11 in my testing, but CircuitPython still isn't connecting.
Speaker 1: So I have some more testing to do there.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I got it up and running on a qualia display, just the one display that I had.
Speaker 1: And it was a fun little project to do.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 2: It's kind of amazing that the Bambu is exposing the MQTT service.
Speaker 2: It's like all authenticated and stuff.
Speaker 2: So like Randos can't just come and look at the status of your printer.
Speaker 2: But they expose that to the world.
Speaker 2: So your little Bambu helper, your Bambu helper in Circa Python can run anywhere on the planet.
Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be on your land, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 2: So what's your first one for this week or for this month?
Speaker 1: You know, it's one thing to own a 3D printer, but it's another thing when you have your own scanner to scan an object and then 3D print a replica.
Speaker 1: And that's what OpenScan does.
Speaker 1: It's an open source and modular scanner.
Speaker 1: They have two models, the OpenScan Mini and the OpenScan Classic, both of which are sold for $239.
Speaker 1: That's without the 3D printer in a Raspberry Pi 4.
Speaker 1: which you can also buy direct from them.
Speaker 1: But what you get for $240 is a pre-soddered and tested pie shield and ring light,
Speaker 1: a 3D printed cross-polarizer module for the OpenScan Mini,
Speaker 1: an Arjucam's 16 megapixel camera with the cables,
Speaker 1: two stepper motors and their drivers,
Speaker 1: and a power supply and a couple small parts that you'll need.
Speaker 1: And if you really want to do it yourself,
Speaker 1: they do make the bill of materials available so you could order all the parts by yourself.
Speaker 1: With the two-steper motors,
Speaker 1: it spins the small table that your object sits on,
Speaker 1: while the second moves the 3D printed parts around and over the top of it.
Speaker 1: Check out the show notes for links to their site.
Speaker 1: It's hard to describe without seeing it.
Speaker 1: When it comes to accuracy, they link to one of their blog posts,
Speaker 1: which I've shared in the show notes.
Speaker 1: The author scanned two Chrome Allied spheres with a diameter of 20 millimeters and 25 millimeters
Speaker 1: and took 150 photos per set,
Speaker 1: which was about 250 megs of total data and took 11 minutes.
Speaker 1: They then process the photos in open scan cloud.
Speaker 1: They're free, and I don't know how to say this word.
Speaker 1: I want to say it like telemetry, but I think it's photogrammetry.
Speaker 1: Don't know.
Speaker 1: But it's a free service that they offer that never shares your data.
Speaker 1: The results from scanning the two spheres were less than 0.028 millimeters, which is impressive.
Speaker 1: If you want to make your own gaming miniatures or really anything at all,
Speaker 1: the combo of the open scan plus a 3D printer would make.
Speaker 1: a killer combination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like there's, there's been photogrammetry apps for, for your phone for a while
Speaker 2: because you're, because what is photogrammetry?
Speaker 2: It's basically taking a lot of photos of an object and you can you spin around with your
Speaker 2: phone.
Speaker 2: And because the phone has sensors inside to tell where it's at in space, you know, with the accelerometer
Speaker 2: and the gyro and stuff, it can tell as you move around where those photos are taken.
Speaker 2: And then like, yeah, there's something that stitches them all together into 3D.
Speaker 2: But if you ever tried to do in that, the resolution is fairly low.
Speaker 2: Whereas this open scan is made for these little tabletop handheld miniatures.
Speaker 2: It's made for high-res small things, which is really neat.
Speaker 2: It's like you don't see that very often.
Speaker 2: And I don't have a use for it, but it's so cool.
Speaker 1: Right, exactly.
Speaker 1: I highly recommend checking out their website and seeing the photos that they've taken and seeing it in action because I can't really describe it that well.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you've ever wanted to recreate a detailed miniature.
Speaker 2: you know, not a lot of people want to do that, but if you want to do that, this is like a godsend.
Speaker 2: What's your next one for us?
Speaker 2: Back in February, I saw some folks on Blue Sky who had a tiny e-book, e-reader that could magnet to the back of your phone.
Speaker 2: It was super simple, having only four buttons, no touchscreen, and explicitly just rendered e-pub-formatted books.
Speaker 2: You loaded onto it via microSD card.
Speaker 2: I've been wanting to try a proper e-reader for a while, but I didn't really get sidetracked or pay the expense of or pay.
Speaker 2: Amazon 4 or something like a Kindle.
Speaker 2: And this little $60 X-E-Ink X-4
Speaker 2: looked like a great choice to get started.
Speaker 2: And then I learned it had an ESP 32 in it.
Speaker 2: So I get it a couple months ago.
Speaker 2: Start using it as intended.
Speaker 2: It's really neat.
Speaker 2: It's got a very focused use case that it presents.
Speaker 2: So the ability to be distracted by doing,
Speaker 2: for doing anything else with it is zero.
Speaker 2: You can just read books on it.
Speaker 2: I think it might be a little bit too small for me as a regular e-reader.
Speaker 2: I, you know, I need glasses.
Speaker 2: I'm a big guy.
Speaker 2: It needs just a little bit bigger, I think.
Speaker 2: But then I distracted myself from its intended use and started hacking on it
Speaker 2: because it turns out you can treat it like any other ESP32 devboard.
Speaker 2: For the record, it's an ESP 32 C3 with 16 megabytes of flash.
Speaker 2: That's pretty low-end as ESP-30 devices go, but, you know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have native USB supports.
Speaker 2: You can't make it look like a hard drive.
Speaker 2: just USB serial, but it does have a Risk 5 processor and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Speaker 2: So there's lots of possibility for fun things there.
Speaker 2: And then I discover CrossPoint Reader, an entirely open-source alternative firmware for the XTE Inc, written from the ground up.
Speaker 2: It's essentially it's written in Arduino using Platform I.O.
Speaker 2: It uses the open source open X4 SDK library, which was new to me that that existed, to access the various peripherals of the reader in a nice clean way.
Speaker 2: And Crosspoint offers some really neat features like saving your reading position, supporting ePubs with images, having nicer fonts.
Speaker 2: You can upload books to it over Wi-Fi, and it has over-the-air firmware updates.
Speaker 2: Like normally to update firmware on the reader, you need to use their special little app or a Chrome browser or something.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it's like you have to have a cable and a computer.
Speaker 2: And new features have been added to Crosspoint Reader firmware all the time.
Speaker 2: So don't wait for an official release.
Speaker 2: Just install it from GitHub and see what happens.
Speaker 2: You can always undo and load the official firmware if you want.
Speaker 2: And then on top of that, I learned that last month,
Speaker 2: friend of the show Liz, aka Blitz City, DOI, has also been hacking on the X4,
Speaker 2: and has added a CircuitPython build for it.
Speaker 2: And she made a nice helper library for it.
Speaker 2: While the CircuitPython firmware sets up the ePaper display
Speaker 2: to act as a standard CircuitPython display I.O. display.
Speaker 2: The helper library that she wrote gives you easy access to the battery monitor and the buttons,
Speaker 2: which are implemented as a resistor ladder,
Speaker 2: so they're kind of tricky to read.
Speaker 2: So thanks, Liz.
Speaker 2: Oh, and also, the e-paper display,
Speaker 2: unlike all the maker-oriented e-paper displays
Speaker 2: or ink displays that we have access to,
Speaker 2: this display is really fast.
Speaker 2: So it's cool to see like a professional e-ink display.
Speaker 2: So suffice to say,
Speaker 2: there's a ton of fun hacking opportunities
Speaker 2: to be had with this quite well-built little e-ink reader.
Speaker 2: It's sturdy enough to live in my backpack,
Speaker 2: and the fact that it can act as a ESP 32 Wi-Fi dev board when I need one,
Speaker 2: gives it double utility, flash on your own Arduino sketch to it,
Speaker 2: and then flash back the e-reader application.
Speaker 2: You know, since all your books live on the SD card, it doesn't matter to you.
Speaker 2: So this is highly recommended if you want a fun thing to hack on,
Speaker 2: maybe as an e-reader even.
Speaker 2: But as I've not used it much as an actual re-reader, you know,
Speaker 2: I can't speak to much of that yet.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize how small it was until I was on there,
Speaker 1: site so it's four inches but that they have a picture of people using an iPhone pro and it's magnetically
Speaker 1: attached to the back and fits within the iPhone so that that kind of gives you a perspective of how big
Speaker 2: it really is yeah i've got i've got an iPhone an iPhone pro max and it's smaller than the phone
Speaker 2: on all dimensions so what's your next one for this one we've covered a couple air quality
Speaker 1: monitors over the years and project aura is another but with a small twist
Speaker 1: Project Aura is running as a Maker World crowdfunding project where you pay $30 for the 3D model and the firmware, which gets you the 3MF file, firmware, and the STL for 3D printing.
Speaker 1: The bill of materials is also provided, and you have to buy the parts yourself, which add up to about $200.
Speaker 1: You need to pick up a WaveShare ESP 32S3 touch with a 4.3 inch screen, a Senserion, Sen.66, an Adafruitbreakout that measures the air quality, temperature, and humidity, as well.
Speaker 1: well as SFA 30 from Seed Studio, which is a formaldehyde sensor.
Speaker 1: An Adafruit pressure sensor and hub, you can choose from a couple of different models,
Speaker 1: which I've linked to in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And lastly, a real-time clock, the Adafruit, 8523.
Speaker 1: Other than that, some miscellaneous cables, capacitors, and a battery are needed.
Speaker 1: All the parts are linked from the project page, making it easy to buy.
Speaker 1: The project blew away its goal.
Speaker 1: It raised $79,000 with an original goal of $1,000.
Speaker 1: which is so impressive, and it doesn't even require any soldering.
Speaker 1: With the project blowing away its goals,
Speaker 1: the creator added a stretch goal for a second alternate enclosure design,
Speaker 1: which he's also released.
Speaker 1: The firmware uses Arduino and Platform I.O.
Speaker 1: And LVGL for the graphics.
Speaker 1: It looks really impressive.
Speaker 1: Check it out with the links in the show notes.
Speaker 1: It even has a night mode.
Speaker 1: It also features an integrated web dashboard with live stats, events,
Speaker 1: setting sync, and over-the-air firmware updates.
Speaker 1: Initial setup can be done as it will create a Wi-Fi hotspot and uses MDNS to connect to it.
Speaker 1: And of course, it's home assistant capable and uses MQTT for communication.
Speaker 1: Lastly, it features a safe boot.
Speaker 1: It will automatically roll back to the last known good config after crashes, making it easy to use.
Speaker 1: I'm still in the market for an air quality sensor from my office.
Speaker 1: I'm curious how bad the air gets with my 3D printer here with me.
Speaker 1: One of these days, I need to bite the bullet and just buy one of these projects.
Speaker 1: But what was really neat to me is the fact that he sold the STL and the firmware for $30.
Speaker 1: People are so used to just downloading STLs for free, but there's clearly a demand if you're going to raise 80 grand on a one grand goal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is a really great solution to the problem of one of the things, I'm on the 3D printing subreddit quite a lot.
Speaker 2: And people always get frustrated because, you know, they'll upload their projects.
Speaker 2: to thing averse printables or maker world
Speaker 2: and then they'll find their designs
Speaker 2: for sell on Amazon or eBay or whatever
Speaker 2: and it's just like,
Speaker 2: they're just like,
Speaker 2: it's really demoralizing,
Speaker 2: you know,
Speaker 2: that like someone's just taking your design
Speaker 2: and printing out a whole bunch and selling them.
Speaker 2: And usually you can get them taken down.
Speaker 2: Like often you can just ask the person
Speaker 2: who stole your design and they'll take it down
Speaker 2: because they're stealing from thousands of people
Speaker 2: who cares of they to take down one of them.
Speaker 2: But this is a great way to just kind of get around that
Speaker 2: because like,
Speaker 2: oh, you make money up front.
Speaker 2: for a really cool idea.
Speaker 2: And if copies are made subsequent,
Speaker 2: it's like, well, at least you actually got paid at the very start.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if you visit the Maker World crowdfunding site,
Speaker 1: I believe he even sold commercial versions.
Speaker 1: So it costs more,
Speaker 1: but you could actually buy a commercial license
Speaker 1: to print them and sell them online.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: I had an argument anybody to look at this
Speaker 2: because it looks very sci-fi.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just like those sort of concatenated
Speaker 2: triangular rhombus with a display on one side.
Speaker 2: and like vents all over it because it's an air quality sensor.
Speaker 2: And all the graphics that are in LVGL look kind of Star Trek-y almost, you know.
Speaker 2: And also if you look in internally, I love how it, because it's all just ATA fruit boards, like the Stemakutie boards.
Speaker 2: And he made a cool little 3D printable rack that houses the four different boards altogether and sort of makes it of one unit, which is really nice.
Speaker 2: It's like this is such a great testament to how cool Stemak QT can be.
Speaker 2: You don't, you just like plug, plug, plug, plug, plug.
Speaker 2: and you've got a thing that actually does a useful task.
Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely.
Speaker 2: And what's your next one for us?
Speaker 2: Okay, so another dev board.
Speaker 2: This one's important, like super important, like societally important.
Speaker 2: So the Baochip 1X by Bunny Huang is another micro-controlled platform like the RP2040 or the ESP 32.
Speaker 2: But unlike those chips, everything about the baochip is open source.
Speaker 2: It's based on an open source risk fee core.
Speaker 2: It's actually got many cores in there.
Speaker 2: And the entire design is open, like not just the cores.
Speaker 2: The baochip includes a main CPU running at 315 meghertz.
Speaker 2: And four smaller cores running at 700 megahertz and a complete set of hardware accelerators for
Speaker 2: cryptography and encryption, true random number generation, and a bunch of other things
Speaker 2: for like sort of the modern things we need in computers.
Speaker 2: For memory, it's got two megabytes of RAM and built in four megabytes of RR RAM or resistive
Speaker 2: random access memory, which is kind of.
Speaker 2: like Flash, but it's different. It also has an MMU, a memory management unit, so it could host
Speaker 2: real OSs. In size and cost, it's similar to the Raspberry Pi, you know, between like under $10 or
Speaker 2: whatever for the devboard. But it's so very different because of this openness. And he's taken the
Speaker 2: openness of the bout chip to the max. In addition to the design being open and the ROM bootloader
Speaker 2: being open, the chip itself is literally open. It's transparent to infrared light. So you can
Speaker 2: inspect it with a microscope and a camera that's sensitive to IR.
Speaker 2: so you can verify that the silicon that you received was what was promised.
Speaker 2: It's like a physical check sum to guarantee that the chip that you got has not got malware
Speaker 2: or compromised encryption hardware in it.
Speaker 2: We just can't do that.
Speaker 2: Any of the chips we get, we just have to trust that what's in them is what's in them.
Speaker 2: I've been following this project for a while, and recently Bunny published a couple of posts
Speaker 2: on the crowd supply campaign page that goes deep into the details of the design of the chip.
Speaker 2: in comparisons with other chips and past designs that other groups have done.
Speaker 2: As someone who once thought they were going to be a VLSI designer, these posts are magical.
Speaker 2: I recommend anyone interested in chip design to read them as they cover decades of CPU design in just a few pages.
Speaker 2: One of the specific things that I found really fascinating was inside the BOW-I-Co processors that are sort of like the PIO co-processors.
Speaker 2: That are sort of like the PIO co-processors that are in the RP2040.
Speaker 2: If you ever heard about these, they're the things that enable.
Speaker 2: us to do really cool protocoly stuff like, oh, neopixels or
Speaker 2: HTML.
Speaker 2: They're like tiny little subcomputers inside the main computer.
Speaker 2: And in his BIO analysis document, he describes that while the RP2040s
Speaker 2: PIOs are conceptually simple, they're actually really complex,
Speaker 2: comparable to how like older CISC-style processors were like one instruction could do a lot.
Speaker 2: But that made the whole chip much more complicated.
Speaker 2: And the PIOs take up a lot of physical space on the chip.
Speaker 2: So Bunny took a different approach with the BIO processors.
Speaker 2: He made each one a tiny Risk 5 processor running at 700 megahertz with a few tricks to make them better for I.O.
Speaker 2: Tasks, like being able to halt on various conditions.
Speaker 2: So these I.O processors are full risk computers, just like the main CPU.
Speaker 2: And so they have much more program space than the 32 instructions of P.S.
Speaker 2: that's in the RP 2040, these BIO co-processors can run additional tasks like signal processing
Speaker 2: or other sort of sensor handling tasks that you would normally do in your main CPU.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to play with this.
Speaker 2: So disclosure, I'm a vague acquaintance of Bunny, and I've personally backed the Boucher crowdfunding campaign.
Speaker 2: Can't wait to play with these.
Speaker 2: A fully open chip that's not patent encumbered is the future.
Speaker 2: Like open source, we've been talking about how open source is the future,
Speaker 2: that's been proving out over the last couple of decades.
Speaker 2: We all talk about open source, but everything we base our open designs on ultimately runs
Speaker 2: on physical chips that are literal black boxes.
Speaker 2: Let's change that.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what I was going to say is I don't know if folks appreciate how the fact
Speaker 1: that it's 100% open source, right?
Speaker 1: We think of the Raspberry Pi Pico as being open source, but the RM2 chip is not.
Speaker 1: The Bluetooth is not.
Speaker 1: So to have something that was from A to Z designed with that in mind is absolutely.
Speaker 1: Absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Like the, the Raspberry Pi Pico, the RP 2040 was a like kind of the next step from where we were a few years ago because it was so open.
Speaker 2: Like there was so much that was there was of the design that was given out that we could see how it all worked.
Speaker 2: It was it was incredible.
Speaker 2: But now this, the baochip is the next is I feel like the next step after that because we're getting to the truly, truly fully fully open.
Speaker 2: So anyway, Paul, what's your last one for today?
Speaker 1: My last one is either you love it or hate it, but it's AI related.
Speaker 1: and it's called OpenCode, which is 100% open source AI coding agents.
Speaker 1: So think Claude Code, but open source.
Speaker 1: I know, I know it's AI, but I have to admit to dipping my toe into AI use this past month
Speaker 1: and I kind of can see the utility in using AI for coding.
Speaker 1: OpenCode is licensed under the Liberal MIT license and features more than 130,000 stars on GitHub.
Speaker 1: It includes a number of free models that you can use or you can connect it to other popular AI providers like Anthropics Claude,
Speaker 1: Google's Gemini and more.
Speaker 1: It features extensions for VS code, cursor, and Zed,
Speaker 1: so you can use it right in your IDE.
Speaker 1: I didn't see an official JetBrains extension for PiCharm,
Speaker 1: but JetBrains does offer one in their marketplace.
Speaker 1: I downloaded the desktop app they offer and tried it out.
Speaker 1: The desktop app is really similar to an IDE.
Speaker 1: On the left, there's a pain to interact with the AI,
Speaker 1: and on the right is your code editor.
Speaker 1: The first project I had to do was to try and convert an Arduino project
Speaker 1: to CircuitPython that uses MQTT,
Speaker 1: the Bambu helper app that we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: Let's just say it didn't do that great of a job.
Speaker 1: But the CircuitPython code was really C Python code
Speaker 1: is what it spit out with how it was trying to connect to the MQTD broker.
Speaker 1: I then tried a different experiment and gave it a library I had just written
Speaker 1: and told it to replace the code.compy and use the library instead.
Speaker 1: It got about 90% right, so it did a lot better.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that there's just not a lot of training data in the free models for circuit
Speaker 1: Python.
Speaker 1: They also offer two paid options.
Speaker 1: The first is Zen, which they say gives you access to a curated set of AI models that open code is tested and benchmarked just for coding agents.
Speaker 1: They claim that they are fixing this for everyone, not just for open code users by testing select models and consulting their teams,
Speaker 1: working with providers to ensure that the models are delivered properly, and benchmarking all the model provider combinations that they recommend.
Speaker 1: They also charge $20, but pay as you go where you can set a monthly spend limit so you don't overpay.
Speaker 1: which is a lot of horror stories on Reddit right now
Speaker 1: when I read about how many tokens are being used for Claude and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second option is open code go, which is $10 a month and is more of a standard plan.
Speaker 1: They claim it has generous limits, but don't really say how many.
Speaker 1: It includes access to the GLM5, Kmi K2.5, the Minimax M2.5, and Minimax 2.7 models.
Speaker 1: One thing I will say is I have no idea how the open source models were created,
Speaker 1: and if it was done in an ethical way.
Speaker 1: So if you're looking to try out this whole AI thing,
Speaker 1: this is one way to do it with an open source app and open source models to see if it works for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I played around with this a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2: I was kind of pitting it and Claude Code against each other.
Speaker 2: Like their terminal apps work very similar.
Speaker 2: If you've used to one, the open code one will be about the same.
Speaker 2: I did find it not to be not as good as cloud code,
Speaker 2: but maybe about as good as chat GPT.
Speaker 2: I was mostly poking at it with C code,
Speaker 2: which I think has probably a broader foothold in the models.
Speaker 2: I did like that there's an LLM.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited by the idea of an LLM that is specifically tailored for coders.
Speaker 2: Because I think that's one of the few cases where the LLM type stuff can actually work,
Speaker 2: especially for some of the stuff I've been doing lately,
Speaker 2: which has been updating code from five years ago to more modern standards,
Speaker 2: where it's like you're not really trying to do new stuff,
Speaker 2: you're just trying to do old stuff in a new way.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And that seems like a perfect,
Speaker 2: perfect fit for these LLM things.
Speaker 2: And so,
Speaker 2: yeah,
Speaker 2: so it's like,
Speaker 2: I think for a lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: like if you're,
Speaker 2: if you use some of the lower end models for,
Speaker 2: unlike Claude or whatever,
Speaker 2: maybe OpenCode could replace that for now.
Speaker 2: I do wish,
Speaker 2: like as you mentioned,
Speaker 2: I do wish there was more details to how they made their Zen models.
Speaker 2: They didn't really talk much about that.
Speaker 2: They're kind of cagey,
Speaker 2: the way that like all these guys are,
Speaker 2: Casey. Right. I know that too.
Speaker 2: And, you know, and hey, you know,
Speaker 2: Claude code sources
Speaker 2: open now too in a way. Yes, it is.
Speaker 2: As of yesterday, I think it just was
Speaker 2: leaked. So, you know, Pandora's box
Speaker 2: has been opened. It's all
Speaker 2: open code. But yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, if you're into LLM-based coding,
Speaker 2: give the open code a try, I think.
Speaker 1: Well, that's our show. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: And you can find detailed show notes and transcripts
Speaker 3: at thebootloader.net.
Speaker 3: Until next time, stay positive.
