This project got away from me a bit, but here it is!

Introducing - Hearth: an interactive story engine for SolarOS and the Web!

Features:

• Uses an open, human readable and writeable file standard (.hearth)
• SolarOS as a first class citizen platform
• Web-based player
• Multiple save slots for each story
• Easy to Use online Story Studio
• The ability to export a transcript of your playthrough (full transcript on web, limited on SolarOS)
• Support for branching narratives, variables, conditions, and user text input
• In-line markdown support for Bold, Italics, and Strikethrough
• An online "Featured Stories" repository

You can get Hearth on the Playground now!
I hope you all enjoy Hearth and I extra hope you share stories of your own for others to enjoy!

I've contributed 3.5 more apps to the playground and these will be the last from me for a while since I'm about to enter my busy season.

Flint/Flint-TUI

If you like Obsidian, good news! Flint is an offline Markdown notebook and personal knowledge base for SolarOS. It keeps notes as ordinary files, works withObsidian-style wiki links and backlinks, has full #tag indexing, and treats daily notes as one part of a general-purpose vault. The GUI and TUI versions both use the same core engine, so you can have one or both installed and they'll use the same vault and settings.

Due to the lack of file enumeration/listing in the solaros.storage micropython api, it can't automatically add files dropped into the vault, but there is a file import function built-in (check the Readme for full documentation on how to use it).

Today

Welcome to your daily overview! This app pulls from my Todo, Calendar, RSS Reader, and Flint apps to give you a top-down look at your day. If you don't have one or any of the apps installed, it just shows no items for that app.

Control Center

Control-Center is half control panel, half dashboard for your SolarOS device. In it, you can check system stats, mount/unmount storage, check the status of jobs, and more!

I've contributed four new apps to the playground!

• Bluesky — Sign in to Bluesky or a self-hosted PDS; browse home and profile timelines; read threads and replies; post, reply, like, repost, and start conversations; read and send DMs; choose compact or full-text timeline display.
• RSS Reader — Manage RSS feeds; browse aggregate or individual-feed views; cache recent articles for offline reading; mark articles and feeds read; render cleaned HTML/Markdown text without loading images by default.
• Wikipedia Reader — Search Wikipedia, browse linked articles, open a random article, and keep recent articles cached. Supports an offline library for articles explicitly saved to keep.
• OPDS Client — Browse and search an OPDS library; navigate categories and book details; download supported books with progress indicators; cache catalogue pages and prefetch nearby pages for quicker browsing.

AI Disclosure: I am not the best programmer. For my own stuff, that's okay, but for contributing to the community I wanted to make sure it was actually good code. I used locally run agentic AI to bug hunt the code, help me develop tests for it, add useful features, and understand things I didn't quite get (AT Proto, for one). Once I had something running and usable, I gave the code to the free tier of Claude and ChatGPT to look it over one more time. I am very much against using AI for art, but using tools to make new tools is a human tradition that predates language.

A social club for Makers, Crafters, and DIY-ers in the Santa Barbara area!

We meet at Lighthouse every other Sunday and other places around SB/Goleta in between! I've been so excited to meet everyone who has joined so far. We have members who do electroforming, 3D printing, fiber arts, papercrafts, amateur radio, carpentry... all sorts!

We have a discord server where we chit-chat, talk about our projects, and share cool things. It's also a great way to keep up to date on meeting info. Come join in!
https://discord.gg/pc4taEHk9x

Photo: A mix of member projects!

I'm very into Solarpunk and - inspired by the computing concepts presented in Becky Chambers' "Monk and Robot" series of books - I've decided to make a solar powered web-server with the eventual goal of moving my personal website to it. This isn't a new concept but, since I've never made anything solar-powered before (more than just small lights, anyway), I decided to start small and try to build something with the constraint of doing useful compute using only solar power.

Community Hub is a community bulletin board that allows anyone within Wi-Fi range to make postings under one of four categories: Need, Offer, Notice, or Event. It runs entirely on an ESP32 (in my case, an ESP32-C3), generates a Wi-Fi AP with captive portal, supports OTA firmware updates via the built-in admin panel, and stores all the post and config data on a persistent storage partition on the built-in flash (SPIFFS). And, yes, it can run entirely on a 5V 6W solar panel.

Full Project Details and Code