A new version of Blinkit is here, with new features, commented code, and visual improvements made to the interface.
Blinkit is notification software that turns a regular USB stick into a notification light when a new Upvote or Follower is detected. A sound is played and the LED light on a connected USB stick will blink to notify the user.
More information about Blinkit can be found in the introduction post:
Blinkit v1.0 introduction post
New features in Blinkit v1.1
Profile picture
To make the software more personal the Blinkit interface now shows the users Avatar / profile picture.
When a Steem username is typed into the username textbox and the Save button is pressed, it downloads and displays the user's avatar profile picture and when the program is closed and started again it will reload.
Blinkit now shows the users profile picture
Code added to the VB project to get and display the users profile picture
.bat files script that prepares "Avatar URL" with the saved Steem username
Setting for the length of the LED Blink notification
Link to the files that are updated to make this work:
Steem and SBD Price
The steemprice.bat is updated and the steem price is now displayed in the Blinkit interface without the special characters ",. and without the words "Price_usd"
To delete the unwanted characters from the downloaded Coinmarketcap api data the following code is added:
Both button
Fixed the "Both" button that plays a notification sound and blinks the LED on the USB stick.
In v1.0 it was linked to the wrong old .bat file; now when the button is pressed it starts blink.bat and bleep.bat
Visual changes
- New header image
- Capital drive letters in pulldown menu
- Changed the interface layout; "Save username" , "Save USB stick drive letter" and "Save Blink length" are now located in the top next to the new avatar image.
Cleaned up the code
In this latest version the code is cleaned up; it's now more readable and organised, breaks and spaces removed, and each part of the code now has (more) detailed comments.
The updated scripts on Github:
Project files
The project files for Visual Studio have been updated to v1.1 and can now be downloaded and used to make changes to the interface.
License added
The GPL-3.0 license has been added to the project
Github Desktop
My programming routine has changed a bit and I now use Github desktop commits.
Blinkit v1.0 was uploaded with the web upload function of Github and changes to the project I were uploaded manually; updates of files where not automatically managed.
A downside of the new routine with Github Dekstop is that I ended up with a deleted version 1.0 Blinkit folder on Github because I didn't find the option to set it to the original "Blinkit" repository. If I'd used Github Desktop from the beginning of the project, it wouldn't have been like that. I learned from it and from now on I will be making commits on the project files with Github Desktop to keep things structured and more easy to work on, by myself and others!
Using Github Desktop, to make updates to the Blinkit project,
I'm not a professional programmer but I like to play with code and hardware. Please make suggestions on how to improve the VB code or .bat file scripts to simplify and shorten them!
Blinkit is a simple program and should also be and stay simple in code; this hopefully also helps for others to understand how it works,. If you make improvements, please add detailed comments!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors