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Nextube is a Kickstarter and Indiegogo project to make a Nixie tube style clock.

There are some promises from Rotrics (the people behind the hardware) to release proper development tools, but these are some notes on how the API works until that is here; for general community information see the Facebook group. In particular, there's a great Community User Guide available there in the Files section and an off-Facebook copy that is far far better than what you will find on the Rotrics site.

The below are some unofficial notes. Using any of this can probably void your warranty, or at least make it difficult to support you, if you don't understand it, it's probably not worth trying any of this yet, sorry.

Hardware

The device is ESP32-WROVER-E based. Likely to be the 16MB of flash variant (/cfg when configuring the network shows "Flash size: 16777216").

More details.

Web config UI

When the device is on your network, assuming you know the IP address (which you may have got from your router, a network scan, or from the web UI when you first connected and set it up) - it should be accessible via plain HTTP (not HTTPS)

http://[IP]/cfg

Note that you'll need to add /cfg on the end of the URL - if you try just http://[IP] you will get a plain text message in the browser window stating: Not found: / (it looks like they haven't set up a redirect or landing page for the root). Similarly, once you are in the web config page, if you click on HOME in the top left, it will try to take you back to '/', which will still not be found.

You can use the web config UI to reconfigure the wifi, upload a new firmware image, or restart the device remotely. Some people report that /cfg doesn't work for them -- the HTTP API below works, but everything under /cfg results in a 404, it is possible after initial configuration the config UI may be disabled, we don't yet know exactly how that process works (it's possible that updating the device via serial will in some cases disable the web config UI).

The web config UI will also let you configure a static IP address, as well as DNS settings, which other configuration methods (via the official app) won't let you do. (If you don't want to install the app at all you can configure via connecting to the built-in AP, configure your network details, download the default config, then upload the config via the HTTP API over your own network.)

YouTube subscriber counter app

See YouTube.

HTTP API

See HTTP API.

Serial API

Presents a USB Serial API. Based on the desktop app software appears to do more than HTTP (different config/update process?); the app has some files that are part of an ESP32 SDK, so it is possible it is doing a full flash of the device -- maybe this is the way they will offer a real SDK?

If you alter the clock faces bundled within in the app (e.g. on a Mac, /Applications/Rotrics Nextube.app/Contents/Resources/static/data, see the community FAQ for more details) you can make the app update them over USB, this will only work over USB. Beware: If you make images which are more complex or less compressed than the provided clock faces you can very easily run the device out of disk space (see notes on HTTP API df endpoint for a way to check).

Scripts

These are some very rough scripts that use the HTTP API.

• number-print.sh

Run this in a directory of Nextube formatted numbers (0.jpg, 1.jpg, ..., blank.jpg) and it will update the first gallery to be the given up to 6 digit number. This is writing to the flash, so don't do it too often, and note it annoyingly needs to reset the device. (Which on my hardware can result in an audible noise, even if volume is turned off.)

"Night mode"

There isn't yet a builtin way to alter the brightness or turn off at night. You can do something like this and arrange for it to be run from crontab or systemd.

Save a copy of your config (do this once):

nextube=your-device
curl http://$nextube'/api/file/download?path=/config.json' > config.json

Alter the LCD brightness in the config, e.g. run this part in the evening:

jq '.lcd_brightness = 1' config.json | curl -F file=@- http://$nextube'/api/file/upload?path=/config.json'
sleep 1
curl -d '' http://$nextube/api/reset

1 is very low brightness, 0 turns off the LCD entirely.

You can also switch off the backlight by changing the value of backlight_onoff from "ON" to "OFF" (and vice versa) using the same method.

You can combine these changes into a single jq command, for example: jq '.lcd_brightness = 1 | .backlight_onoff = "OFF"' config.json (or just upload different versions of the config file).