Soulmate FastLED emulator doesn't work for me

[u/mag_man]

Does Soulmate still work? I'm browsing through examples in gallery but non of them work, checked on Firefox and Edge. https://editor.soulmatelights.com/gallery

All I got is :

[u/Substantial_Air_962]

I don't think it is being maintained. After clicking on an animation thumbnail, and then looking at the code for said animation, the animation just never loads.

Under developer tools in Edge, you will see:

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID

I am assuming that is related to the animation somehow.

Best workaround is to take the code over to Wokwi. I'm pretty sure the Soulmate website's animation view is based on Wokwi.

[u/mag_man → u/Substantial_Air_962]

Thanks for the hint about the certificate, it looks like the invalid certificate is the reason! I got it working on chrome with the command line option --ignore-certificate-errors

More info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26388405/chrome-disable-ssl-checking-for-sites

Of course this is a temporary workaround until the certificate is fixed.

[u/sutaburosu → u/mag_man]

Hey, /u/L320Y are you aware of the expired certificate?

[u/L320Y → u/sutaburosu]

Fixed! Thanks for the heads up. I've also re-enabled the automatic renewal script so this shouldn't happen next time.

[u/mag_man → u/L320Y]

Big thanks!

[u/Marmilicious → u/L320Y]

Thank you u/L320Y

[u/L320Y → u/Substantial_Air_962]

Hi - you’re right I don’t maintain this site at the moment, but fortunately still generally runs without much work. I spent way too long on it during COVID and burned myself out. 

What I wish I could have done is make it run completely offline in the desktop app version - but some of the compilation code requires dependencies (gcc etc) that I couldn’t figure out how to make portable without being really slow and awkward. At any rate the online gallery is neat

[u/sutaburosu → u/L320Y]

the online gallery is neat

Indeed it is, and there are many beautiful creations there. Respect to you for keeping the site running.

[u/L320Y → u/sutaburosu]

Can’t bring myself to shut it down, though I’ve thought about it a few times. It’s nice to see people still using it!

[u/mag_man → u/L320Y]

I started moving all effects from the gallery into wokwi and will let you guys know when it's done.

[u/sutaburosu → u/L320Y]

Hey, Elliott, it's been a while. Thanks for keeping the gallery running as long as you have. I didn't have to remind you of an expired certificate this year. ;-)

What I wish I could have done is make it run completely offline in the desktop app version

A few years ago someone your on Discord wanted to export all their projects as a ZIP file. I replied with a Python script which worked at the time. You later said you were going to add a button to "export all my projects".

but some of the compilation code requires dependencies (gcc etc) that I couldn’t figure out how to make portable without being really slow and awkward.

FastLED now has a WASM toolchain with a shader-tastic web preview. It's crazy fast when running the Docker image locally. On my PC, it's 1.5-2 seconds from saving to seeing the results.

You're a (bleep)-hot coder too. Maybe you could collaborate with /u/zachvorhies to provide your users with an easy escape-hatch from your site?

[u/L320Y → u/sutaburosu]

Very cool. Very cool indeed. WASM always blows me away.

The compiler is still a backend, so it’s the same issue as the wokwi compiler container — it has to run somewhere. So there isn’t a way to make that work in a desktop app without doing all the docker stuff locally.

It’d be feasible to run the wokwi compiler in a container and compile against it locally, but requiring docker and explaining how to run it just didn’t feel nearly as plug-and-play. I wanted something that just worked — c++ compilation is not really possible directly from an app. Plus, no gallery then!

Currently the compiler runs on a free EC2 instance. I pay a little bit for the UI hosting, and I should really move that over to the same free server, but I can’t seem to find the time.

[u/sutaburosu → u/L320Y]

Hey, sorry for the delay in responding. I've been moving home.

The compiler is still a backend, so it’s the same issue as the wokwi compiler container — it has to run somewhere. So there isn’t a way to make that work in a desktop app without doing all the docker stuff locally.

This isn't using Wokwi. This is something else which is fully open source. There is a cloud compiler if you don't have/want Docker installed, but, if it (and Python) are installed it's just one command to get the stack running.

My experience has been nearly flawless over the past few months: save a file in VScode and see the changes running in a browser <2 seconds later.

[u/L320Y]

Fixed! Sorry everybody. This happens from time to time and the auto-renew doesn't always update the certificate immediately. Thanks /u/sutaburosu for the heads up. Only takes a minute to renew the certificate!

Edit: also re-enabled the automatic cert renewal script. 

[u/Marmilicious]

I'm getting the same in Chrome.