Appsemble is most often used for forms, registrations and processes at municipalities and other organisations. That is where the platform is strong, but it is not where it ends. To find out how far we could get with design, offline use and hardware, we built Rooster: an app to control a nursery lamp.

What Rooster does

Rooster controls a Fisher-Price Lumalou (GLD09) directly over Bluetooth. You add a lamp, give it the name of the room, and control it from a dashboard: night light, sound, naps with a duration of their own, saved scenes and a sleep trainer that shows when it is bedtime and when it is time to get up again.

On top of that you put together a routine per day, out of steps such as brushing teeth, getting dressed, reading and tidying up. A day you have set up can be copied in one go to the weekdays you tick, so you do not have to fill in the same thing seven times.

Two things are deliberately absent: an account and a cloud. There is no server that knows your lamp or your child. The app talks to the lamp directly through Web Bluetooth in the browser and keeps the settings in IndexedDB on the device itself. If you are not near the lamp, you can still change your settings. They are then queued and applied as soon as the lamp is back in range.

The lamp we built it for still works perfectly well. Only the manufacturer’s app is gone, which is a story of its own: when the app disappears, working hardware becomes waste.

How it is built

Rooster is an ordinary Appsemble app: an app definition in YAML, with pages made up of blocks. Most of it comes from the platform itself, with blocks such as markdown, button-list, html, form, list, tiles and detail-viewer. Two blocks are new and specific to this app: one for the shelf of lamps on the home screen, and one that shows the lamp itself, including the glow that belongs to the selected setting.

The Bluetooth logic sits in the app controller. That is a piece of TypeScript belonging to the app that offers its own actions to the blocks, just like the built-in actions do. As a result, the blocks know nothing about Bluetooth or about the lamp’s protocol: they call an action and show the result. Storage goes through the regular storage.read and storage.write actions.

The looks come entirely from the theme: a dark palette in theme variables, two custom fonts and a stylesheet per block. No separate framework was involved.

What the platform gets out of it

An app that works well but does not look the part gets used less. That is why Rooster is, above all, a reason for us to push the design side of the platform forward. What we work out here lands in the blocks everyone uses: roomier sizing for images, a footer block to close off a page with, a markdown field with an adjustable height, and pages with a grid layout that moves with the screen width.

It works the other way around too. The way Rooster handles being offline, keeping changes until the device is reachable again, is exactly the pattern an inspection or registration app needs out in the field.

Where it does not work yet

Web Bluetooth is not in every browser. Chrome on Android and on desktop works; on Linux you first have to switch Web Bluetooth on through a browser flag. Firefox and Safari do not support it. On iPhone and iPad you therefore open Rooster in Bluefy, a browser that does offer Web Bluetooth. Rooster checks this up front and shows what is needed instead of quietly doing nothing.

Building something that does not look like a form

Rooster is an extreme, but it shows where the room is: an app made from the same building blocks as an application form, yet nothing like it. If you would like to talk through what is possible for your organisation, get in touch.

The post Rooster: controlling a night light with Appsemble first appeared on Appsemble.

It is the Fisher-Price Lumalou, one of the products in the Smart Connect line. On its own service pages Mattel states: “the Smart Connect product has been discontinued and app support will end on June 6, 2022”. There is nothing wrong with the device itself. The app that made it adjustable is no longer supported.

This is e-waste, it just does not look like it

Most people picture broken devices when they think of electronic waste. More and more often it is about devices that still work, but whose accompanying software has been phased out. An app that disappears from the store, a cloud connection that is switched off, an account that can no longer be created: the result is the same. What made the device more than an object is gone.

The environmental bill for that is a hefty one, because with electronics the impact sits mostly in production. A device replaced years earlier than necessary does not only cost those years of use. A whole new one gets made to take its place.

None of this is a reproach aimed at one particular manufacturer, by the way. Supporting software forever is free for nobody, and at some point a line is drawn somewhere. The point is what happens to the hardware after that.

What we did about it

We built our own app for our own lamps: Rooster. It does what we needed ourselves, and nothing more remarkable than that. Lamps in a list, a night light setting, a time to wake up. The app talks to the lamp directly over Bluetooth, there is no account and no cloud.

The app is built on Appsemble, our open source low-code platform, so its definition can be read and changed. Anyone who wants to adjust it tomorrow, or run it themselves, can.

A replacement you actually want to use

Giving hardware a second life only works if the replacement software does not feel like a stopgap. Something you use at the moment you are putting a child to bed should not look like an admin screen.

That is why we put as much attention into how the app looks as into what it does: a dark theme that does not sting your eyes in a darkened room, custom illustrations for the lamps, a typeface of its own, and a list that shows at a glance what is on and when the light comes up.

That is also exactly why we take on projects like this. With low-code, design is quickly the poor relation, and it is one of the first reasons people leave an app alone. What we work out here about themes, custom fonts and visual building blocks lands back in the platform, and with it in the apps of everyone who uses Appsemble.

The same principle, a few sizes up

That idea, that things do not have to disappear because the process around them is missing, comes back in a very different project. For the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security we built RePurposed, a pilot application that brings seized goods to organisations with a social purpose instead of to destruction.

There too, the technology is not the problem. The problem is that destruction is administratively the easiest route and reuse the hardest. Organisations register in RePurposed themselves and submit their own request, and an administrator approves or rejects it. What is left of the manual work is the assessment itself.

A night light and a depot full of seized goods have little to do with each other. The barrier is the same in both cases: there is no working way to give the thing a second life, so it disappears.

Software increasingly decides how long hardware lasts

Whoever buys a device with an app attached today is buying the lifespan of that app. That is rarely what the conversation is about at the time of purchase, and it is what decides in five years whether the thing can still do what it could.

Something can be done about that, and it does not have to be big. Local control instead of a mandatory cloud. An open protocol, or at the very least documentation. An app definition someone else can take over if the maker stops.

We would rather build software nobody has to replace if we fall over tomorrow. That is not only decent towards our customers. It also saves a pile of devices that worked perfectly well.

Appsemble and d-centralize are not affiliated with Mattel or Fisher-Price, and this article has not been approved or sponsored by them. Fisher-Price, Lumalou and Smart Connect are trademarks of their respective owners and are mentioned here only to refer to the product in question. Rooster was made by us for our own devices.

The post When the app disappears, working hardware becomes waste first appeared on Appsemble.