web-druid

While I was working on Blackbird, which emulates the behavior of monome crow on the Workshop Computer, I ended up doing a lot of testing with the python-based druid CLI app.

At some point during development, Chris Johnson was doing some testing and noted that a web-based version of druid might be possible. This was a mind blowing idea to me since I had always felt the number one hang-up for getting started with crow development was that step one was kind of “Install Python” which always raised a barrier to entry, especially with environment management and older versions no longer working, etc.

So I gave it a try and web-druid is the result! It uses WebSerial to communicate with crow (or Blackbird) and provides a minimal IDE for development as well with autocomplete etc.

The dream for this was for web-druid to be a place that people who wanted to develop scripts for crow could start doing that without having a pre-assumed background in software development etc.

Essential for this was that it worked seamlessly with real crow devices so I tested thoroughly with mine in addition to my latest Blackbird firmware. Thankfully (and as expected) I found that real crow always worked more seamlessly than Blackbird.

The crow community was pretty excited about this and monome ultimately added a section on it to their druid docs. This also happened to in parallel be a path (WebSerial based interface) that monome was considering for their new iii platform, so web-druid ultimately led to @tehn commissioning me for the development of diii.