CIs are good, as soon as your projects grow, having a continuous integration software that manages all your apps and deployments is really useful. We have been using a self-hosted jenkins instance in our server for a few years already, and we have some interesting things with it.

However, we have always known that jenkins is too heavy, it consumes too much memory and it has a slow interface, as it is written on Java.

So we were really looking for a lightweight self-hosted CI that could run easily on a Raspberry PI, but we couldn’t find any existing solution, so we decided to build our own, and it was easier that we expected.

We have been just playing with Unity3D for a few months, but we have already tried to build something: a new RTS (Real Time Strategy) game for Desktop and Mobile. But we want to make this game abstract and adaptable, so that it works like an engine, which means we could easily change the models, behaviour and statistics from the objects in the scene to make a completely new game, a clone of Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds Clone Campaings maybe ? or maybe completely new strategy game featuring plants vs zombies, pirates vs ninjas, angels vs demons or monkeys vs giraffes.

In our case, we’ve started by using the 3D models, animations from StarCraft II game and reverse engineered the behaviour of this game to make our strategy game template.

Year 2015 has come to an end, and as it turns out we do have hoverboards, holograms/augmented reality, yet for some reason hip-kids insist in dressing as lumberjacks rather than in futuristic clothing.

It feels just like yesterday when we were writing our retrospective post last year. Time does fly! So how did we fare this year in comparison?

You may have noticed a mysterious project that has been since the dawn of time in our front page: “Gramola, lightweight online music player, powered by JPlayer with tons of features”. We even have a detailed project page about it… yet disapointingly, you would find no download links or source code there.

We built (and rebuilt!) Gramola some time ago, and we’ve been wanting to find some time to give it some polish and open source it. In fact, at the begining of the year we promised you that we would get it out in 2015. So to honor our words, here it is!

Read details about it on the project page, or head directly to the Github repository for code and install instructions.

Happy music listening in 2016!

Last weekend we attended a hardware hackathon organised by PCH in London. The theme of the hackathon was “Take your prototype to the next stage in 54 hours”, so in our case we brought our Watchduino prototype and focused on trying to make it closer to how it would look if it were a commercial product.

The best part is that at the hackathon there was a set of mentors, people who are experts in different areas of IoT, which were giving us useful advice about our product direction, design optimizations or the ins and outs of manufacturing.

By the end of the hackathon, we had a functional (at least theorethically) design for Watchduino that looks this awesome: