Hacker News Reader

Comment by KeplerBoy | Hacker News Reader

What a humbling writeup. This is real fullstack engineering.

Humbling all right. I think it would take me weeks to achieve this - and that's assuming I had this article to start from!

I suspect it may have taken the author weeks as well, given they indicated waiting for chips from China and that there was communications with Elgato's customer support. This writeup looks like it's the report of a few weeks if not months of on and off work.

I'm the author of this article and you're absolutely correct! This was a long, drawn-out project. For some context, I ordered the replacement regulators in February. The new LED driver chips were ordered in March, so that was around the time that I actually had the failed hardware fixed. Then everything sat idle for months. The firmware reverse engineering to figure out the LEDs was several weeks of on and off work in my spare time.

This type of thing is definitely not something you can just figure out in a couple hours (or even days).

Your writeup is inspiring.

I most appreciate the honesty about mistakes and failures and dead-ends. Too often wasted effort and small failures are elided from articles and instead you get something that is written retrospectively as though everything went perfectly...

Thanks! I wouldn't want to write it any other way. I think it helps convey just how much work it really was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com