Follow layer mode

[mtoonen]

As mentioned in https://discord.com/channels/895297925578637362/1174360045153177640, a way for bazecor to show the current active layer

[mtoonen]

Couple of questions:

1. const active = await focus.command("layer.isActive"); returns empty. Is this a bug in the firmware?
2. layer.state gives for a oneshot layer: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . This makes it hard to make this work foolproof: you don't know if I went from 1 to 3, or from 3 to 1. See also 1
3. Made the interval 1000ms. Is this an ok setting?
4. I had a horrible time debugging: a reload because of a code change resulted in the focusapi losing it's connection, and I had to start the server again. What did I do wrong?

[AlexDygma]

Couple of questions:

1. const active = await focus.command("layer.isActive"); returns empty. Is this a bug in the firmware?
2. layer.state gives for a oneshot layer: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . This makes it hard to make this work foolproof: you don't know if I went from 1 to 3, or from 3 to 1. See also 1
3. Made the interval 1000ms. Is this an ok setting?
4. I had a horrible time debugging: a reload because of a code change resulted in the focusapi losing it's connection, and I had to start the server again. What did I do wrong?

Hey there!

1. layer.isActive requires a layer number to test, it will answer true or false depending on its state, so for example layer.isActive 0 -> "true" if you are in layer 0.
2. the only way to validate that is to compare the current and past states to know what change did you do, we could change the number when you are shifting or one-shotting to layer 3, like using a 2 or whatnot, but that requires FW modifications.
3. There should not be any issues, but as its integrated, it does not disable when changing views and blocks other data transmissions, so we need to fix that before publishing this feature.
4. this is a known dev bug due to the serialport library 🤣 , you need to disconnect the keyboard before applying changes. This will be solved when the new comms architecture comes forth with Bz v2.0, which hopefully is very soon 😄

PS. The feature is really cool! 👍

[LuisSevilla]

Hey @mtoonen!

We've reviewed the feature, and it's interesting, but we want to tweak the UX a bit. We don't want to create two scenarios where people are "locked," either switching layers with the keyboard or the UI. The ideal scenario is that you can do both at the same time.

We'll add it to our feature backlog and hopefully implement it soon.

Thanks for your PR! 💪

[mtoonen]

Hi, sorry for not answering, apparently I turned off notifications 😿 .

If I can do anything to help, please reach out. Will try to enable notifications for this PR.

Thanks for the answers @AlexDygma , glad to see I am not that crazy regarding point 4. Makes sense that serial borks dev experience, had these kinds of problems as well when programming arduino's/esps/etc.

[DabblingLayman]

any idea when this feature might make it into bazecor? very very interested in this functionality