Hacker News: mogrinz

New comment by mogrinz in "GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone"

mogrinz — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:59:03 +0000

They made fake, terrible artifacts (colorless paint chips, text-only city guides and instruction manuals) to show how terrible that is, and then "fixed" them. The problem is, in reality their examples don't exist. Paint chips have color samples. City guides have maps, pictures, and color. Instruction manuals almost always have illustrations. If what you made is better than what exists, you should compare it to what exists and not some alternate reality.

New comment by mogrinz in "Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)"

mogrinz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:14:54 +0000

Yeah, I didn’t realize there was a time limit on edits, and I was well outside of it

New comment by mogrinz in "Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)"

mogrinz — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:42:12 +0000

Fwiw, I used the same phrasing in my title as the product I bought on Amazon. Most of these are made (and packaged) in China: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=backup+camera A search for “reverse camera” only returns “backup camera”s

New comment by mogrinz in "Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)"

mogrinz — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:44:35 +0000

The setup I bought only has one camera but the AMT supports up to 3 separate composite sources (I did not add switching to the library yet b/c I couldn’t test this). It looks like split-screen is supported also. For now, I am adding some simple sensors to the back of the suit and triggering an on-screen pop-up when something is behind me

New comment by mogrinz in "Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)"

mogrinz — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:38:48 +0000

Thanks! I’ll fix that

New comment by mogrinz in "Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)"

mogrinz — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:06:30 +0000

This started because I built a full-size Robby the Robot suit and discovered I couldn't actually see out of it (https://youtu.be/gAHd46ErNA8?si=-iOwbobp4trPXdGB)

I bought a $35 backup camera/display to solve that problem, then discovered that the display contained an AMT630A video processor with a surprisingly capable OSD system. That sent me down a rabbit hole of I2C probing, firmware dumping, register tracing, custom graphics, bitmap formats, hidden factory menus, and eventually figuring out how to use an ESP32 to generate a programmable HUD over the live composite video.

I ended up turning what I learned into an Arduino library, which I've released on GitHub. It supports built-in and custom fonts, multiple OSD windows, 16-color bitmaps, palettes, transparency, and animation. It can also be used with composite video sources other than the camera.

The library and code are here: https://github.com/mogrinz/AMT630A You can also install directly from the Arduino IDE Library Manager (search for AMT630A)

Reverse-engineering a $35 backup camera display (AMT630A)

mogrinz — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:06:30 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/mogrinz/AMT630A

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49884346

Points: 83

# Comments: 26

New comment by mogrinz in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

mogrinz — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:13:43 +0000

The site is localendar.com (you can reach me through the Contact Form there and I can share more financials). Short version: I started back in '99. There were no good calendaring engines back then so I had to build my own (with wicked performance btw ;)). The site is Java/SQL Server. It's sticky b/c it targeted webmasters who needed an easy-to-update calendar for their own site.

The original goal was to aggregate all these local events into a single searchable index and serve up local ads alongside. I never really got that part to take off, though I did get a very early patent for local search on the web. Since then, calendaring libs have come along which allowed many site-builder tools to offer a built-in solution.

The primary reasons for declines are 0) Not as many people build raw sites anymore; people migrate to things like Wordpress or Wix) 1) Google showing less profitable ads and 2) Webmasters w/ a popular site can remove ads via a subscription (which are drastically underpriced; some are still on a legacy $9.95/year). Everything is exportable (and importable) via iCal if desired. Buyer gets everything, w/ no residual royalties to me. I'd have to have an active role in the handover since it's all bespoke code. The buyer would need some level of Java+T-SQL since I don't want to teach coding from scratch.

I love my users and many rely heavily on the site - it's meant to be very simple to use and I tend to draw an older demographic that doesn't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles. 26+ years is a lot of time and I don't have the passion for it I used to. I had a recent health issue and my wife is concerned that she wouldn't know how to close this out gracefully if the worst ever happened.

New comment by mogrinz in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

mogrinz — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:41:21 +0000

I have a calendaring site (won't mention it here b/c I don't want to be seen as plugging it) that has been generating revenue from ads and subscriptions for 26 years now. At its peak, well over 100k/yr but now more like 15k/yr for the past 5 years. Still a very steady income b/c the site is sticky. The only expense I have is about $3k every 36/mo for VPS hosting. At this point the code base is so mature that I only do minimal user support. I've looked into selling but people only want to offer 2x annual revenue. Why would I do that when I can just hold onto it for another year? I wish more people saw the math your way.