Cosplay App

Mission briefing

A friend commissioned me to build an app for his cosplay. The costume has LEDs driven by a microcontroller, and he wanted to change their settings from his phone. He is more familiar with hardware, so he programs the microcontroller himself while I build the app that talks to it. When I asked what he wanted to call the app, he did not have a name in mind either, so it is just the cosplay app.

Screenshots

The service and characteristic UUIDs have been removed from the screenshots below for demonstration purposes. They need to be set before the app can connect to a device.

View screenshots

Field notes

The app talks to the microcontroller over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which makes the phone a remote for the LEDs. It is built with Svelte and wrapped with Capacitor so it runs as a native mobile app, and GitHub Actions compiles it, so I never had to set up a mobile build environment by hand.

My first commit was on 31 August and my latest was on 20 September. That looks like a long time for a small app, but most of it was waiting. My friend needed to work out more of what he wanted before I fully committed, so we spent a while discussing the details to be sure of everything first.

Squad

Just me, building for one client who was also the user.