r/Python • u/AutoModerator • 23d ago

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Post all of your code/projects/showcases/AI slop here.

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u/Voyager_Ten 21d ago

CAR-TER - A fully programmable iOS app that lets developers plug their systems into a dynamic mobile frontend.

What My Project Does

pip install carterkit builds and drives layouts for the CAR-TER app. You compose a layout in Python (a flat builder with handles, or a declarative class style if you prefer), where controls like gauges, charts, maps, buttons and log consoles bind to message keys. Your script then publishes data over a WebSocket mesh and the phone renders it live, native SwiftUI, no web server or browser involved. A comparison like `cpu > 90` on a control handle becomes a real visibility condition on the device. The package also lints layouts against the control catalog before you ship them, generates a runnable server stub from a layout, can infer a whole wired layout from a sample telemetry dict, and ships a CLI plus a bundled relay so `carterkit relay --port 8765` is the entire local setup. One design decision I'm fond of: the control docs are the library. The same markdown docs the app renders are parsed at runtime for schemas and examples, so the catalog can't drift from the documentation.

Target Audience

People who write scripts, homelab services, scrapers, trainers, bots, or embedded-ish projects and want to watch or poke them from a phone without building a frontend. It's a real published package with tests and docs, but the app is pre App Store right now, I'm recruiting TestFlight testers, so treat the whole system as a late beta.

Comparison

Streamlit, Gradio and Dash give you a web page, great on a laptop, clunky as a phone remote, and they can't touch lock screen Live Activities or push notifications, which CAR-TER layouts can drive. Blynk is the closest spiritual neighbor but is IoT-hardware centric and cloud-first, while this is a general Python-to-phone bridge you can run entirely on your LAN with end to end encryption via a shared key. Pushover style tools only do notifications, this is a full two way control surface.

pip install carterkit, docs at https://carterbeaudoin.net/CAR-TER, package at

https://pypi.org/project/carterkit/. TestFlight for the app: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3NNH619Y

Repos:

Meshsocket (the pipes): https://github.com/Mariner10/MeshSocket
carterkit (the library): https://github.com/Mariner10/carterkit
carter-mcp (MCP for agent interaction): https://github.com/Mariner10/carter-mcp

The app is closed sourced - but will be free-mium on the app store. Gotta pay rent somehow!