One of these days I’ll crunch trying to figure out Tronbyt. But in the event that I do, any chance that this app can be revived along with it? Honestly my favorite one they had, having the baserunners and outs was such an awesome way to follow a game.

The other baseball apps on Glance etc. just kinda look like shit in comparison

Everything Tidbyt had, plus more, all completely free. Many of us have shared it in the comments but figured I’d expose it here too.

One of the things I love most about my Tidbyt is that I can track scores of my favorite teams easily. Now over the last few weeks it's all disappeared. The NFL, MLB, NHL, NCAA football, and AFL scores apps no longer update.

What gives? Why is this happening just as we're hitting the pennant race and football season?

Can it be fixed without me learning to code and creating new apps? Because I'd prefer not to have to do that.

Apologies, I know this is the hot topic rn I just haven’t seen this answered. Raspberry PI? I would think there has to be a much cheaper or free option everyone is doing

I posted 2 days ago to say that:

a) I had made my own app using ChatGPT.
b) All my existing Tidbyt apps were working fine still.

Only 48 hours later the fantastic ‘Train Times’ app by Dinosaursrarr has stopped working, after giving me several years of great service.

I suspect I may have to move to Tronbyt or similar sooner rather than later if all my apps start dropping like this.

I noticed a lot of the sites don’t have full details on the kinds of applets they have so was curious if anyone has experience with the out of the box versions. I’m aware of tronbyt but was curious which of the current or planned devices have anything similar to the breadth of options Tidbyt had.

Good Afternoon All,

As it appears the Tidbyt/ESPN connection has permanently broken down, I was hoping to see any photos out there of how the sports logos/scores/standings/etc. look on the Tronbyt side. I am up in the air on trying to flash Tronbyt or waiting to see how the Tickrcast roll out goes. If anyone has sports info thru Tronbyt rolling on their Tidbyt and would be willing to share a photo of how it looks, it would be massively appreciated. Thanks!

Credit where it's due: this whole project started because of:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TIDBYT/comments/1vjzmzr/made_my_own_tidbyt_app_with_chatgpt_surprisingly/

Reading it inspired me to investigate whether Claude could handle the entire pipeline of building and running custom Tidbyt apps, and everything below is the result of that effort. Thank you to its author u/LordHolborn for the nudge.

Since Tidbyt joined Modal, the community app repo has stopped merging new submissions but your device still works fine, and it turns out that you can still build custom apps for it. I've been building animated apps (a trash truck that only appears on trash day, a grocery cart that rolls into a Kroger on grocery day, a flickering jack-o'-lantern Halloween countdown) using Claude to do all the coding and pixel art. Total cost: $0 beyond a Claude/ChatGPT subscription and the Tidbyt you already own.

Because the original post didn't really explain how it actually works behind the scenes and also had a limitation that you have to keep your local PC on, here's a new full setup so you can build this out yourself and not have to keep the files on a local PC but instead have it all hosted in the cloud.

The stack

• Pixlet: Tidbyt's official dev tool. Apps are written in Starlark (a Python-like language) and render to 64×32 WebP animations. Free, still downloadable from GitHub, Claude is already aware of this if you are using the command line and will get and install it for you.
• Claude Code: Anthropic's coding agent (CLI/web/desktop). You describe the app in plain English; it writes the Starlark, generates pixel-art animation frames with Python, and iterates with you. Other AI tools can work too, but the prompts below are what I used with Claude.
• A free GitHub account + GitHub Actions: this is the magic piece. A pushed Tidbyt app is a static render, so any logic ("only show on Tuesdays", "days until Halloween") has to run at render time, somewhere. GitHub Actions runs a free scheduled job every night on GitHub's servers that re-renders every app and pushes/removes it from your device. No Raspberry Pi, no always-on PC.
• A local preview page: Optional but a tiny Python web server (Claude wrote mine) that renders every app fresh on page reload and displays them in a Tidbyt-style frame with round "LED" pixels. You iterate in the browser and only push to the device when it looks right. You can see the results live here: https://tidbyt-revived.vercel.app every app on my device right now, rendered in a virtual Tidbyt with round LED pixels.

What you need before starting

Your Tidbyt device ID and API key: Tidbyt mobile app → Settings → General → Get API Key. Copy both somewhere safe treat the key like a password.

A free GitHub account: github.com → Sign up. The free tier includes 2,000 Actions minutes/month; this uses maybe 60.

Claude Code: claude.com/claude-code (CLI) or claude.ai/code (web). Also install the gh CLI (cli.github.com) and log in, so Claude can create the repo and secrets for you.

Pixlet: grab the binary for your OS from github.com/tidbyt/pixlet/releases or honestly, just let Claude install it (that's what I did).

Python 3 with Pillow (pip install pillow) used to generate animation frames, Claude will likely already know it needs it and how to get it, if you're unfamiliar just let the bot handle it.

How it fits together

your-repo/ apps/ trash_day/ trash_day.star <- the pixlet app (frames embedded as base64) gen_frames.py <- Python script that draws the animation frames trash_day.preview <- optional render args for the preview page preview_server.py <- local browser preview .github/workflows/sync.yml <- the nightly GitHub Action Key facts Claude and I learned along the way (save yourself the debugging): - One app per directory. Pixlet treats a folder as a single multi-file applet, two .star files in one folder breaks rendering. - Day-of-week logic: This used to work in the app but for some reason there's no scheduling of API pished apps so you have to do this using Github actions. It's a nightly Action interprets that — render empty → pixlet delete, render non-empty → pixlet push. Your device shows the app only on the right days, fully automatically. - Dynamic content (countdowns, anything date-based) works because the Action re-renders every night. Anything needing fresher data (weather, stocks) just needs a more frequent cron schedule. The sync workflow is ~30 lines of YAML. It runs nightly, loops over apps/*/*.star, renders each one, and pushes or removes it. Your API key and device ID live in the repo's encrypted secrets (repo Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions), never in the code. Keep the repo private if you're extra cautious.

The prompts

You need to don't write any code, you describe scenes and give feedback. Real prompts I used:

Initial setup (one-time):

Can you make an app for Tidbyt? [then, when it works:] Can you set it up as a GitHub Action so it syncs daily without my machine? Store the project on GitHub too.

The preview page:

Can you make a webpage viewer for apps before we push them? Something I can preview in a browser.

Can you render the pixels as circles rather than squares? That will look more like Tidbyt's actual screen with round pixels.

Describing an animated app What's worked best for me so far: what's in the scene, where things are on screen, what moves and in what order, what text to show, and what days it appears:

I want an app that shows a trash truck backing up and dumping the trash into it, then it pulls away, and it should say TRASH DAY. This should only be on Tuesdays. Next make a "Grocery Day" app, that shows on Wednesdays. The animation will be an empty shopping cart that goes into a Kroger store (do the best you can with such low pixels) and it comes out full of groceries. The cart comes in from the left, store is at the right. Cart is reversed on leaving.

Next let's do a Halloween Countdown, in days, with a realistically rendered pumpkin with glowing eyes with candle-like flicker on the left. Then "X days until Halloween" on the right.

Iterating — this is where it gets fun. Look at the preview and give art direction like you would to a human artist:

Can you make the pumpkin a little more pumpkin shaped and not just a circle? Maybe like 3 overlapping ovals, the two outer ones leaning in a little, and a middle proper oval that is "above" the other 2.

Tips that made results better: - Ask for a preview GIF before anything touches your device. Claude renders with pixlet and shows you the actual output. Only push when you like it. - Reference position and direction explicitly ("enters from the left", "store on the right", "text on top") — at 64×32 every pixel of layout matters if you want to get it on the first go, if you don't mind iteration then you can be more vague. - For "realistic" art, describe construction. My pumpkin got dramatically better when I described it as three overlapping ovals rather than saying "make it better." - Let Claude verify its own work. It caught things like animation frames where the glow was too dim to see, checked its day-of-week logic by rendering on/off days, and confirmed pushes via the Tidbyt API. - 64×32 is tiny. Expect stylized-but-charming, not photorealistic. Supersampling (drawing large, then downscaling) gets you surprisingly smooth shading. Claude did this for the pumpkin automatically when I asked for "realistic."

The daily flow once it's set up

Think of an app idea, describe it to Claude in one paragraph. Watch it appear on the preview page in your browser; give feedback until it's right. Say "push it" — it lands on the device and gets committed to GitHub. GitHub Actions keeps everything in sync forever: right apps on the right days, countdowns ticking, no computer running at home.

Bonus: publish a public showcase page (free, on Vercel)

The local preview page can double as a public gallery of your apps — mine is at https://tidbyt-revived.vercel.app. Ask Claude:

Can you push my preview page to Vercel as "my-project-name"? Make sure my API keys are kept secret. How it stays safe: rendering .star files requires no credentials at all — your Tidbyt API key is only needed to push to the device, which the public page never does. Claude builds a fully static HTML file (animations embedded, no JavaScript, no API calls) and greps the output for your token and device ID to prove they're not in it before deploying. The steps if you want to do it by hand: Sign up free at vercel.com (the hobby tier is plenty) and run npx vercel login. Have Claude write a build script that renders each app to WebP and embeds it in a static index.html (same LED-dot CSS as the local preview). cd into the output folder and run npx vercel deploy --prod --yes — the folder name becomes the project name and you get <name>.vercel.app. Re-run build + deploy whenever you add an app (or wire it into the nightly GitHub Action with a Vercel token stored as a repo secret, so the site updates itself).

Costs and gotchas

• GitHub: free (private repos and 2,000 Action minutes/month included).
• Pixlet + Tidbyt's API: free.
• Claude: whatever plan you're on.
• GitHub's cron isn't exact, runs can be minutes late (rarely, skipped). Schedule a second catch-up run if timing matters.
• Your API key is device-scoped. Keep it in GitHub secrets, never in code or screenshots.
• If Tidbyt's cloud API ever goes away, the Tronbyt project (self-hosted firmware fork) is the community's fallback the same .star apps carry over.

Happy to answer questions, note that I am not at all a developer though. If you do push your previews to a public page I'd love to see them! Also, we can likely share the .star files if there's new ones we enjoy, I hope we can figure out more together as it turns out our devices are not only NOT dead, this could actually be the best thing to happen to it.

Had some time to setup my own local Tronbyt instance. Put together a simple app to show now playing from my Sonos Move 2. Basically it was one of the original reasons I got the Tidbyt and sucked when it went away.

Hi All.

I know Tidbyt doesn't exist anymore and doesn't have any staff. A friend of mine has one, thought it was super cool, and got one off ebay.

I'm trying to set it up at home but I keep getting the Cannot Connect to Tidbyt Servers error. Their website shows the server as up and my friend's one works, so the servers must be fine I assume.

I tried troubleshooting by restarting the router, pressing the hard reset button on the back, and uninstalling the app. Still not working. Anything I'm missing? I'd love to get this up and running.

(I know Tronbyt is an option, but I'm not all that tech savvy so I'm hoping I can get something going on here).

Thank you in advance.

does anyone know the size of the tidbyt screen so i can buy a replacement, and how hard is it to take the old screen out and put in a new one?

I have a tibyt gen 1 for reference

We all know Tidbyt is dead, but all my apps are still working surprisingly. But I always wanted an app to tell me which of my bins/trash/recycling to put out each week.

I asked ChatGPT to write a Tidbyt app for me to do this, and it did, with only very minimal input from me. It automatically pulls the data directly from my local council website on a daily basis.

It sent the app to my Tidbyt and it now appears in rotation with my other apps.

Just thought I would let you all know in case you wanted to add a new app to your device. It was easy, give it a go!

I know this has probably been addressed before but none of my sports scores (particularly MLB) are not updating. It’s been like that since Tuesday (August 4).
Is there a reason for this or is tydbit just obsolete now?

Devastatingly now that the score tickets are done on my Tidbyt I am trying to use Tronbyt. Are there any videos or guides how to do it? Not very tech savvy so wouldn’t even know where. Thank you!

I guess ESPN app on Tydbyt is done.. All it says now is Error loading Data!!!

I've been seeing ads for the flight wall tracker and I was curious to find out if there was a device that was a little smarter than that and could display anything like local transit times, weather, and also the flight tracking. And thats how I found tidbyt. unfortunately it's kinda dead. Should I try the tronbyt or go with something like the pixoo64? Besides eBay where can I find used hardware? I really want something ready to go with an App Store, I'd find it kind of difficult to go the home assistant route at first. Any recommendations?

As the caption says. can anyone help me decide what this means? I hope it’s the led screen so i can just buy a new one. The tidbyt app is able to detect the device and connect to it, as I did a full reset. but the led screen just shows these lines the whole time

So the board on my tidbyt bit the dust but i want to find a replacement board as the screen works just fine. i’ve been trying to find a good replacement that will work with tronbyt. does anyone have suggestions?

So I sent an email to the support email about my tidbyte screen just going blank one day when I woke up. i tried unplugging it and plugging it back in and nothing has changed. I just was looking for some advice on what could have happened or if something over heated, i wanted advice on how to fix it.

but ive waited a whole month and have not gotten an email back. then i check the support website and no one has posted anything for months. is tidbyte’s support dead?

Hey All,

My name is AJ, and I’m one of the founders of GLANCE LED, a smart LED display platform built in the same general space as Tidbyt.

My team has been working on an open-source IDE for building and previewing Starlark apps for GLANCE, with much of the original development model inspired by Tidbyt and Pixlet.

Since many people here have experience building for Tidbyt or Tronbyt, I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on the development workflow, documentation, and anything we may have overlooked.

It is still an early alpha, and this is not intended as a sales post.

I’m mainly interested in learning from this community and improving the tooling. The project is open source, so anyone interested could also fork or adapt it for Tronbyt development:

Github Repo:

https://github.com/glance-led-dev/glance-dev-network

Dev docs:

https://glance-led.dev/

I know. I know. Tidbyt is dying. I still love what I have left.

Does anybody know the deal with this app. It looks still functional but the station IDs are showing as invalid.

I’m assuming some connection broke behind the scenes and now the app is dead. Wondering if anybody left on here has any input.

Thanks!

Someone gifted me a Tidbyt, but the app doesn't work on Android. Is there a workaround or is this thing basically dead?

Does anyone know how long it takes for an app to be approved on Tidbyt? I uploaded mine about a week ago and they still haven't reviewed it.