DIY Projector Movie Theater for $545.34

This post goes into the setup I ended up with for my DIY Movie Theater. I’m not an A/V purist, so take that into consideration.

The original reason I wanted to get a projector was so I could watch a movie outside with my kids, but then it snowballed a bit. The budget projectors in the $100-$150 range didn’t have great reviews, and I wanted something a little better. This post shows what I ended up with that is now hobbled together. It works pretty great, after some trouble shooting.

Problem 1: Dolby Digital Audio

These cheaper projectors can’t process audio when it is encoded for 5.1 surround sound. When I played a kids show like “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”, the projector played sound fine, but when I tried a movie, there was no audio at all. I went down a few rabbit holes, but finally figured out that the projector couldn’t handle Dolby Digital Audio.

I thought that bluetooth could help here, but that doesn’t work with dolby audio either, and the bluetooth audio just didn’t hold up at high volumes. It would sometimes make cracking noises.

In order to listen to something with Dolby Digital Audio, you’ll have to strip out the audio before it gets to the projector. Some people would use a stereo receiver, but I got an HDMI audio extractor and that does the trick. It’s another adapter to bring along, but allows the audio to be pulled from the HDMI signal, but then allows the HDMI signal to carry on to the projector.

Problem 2: Video Source

The projector I got doesn’t have any software on it like Chromecast or Roku, so you’ll have to bring that yourself. That works well if you’re in range of your WiFi signal, but if you go away from there, be ready to have something that hooks offline via HDMI, or USB. Another thing to note is that you may think your Phone can just be mirrored to the screen, but many video apps will show a blank screen for it.

It Finally Works! 🧟

We just finished watching The Mandalorian on Disney+ on the “Movie Theater”, and it was a MUCH better experience than watching it on our 55 inch 4k TV (That we had got on sale for $330 2.5 years ago). Having it on a big screen just really makes it something you “feel” instead of just “watch”.

The Hardware

TOTAL Price: $545.34

Final Thoughts

The projector quality at 1080p is good, but it’s not REALLY good. It’s enough for me though, and we control the amount of light in the basement, so the picture is nice. I got the soundbar later on after trying some bluetooth speakers, and that made a huge difference. Having a large, high quality projector screen is critical, but if you have weak sound, it’s just not the same.

Kotlin Multiplatform: Building a “Fat” iOS Framework for iosArm64 and iosX64

If you are building a Kotlin Multiplatform library which will be consumed by an existing iOS application, using a framework is a great way to do this. Frameworks are typically compiled for a specific target architecture which can then be run on an iPhone, iPad or iOS Simulator on your Intel Macbook.

If you are going use your Kotlin Multiplatform library as a framework in an existing app, you will want to provide a “Fat” framework which will contain both Arm64 and X64 architectures. This article contains the configuration I used to build the “Fat” framework. This is not a full build.gradle.kts file, but just the additional parts needed for a Kotlin Multiplatform project to build a “Fat” framework.

⚠️Use an XCFramework instead ⚠️

This “Fat” framework method no longer works with XCode 12+. Use an XCFramework instead.


I ended up with this Error Message in XCode 12.4: “Building for iOS Simulator, but the linked and embedded framework ‘my_library.framework’ was built for iOS + iOS Simulator.”

This Stack Overflow post shows you how to create an XCFramework from your two frameworks, and I’ll follow up with a blog post on how to do it with an XCFramework a bit later. This solutions ends up combining the two frameworks into a single XCFramework.

xcrun xcodebuild -create-xcframework \
    -framework /path/to/ios.framework \
    -framework /path/to/sim.framework \
    -output combined.xcframework

Custom Gradle Task to Build “Fat” framework

import org.jetbrains.kotlin.gradle.tasks.FatFrameworkTask

kotlin {
    // Set a name for your framework in a single place and reuse the variable
    val libName = "my_library"

    // Configure your Kotlin Multiplatform lib to generate iOS binaries
    // NOTE: This will only work on Macs
    ios {
        binaries.framework(libName)
    }

    // You can choose your output directory
    val frameworkDestinationDir = buildDir.resolve("cocoapods/framework")

    tasks {

        // Custom task to build the DEBUG framework
        // ./gradlew universalFrameworkDebug
        register("universalFrameworkDebug", FatFrameworkTask::class) {
            baseName = libName
            from(
                iosArm64().binaries.getFramework(libName, "Debug"),
                iosX64().binaries.getFramework(libName, "Debug")
            )
            destinationDir = frameworkDestinationDir
            group = libName
            description = "Create the debug framework for iOS"
            dependsOn("linkDebugFrameworkIosArm64")
            dependsOn("linkDebugFrameworkIosX64")
        }

        // Custom task to build the RELEASE framework
        // ./gradlew universalFrameworkRelease
        register("universalFrameworkRelease", FatFrameworkTask::class) {
            baseName = libName
            from(
                iosArm64().binaries.getFramework(libName, "Release"),
                iosX64().binaries.getFramework(libName, "Release")
            )
            destinationDir = frameworkDestinationDir
            group = libName
            description = "Create the release framework for iOS"
            dependsOn("linkReleaseFrameworkIosArm64")
            dependsOn("linkReleaseFrameworkIosX64")
        }
    }
}

Here are two custom gradle tasks that build a “Fat” framework for debug or release. In this I have it outputting to the build/cocoapods/framework directory, but you can configure that as you like.

Gradle Task for “Fat” iOS framework

  • Build a “Fat” debug version of the framework
    • ./gradlew universalFrameworkDebug
  • Build a “Fat” release version of the framework
    • ./gradlew universalFrameworkRelease

Importing the iOS Framework into XCode

I previously wrote a blog post about how to do this which has a companion video along with it. 👇

Thanks and Related Resources

I didn’t figure this all out myself. I just got it to work for me and extracted out the bare minimum you need to make this work. Thanks to Swapnil Patil for letting me know that “Fat” frameworks are possible. Thanks so much to Marco Gomiero for his post Introducing Kotlin Multiplatform in an existing project.

How to Install a Specific Ruby Version for Cocoapods

After a few wrong turns, the way I was able to get the correct version of Ruby to install on my Macbook was using rvm. Use the steps below. If you run into issues, you may need to install homebrew as well.

  1. Install RVM
    • curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash
  2. Install the Ruby version you need (x.x.x).
    • rvm installĀ 2.7.3
    • If you want to set that version as default, run rvm use 2.7.3 --default
    • More docs on rvm: https://rvm.io/rvm/install
  3. Install bundler
    • gem install bundler

That should be it! Now you should be able to run bundle install in your iOS project directory on the terminal, and you’re good to go from there!

Run Custom Gradle Task After “build”

After running ./gradlew build on my Kotlin Multiplatform project, I wanted to copy the JavaScript build artifacts (.js & .html) to publish a demo where someone could test my library via a web browser. A custom Gradle task is is a great way to write your own behavior to accomplish this using the Gradle build system.

My Custom Gradle Task

I found the Gradle documentation for how to copy files, and was able to write this custom task "myTaskName" to do it. You can then just run ./gradlew myTaskName and it’ll run the task independently. The problem was that I didn’t know how to get it to always run after ./gradlew build ran.

/** Copies files from "build/distributions" to "demo" directory */
tasks.register<Copy>("myTaskName") {
    println("Copying Build Artifacts!!!")
    from(layout.buildDirectory.dir("distributions"))
    include("**/*.*")
    into(layout.buildDirectory.dir("../demo"))
}

TL;DR – Use finalizedBy()

  • finalizedBy – Runs my task AFTER “build”. ✅
    • tasks.named("build") { finalizedBy("myTaskName") }
  • dependsOn – Runs “build” BEFORE my task, if my task is executed explicitly.
    • tasks.named("myTaskName") { dependsOn("build") }

To give you more details and to go into my process of how I figured it out, here are a few options I tried while figuring out how to run this custom task after every execution of the “build” Gradle task.

1. finalizedBy ✅

You can use finalizedBy() to say what task you should run after a named task. I think this reads nicely because it calls out the task dependency separately from it’s declaration. This will appropriately run after the build task executes as I needed.

tasks.named("build") { finalizedBy("myTaskName") }

2. shouldRunAfter 🤔

Another possible way to do this is with shouldRunAfter() which can just be added inside the block where you register your custom task. This will run after the build task executes. HOWEVER: I had to call .get() after registering my task to get it to work in order to have this actually run, which just feels wrong… Someone feel free to explain why, but I’m guessing this is some sort of lazy initialization happening if I don’t call “.get()”. Because of this, I don’t like this solution personally.

tasks.register<Copy>("myTaskName") {
    shouldRunAfter("build") // Tells Gradle to execute after "build" task
    // My Custom Task Code
}.get()

3. dependsOn() 🙃

You would think dependsOn() may work, but it’s the opposite behavior than what I wanted. It’s saying that “myTaskName” needs “build” to have run before it executes. It’s the opposite task dependency relationship from finalizedBy(). This wasn’t the behavior I wanted for this use case because I wanted it to copy the artifacts after every time a ./gradlew build was run, but could be useful depending on your use case.

tasks.named("myTaskName") { dependsOn("build") }

Wrap Up

None of this is rocket science, but if you try to Google for how to do it, it may take you a while to figure out how to do it. Using Option 1, finalizedBy() was the solution that worked for my use case! I hope this saved you an hour or more!

Intro to Kotlin Multiplatform JavaScript

One of the compilation targets of Kotlin Multiplatform is JavaScript. It’s pretty awesome that I can take the same Kotlin code and tools I write Android with, and write code that runs in a browser (or in Node.js).

Here is the video I’ve created to walk you through the creation of a Kotlin Multiplatform Project using the templates in Intellij IDEA, and what you can do to get your Kotlin running as JavaScript in the Browser!

Here are the code snippets mentioned in the video:

./gradlew build
 js(LEGACY) {
     browser {
         webpackTask {
             output.libraryTarget = "this" // Will add to window
         }
         binaries.executable()
     }
 }
 fun printHi() {
     println("Hello World Sam!")
 }
 fun main(args: Array) {
     printHi()
 }
 helloworldsam.printHi()

What & Why, Not How

As engineers we love to dive into problems and start thinking of how we can use the latest frameworks and architecture patterns to solve a problem, but we don’t always spend as much time thinking about what problem we are solving and why.

Engineers focus on “how” we should build something.

We build amazing solutions to really hard problems. Yes, our implementations will probably go through many iterations, but will end up as an elegant solution in the end. The ability to bring hard technical problems to fruition is an invaluable skill.

Engineering Mindset ➡ Leadership Mindset

Leadership and prioritization are hard, and they require you to take off your engineering hat. The way to do that, is to step away from thinking about how you are going to solve something.

Stereotypically, leaders are thought of as people that just focus on business goals and don’t worry about the technical problems. While this might be true in some cases, there are great engineering leaders who are aware of the technical landscape and can balance business and technology.

Exercise: List out what you want to and why without taking how into consideration.

Because switching context is really hard, do this exercise early in the morning when your thoughts are fresh and you haven’t dug into any code yet for the day.

Create a two columns with WHAT & WHY, and don’t allow yourself to enumerate on HOW. List out all the things you want to focus on.

Done? Okay, what did you come up with?

Did upgrading to the latest version of a library really end up being a top priority? If so, you have probably justified why. Maybe it’s a breaking change, or maybe it has security vulnerabilities. More than likely, there are things at the top that wouldn’t have been thought of if you were just thinking purely in your engineering mindset.

Deliberately thinking in this way will help you prioritize, because your time is finite.

My Failed Startup Ideas

Over the last 15 years I’ve bought over 100 domain names based on ideas for apps. I’d be excited about it, and start building something right away. I got to learn all kinds of new tools and frameworks by doing this, and got really great at knowing how to build great software. However, none of my ideas took off. Some might have been based on timing and luck, but more-so I just found it more fun to tinker, than to step back and put on my leadership hat. These experiences were invaluable to growing my engineering skillset.

Conclusion

Great ideas and companies usually have leaders or “visionaries” that can figure out the what should be done and why. Some of the most successful products have been built on the worst tech stacks you’ve ever seen. As engineers, we don’t want to always think like this, but it’s a valuable skill to have, and can help you step back and see the bigger picture of what and why.

The Best Way to Collect a Flow in Kotlin – launchIn

At some point you’ll need to collect (receive items) from a Flow (reactive stream) within a Kotlin Coroutine.  More than likely you will use a launch on a CoroutineScope, and then collect like this:

scope.launch {
  flow
    .onEach { println(it) }
    .collect()
}

This works great, but there is a better way for most use cases. It’s using a function called launchIn. What’s launchIn? It’s just shorthand to do what you did above. This is the equivalent logic as above, but using launchIn.

flow
  .onEach { println(it) }
  .launchIn(scope)

This is less code to write, but more importantly it’ll get you out of some hard to debug situations when collecting from Flows. The non obvious thing to understand is that collect() will block the coroutine until the flow has finished emitting. This behavior is sometimes desired, but for me it’s not in most cases.

In the example below, you’d think that both Flows are being collected at the same time, but flow1 is collected until the Flow finishes emitting, and then flow2 is collected until it is finished emitting.

scope.launch {
  flow1
    .onEach { println(it) }
    .collect()
  
  // Will not run until flow1 finishes emitting
  flow2
    .onEach { println(it) }
    .collect()
}

To collect both in parallel, you’d need to write this:

scope.launch {
  flow1
    .collect { println(it) }
}
scope.launch {
  flow2
    .collect { println(it) }
}

This is where launchIn comes to the rescue to make this reach much easier in my opinion. Here is the equivalent using launchIn:

myFlow1
  .onEach { println(it) }
  .launchIn(coroutineScope)
myFlow2
  .onEach { println(it) }
  .launchIn(coroutineScope)

I like launchIn because it’s less code to write, I don’t have to have indentation, and I just found it easier to understand.

In no way does this mean that the normal launch() and collect() aren’t great things to use, but for most use cases, I’d suggest considering using launchIn().

My MutableStateFlow Didn’t Emit!

I am in love with MutableStateFlow which is part of the Kotlin Coroutines Library. It makes managing state, and exposing it as a reactive Flow so easy.

You just create a MutableStateFlow(initialValue), and then you can later on just set myMutableStateFlow.value = newValue, and if it has changed, it’ll emit a new event as a reactive event on the Flow!

This is amazing, but in order to make this work the way you want it to, you HAVE to use Immutable Data Structures.

Why? Glad you asked, here we go.

How MutableStateFlow’s “value” Property Works

Just set mutableStateFlow.value=newValue and the value will be emitted! This Flow is a great way to keep track of state where you only want to emit when there is a change.

You can set your mutableStateFlow.value many times, but unless !oldValue.equals(newValue), then a new value won’t be emitted. That way subscribers don’t need to use distinctUntilChanged() to filter out duplicates.

Scenario where “My MutableStateFlow Didn’t Emit!

I’ve simplified a scenario I ran into to share how MutableStateFlow may not work the way you think you should. I banged my head on the wall trying to figure out what was happening, and hopefully this simplified example will save you a headache.

/** Class with Mutable Data */
data class SomePojo(var name: String = "placeholder")
val somePojo = SomePojo()
val mutableStateFlow = MutableStateFlow(somePojo)
println("INITIAL: ${mutableStateFlow.value}")

// Update the value
somePojo.name = "Something Different"

// Print MutableStateFlow current value, but realize the value has changed because the data in that object has been mutated
println("CURRENT: ${mutableStateFlow.value}")

// Try to assign the new value to the MutableStateFlow, but they are already equal!  This means no emissions will occur.
mutableStateFlow.value = somePojo

// The result is the same, and no value was emitted.
println("UPDATED: ${mutableStateFlow.value}")

The output will be:

INITIAL: SomePojo(name=placeholder)
CURRENT: SomePojo(name=Something Different)
UPDATED: SomePojo(name=Something Different)

How I Went Wrong

  • My state model was “SomePojo” which had a mutable var “name” on it.
  • The “somePojo” variable was initially set as mutableStateFlow.value
  • I set myPojo.name=”Something Different” to change the name.
  • I wanted to emit the new state, so set mutableStateFlow.value=somePojo.
  • My MutableStateFlow Didn’t Emit!
  • 🤔
  • The current value of mutableStateFlow.value was already set to myPojo, and I had modified the property “name” on it.
  • As seen above, MutableStateFlow.value will emit unless the oldValue.equals(newValue). Because I had modified the mutable property name, when the equals() comparison happened.
  • The value was already the same, and therefore no change occurred, and there was no emission.
  • Whoa… that’s confusing. Yes, but it makes sense now.

Conclusion

There are things you can do to avoid running into this problem. Use immutable data structures (classes with all val properties) with MutableStateFlow to avoid unexpected behavior.

If you mutate (change) the value of an object that’s currently the state of a mutable state flow, it won’t emit a new value when re-assigned because it only emits when the value has changed. In this case the mutable value has changed… but so has the underlying state, so when compared it looks as if nothing has changed.

Try for yourself with this Unit Test Gist: https://gist.github.com/handstandsam/1007031cea66e9862bed44840fafb92e

Kotlin Actors – No Drama Concurrency

Kotlin Actors are part of the Kotlin Coroutines library. I’ll walk you through the reasons why I use Kotlin Actors to achieve concurrency, while leveraging Coroutines to process reactive events in unknown order.

Concurrency?

  • Allows events to happen out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the final outcome.
  • This allows for leveraging parallel execution without giving up determinism.

Why Does Android need Reactive Programming?

  • Click Events
  • Intents
  • Networking Requests
  • Disk Writes
  • etc.

Kotlin Coroutines?

Essentially, Kotlin Coroutines are light-weight threads. They are launched in a context of some CoroutineScope.

Kotlin Actors?

  • A Single Kotlin Coroutine
  • Processes incoming Messages
  • Backed by a Channel
  • Concurrent

Actors receive Messages (Intentions) via a Channel

Channels are the only way to safely communicate across Coroutines.

This example implements a Shopping Cart Dao from my GitHub Project ShoppingApp. I’ve created a type called Intention which are sent across the channel as messages. The intentions represent actions I want to perform, but keep my data thread safe.

sealed class Intention {
    class FindByLabel(
        val label: String,
        val deferred: CompletableDeferred<ItemWithQuantity?>
    ) : Intention()

    class Upsert(val itemWithQuantity: ItemWithQuantity) : Intention()

    class Remove(val itemWithQuantity: ItemWithQuantity) : Intention()

    object Empty : Intention()
}

Actors Process Messages Sequentially in a for() loop

These messages (Intentions) come in across a Channel from other Coroutines, get queued, and then get processed by the Actor sequentially to achieve concurrency.

scope.actor<Intention> {
    for (intention in channel) {
        // Process Messages/Intentions
        when (intention) {
            is Intention.FindByLabel -> {
                // ...
            }
            is Intention.Upsert -> {
                // ...
            }
            is Intention.Remove -> {
                // ...
            }
            is Intention.Empty -> {
                // ...
            }
        }
    }
}

Sending Messages to the Actor – send() vs offer()

To send messages to the actor, you send a message to it using actor.send(intention) or actor.offer(intention). Here are the differences between them (from the Kotlin documentation of SendChannel).

CompletableDeferred to await() Results

We send in messages to the actor, but sometimes we want to wait for a result once the message has been processed by the actor. We use CompletableDeferred to do this. We await() the result, like in this example where we are querying for a value:

class FindByLabel(
    val label: String,
    val deferred: CompletableDeferred<ItemWithQuantity?>
) : Intention()
// ---
val deferred = CompletableDeferred<ItemWithQuantity?>()
actor.send(
    Intention.FindByLabel(
        label = label,
        deferred = deferred
    )
)
val result : ItemWithQuantity? = deferred.await()

Aren’t Actors Marked with @ObsoleteCoroutineApi?

Yes, but complex actors will also support the same use cases, and there will be a clear path. Also, there is no planned replacement at this point. See the response from the Kotlin Coroutines tech lead from the GitHub issue:

Video & Slides

I was able to present this to Boston Android meetup group and 18 other meetup groups on Tuesday, July 14th which was an amazing experience. The video will be available soon and I’ll be sure to put it here. Here are the slides for now.

Links