This project has been a lot of fun. The point of it is to assist in conversations in a music-related Hangouts group chat. I’m not sure why everyone settled on Hangouts as the chat standard for our group, but people like it because the barrier to entry is so low. I’m used to IRC and having bots assist in the conversation, so I was a little bummed that everyone wanted to use Hangouts....
Back in December, my buddy Epitrope moved to NY, and was trying to get rid of the things he wasn’t going to transport across the entire US. One of these things was an older 720p plasma Zenith TV. He is a hacker extraordinaire, and after doing a bit of looking at the manual, saw that the protocol for the serial interface on the back is documented. He created a set of programs to communicate with this port to do some TV automation, which I thought was really cool....