Thanks to a good deal on one at Guitar Center I picked up an EYESY by Critter & Guitari. It’s a small metal box with wooden buttons and it makes DOS-like visuals.

I first came across the EYESY at a Circuit Church show:

Once I saw this (and immediately after was told that you can program your own visualizations in Python) I was sold. Approximately one year and one month later I now finally have one.

Editing on the EYESY

The different visualizations on the EYESY are called “Modes”. The process of developing your own Modes is actually pretty easy - Once you give it your wifi settings you can access a web-based editor by going to a web address on your machine:

However, while the web editor is very well done I was still yearning to develop for the EYESY in VSCode which is the editor I’m very familiar with. You can see the final result here:

How to do it:

1. Get the VSCode Remote Extension Pack and Run On Save plugins
2. Edit your user settings to tell VSCode not to try to install anything on the home directory inside the EYESY as it’s read-only (/sdcard is not):

   "remote.SSH.serverInstallPath": {
   	"eyesy.local": "/sdcard/"
   }
   

3. In VSCode run the Remote-SSH: Connect to Host... command, select + Add New SSH Host..., then enter ssh music@eyesy.local
4. Edit your workspace settings and configure Run On Save to reload the mode on the EYESY when you save the file:

   "emeraldwalk.runonsave": {
   	"commands": [
   		{
   			"match": "\.py$",
   			"cmd": "curl 'http://localhost:8080/reload_mode' --data-raw 'name=${file}'"
   		}
   	]
   }
   

5. Optional: Open the VSCode terminal and run tail -f /tmp/video.log if you want the see the log

That’s it! Now in VSCode you can edit one of the mode files (in /sdcard/Modes/python/) and when you save the EYESY will reload your visualization!