beeswaxpat
beeswaxpat on Hacker News
Posted by
beeswaxpat on Thursday September 03, 2026 @04:44PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://sirenfall.live/
I built a cool browser scene, a shelter window over a dystopian city in the rain. Pull the breaker and a siren tower spins up. The wind-down is super unsettling and I love it.The siren is not a recording. Two port rings make a 5:6 dual tone, 515 and 618 Hz. The horn turns at 4 RPM and everything (loudness, brightness, doppler and stereo position) follows the horn angle you can see on the tower....
Looks clean and wired up nicely. What model API are you using for the AI summary? Great job!
I feel the same way after looking at the Sun feed and space in general, there's something calming about it
Update: I reached out to him on X :D
Half of it was a to-do list from an LLM response, Claude Opus 4.7, also why it was updated so fast :D
Hmm I will think on this. An open source desktop widget could recreate the screensaver function, triggering on X minutes of inactivity, then minimize upon any user activity. I'll play around and see!
Update: Updated! Optimizations implemented, thanks for the feedback!
Oh wow well thank you! I appreciate feedback and am happy to incorporate it ASAP if I'm by the computer :D
It should be available in all countries (it just went live a few hours ago, perhaps it takes a day?), I will look into that though and confirm. Hopefully it is available ASAP!
Just about everything should be updated now, thanks again!
Thanks for the 1000 points!!! :D
I appreciate your feedback and will be rolling in some of these suggestions into the next update today! :D
Thank you for the feedback and I'll look for Stefan Burns!
Just you wanting it is enough for me to make it!
Honestly considering it now — Flutter doesn't have tvOS support yet, so it'd be a SwiftUI rewrite. But the core ports cleanly. I want to do it now!
Thank you for the detailed feedback, I did not take it as pedantic. It's important to be accurate and I would hate for this to be shown in a classroom somewhere and have incorrect data! I'll have the site updated today.
I did not anticipate having a screensaver project on my bingo card on this day in 2026 but it is now so!
I am guessing that most people would want to see the Sun videos for a screen saver, maybe a random wavelength on each screensaver instance? I will make an opensource repo to it that works on desktop-anything with a little GUI for user settings/preferences.
EDIT: Or did you all mean basically replicating the site as it is but as like a dashboard screensaver? Thank you for all the feedback!
P.P.S.- Live now on Appstore and Play store!
Thank you! You know you are the 2nd person to mention a screensaver, that is enough motivation for me to build it! Seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I will look into it soon.
Sounds like a cool project!
That's a great idea, I will add that today thank you!
Touché — when the person who rebuilt the pipeline says it's not raw, it's not raw :)
Is optical-flow interpolation a step too far for outreach, or fair game? Tempted to motion-interpolate (ffmpeg's minterpolate) the daily MP4s up to 60fps for Lumara— looks gorgeous but the in-between frames are extrapolated. You're totally right about "raw", I suppose I meant more straight from NASA APIs.
Thank you so much. This is one my favorite projects, few bugs, straight forward. I find it refreshing too to sometimes take a step back and observe the Sun and space.
It's on Google play store for android phones under Lumara, hopefully on Appstore within a day or so too! I find the Desktop experience the best though since it includes the ISS live cam feed of the Earth.
That's raw NASA SDO satellite footage. Claude (Opus 4.7) was used almost exclusively for building the site. Static site on Render (no hosting fees), pushed from Github. Uses NASA API's (free), a very cost-friendly project on the ole wallet!
Good eye! That's the Sun's own rotation — ~27 days (Carrington rotation period) at the equator, it's plasma, so slower at the poles. 24hrs ≈ 13° of longitude ≈ ~7% of the disk. 1/365 would be Earth's orbit, which is a different motion :)
Also the videos are made with frames from every 12 seconds or so over 24 hours, I am definitely using "live" very liberally :D
Me too! I kind of forgot about them for a minute. You see more screensavers on TV now than on the computer!
Thank you! It is live on Android, in review on App store and hopefully live shortly. Will remove that hyperlink from the Appstore image until it's live