13 ms·

Buttplug (Sex Toy Control Library) Hits v1 Milestone

319 points by qdot76367 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
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dang 6y ago
If curious see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477
- deleted 6y ago
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ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
terrible hacking :Ð
qdot76367 6y ago
Buttplug Project lead here! AMA.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  What's the security model? Are there multiuser devices?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    This is a really difficult to answer question because of the place in the stack this library inhabits. Buttplug only cares about accessing hardware, so while it may sound like a cop-out, our security model is "whatever the hardware gives us". Multi-user control systems would be built on top of the library, and that's where a good bit of the security work would happen. That said, there are some security/privacy features built into the architecture to reduce metadata dissemination, I'll be outlining those in the developer guide at some point.
- codefined 6y ago
  Do you feel the progress of the project is hindered / benefitted / not effected by any stigmatism in western society? Do you ever find it hard to talk to friends / family / colleagues / strangers about this project?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Oh, definitely hindered, but it's kind of a network effect deal. Sex education isn't a high priority, so most people barely know sex, much less sex + tech, which is very much its own thing. That makes building technology like this extra fraught, because of the amount of thinking I have to do up front in order to try and guide things in as safe-ish a direction as possible. As for talking to people about the project, I've been a public face for the field of sex tech since like 2005, so by this point I'm pretty used to it. It's on my resume, I have academic publications and book chapters on the subject, I've spoken about it at all sorts of conferences around the world, so I've kinda settled into being "The Buttplug Guy". It took a ton of hard work and image building to get here though, so it's a cliff I don't really recommend anyone else try to climb without realizing how much work it is.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      There's way worse stuff than being "The Buttplug Guy"! [0] [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A85ipUgy5B4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A85ipUgy5B4
    - zamalek 6y ago
      What you are doing is important work, not because of butt plugs, but because it is helping normalize talking about sex, and "niche sex," in the tech community (also YouPorn engineering!). Having engineers in the west be open about sex is far better than having nobody open about it. Openness about sex really is one way to improve the health of the societal zeitgeist.
      - qdot76367 6y ago
        Thanks! This is why I say the project is as much social as it is technical. The technical topics are definitely important, but the project as a whole invites scrutiny not just from developers, security engineers, etc, but also from those interested in or critical of how consent and control work in technical means, what it means to be intimate over remote mediums, etc... As an example, one of the things I was working on right before COVID-19 hit was a book chapter on digital proxemics, i.e. how we map and relate personal space in digital realms. This project and how it's been utilized to augment online intimacy was a big part of that, and I turned in the book chapter to the publisher the week COVID-19 lockdowns started to hit in the US (still no pub date tho :( ), so it's been a lot of seeing how those ideas play out in large scale since.
- deleted 6y ago
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- errantspark 6y ago
  I very much appreciate STPIHKAL helping me get started exploring this stuff. I'll admit that the library itself was a bit intimidating. I ended up not using it and just wrapping the protocol for the particular toys that were of interest to me in about 40 lines of JS in order to implement chrome's experimental `writeValueWithoutResponse`. I'm pleased to report has a dramatic effect on latency. I wish I could contribute back but the code is just over-my-head complicated.
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    This is something I'm trying to figure out how to better communicate about the project, and there will be another blog post on this soon. Buttplug is both a floor cleaner AND a dessert topping, and that can really be detrimental to the initial developer experience. There's a dichotomy in this project that's difficult to resolve: - Community wants sex toy access because there isn't much else out there that does this. - I wanna learn new stuff and also have a weird "LET'S PUT DOOM ON IT" mentality of having the library support everywhere. So we end up with support for lots of toys, but it's on top of a complicated, violently async rust library that is in some cases compiled to WASM, which is a whole stack of technologies not a lot of people are familiar with. To torture another metaphor, I've ended up building the hulking game engine for sex toys, when a lot of people would be fine with some Atari 2600 games that vibrate. Lots of people are going to have 1 toy they want to control with 1 simple interface, where my interest lies in "how does someone release a game on Steam that seamlessly supports whatever the user shows up with". The updated developer guide (https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io) is my first crack at trying to cater to all audiences, but it's got a long way to go, and the only way to test documentation is to hopefully wait for feedback from people who read it. But that's why try to I keep both the protocol and reverse engineering documentation up to date. I don't want people to have to go and reimplement things, but if it has to happen, I want to make it as easy on them as possible.
- j1elo 6y ago
  Would you say that collecting all protocol specs from each individual device is where most of the work lays behind this library? Otherwise, could you tell us about where is/was the 80% effort to build what the library does, and what would be the next 20% / last mile to consider it "done"?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Protocol specs are actually pretty easy. The protocols aren't that complicated, and there's some pretty simple ways to figure them out. It's usually an hour or two per new device, at most. Everything that v1 rust does right now, our C#/JS versions did before, so the technical work there was mostly fitting it from gc'd runtime'd languages into Rust. I'm much better at Rust now though! The majority of the work technically AND design-wise (for me at least) is the haptics abstraction. Our protocol is built on a system of "verbs" at the moment, i.e. "vibrate", "rotate", "stroke" (though we call it linear because it only goes one direction at a time), etc... I'm writing a larger blog post on this, but to summarize, it's REALLY hard to build a language around this that's general. For instance, the Lovense Max (a onahole style toy) has an air bladder that inflates/deflates. It's about the only thing that has that. So do I just make a new verb called "inflate"? Do I try to match it to other toys with constriction like systems and call it "constrict"? Does it even matter? But, that's an ongoing problem. In terms of "done", I think the next big milestone will be mobile app support. We work on mobile web browsers in a couple of different ways, but Buttplug still needs app support, both native and for things like cordova/react native/etc... The biggest issue there at the moment lies in our bluetooth library (btleplug, https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug), because getting the FFI via JNI to android is going to suck (even though I can crib off Servo's WebBluetooth impl, which worked on Android).
    - Corrado 6y ago
      "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." - Phil Karlton
- raldi 6y ago
  What are some of your dream ideas for how this one day might be used?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Seeing the uptake in VRChat has been pretty awesome. For the record, I grew up on MU*s, built the first Second Life sex toy interface in 2005, which ended up with me working at Linden, so I have a special place in my heart for virtual worlds. Otherwise, I am always really interested in ways people build for themselves that they're willing to share with others. So the answer to this question tends to be "my dream ideas are the stuff I can't possibly dream of" :)
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  Any plans to do a panel on sex toy development at post-covid furry cons?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    God, it's been a while, hasn't it? We'll see if I get any invites. Seems like a very BLFC kinda panel.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  What motivated you to do this? Is there some financial gain to be had? How is adoption?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    I'm motivated because it's a really novel set of things to work on with the tools of technology. There's a TON of financial gain to be had, and I am incredibly bad at actually harnessing that because I'm too obsessed with silly details rather than user wants/needs. But it's a balance of keeping myself happy/learning and having cash, and I'm OK enough on cash that I do this to keep myself happy and learning. Adoption is... decent? One of the interesting parts of this is that I will really never know how many people are using it because a lot of people will take the project, implement something, but definitely not post it to somewhere like github. And really, that's fine. There are games using the library on Steam right now, a few commercial systems that use it, and I get lots of reports from independent developers doing different things with it, so that'd good enough for me.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  How much good sex has this project lead to you having? :)
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Damnit Egypt, stop embarrassing me in front of the VCs! You know I leave the in-depth yiff stories for twitter. :|
    - egypturnash 6y ago
      Or for getting drunk at a con. If those ever happen again.
- mrwoggle 6y ago
  As someone who's working in haptics, not in the adult industry, but in VR: What are most actuators like? Are they ERM's or LRA's or even VCA's? Your interface is pretty generic. Vibrating and rotating at a certain amplitude it seems? Are there toys out there where you can also set both amplitude and frequency?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    First off, since you’re working in haptics, time to pitch the Haptics Industry Forum! https://hapticsif.org https://hapticsif.org It’s a big forum of various companies (mine included) discussing different issues facing haptics companies. Has been around since March 2020, is a really neat place. As for actuators, it’s either ERMs or incredibly odd things like friction/pressure systems (some with fairly off kinematics, for instance https://patreon.com/tempestvr https://patreon.com/tempestvr) and electrostimulation. No LRAs yet, that’s why I’m trying to get to supporting the nintendo joycon and vr controllers, to start thinking about how signal generation should work in that context. And yeah the top level library is incredibly generic, mostly to just get people using the library at all. I don’t know how long that’ll last, due to the complexity of actuators we’ll be dealing with, but I’ve got some strategies to grow that out a bit. Happy to go into those if you’re interested.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Technical question, why not C? For a library that deals with hardware and aims for compatibility, C seems like the obvious choice. Most languages have C bindings, and most hardware-oriented libraries have a C interface. Rust looks like a nice language and could be used for all the internal logic, but expose C interfaces to the outside world for compatibility (I think Rust can do that).
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    It's not really a technical reason as much as it is personal. It's not C/C++ because I loathe C/C++, and if I never write C/C++ again, it will be too soon. The reasons for these feelings are borne out of decades of experience with them. Of course, I'm currently an embedded engineer again at the moment, so "never" is actually "every day" unfortunately. Luckily embedded Rust is really looking good these days, and I've been using it a bit lately. I don't really care about what other libraries do, and really, Buttplug isn't your normal "hardware driver" library. Either way, other libraries made their choices, I made mine. I hate C/C++ enough that I'd never spend my free time on it, and this is basically my back yard shed project that also happens to be a business, so it gets done with technologies I'm comfortable in. As for exposing things, I mention that C/C++ FFI is coming in the post, mostly for Unreal Engine support. I currently have Rust exposing cdecl calls for the FFI, but it's bottlenecked to be as few calls as possible, mostly flinging protobufs back and forth because that's easy. The main thing holding up C/C++ FFI is figuring out how to translate some of the async paradigms I use to C/C++ in a way that will be generally useful.
- ghosty-discord 6y ago
  Are you Australian?
- herbst 6y ago
  Favorite toy? :)
caeril 6y ago
Glad to see HN really interested in the technologies that will truly advance humanity to the stars, rather than those that encourage distraction by our limbic systems. I'm sure that climate change and other existential risks will wait until after we're done with our sex toys to wipe us out. edit: Brilliant response, "Hacker News". Maybe if you cum enough, we'll be able to grow enough cereal crops to feed 8 billion people in 102 degree weather, after potash is a thing of the past.
- codefined 6y ago
  You might want to read up on 'Fallacy of Relative Privation' to see why this point of view is likely to not be helpful. A good starting point is this[0]. [0] https://academy4sc.org/topic/fallacy-of-relative-privation-all-problems-are-relative/ https://academy4sc.org/topic/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...
  - caeril 6y ago
    Thanks for the rare thoughtful reply, but the fallacy is, itself, a fallacy. IQ/g-factor/ability to reason about systems is unevenly distributed - and, critically, a zero-sum game. For every +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to making humans orgasm, there is one fewer +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to other pursuits, N% of which would have been positive for humanity's progress. Unfortunately, you can't really get around this without heroic efforts to shift the bell curve to the right. edit: Looks like I'm wrong again! Looking forward to HN pointing me to the magic fairy dust that miraculously conjures up raw intellectual talent from the ether.
    - aprescott 6y ago
      I have no real opinion on the project in question but devotion is not a fungible, generically applicable resource you decide to apply to one issue or another. Run a test for whatever "IQ/g-factor/ability" handwave you're referencing on someone that loves their work and someone that doesn't.
      - 6y ago
asfarley 6y ago
This reminds me of a story an industrial designer told me: he worked on a dildo with a scripting system, so the ladies could set the number of milliseconds for each waveform profile on the haptic motor. The product was not a success.
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Yup! Interfaces have been a problem in the industry going back decades. See me getting excited about a similar product that catastrophically failed back in 2006 (when I was a young, far less experienced engineer :D ): https://www.metafetish.com/2006/02/17/je-joue-part-2-my-god-i-think-i-might-be-impressed/ https://www.metafetish.com/2006/02/17/je-joue-part-2-my-god-... Presenting something like this library directly to the user will end up in product death. What I'm building is a tool for developers to refine that end product interface specifically so the user (who is usually horny and does not care about technological details) can have something they can work while in that state. But it's gonna take a while to get there.
- xellisx 6y ago
  I looked into doing something like in the early 2000s, bit found that my idea would take more power I was comfortable to be able to provide in such spaces.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
Reminds me of an episode of MST3K where they played a '50s beer documentary that went in depth into all the science and engineering behind keeping the beer cold between the brewery and the store. Then one of the robots pops up and says - "Meanwhile, the Soviets were developing Sputnik."
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Are you thinking of "As You Like It"? If so it's also available from rifftrax.com.
djsumdog 6y ago
I was curious and tried working with this an a device about a year ago and the whole thing felt like a mess. There are browser components, electron cancer, web-to-bluetooth pieces. I think I could get my device to register/pair but couldn't get anything past that. I was looking through the docs and the only useful thing seemed to be the low-level code if I wanted o make my own applications on top of it. The reverse engineering work is important, but the tooling/UI needed work. I actually want to contribute to this to help, but it's a bit far down on the backlog of life.
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Yup, the way I'm trying to do things definitely may not be right for everyone, and that's fine! That's why the reverse engineering work is documented (https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io, but also check the github repo because I am years behind on updates based on issues now), so if people want to pick up protocols and try their own thing, they absolutely can. I want to learn from other people approaches to this too. In fact, that's exactly what xtoys has done: https://xtoys.app https://xtoys.app They're just using the reversed protocols my project documented, while building outside of my admittedly complicated library interface. It's been a great project to watch grow, because while I'm kinda hyperfocused on platform and hardware support, they're going breadth-first with user focused features on a WebRTC platform.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  What's wrong with web to bluetooth or web browser components? Electron is pretty standard for user facing cross platform UI. This is a sort of application that has the right to use more resources - because if you're 'vibin' I don't imagine you're really needing that other 150MB to run minecraft modpacks. Perhaps if you're in VR and only have 8GB of ram. You have to hone your expectations for free projects. Native or native-like UI toolkits are expensive on time. Time is the biggest problem with making free software for people. Now if this were a commercial product - yes I agree with the criticism. There's no reason at that point that they couldn't do GTK3, QT, flutter, etc.
  - thatguymike 6y ago
skocznymroczny 6y ago
How's the security of this? Do you do penetration tests?
- keyle 6y ago
  Off topic, I love that the good jokes still get upvoted on HN and it's not a bro-aehaeh-land like Reddit is. I wonder what the difference is, maybe just a more mature audience? Nerdier jokes?
  - kreeben 6y ago
    Joking on HN without being teared to pieces is AI-hard.
    - monksy 6y ago
      It's human-hard level
- snuxoll 6y ago
  Groan, take an upvote. In all seriousness, many of the devices in this space are woefully insecure - this is just a library to control them using whatever native protocols they expose.
  - dhsysusbsjsi 6y ago
    This is something I could get behind
    - IgorPartola 6y ago
      Always a good idea to check it out for any back door access issues.at least we haven’t gotten to hot code loading being a problem yet. I suspect that engineering of any kind has more perverse or pervertible terms than any sex toy industry.
      - 6y ago
noman-land 6y ago
Speaking of sex toy security, this reminds me of one of my favorite recent posts here: Blowjob Injection Attack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702282
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Sarah Jamie Lewis's work on privacy has been massively influential on the work I'm trying to do. I also highly recommend checking out her Oniondildonics post about metadata obfuscation in anonymous teledildonics interactions: https://mascherari.press/oniondildonics/ https://mascherari.press/oniondildonics/ She's now running the Open Privacy project, which is doing great work on general anonymized communication: https://openprivacy.ca https://openprivacy.ca
- stevespang 6y ago
  Hahahahahah.
- Debug_Overload 6y ago
  That was awesome. Security is often an afterthought for many companies. Anyway, it's good that they fixed it in the end.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
> 2013 - First Python implementation, known as “Fuck Everything”. Amazing. Nice to see people dedicated to the fine arts of buttplug manipulation. Just FYI: > August 2017 - Kyle incorperates Nonpolynomial
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Someday I will learn to spell incorporates. But yes I do run a startup on this software! Mostly for consulting for larger product manufacturers, though there may be some services work happening in the future. I've been poking at some ideas around containerizing teledildonics services, but there's a whole host of social and legal issues around the idea that will take a while to iron out.
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    If you have the time, mind detailing some of the legal issues?
    - qdot76367 6y ago
      The biggest one for me is information storage and transmission. People want repeatable interfaces, which means it'd be nice if they have an account, but how much information should I hold about that user in relation to their usage of a teledildonics service? My work exists in a very odd gray area that's not quite porn, so under SESTA/FOSTA and the upcoming SISEA, I'd have to figure out what I am/am not liable for. Being a single developer project that's open source but also a company and yet I already have multiple lawyers, I really can't afford to be a test case for that.
amelius 6y ago
Will there be support for iOS?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Working on it! Technically I think btleplug might already work for iOS (I haven't tested this but I've heard the corebluetooth calls stay the same?), and I've gotten the library to compile for iPhone, but I still need to build Swift FFI bindings. The web version currently "works" via the WebBLE browser that's a available in the app store, which is just the webview polyfilled for WebBluetooth: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073 But I wouldn't call that a great experience. The hope is to support both android and iOS for apps soon though!
  - amelius 6y ago
    Would Apple allow it in the App Store?
    - qdot76367 6y ago
      Sure. Lovense, kiiroo, and other major toy manufacturers all host apps in the store. Xtoys is on there too. Just don’t call the app “buttplug”. :)
ww520 6y ago
Is manual fallback the only option in the case of a unrecoverable exception?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Turns out that rust's "panic" has a completely different context when applied to this context. :|
  - mrlonglong 6y ago
    The equivalent of a safe word, I'd suppose.
wut42 6y ago
I played a bit last year building my own sex toy controller, using a lightweight RPi Zero, an Erlang server, and a nanoKONTROL2 controller. It was quite fun and I hope to find some time soon to resume working on it :-) Bluetooth isn't a fun protocol to deal with, tho.
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Oh that's awesome! Sounds like a real cool setup. :D We do have our CLI server compiling for RPi0W if you're interested, though I need to update that soon. This is well into the "no so documented" part of the project tho, so it's not super easy to use yet. https://github.com/intiface/intiface-cli-rs https://github.com/intiface/intiface-cli-rs
  - wut42 6y ago
    I decided to go custom because I love writing code, but thanks a lot for buttplug and its documentation: it's how I managed to get my code to work with Lovense's products. I'll surely try to give a shot at using Buttplug one of theses days :). To elaborate on the setup, it could manage four or five toys at the same time; all controlled by the nanoKontrol. I could even record custom loops and patterns for each "track" to have more fun.
    - qdot76367 6y ago
      Great to hear you got something working, and glad I could at least provide some implementations to follow. :D Yeah, 4-5 toys sounds about right. I've managed to get 6 running simultaneously on one radio (BTLE spec I believe says 2 at most?), but there was massive dropout.
thunderbong 6y ago
A sixteen year quest! Amazing!
cromwellian 6y ago
Brings a whole new meaning to the term “plug-and-play”. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
miohtama 6y ago
We never got desktop Linux, but 2021 will be the year of open source kinkware.
- deleted 6y ago
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StavrosK 6y ago
> When working on Buttplug applications, something that should be at the forefront of your design thinking is: > Someone is going to fuck this. I love this project.
gleventhal 6y ago
I want to submit bad code to the open source project just so I can say to someone "What's the matter with you, got a bug up your ass?!"
batmaniam 6y ago
What happened with python support? Is it coming back or just dropped? > 2013 - First Python implementation, known as “Fuck Everything”. > Buttplug v1.0.0 is available in the following flavors: > Rust – Crates.io, Github > C# – Nuget, Github > JS/Typescript (via WASM, Web-only currently) – NPM, Github
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Oh sorry yeah that’s not super clear in that explanation. There’s a “buttplug” package on pypi (see also https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug-py https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug-py) now that can be used to access an external server (like intiface desktop: https://intiface.com/desktop https://intiface.com/desktop) but the plan is to make direct links to the rust library to give things more flexibility. That’ll hopefully be done in the next month or two.
zajio1am 6y ago
I checked the webpage and i must say that i am totally confused. First, it says buttplug is a library. Then, in architecture overview there are 'protocol' and 'client/server', which does not make sense for a library. So it is not a library, but a deamon handling these devices? Wh then call it library? If it is a deamon, is there any user configuration? Am i only one who is totally confused? Perhaps some picture with components and relations between them would be helpful?
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rsynnott 6y ago
Hold on, someone wrote a general library for sex toys, of many different types, and named it after a specific type of sex toy? This seems unhelpful.
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Never let engineers do their own branding. But there's some explanation too: https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io/intro/introduction.html#what-even-is-buttplug https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io/intro/intr...
  - salawat 6y ago
    ...I don't know, might be fun if they ran a stripped down Pop! Distro.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > This list will also continue to grow over time, as I try and convince myself this was a good branding choice. :D
ruok0101 6y ago
In the office, we used to joke that our next project would be in the teledildonics space. It's just fun to say. Someone actually did it...
coffeemug 6y ago
DirectXXX.
glouwbug 6y ago
Hackernews always implodes at the mention of sex
Uptrenda 6y ago
Looks like the Github is here: https://github.com/buttplugio https://github.com/buttplugio I expect we'll see some interesting issues posted there eventually
saltmeister 6y ago
who gives a shit

319 points by qdot76367 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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dang 6y ago

If curious see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477

deleted 6y ago
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ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago

terrible hacking :Ð

qdot76367 6y ago

Buttplug Project lead here! AMA.

lordnacho 6y ago
What's the security model? Are there multiuser devices?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  This is a really difficult to answer question because of the place in the stack this library inhabits. Buttplug only cares about accessing hardware, so while it may sound like a cop-out, our security model is "whatever the hardware gives us". Multi-user control systems would be built on top of the library, and that's where a good bit of the security work would happen. That said, there are some security/privacy features built into the architecture to reduce metadata dissemination, I'll be outlining those in the developer guide at some point.
codefined 6y ago
Do you feel the progress of the project is hindered / benefitted / not effected by any stigmatism in western society? Do you ever find it hard to talk to friends / family / colleagues / strangers about this project?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Oh, definitely hindered, but it's kind of a network effect deal. Sex education isn't a high priority, so most people barely know sex, much less sex + tech, which is very much its own thing. That makes building technology like this extra fraught, because of the amount of thinking I have to do up front in order to try and guide things in as safe-ish a direction as possible. As for talking to people about the project, I've been a public face for the field of sex tech since like 2005, so by this point I'm pretty used to it. It's on my resume, I have academic publications and book chapters on the subject, I've spoken about it at all sorts of conferences around the world, so I've kinda settled into being "The Buttplug Guy". It took a ton of hard work and image building to get here though, so it's a cliff I don't really recommend anyone else try to climb without realizing how much work it is.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    There's way worse stuff than being "The Buttplug Guy"! [0] [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A85ipUgy5B4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A85ipUgy5B4
  - zamalek 6y ago
    What you are doing is important work, not because of butt plugs, but because it is helping normalize talking about sex, and "niche sex," in the tech community (also YouPorn engineering!). Having engineers in the west be open about sex is far better than having nobody open about it. Openness about sex really is one way to improve the health of the societal zeitgeist.
    - qdot76367 6y ago
      Thanks! This is why I say the project is as much social as it is technical. The technical topics are definitely important, but the project as a whole invites scrutiny not just from developers, security engineers, etc, but also from those interested in or critical of how consent and control work in technical means, what it means to be intimate over remote mediums, etc... As an example, one of the things I was working on right before COVID-19 hit was a book chapter on digital proxemics, i.e. how we map and relate personal space in digital realms. This project and how it's been utilized to augment online intimacy was a big part of that, and I turned in the book chapter to the publisher the week COVID-19 lockdowns started to hit in the US (still no pub date tho :( ), so it's been a lot of seeing how those ideas play out in large scale since.
deleted 6y ago
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errantspark 6y ago
I very much appreciate STPIHKAL helping me get started exploring this stuff. I'll admit that the library itself was a bit intimidating. I ended up not using it and just wrapping the protocol for the particular toys that were of interest to me in about 40 lines of JS in order to implement chrome's experimental `writeValueWithoutResponse`. I'm pleased to report has a dramatic effect on latency. I wish I could contribute back but the code is just over-my-head complicated.
- qdot76367 6y ago
  This is something I'm trying to figure out how to better communicate about the project, and there will be another blog post on this soon. Buttplug is both a floor cleaner AND a dessert topping, and that can really be detrimental to the initial developer experience. There's a dichotomy in this project that's difficult to resolve: - Community wants sex toy access because there isn't much else out there that does this. - I wanna learn new stuff and also have a weird "LET'S PUT DOOM ON IT" mentality of having the library support everywhere. So we end up with support for lots of toys, but it's on top of a complicated, violently async rust library that is in some cases compiled to WASM, which is a whole stack of technologies not a lot of people are familiar with. To torture another metaphor, I've ended up building the hulking game engine for sex toys, when a lot of people would be fine with some Atari 2600 games that vibrate. Lots of people are going to have 1 toy they want to control with 1 simple interface, where my interest lies in "how does someone release a game on Steam that seamlessly supports whatever the user shows up with". The updated developer guide (https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io) is my first crack at trying to cater to all audiences, but it's got a long way to go, and the only way to test documentation is to hopefully wait for feedback from people who read it. But that's why try to I keep both the protocol and reverse engineering documentation up to date. I don't want people to have to go and reimplement things, but if it has to happen, I want to make it as easy on them as possible.
j1elo 6y ago
Would you say that collecting all protocol specs from each individual device is where most of the work lays behind this library? Otherwise, could you tell us about where is/was the 80% effort to build what the library does, and what would be the next 20% / last mile to consider it "done"?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Protocol specs are actually pretty easy. The protocols aren't that complicated, and there's some pretty simple ways to figure them out. It's usually an hour or two per new device, at most. Everything that v1 rust does right now, our C#/JS versions did before, so the technical work there was mostly fitting it from gc'd runtime'd languages into Rust. I'm much better at Rust now though! The majority of the work technically AND design-wise (for me at least) is the haptics abstraction. Our protocol is built on a system of "verbs" at the moment, i.e. "vibrate", "rotate", "stroke" (though we call it linear because it only goes one direction at a time), etc... I'm writing a larger blog post on this, but to summarize, it's REALLY hard to build a language around this that's general. For instance, the Lovense Max (a onahole style toy) has an air bladder that inflates/deflates. It's about the only thing that has that. So do I just make a new verb called "inflate"? Do I try to match it to other toys with constriction like systems and call it "constrict"? Does it even matter? But, that's an ongoing problem. In terms of "done", I think the next big milestone will be mobile app support. We work on mobile web browsers in a couple of different ways, but Buttplug still needs app support, both native and for things like cordova/react native/etc... The biggest issue there at the moment lies in our bluetooth library (btleplug, https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug), because getting the FFI via JNI to android is going to suck (even though I can crib off Servo's WebBluetooth impl, which worked on Android).
  - Corrado 6y ago
    "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." - Phil Karlton
raldi 6y ago
What are some of your dream ideas for how this one day might be used?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Seeing the uptake in VRChat has been pretty awesome. For the record, I grew up on MU*s, built the first Second Life sex toy interface in 2005, which ended up with me working at Linden, so I have a special place in my heart for virtual worlds. Otherwise, I am always really interested in ways people build for themselves that they're willing to share with others. So the answer to this question tends to be "my dream ideas are the stuff I can't possibly dream of" :)
mkr-hn 6y ago
Any plans to do a panel on sex toy development at post-covid furry cons?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  God, it's been a while, hasn't it? We'll see if I get any invites. Seems like a very BLFC kinda panel.
joelbluminator 6y ago
What motivated you to do this? Is there some financial gain to be had? How is adoption?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  I'm motivated because it's a really novel set of things to work on with the tools of technology. There's a TON of financial gain to be had, and I am incredibly bad at actually harnessing that because I'm too obsessed with silly details rather than user wants/needs. But it's a balance of keeping myself happy/learning and having cash, and I'm OK enough on cash that I do this to keep myself happy and learning. Adoption is... decent? One of the interesting parts of this is that I will really never know how many people are using it because a lot of people will take the project, implement something, but definitely not post it to somewhere like github. And really, that's fine. There are games using the library on Steam right now, a few commercial systems that use it, and I get lots of reports from independent developers doing different things with it, so that'd good enough for me.
egypturnash 6y ago
How much good sex has this project lead to you having? :)
- qdot76367 6y ago
  Damnit Egypt, stop embarrassing me in front of the VCs! You know I leave the in-depth yiff stories for twitter. :|
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Or for getting drunk at a con. If those ever happen again.
mrwoggle 6y ago
As someone who's working in haptics, not in the adult industry, but in VR: What are most actuators like? Are they ERM's or LRA's or even VCA's? Your interface is pretty generic. Vibrating and rotating at a certain amplitude it seems? Are there toys out there where you can also set both amplitude and frequency?
- qdot76367 6y ago
  First off, since you’re working in haptics, time to pitch the Haptics Industry Forum! https://hapticsif.org https://hapticsif.org It’s a big forum of various companies (mine included) discussing different issues facing haptics companies. Has been around since March 2020, is a really neat place. As for actuators, it’s either ERMs or incredibly odd things like friction/pressure systems (some with fairly off kinematics, for instance https://patreon.com/tempestvr https://patreon.com/tempestvr) and electrostimulation. No LRAs yet, that’s why I’m trying to get to supporting the nintendo joycon and vr controllers, to start thinking about how signal generation should work in that context. And yeah the top level library is incredibly generic, mostly to just get people using the library at all. I don’t know how long that’ll last, due to the complexity of actuators we’ll be dealing with, but I’ve got some strategies to grow that out a bit. Happy to go into those if you’re interested.
GuB-42 6y ago
Technical question, why not C? For a library that deals with hardware and aims for compatibility, C seems like the obvious choice. Most languages have C bindings, and most hardware-oriented libraries have a C interface. Rust looks like a nice language and could be used for all the internal logic, but expose C interfaces to the outside world for compatibility (I think Rust can do that).
- qdot76367 6y ago
  It's not really a technical reason as much as it is personal. It's not C/C++ because I loathe C/C++, and if I never write C/C++ again, it will be too soon. The reasons for these feelings are borne out of decades of experience with them. Of course, I'm currently an embedded engineer again at the moment, so "never" is actually "every day" unfortunately. Luckily embedded Rust is really looking good these days, and I've been using it a bit lately. I don't really care about what other libraries do, and really, Buttplug isn't your normal "hardware driver" library. Either way, other libraries made their choices, I made mine. I hate C/C++ enough that I'd never spend my free time on it, and this is basically my back yard shed project that also happens to be a business, so it gets done with technologies I'm comfortable in. As for exposing things, I mention that C/C++ FFI is coming in the post, mostly for Unreal Engine support. I currently have Rust exposing cdecl calls for the FFI, but it's bottlenecked to be as few calls as possible, mostly flinging protobufs back and forth because that's easy. The main thing holding up C/C++ FFI is figuring out how to translate some of the async paradigms I use to C/C++ in a way that will be generally useful.
ghosty-discord 6y ago
Are you Australian?
herbst 6y ago
Favorite toy? :)

caeril 6y ago

Glad to see HN really interested in the technologies that will truly advance humanity to the stars, rather than those that encourage distraction by our limbic systems. I'm sure that climate change and other existential risks will wait until after we're done with our sex toys to wipe us out. edit: Brilliant response, "Hacker News". Maybe if you cum enough, we'll be able to grow enough cereal crops to feed 8 billion people in 102 degree weather, after potash is a thing of the past.

codefined 6y ago
You might want to read up on 'Fallacy of Relative Privation' to see why this point of view is likely to not be helpful. A good starting point is this[0]. [0] https://academy4sc.org/topic/fallacy-of-relative-privation-all-problems-are-relative/ https://academy4sc.org/topic/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...
- caeril 6y ago
  Thanks for the rare thoughtful reply, but the fallacy is, itself, a fallacy. IQ/g-factor/ability to reason about systems is unevenly distributed - and, critically, a zero-sum game. For every +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to making humans orgasm, there is one fewer +2 SD IQ engineer devoted to other pursuits, N% of which would have been positive for humanity's progress. Unfortunately, you can't really get around this without heroic efforts to shift the bell curve to the right. edit: Looks like I'm wrong again! Looking forward to HN pointing me to the magic fairy dust that miraculously conjures up raw intellectual talent from the ether.
  - aprescott 6y ago
    I have no real opinion on the project in question but devotion is not a fungible, generically applicable resource you decide to apply to one issue or another. Run a test for whatever "IQ/g-factor/ability" handwave you're referencing on someone that loves their work and someone that doesn't.
    - 6y ago

asfarley 6y ago

This reminds me of a story an industrial designer told me: he worked on a dildo with a scripting system, so the ladies could set the number of milliseconds for each waveform profile on the haptic motor. The product was not a success.

qdot76367 6y ago
Yup! Interfaces have been a problem in the industry going back decades. See me getting excited about a similar product that catastrophically failed back in 2006 (when I was a young, far less experienced engineer :D ): https://www.metafetish.com/2006/02/17/je-joue-part-2-my-god-i-think-i-might-be-impressed/ https://www.metafetish.com/2006/02/17/je-joue-part-2-my-god-... Presenting something like this library directly to the user will end up in product death. What I'm building is a tool for developers to refine that end product interface specifically so the user (who is usually horny and does not care about technological details) can have something they can work while in that state. But it's gonna take a while to get there.
xellisx 6y ago
I looked into doing something like in the early 2000s, bit found that my idea would take more power I was comfortable to be able to provide in such spaces.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

Reminds me of an episode of MST3K where they played a '50s beer documentary that went in depth into all the science and engineering behind keeping the beer cold between the brewery and the store. Then one of the robots pops up and says - "Meanwhile, the Soviets were developing Sputnik."

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Are you thinking of "As You Like It"? If so it's also available from rifftrax.com.

djsumdog 6y ago

I was curious and tried working with this an a device about a year ago and the whole thing felt like a mess. There are browser components, electron cancer, web-to-bluetooth pieces. I think I could get my device to register/pair but couldn't get anything past that. I was looking through the docs and the only useful thing seemed to be the low-level code if I wanted o make my own applications on top of it. The reverse engineering work is important, but the tooling/UI needed work. I actually want to contribute to this to help, but it's a bit far down on the backlog of life.

qdot76367 6y ago
Yup, the way I'm trying to do things definitely may not be right for everyone, and that's fine! That's why the reverse engineering work is documented (https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io https://stpihkal.docs.buttplug.io, but also check the github repo because I am years behind on updates based on issues now), so if people want to pick up protocols and try their own thing, they absolutely can. I want to learn from other people approaches to this too. In fact, that's exactly what xtoys has done: https://xtoys.app https://xtoys.app They're just using the reversed protocols my project documented, while building outside of my admittedly complicated library interface. It's been a great project to watch grow, because while I'm kinda hyperfocused on platform and hardware support, they're going breadth-first with user focused features on a WebRTC platform.
devwastaken 6y ago
What's wrong with web to bluetooth or web browser components? Electron is pretty standard for user facing cross platform UI. This is a sort of application that has the right to use more resources - because if you're 'vibin' I don't imagine you're really needing that other 150MB to run minecraft modpacks. Perhaps if you're in VR and only have 8GB of ram. You have to hone your expectations for free projects. Native or native-like UI toolkits are expensive on time. Time is the biggest problem with making free software for people. Now if this were a commercial product - yes I agree with the criticism. There's no reason at that point that they couldn't do GTK3, QT, flutter, etc.
- thatguymike 6y ago

skocznymroczny 6y ago

How's the security of this? Do you do penetration tests?

keyle 6y ago
Off topic, I love that the good jokes still get upvoted on HN and it's not a bro-aehaeh-land like Reddit is. I wonder what the difference is, maybe just a more mature audience? Nerdier jokes?
- kreeben 6y ago
  Joking on HN without being teared to pieces is AI-hard.
  - monksy 6y ago
    It's human-hard level
snuxoll 6y ago
Groan, take an upvote. In all seriousness, many of the devices in this space are woefully insecure - this is just a library to control them using whatever native protocols they expose.
- dhsysusbsjsi 6y ago
  This is something I could get behind
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Always a good idea to check it out for any back door access issues.at least we haven’t gotten to hot code loading being a problem yet. I suspect that engineering of any kind has more perverse or pervertible terms than any sex toy industry.
    - 6y ago

noman-land 6y ago

Speaking of sex toy security, this reminds me of one of my favorite recent posts here: Blowjob Injection Attack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702282

qdot76367 6y ago
Sarah Jamie Lewis's work on privacy has been massively influential on the work I'm trying to do. I also highly recommend checking out her Oniondildonics post about metadata obfuscation in anonymous teledildonics interactions: https://mascherari.press/oniondildonics/ https://mascherari.press/oniondildonics/ She's now running the Open Privacy project, which is doing great work on general anonymized communication: https://openprivacy.ca https://openprivacy.ca
stevespang 6y ago
Hahahahahah.
Debug_Overload 6y ago
That was awesome. Security is often an afterthought for many companies. Anyway, it's good that they fixed it in the end.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

> 2013 - First Python implementation, known as “Fuck Everything”. Amazing. Nice to see people dedicated to the fine arts of buttplug manipulation. Just FYI: > August 2017 - Kyle incorperates Nonpolynomial

qdot76367 6y ago
Someday I will learn to spell incorporates. But yes I do run a startup on this software! Mostly for consulting for larger product manufacturers, though there may be some services work happening in the future. I've been poking at some ideas around containerizing teledildonics services, but there's a whole host of social and legal issues around the idea that will take a while to iron out.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  If you have the time, mind detailing some of the legal issues?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    The biggest one for me is information storage and transmission. People want repeatable interfaces, which means it'd be nice if they have an account, but how much information should I hold about that user in relation to their usage of a teledildonics service? My work exists in a very odd gray area that's not quite porn, so under SESTA/FOSTA and the upcoming SISEA, I'd have to figure out what I am/am not liable for. Being a single developer project that's open source but also a company and yet I already have multiple lawyers, I really can't afford to be a test case for that.

amelius 6y ago

Will there be support for iOS?

qdot76367 6y ago
Working on it! Technically I think btleplug might already work for iOS (I haven't tested this but I've heard the corebluetooth calls stay the same?), and I've gotten the library to compile for iPhone, but I still need to build Swift FFI bindings. The web version currently "works" via the WebBLE browser that's a available in the app store, which is just the webview polyfilled for WebBluetooth: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webble/id1193531073 But I wouldn't call that a great experience. The hope is to support both android and iOS for apps soon though!
- amelius 6y ago
  Would Apple allow it in the App Store?
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Sure. Lovense, kiiroo, and other major toy manufacturers all host apps in the store. Xtoys is on there too. Just don’t call the app “buttplug”. :)

ww520 6y ago

Is manual fallback the only option in the case of a unrecoverable exception?

qdot76367 6y ago
Turns out that rust's "panic" has a completely different context when applied to this context. :|
- mrlonglong 6y ago
  The equivalent of a safe word, I'd suppose.

wut42 6y ago

I played a bit last year building my own sex toy controller, using a lightweight RPi Zero, an Erlang server, and a nanoKONTROL2 controller. It was quite fun and I hope to find some time soon to resume working on it :-) Bluetooth isn't a fun protocol to deal with, tho.

qdot76367 6y ago
Oh that's awesome! Sounds like a real cool setup. :D We do have our CLI server compiling for RPi0W if you're interested, though I need to update that soon. This is well into the "no so documented" part of the project tho, so it's not super easy to use yet. https://github.com/intiface/intiface-cli-rs https://github.com/intiface/intiface-cli-rs
- wut42 6y ago
  I decided to go custom because I love writing code, but thanks a lot for buttplug and its documentation: it's how I managed to get my code to work with Lovense's products. I'll surely try to give a shot at using Buttplug one of theses days :). To elaborate on the setup, it could manage four or five toys at the same time; all controlled by the nanoKontrol. I could even record custom loops and patterns for each "track" to have more fun.
  - qdot76367 6y ago
    Great to hear you got something working, and glad I could at least provide some implementations to follow. :D Yeah, 4-5 toys sounds about right. I've managed to get 6 running simultaneously on one radio (BTLE spec I believe says 2 at most?), but there was massive dropout.

thunderbong 6y ago

A sixteen year quest! Amazing!

cromwellian 6y ago

Brings a whole new meaning to the term “plug-and-play”. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

miohtama 6y ago

We never got desktop Linux, but 2021 will be the year of open source kinkware.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

StavrosK 6y ago

> When working on Buttplug applications, something that should be at the forefront of your design thinking is: > Someone is going to fuck this. I love this project.

gleventhal 6y ago

I want to submit bad code to the open source project just so I can say to someone "What's the matter with you, got a bug up your ass?!"

batmaniam 6y ago

What happened with python support? Is it coming back or just dropped? > 2013 - First Python implementation, known as “Fuck Everything”. > Buttplug v1.0.0 is available in the following flavors: > Rust – Crates.io, Github > C# – Nuget, Github > JS/Typescript (via WASM, Web-only currently) – NPM, Github

qdot76367 6y ago
Oh sorry yeah that’s not super clear in that explanation. There’s a “buttplug” package on pypi (see also https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug-py https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug-py) now that can be used to access an external server (like intiface desktop: https://intiface.com/desktop https://intiface.com/desktop) but the plan is to make direct links to the rust library to give things more flexibility. That’ll hopefully be done in the next month or two.

zajio1am 6y ago

I checked the webpage and i must say that i am totally confused. First, it says buttplug is a library. Then, in architecture overview there are 'protocol' and 'client/server', which does not make sense for a library. So it is not a library, but a deamon handling these devices? Wh then call it library? If it is a deamon, is there any user configuration? Am i only one who is totally confused? Perhaps some picture with components and relations between them would be helpful?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rsynnott 6y ago

Hold on, someone wrote a general library for sex toys, of many different types, and named it after a specific type of sex toy? This seems unhelpful.

qdot76367 6y ago
Never let engineers do their own branding. But there's some explanation too: https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io/intro/introduction.html#what-even-is-buttplug https://buttplug-developer-guide.docs.buttplug.io/intro/intr...
- salawat 6y ago
  ...I don't know, might be fun if they ran a stripped down Pop! Distro.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > This list will also continue to grow over time, as I try and convince myself this was a good branding choice. :D

ruok0101 6y ago

In the office, we used to joke that our next project would be in the teledildonics space. It's just fun to say. Someone actually did it...

coffeemug 6y ago

DirectXXX.

glouwbug 6y ago

Hackernews always implodes at the mention of sex

Uptrenda 6y ago

Looks like the Github is here: https://github.com/buttplugio https://github.com/buttplugio I expect we'll see some interesting issues posted there eventually

saltmeister 6y ago

who gives a shit