HTA Firmware Tracker

A web dashboard that tracks the latest firmware/software versions for HTA's audio gear, so nobody has to manually check manufacturer sites.

What it does

• Tracks 48 pieces of equipment across DiGiCo, Yamaha, Solid State Logic, Allen & Heath, Shure, d&b audiotechnik, and Dante/Audinate.
• All 48 items are checked automatically — most by scraping a static page, several manufacturers via a real headless browser where the site needs JavaScript or blocks plain requests (see How each manufacturer is checked).
• Re-checks everything once a day (via a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow - see Deployment - or via a background job if you run it locally) and highlights anything whose version changed since the last check.
• A stats panel at the top (Tracked / Updates / Errors / Last checked, the last shown as a relative time like "2h ago"), with a search box and Up to date / Update available / Check failed filters. Clicking the Updates card jumps straight to the flagged rows.
• Dashboard grouped by manufacturer, with status badges (Up to date / Update available / Check failed). A row with a new version gets a soft amber highlight in place (it isn't reordered) that clears itself automatically 1 month after the change was first detected — no one needs to click anything to dismiss it. Installable as a PWA on a phone (Add to Home Screen) for a full-screen, app-like view.
• Items that are genuinely the same underlying platform tracked from one source — e.g. DiGiCo's seven Quantum consoles — collapse into a single family row ("Quantum series", under DiGiCo's own section heading) instead of listing near-duplicate rows that always move together. See Firmware families for how that grouping is decided and kept in sync with Slack notifications.

Architecture at a glance

One flow, run in two places (a daily GitHub Actions job, and locally on demand):

app/seed.py ──► SQLite (throwaway in CI) ◄── data/equipment.json
 (what we track)         │                    (last known state, in git)
                         ▼
           app/runner.py  ─►  checker module per manufacturer
           (diff + persist)    (check_all(items) -> {item.id: CheckResult})
                         │
                         ├─►  app/slack.py       (only genuinely new versions)
                         ▼
           data/equipment.json  ─►  scripts/build_static.py  ─►  public/index.html
           (committed back)          (shared app/dashboard_data.py)   (Vercel)

• seed.py is the list of what's tracked; each row names a checker_key (e.g. digico:quantum), whose prefix registry.py routes to a manufacturer module. A checker gets all of its items at once and returns one CheckResult per item - it fetches each source once, not once per model.
• State lives in git, not a database server. CI starts from nothing each run: it re-seeds a throwaway SQLite DB, overlays the last known versions/timestamps from data/equipment.json (matched on manufacturer + model), checks, and writes the result back. So history persists as commits, and "what changed" is a before/after diff of two JSON snapshots (app/changes.py) rather than anything stored.
• The deployed site is static HTML. build_static.py renders the same Jinja template and calls the same build_dashboard_context() as the live FastAPI app, so the two can't drift on grouping/sorting/stats. There's no server in production - and so nothing that writes: flags clear themselves after a month instead of needing an "acknowledge".
• Failures degrade, they don't cascade. A checker that raises marks only its own items "Check failed"; a Slack outage or missing webhook never blocks the daily commit; a release-date lookup failing doesn't fail the version check it rode along with.

Quick start

cd "hta-firmware-tracker"
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium
uvicorn app.main:app --reload

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 — the database (SQLite, at data/tracker.db) is created and seeded automatically on first run, and a check kicks off ~5 seconds after startup. (The playwright install chromium step downloads a ~90MB headless browser used only by the Allen & Heath / Shure / d&b / Dante checkers — see below.)

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗