Darkplug

Darkplug is an iPhone darkroom timer that talks to your enlarger. It pairs with a Shelly smart plug on your local network, so the phone in your hand becomes the timer on the enlarger head — no cloud account, no hardware dongle, just a plug beside the enlarger.

The craft is in the workflows, not just the countdown. Guided test strips run in seconds or f-stop increments and ask which step you liked best; a unique grid planner lets you design complex dodge & burn sequences before the paper is under the lens; split-grade printing and a guided paper-developing timer cover the rest of the session. Everything renders in a red-on-black interface that the author tested so it doesn't fog photo paper — the kind of domain detail you only get from someone who actually prints.

The maker, Péter Szentkirályi, announced it on Hacker News on 2026-10-06 with a refreshingly honest disclaimer: "Fair warning: the app was blindly vibe coded using Codex and Xcode." Blind or not, the result is on the App Store now, with the advanced tools (f-stop timing, test strips, dodge & burn, split grade) unlocked as a one-time Darkplug+ purchase rather than a subscription. Hardware-adjacent, niche, genuinely useful software from prompts — this is the genre where vibe coding earns its keep.

curated by the VibeFix editors