FLOSS Weekly Episode 768: Open Source Radio

January 31, 2024 by 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site.

In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 768: Open Source Radio” →

A Practical Open Source Air Purifier

January 16, 2024 by 44 Comments

In the years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s fair to say we’ve all become a lot more aware of the air quality surrounding us. Many of us have added a CO2 monitor to our collection of tools, and quite a few will have an air filtration system too. There are plenty of devices on the market that fulfill this niche at varying qualities and prices, but shouldn’t a decent filter be something to make for yourself? [Naomi Wu] thinks so, and she’s put up the design for her Nukit open air purifier online under the GPLv3.

The principle of the unit is simple enough: it’s a box with an HVAC filter on the front and a set of computer fans on its side to draw air through. But it’s more than just a box, as there are three separate versions for wall-mount, hanging mount or a freestanding tower, and each one comes as a DXF file with all parts ready for laser cutting. It’s about as straightforward a way to get your hands on a well-designed and high quality air purifier as could be imagined.

[Naomi] has been quiet for a while in her familiar role as YouTube maker and guide to the nooks and crannies of her native Shenzhen, so it’s very positive to see her still active and producing projects after being warned off social media by the authorities. If you’d like to see another recent project of hers, look no further than her update to [Bunnie Huang]’s Shenzhen guide.

Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive In 2024

January 15, 2024 by 24 Comments

Haiku is one of those open source operating systems that seem to be both exceedingly well-known while flying completely under the radar. Part of this is probably due to it being an open source version and continuation of the Be Operating System (BeOS). Despite its strong feature set in the 1990s, BeOS never got much love in the wider computer market. Nevertheless, it has a strong community that after twenty-two years of development has now reached a point where you can daily drive it, according to the [Action Retro] channel on YouTube.

One point where Haiku definitely scores points is with the super-fast installation and boot. [Action Retro] demonstrates this on real hardware, and we can confirm that it boots very fast in VirtualBox on a low-end Intel N100-based host system as well. With the recently introduced QtWebEngine-based Falkon browser (formerly known as QupZilla) even JavaScript-heavy sites like YouTube and retro Mac emulators work well. You can even get a Minecraft client for Haiku.

Although [Action Retro] notes that 3D acceleration is still a work-in-progress for Haiku, his 2014-era AMD system smoothly played back 1080p YouTube videos. Although not addressed in the video, Haiku is relatively easy to port existing software to, as it is POSIX-compatible. There is a relatively modern GCC 11.2 compiler in the Beta 4 release from 2022, backed up by solid API documentation. Who doesn’t want to take a poke at a modern take on the OS that nearly became MacOS?

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Open Source Needs A New Mission: Protecting Users

January 10, 2024 by 42 Comments

[Bruce Perens] isn’t very happy with the current state of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and an article by [Rupert Goodwins] expounds on this to explain Open Source’s need for a new mission in 2024, and beyond. He suggests a focus shift from software, to data.

The internet as we know it and all the services it runs are built on FOSS architecture and infrastructure. None of the big tech companies would be where they are without FOSS, and certainly none could do without it. But FOSS has its share of what can be thought of as loopholes, and in the years during which the internet has exploded in growth and use, large tech companies have found and exploited all of them. A product doesn’t need to disclose a single line of source code if it’s never actually distributed. And Red Hat (which [Perens] asserts is really just IBM) have simply stopped releasing public distributions of CentOS.

In addition, the inherent weak points of FOSS remain largely the same. These include funding distributions, lack of user-focused design, and the fact that users frankly don’t understand what FOSS offers them, why it’s important, or even that it exists at all.

A change is needed, and it’s suggested that the time has come to move away from a focus on software, and shift that focus instead to data. Expand the inherent transparency of FOSS to ensure that people have control and visibility of their own data.

While the ideals of FOSS remain relevant, this isn’t the first time the changing tech landscape has raised questions about how things are done, like the intersection of bug bounties and FOSS.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

X1Plus: Open Source Bambu Lab X1 Firmware

January 9, 2024 by 35 Comments

Recently [Michael] over at the [Teaching Tech] YouTube channel got access to the X1Plus firmware, and takes us through what it may mean for Bambu Lab X1 owners. X1Plus is alternative firmware for the Bambu Lab X1 FDM 3D printer that was developed by X1 owners who felt that there were some features that they were missing, such as a detailed report on automatic bed leveling, input shaping calibration response graphs and more.

Perhaps most interesting is that this firmware does not replace the Bambu Lab firmware, but rather runs completely from a microSD card that’s inserted into the display’s SD card reader. This means that only the bootloader of the printer’s boot medium is changed, and the printer thus retains the ability boot to the OEM firmware as needed. Whether you want to try it on your own X1 depends on a few factors, first of all being that it only works with the OEM firmware up to and including version 1.7.0.

Since the bootloader modification relies on an exploit that was patched in newer firmware, a lot depends on whether Bambu Lab allows such tinkering, much like Prusa does with the Mini printer, or allows flashing of older firmware which would enable the exploit on newer X1 printers. Depending on Bambu Lab’s response, the imminent public release of this open source firmware may as a result run into some pretty big hurdles.

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DIY Chemistry Points The Way To Open Source Blood Glucose Testing

January 4, 2024 by 16 Comments

Every diabetic knows that one of the major burdens of the disease is managing supplies. From insulin to alcohol wipes, diabetes is a resource-intensive disease, and running out of anything has the potential for disaster. This is especially true for glucose test trips, the little electrochemical dongles that plug into a meter and read the amount of glucose in a single drop of blood.

As you might expect, glucose test strips are highly proprietary, tightly regulated, and very expensive. But the chemistry that makes them work is pretty simple, which led [Markus Bindhammer] to these experiments with open source glucose testing. It’s all part of a larger effort at developing an open Arduino glucometer, a project that has been going on since 2016 but stalled in part thanks to supply chain difficulties on the chemistry side, mainly in procuring glucose oxidase, an enzyme that oxidizes glucose. The reaction creates hydrogen peroxide, which can be measured to determine the amount of glucose present.

With glucose oxidase once again readily available — from bakery and wine-making suppliers — [Markus] started playing with the chemistry. The first reaction in the video below demonstrates how iodine and starch can be used as a reagent to detect peroxide. A tiny drop of glucose solution turns the iodine-starch suspension a deep blue color in the presence of glucose oxidase.

While lovely, colorimetric reactions such as these aren’t optimal for analyzing blood, so reaction number two uses electrochemistry to detect glucose. Platinum electrodes are bathed in a solution of glucose oxidase and connected to a multimeter. When glucose is added to the solution, the peroxide produced lowers the resistance across the electrodes. This is essentially what’s going on in commercial glucose test strips, as well as in continuous glucose monitors.

Hats off to [Markus] for working so diligently on this project. We’re keenly interested in this project, and we’ll be following developments closely. Continue reading “DIY Chemistry Points The Way To Open Source Blood Glucose Testing” →

Open Source Scanner Scans The Slides

December 26, 2023 by 9 Comments

What do you get when you join a slide projector and a digital camera? Filmolimo, an open source slide scanner. The scanner uses an M5Stack Fire, an ESP32 development board. Thanks to the ESP32, you can control the device via WiFi.

All the project files, including KiCAD design files, are on GitHub. Of course, you will probably have to adapt things to your specific camera and slide projector. The PCB is double-sided and looks easy to put together. The board is mostly opto-isolation and interface between the controller and the equipment. The software allows you to change things like the time between slides, for example.

This is one of those projects you probably only need for a bit. Unless, of course, you regularly scan slides. You can farm it out to a service provider, but what fun is that? If you have a few hundred thousand slides, you might need to go for speed. If you just have a few, you can get by with a simple adapter.