This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Frank Delporte about Pi4J, the friendly Java libraries for the Raspberry Pi, that expose GPIO, SPI, I2C and other IO interfaces. Why would anyone want to use Java for the Pi? And what’s changed since the project started? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 809: Pi4J – Stable And Boring On The Raspberry Pi”
The best part about real-time OS (RTOS) availability in 2024 is that we developers are positively spoiled for choice, but as a corollary this also makes it a complete pain to determine what the optimal choice for a project is. Beyond simply opting for a safe choice like FreeRTOS for an MCU project and figuring out any implications later during the development process, it can pay off massively to invest some time up-front matching the project requirements with the features offered by these various RTOSes. A few years ago I wrote a primer on the various levels of ‘real-time’ and whether you may even just want to forego an RTOS at all and use a simple Big Loop™ & interrupt-based design.
With such design parameters in mind, we can then look more clearly at the available RTOS options available today, which is the focus of this article. Obviously it won’t be an exhaustive comparison, and especially projects like FreeRTOS have seen themselves customized to various degrees by manufacturers like ST Microelectronics and Espressif, among others. This also brings to the forefront less pleasant considerations, such as expected support levels, as illustrated by e.g. Microsoft’s Azure RTOS (formerly ThreadX) recently getting moved to the Eclipse Foundation as the Eclipse ThreadX open source project. On one hand this could make it a solid open-source licensed RTOS, or it could have been open sourced because Microsoft has moved on to something else and cleared out its cupboard.
Thus without further ado, let’s have a look at RTOSes in 2024 and which ones are worth considering, in my opinion.
Continue reading “Making Sense Of Real-Time Operating Systems In 2024”
We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography. While color pictures eventually became the norm, black and white TV was common for many years. After all, a TV set was a big investment, so people didn’t run out and buy the latest TV every year. Even if you did buy a new or used TV, a black and white model was much less expensive and, for many years, some shows were in black and white anyway. RCA, of course, wanted you to buy a color set. [PeriscopeFilm] has a 1963 promotional film from RCA extolling the virtues of a color set. The video also shows something about how the sets were made, as you can see below.
We aren’t sure we’d have led with the idea that color could save your life in this context, but we have to salute the melodrama. There is a good bit of footage of picture tube manufacturing, although the technical detail is — understandably — aimed at the general public.
Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB stick or sometimes even just use the scope’s PC or web interface to save the picture directly to your computer. Of course, if it is on the computer, you could use normal screen capture software. But that hasn’t always been the case. Back in the days when scopes were heavy and expensive, if you wanted to capture an image from the tube, you took a picture. While you might be able to hold up your camera to the screen, they made specific cameras just for this purpose.
[Ziddy Makes] describes this cute little guy as a biblically-accurate keyboard. For the unfamiliar, that’s a reference to biblically-accurate angels, which have wings (and sometimes eyes) all over the place. They’re usually pretty scary to behold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This 16-key macro cube uses a Pro Micro and a system of PH2 5p ribbon cables to connect the four four-key sisterboards to the main board. A 3D-printed base holds all the boards in place. Out of all the switches in the world, [Ziddy] chose Otemu Blues. Clack!
Although it may take some getting used to, this seems like it would be a fun way to input macros. I can see the case for putting some rubber feet on the bottom, otherwise it might scoot around on the desk. That might be cute, but only the first couple of times, you know?
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The Espionage”
Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, shortly after which the sheriff of Beaufort County was notified to be on the lookout for the tribe. Luckily, none of the animals has been used in any kind of infectious disease research, so this likely won’t be the origin story for anything apocalyptic. At least some of the animals were quickly located, doing their monkey thing in the woods and getting to swing from real trees for probably the first time in their lives. Alpha Genesis employees are trying to lure the monkeys back to captivity with food, but we suspect they’re too smart for that. They’ll probably come back on their own recognizance or when they get bored and realize that the real world isn’t all they thought it would be. When it’s all done we’d love to hear details about the breakout; was it something the monkeys got together and planned, or did one of the humans mess up?
We just got home from Supercon and well, it was super. It was great to see everyone, and meet a whole bunch of new folks to boot! The talks were great, and you can see a good half of them already on the Hackaday YouTube channel, so for that you didn’t even have to be there.
The badge hacks were, as with most years, out of this world. I’ll admit that my cheeks were sore from laughing so much after emceeing it this year, due in no small part to two hilarious AI projects, both of which were also righteous hacks in addition to full-on comedy routines. A group of six programmers got all of their hacks working together, and the I2C-to-MQTT bridge had badges blinking in sync even in the audience. You want blinkies? We had blinkies.
But the hack that warmed everyones’ hearts was “I figured it out” by [Connie]. Before this weekend, she had never coded MicroPython and didn’t know anything about I2C. But yet by Sunday afternoon, she made a sweet spiral animation on the LED wheel, and blinked the RGBs in the touchwheel.
What I love about the Hackaday audience is that, when the chips are down, someone doing something new for the first time is valued as much as some of the more showy work done by more experienced programmers. Hacking is also about learning and pushing out boundaries after all. The shouts for “I figured it out” were louder than any others in the graphics hacks category, it took home a prize, and I was smiling from ear to ear.
Hackaday can learn from this too. [Connie]’s hack definitely shows the need for another badge-hack category, first timers, because we absolutely should recognize first tries. There was also a strong petition / protest from people who had worked new hacks onto previous year’s badges – like [Andy] and [koppanyh]’s addition of bit-banged I2C to the Voja 4 badge from two years ago, and [Instant Arcade]’s Polar Pacman, which he named “Ineligible for this Competition” in protest. Touche.
We’re stoked to learn new things, see new hacks, and basically just catch up with everything folks did over the weekend. We can’t wait to see what you’re up to next year!
