Software Hacks

1141 Articles

Edit Hex In The Browser

July 27, 2017 by 28 Comments

If you can’t stand the thought of using an application in your browser, you might as well jump ahead to the comments and start flaming.

Still with us? Imagine this scenario. You are at the office, at a client’s site, at a school, or visiting your mom. Suddenly, for some strange reason, you need to edit a hex file. We don’t know why, but if you are reading Hackaday, it isn’t that big of a stretch to imagine it. What do you do? Download and install a hex editor? Maybe you can’t. Or, if it is mom’s computer, maybe you just don’t want to. Your next option is to navigate to HexEd.it.

The application, by [Jens Duttke], uses HTML5 and JavaScript and is actually a nicely capable editor. It shows the data in hex and ASCII as you’d expect. It also shows the current cursor location in a number of formats like 8-bit integer, 32-bit integer, date and time, and more. It even shows all the representations as big endian and little endian.

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Take Control Of Your Cheap Laser Cutter

July 19, 2017 by 24 Comments

The relatively inexpensive K40 laser cutter/engraver machines from China have brought laser cutting to the masses, but they are not without their faults. Sure, they’re only powerful enough for the lightest cutting tasks, but on top of that, their bundled software is inflexible and disappointing. If your workshop or hackspace has one of these machines languishing in the corner, then the release of a new piece of software, K40 Whisperer from [Scorch], is an interesting and welcome development.

He tells us that the reverse engineering process required to understand the K40’s protocol was non-trivial, given that it does not use handy decimal numbers to issue commands. A spreadsheet was used to collate data packets and spot repeating patterns to analyse the inner workings. Feature-wise, the software reads SVG and DXF files, and can split SVGs by colour. It has a halftone algorithm for rendering grey scales, and cuts from the inside of each shape first to avoid pieces of work dropping out of the piece of material. Currently it works with the stock M2 Nano controller board and is available as a Windows download, though it can also be compiled for Linux distributions, or MacOS, and he is asking owners to test it with as many machines as possible to ensure compatibility with other boards.

He has posted a video of K40 Whisperer in action, which you can see below the break.

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The Site Of A Hundred Languages

July 18, 2017 by 37 Comments

Silent film star [Lon Chaney] had the nickname “man of a thousand faces.”  The Try It Out website (tio.run) might well be the site of a hundred languages. Well, in all fairness, they only have 97 “practical” languages, but they do have 172 “recreational languages” but the site of 269 languages doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it? The site lets you run some code in each of those languages from inside your browser.

By the site’s definition, practical languages include things like C, Java, Python, and Perl. There’s also old school stuff like FOCAL-69, Fortran, Algol, and APL. There’s several flavors of assembly and plenty of other choices. On the recreational side, you can find Numberwang, LOLCODE, and quite a few we’ve never heard of.

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Using The GPU From JavaScript

July 17, 2017 by 50 Comments

Everyone knows that writing programs that exploit the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in your computer’s video card requires special arcane tools, right? Well, thanks to [Matthew Saw], [Fazil Sapuan], and [Cheah Eugene], perhaps not. At a hackathon, they turned out a Javascript library that allows you to create “kernel” functions to execute on the GPU of the target system. There’s a demo available with a benchmark which on our machine sped up a 512×512 calculation by well over five times. You can download the library from the same page. There’s also a GitHub page.

The documentation is a bit sparse but readable. You simply define the function you want to execute and the dimensions of the problem. You can specify one, two, or three dimensions, as suits your problem space. When you execute the associated function it will try to run the kernels on your GPU in parallel. If it can’t, it will still get the right answer, just slowly.

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Hacking IBeacons For Automating Routines

July 17, 2017 by 17 Comments

Every self-respecting hacker has an automation hack somewhere in his/her bag of tricks. There are a lot of modern-day technologies that facilitate the functionality like GPS, scripting apps, and even IFTTT. In an interesting hack, [Nick Lee] has combined iBeacons and a reverse engineered Starbucks API to create an automated morning routine.

By creating a mobile app that scans for iBeacons, [Nick Lee] was able to reduce the effort made every morning while heading to his office. When the app encounters a relevant beacon, a NodeJS app sitting in the cloud is triggered. This consequently leads to desired actions like ordering an Uber ride and placing an order for an iced latte.

[Nick Lee] shares the code for the Starbucks application on GitHub for anyone who wants to order their favorite cup of joe automatically. This project can be easily expanded to work with GPS or even RFID tags and if you feel like adding IoT to a coffee machine, you could automate all of your beverage requirements in one go.

Machine Learning IDE In Alpha

June 27, 2017 by 11 Comments

Machine is an IDE for building machine learning systems using TensorFlow. You can sign up for the alpha, but first, have a look at the video below to see what it is all about.

You’ll see in the video, that you can import data for a model and then do training (in this case, to find a mustache in an image). You’ll see the IDE invites an iterative approach to development since you can alter parameters, run experiments, and see the results.

The IDE syncs with “the cloud” so you can work on it from multiple computers and roll back to previous results easily. We don’t know when the IDE will leave alpha status (or beta, for that matter), but the team’s goal is to release a free version of Machine to encourage widespread adoption.

If you want to learn more about TensorFlow, you are in the right place. We’ve also covered a bare-bones project if you’d rather get started that way. You can also find some good background material going all the way back to the early perceptron-based neural networks.

Simple Wave Generation In Python (and SciPy)

June 26, 2017 by 15 Comments

[153Armstrong] did a short post on how easy it is to generate waveforms using Python. We agree it is simple, but actually, it isn’t so much Python per se, it is some pretty cool libraries (SciPy, in particular) that do all the hard work. That may be splitting hairs, but it is worth nothing that SciPy (pronounced “Sigh Pie”) also does other handy tricks like Fourier transforms, too. You can see a video of his results, below.

The code is simple and one of the commenters pointed out an even more efficient way to write the data to a WAV file. The basic idea is to create an array of samples in a buffer using some features of SciPy’s NumPy component.

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