Software Hacks

902 Articles

Decoding The 8088

October 9, 2023 by 2 Comments

There is a lot to like about open software, and in some areas, a well-thought-out piece of software can really make a huge impact. A great example of this is the Sigrok project. Creating simple devices that act like a logic analyzer is relatively easy. What’s hard is writing nice software for such a setup including protocol decoders. Sigrok has done it and since it is open, you can add your device and decode your protocol. [GloriousCow] had done the hardware part of interfacing to the 8088 in an IBM PC using an off-the-shelf logic analyzer that uses a customized version of Sigrok. But the output was a CSV file you had to process in a spreadsheet program. The next step: write a decoder for Sigrok to understand 8088 bus cycles.

The post covers the details of writing such a plug-in for Pulseview, the Sigrok GUI. It will also work for the command line interface if you prefer that. The code is in Python.

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Ordering Pizza While Racing

October 9, 2023 by 6 Comments

As [Matt Stele] prepared to bike a local 300-mile (~480km) race in addition to training, he had to prepare for food. A full day of riding was ahead on gravel trails, and one of the best options for him was Casey’s General Store pizza. However, as it was a race, other riders were much faster than him. So, all the hot slices were gone when he arrived. With the help of a serverless GPS tracker, some cloud lambdas, and some good old-fashioned web scraping, [Matt] had a system that could order him a fresh pizza at the precise moment he needed. Continue reading “Ordering Pizza While Racing” →

Fluid Simulation Does The Math

October 6, 2023 by 2 Comments

If you like math, you should enjoy [kynd’s] page about simulating fluid in p5.js. You might still enjoy the pretty colors and shapes if you aren’t into math. What’s scary is that the page promises to have as little math as possible, but there’s still quite a bit. Of course, we are sure you could go even deeper down the rabbit hole.

The algorithm’s core is a pair of 2D arrays representing cells that comprise the display area. One array holds the color of the cell, while another holds a velocity vector of the fluid in the cell. A vector, of course, has both a magnitude and a direction.

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Audacity Runs Surprisingly Well In Your Browser

October 5, 2023 by 13 Comments

Audacity is an extremely popular open source audio editor, with hundreds of millions of downloads on the books. But due to some controversy over changes the Muse Group wanted to implement when they took ownership of the project back in 2021, the userbase has fractured somewhat. Some users simply stick with an older version of the program, while others have switched over to one of the forks that have popped up in the last couple of years.

The Wavacity project by [Adam Hilss] is a bit of both. It looks and feels just like an older version of Audacity (specifically, 3.0.0). But the trick here is that he’s managed to get it working with WebAssembly (WASM) so you can run it in your browser. Impressively, it even works on mobile devices. Though the Audacity UI, which already carries the sort of baggage you’d expect from a program that’s more than 20 years old, is hardly suited to a touch screen. Continue reading “Audacity Runs Surprisingly Well In Your Browser” →

Bleep Remover Censors Those **** Bleeps

October 4, 2023 by 20 Comments

One of the more interesting cultural phenomena is the ‘bleep’ that replaces certain words in broadcasts, something primarily observed in the US. Although ostensibly applied to prevent susceptible minds from being exposed to the unspeakable horrors of naughty words, the applied 1 kHz censoring tone is decidedly loud and obnoxious enough that its entertainment level falls somewhere between ‘truck backing up’ and ‘loud claxon in busy traffic’. There is thus a definite argument to be made to censor the censoring beep to preserve one’s sanity, which is the goal of [Oona Räisänen]’s Bleep-be-gone project on GitHub.

Using a Perl-based wrapper, the versatile ffmpeg framework is used to filter a provided video that was afflicted with bleepitus, before outputting a pristine version where the infernal noise is replaced with blissful silence. This use of silence for censoring naughty words is incidentally becoming more commonplace over an ear-piercing beep, but a tool like Bleep-be-gone can be used to hasten the demise of its terror. Considering that the point of the 1 kHz back-up alarm beep is to draw a person’s attention to a piece of heavy equipment moving about, there is clearly no good reason why the replacement of a naughty word should warrant a similar drawing of attention.

Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0

October 3, 2023 by 53 Comments

Nearly three years ago at the start of 2020 and before the pandemic hit, we took a look at an up-and-coming player in the world of PCB design. LibrePCB is by no means as old as the more established players, but at the time it was joining the ranks of open-source EDA packages with its first early stable releases. It showed a lot of promise but was still a little rough around the edges back then, but in the years since it’s advanced to the extent that in September they released version 1.0. That’s a significant moment for any open source package, so it’s time to return and take another look. It’s a cross-platform package with builds available for Linux, Windows, MacOS and FreeBSD, of which I needed the Linux version. There are one or two options to choose from, I went for the appImage as probably the least trouble. Very quickly I was in a new EDA package, and I set out to make a simple Schmitt trigger oscillator as a test project. Continue reading “Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0” →

The End Of Basic?

September 17, 2023 by 101 Comments

Many people, one way or another, got started programming computers using some kind of Basic. The language was developed at Dartmouth specifically so people could write simple programs without much training. However, Basic found roots in small computers and grew to where it is today, virtually unrecognizable. Writing things in something like Visual Basic may be easier than some programming tasks, but it requires a lot of tools and some reading or training. We aren’t sure where the name EndBasic came from, but this program — written in Rust — aims to bring Basic back to a simpler time. Sort of.

You can run the program in a browser, locally, or connected to a cloud service. It looks like old-fashioned Basic at first. But the more you dig in, the odder it gets. The command line is more akin to a Python REPL. You type things, and they happen. It took a while to figure out that you need to enter EDIT to write a program. Then, what you type gets saved until you press escape. The syntax is Basic-like but has oddities. There are no line numbers, but you can use labels that start with an at sign.

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