Software Development

795 Articles

FOSSCON 2018: Hacking The Indego Bike Sharing API

August 27, 2018 by 5 Comments

It’s often said that necessity of the mother of invention, but as a large portion of the projects we cover here at Hackaday can attest, curiosity has to at least be its step-mother. Not every project starts with a need, sometimes it’s just about understanding how something works. That desire we’ve all felt from time to time, when we’ve looked at some obscure piece of hardware or technology and decided that the world would be a slightly better place if we cracked it open and looked at what spilled out.

That’s precisely the feeling Eric O’Callaghan had when he looked out the window of his Philadelphia apartment a few years back and saw something unusual. Seemingly overnight, they had built an automated Indego bike sharing station right across the street. Seeing the row of light blue bicycles sitting in their electronic docks, he wondered how the system worked, and what kind of data they might be collecting. He didn’t need to rent a bike, he hadn’t even ridden one in years, but he suddenly had a strong urge to go across the street and learn as much as he could about this system.

He recently presented those findings during FOSSCON 2018 at the International House in Philadelphia, in the hopes that others might be interested in getting involved. Currently Eric is one of the only people who’s investigating the public data Indego offers, and as his personal MySQL database has now surpassed 15 million rows of data, he’s hoping to get some developers with big data experience into the fray. His approach to making this data useful is an interesting one which I’ll dive into after the break.

Continue reading “FOSSCON 2018: Hacking The Indego Bike Sharing API” →

How To Mash Up BLE, NodeJS, And MQTT To Get Internet Of Things

August 24, 2018 by 10 Comments

We’re living in the world of connected devices. It has never been easier to roll your own and implement the functionality you actually want, rather than live with the lowest common denominator that the manufacture chose.

In a previous article I walked though a small python script to talk to a BLE light and used it to cycle through some colors. Now I want to delve deeper into the world of Internet Connected BLE devices and how to set up a simple Internet-Of-Things light. With this example in hand the sky’s the limit on what you can build and what it will be able to do.

Join me after the break as I demonstrate how to use NodeJS to bridge the digital world with the physical world.

Continue reading “How To Mash Up BLE, NodeJS, And MQTT To Get Internet Of Things” →

Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly

August 21, 2018 by 11 Comments

Imagine having to program your computer by rewiring it. For a brief period of time around the mid-1940s, the first general-purpose electronic computers worked that way. Computers like ENIAC initially had no internal storage for code. Programming it involved manipulating thousands of switches and cables. The positions of those switches and cables were the program.

Kathleen Booth began working on computers just as the idea of storing the program internally was starting to permeate through the small set of people building computers. As a result, she was one of the first programmers to work on software and is credited with inventing assembly language. But she also got her hands dirty with the hardware, having built a large portion of the computers which she programmed. She also did some early work with natural language processing and neural networks. And this was all before 1962, making her truly a pioneer. This then is her tale.

Continue reading “Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly” →

Stop Using Python 2: What You Need To Know About Python 3

August 15, 2018 by 113 Comments

Though Python 3 was released in 2008, many projects are still stuck on Python 2.

It’s understandable that porting large existing codebases to a new version is a prospect which sends a shiver down many a developer’s spine. But code inevitably needs to be maintained, and so when all the shiny new features that would fix everything are in a new version, is it really worth staying rooted in the past?

We’ll take you through some of the features that Python 2 programs are missing out on, not only from 3.0 but up to the current release (3.7).

Continue reading “Stop Using Python 2: What You Need To Know About Python 3” →

Even The PlayStation 2 Can’t Escape Java

August 7, 2018 by 11 Comments

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that Java has a pretty impressive track record in terms of supported platforms. Available on everything from flip phones to DVD players, not to mention computers, Oracle once famously claimed that Java runs on three billion devices. An estimate that, in truth, is probably on the low side at this point. Especially when [Michael Kohn] keeps figuring out how to run it on increasingly esoteric devices.

[Michael] writes in to tell us that he’s added support for the PlayStation 2 console to Java Grinder, his software for taking Java code and turning it into a native binary for a variety of unexpected platforms. His previous conquests have included the TRS-80 and Atari 2600, so by comparison the PS2 is an almost tame addition to the list.

Let’s be honest, you probably don’t have any desire to run a Java program on Sony’s nearly two decade old game system. But that’s OK. The documentation [Michael] has written up is fascinating anyway, covering specifics of the PS2’s rather unique hardware and quirks he ran into when developing on an emulator and deploying on real hardware. Even if you’ll never put the findings to practical use, it’s absolutely worth a read.

In the video after the break you can see the demo [Michael] came up with booting on a real PS2 to prove the software works. To really put his mark on it, he mentions he wrote and performed the demo’s songs and even drew some of the artwork on paper and scanned it into his computer.

We’ve previously covered his work getting Java running on the Sega Genesis, as well as the venerable 6502 CPU. Oh, and one time he encoded data onto a pancake. We like this guy’s style.

Continue reading “Even The PlayStation 2 Can’t Escape Java” →

Web Pages Via Forth

August 2, 2018 by 16 Comments

Forth. You either love it or you hate it. If you have struggled to work on tiny microcontrollers, you probably are in the first camp. After all, bringing up a minimal Forth system is pretty simple and requires very little resources on the CPU. Once you have such an environment it is then easy to extend Forth in Forth. [Remko] decided he wanted to build a Forth compiler that uses WebAssembly and runs in your browser. Why? We’ve learned not to think about that question too much.

The world has changed a lot since the first introduction of the WorldWideWeb browser in 1990. What started out as a way to show text documents over the network has become — for better or worse — an application platform. JavaScript won the browser scripting language wars and security concerns pretty much killed Java applets and Flash. But JavaScript isn’t always fast. Sure, there are ways to do just in time compiling, such as Google’s V8 engine. But that compile step takes time, too. Enter WebAssembly (or Wasm).

Continue reading “Web Pages Via Forth” →

CD Image Via Twitter: A Handcrafted Game Disc

August 2, 2018 by 7 Comments

Humans can turn anything into a competition. Someone always wants to be faster or drive a ball farther. Technical pursuits are no different, which is why a lot of people overclock or play regular expression golf. [Alok Menghrajani] sets himself some odd challenges. A few years ago, he hand-built a bootable floppy image that had a simple game onboard and managed to fit it in a Twitter message. Twitter has increased their number of characters, so — you guessed it — this time he’s back with a CDROM image.

His tweet is a command line that starts with perl. The text is base64-encoded binary and if you run the Tweet from a shell — which is an odd thing to do with a Tweet, we grant you, you’ll be rewarded with a file called cd.iso. You could burn that to a CDROM, but it is more likely you’ll just mount in a virtual machine and boot that. [Alok] says it does work in QEMU, VirtualBox, and — yes — even a real CD.

Continue reading “CD Image Via Twitter: A Handcrafted Game Disc” →