javascript

137 Articles

What Does GitHub’s Npm Acquisition Mean For Developers?

March 26, 2020 by 33 Comments

Microsoft’s open-source shopping spree has claimed another victim: npm. [Nat Friedman], CEO of GitHub (owned by Microsoft), announced the move recently on the GitHub blog.

So what motivated the acquisition, and what changes are we likely to see as a result of it? There are some obvious upsides and integrations, but these will be accompanied by the usual dose of skepticism from the open-source community. The company history and working culture of npm has also had its moments in the news, which may well have contributed to the current situation. This post aims to explore some of the rationale behind the acquisition, and what it’s likely to mean for developers in the future.

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RasterCarve Converts Images To CNC

January 19, 2020 by 11 Comments

CNC machines are an essential part of the hacker’s toolset. These computer-controlled cutters of wood, metal and other materials can translate a design into a prototype in short order, making the process of iterating a project much easier. However, the software to create these designs can be expensive, so [Franklin Wei] decided to write his own. In particular, he decided to write his own program to engrave images, converting a photo into a toolpath that can be cut. The result is RasterCarve, a web app that converts an image into a GCode that can be fed into a CNC machine.

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New Part Day: Arduino Goes Pro With The Portenta H7

January 15, 2020 by 92 Comments

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is traditionally where the big names in tech show off their upcoming products, and the 2020 show was no different. There were new smartphones, TVs, and home automation devices from all the usual suspects. Even a few electric vehicles snuck in there. But mixed in among flashy presentations from the electronics giants was a considerably more restrained announcement from a company near and dear to the readers of Hackaday: Arduino is going pro.

While Arduino has been focused on the DIY and educational market since their inception, the newly unveiled Portenta H7 is designed for professional users who want to rapidly develop robust hardware suitable for industrial applications. With built-in wireless hardware and the ability to run Python and JavaScript out of the box, the powerful dual-core board comes with a similarly professional price tag; currently for preorder at $99 USD a pop, the Portenta is priced well outside of the company’s traditional DIY and educational markets. With increased competition from other low-cost microcontrollers, it seems that Arduino is looking to expand out of its comfort zone and find new revenue streams.

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WebAssembly: What Is It And Why Should You Care?

April 4, 2019 by 45 Comments

If you keep up with the field of web development, you may have heard of WebAssembly. A relatively new kid on the block, it was announced in 2015, and managed to garner standardised support from all major browsers by 2017 – an impressive feat. However, it’s only more recently that the developer community has started to catch up with adoption and support.

So, what is it? What use case is so compelling that causes such quick browser adoption? This post aims to explain the need for WebAssembly, a conceptual overview of the technical side, as well as a small hands-on example for context.

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Death Generator Makes Game Over More Personal

February 21, 2019 by 11 Comments

“Game over”. In this day and age of complex games with storylines and career modes that last for tens of hours, it’s not really a concept that has a lot of relevance. However, in the golden age of the arcade, those two words made it very clear that your time was up and it was time to find another quarter. Home games of this era were similarly blunt, and if you couldn’t rise to the challenge, you’d be seeing the death screen more often than not.

[foone] was a fan of Sierra’s classic adventure games, and decided to create a tool to generate custom versions of these Game Over/YOU DIED screens. Aptly named Death Generator, the tool is programmed in JavaScript and quickly expanded to cover a wide realm of classic titles. There are King’s Quest IV and V, Gold Rush!, and even modern titles like Cave Story+ and Undertale. There’s plenty of fun to be had typing in completely ridiculous quotes for various screens; our personal favourite is Skate or Die, though Police Quest comes a close second.

[foone] continues to maintain the site, and adds new games from time to time. Animated GIF support has been a recent addition for screens like Metroid and Bad Dudes, and there are even character choices for Super Mario Bros. The code is available on Github if you feel the need to tinker yourself.

Arduino Enters The Cloud

February 7, 2019 by 61 Comments

Love it or hate it, for many people embedded systems means Arduino. Now Arduino is leveraging its more powerful MKR boards and introducing a cloud service, the Arduino IoT Cloud. The goal is to make it simple for Arduino programs to record data and control actions from the cloud.

The program is in beta and features a variety of both human and machine interaction styles. At the simple end, you can assemble a dashboard of controls and have the IoT Cloud generate your code and download it to your Arduino itself with no user programming required. More advanced users can use HTTP REST, MQTT, Javascript, Websockets, or a suite of command line tools.

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Build Retro Games With Script-8

January 30, 2019 by 17 Comments

A whole generation of programmers learned to program by writing — or at least typing in — game programs for relatively simple computers like a TRS-80, a Commodore 64, or any of a handful of similar machines. These days, games are way more complicated and so are computers. Sure, it is more fun to play Skyrim than Snake, but for learning, you are probably going to get more out of starting with a simple game. If you want to learn programming today — or maybe start someone else on that same journey, you should check out Script-8, a project by [Gabriel Florit]. You can get a taste of how it looks in the video below, or just surf over to the site and play or modify a game (hint: press “a” to launch the ball).

Instead of paraphrasing, here’s the excellent elevator speech from the web site:

SCRIPT-8 is a fantasy computer for making, sharing, and playing tiny retro-looking games (called cassettes). It’s free, browser-based, and open-source. Cassettes are written in JavaScript.

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