json

19 Articles

CADmium Moves CAD To The Browser

May 23, 2024 by 43 Comments

For plenty of computer users, the operating system of choice is largely a middleman on the way to the browser, which hosts the tools that are most important. There are even entire operating systems with little more than browser support, under the assumption that everything will be done in the browser eventually. We may be one step closer to that type of utopia as well with this software tool called CADmium which runs exclusively in a browser.

As the name implies, this is a computer-aided design (CAD) package which looks to build everything one would need for designing project models in a traditional CAD program like AutoCAD or FreeCAD, but without the burden of needing to carry local files around on a specific computer. [Matt], one of the creators of this ambitious project, lays out the basic structure of a CAD program from the constraint solver, boundary representation (in this case, a modern one built in Rust), the history tracker, and various other underpinnings of a program like this. The group hopes to standardize around JSON files as well, making it easy to make changes to designs on the fly in whatever browser the user happens to have on hand.

While this project is extremely early in the design stage, it looks like they have a fairly solid framework going to get this developed. That said, they are looking for some more help getting it off the ground. If you’ve ever wanted something like this in the browser, or maybe if you’ve ever contributed to the FreeCAD project and have some experience, this might be worth taking a look at.

Bridging A Gap Between LLMs And Programming With TypeChat

July 22, 2023 by 33 Comments

By now, large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are old news. While not perfect, they can assist with all kinds of tasks like creating efficient Excel spreadsheets, writing cover letters, asking for music references, and putting together functional computer programs in a variety of languages. One thing these LLMs don’t do yet though is integrate well with existing app interfaces. However, that’s where the TypeChat library comes in, bridging the gap between LLMs and programming.

TypeChat is an experimental MIT-licensed library from Microsoft which sits in between a user and a LLM and formats responses from the AI that are type-safe so that they can easily be plugged back in to the original interface. It does this by generating JSON responses based on user input, making it easier to take the user input directly, run it through the LLM, and then use the output directly in another piece of code. It can be used for things like prototyping prompts, validating responses, and handling errors. It’s also not limited to a single LLM and can be fairly easily modified to work with many of the existing models.

The software is still in its infancy but does hope to make it somewhat easier to work between user inputs within existing pieces of software and LLMs which have quickly become all the rage in the computer science world. We expect to see plenty more tools like this become available as more people take up using these new tools, which have plenty of applications beyond just writing code.

Turn Timing Diagrams Into ASCII Art, For Friendlier Pasting

April 4, 2022 by 21 Comments

We all use text-based fields at one time or another, and being limited to ASCII only can end up being a limitation. That’s what led [Luke Wren] to create asciiwave, a fantastic tool that turns WaveDrom timing diagrams into ASCII art. Unlike images, ASCII timing diagrams are suitable for pasting into comment fields, change logs, or anywhere else that accepts text only. [Update: As the author kindly shared in the comments below, this tool’s original niche is pasting into HDL (e.g. Verilog) source code comments, where it has a special kind of usefulness.]

WaveDrom itself is a nifty JavaScript tool that we have covered before. It accepts timing diagrams expressed as JSON data, and renders nicely-readable digital timing diagrams as images directly inside one’s browser.

As cool and useful as that is, images can’t be pasted into text fields. That’s where asciiwave comes in. It reads the exact same format that WaveDrom uses, but generates an ASCII-art timing diagram instead. So if you’ve found WaveDrom useful, but wish you could generate ASCII versions, here’s your solution.

Serial Studio One Year On

January 15, 2022 by 14 Comments

Last year we wrote about [Alex Spataru]’s Serial Studio project, which started life as serial port data visualizer, like a souped-up version of the Arduino serial plotter. [Alex] has been actively improving the project ever since, adding a variety of new features, including

  • JSON editor for data formats
  • TCP, UDP, and Multicast
  • New and more flexible display widgets
  • Multi-signal plots
  • FFT and logarithmic plots
  • VT-100 emulation
  • Support for plugins and themes
  • Added MQTT support

[Alex] originally came up with Serial Studio because he was involved in ground station software for various CanSat projects, each one with similar yet slightly different data formats and display requirements. Rather than make several different programs, he decided to make Serial Studio which could be configured using JSON descriptor files.

The program is open-source and multi-platform. You can build it yourself or download pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac. See the project GitHub repository for more details. In addition to English, it has also been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and German. What is your go-to tool for visualizing serial data telemetry these days? Let us know in the comments below.

Making Linux Offline Voice Recognition Easier

September 25, 2021 by 10 Comments

For just about any task you care to name, a Linux-based desktop computer can get the job done using applications that rival or exceed those found on other platforms. However, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to get it working, and speech recognition is just one of those difficult setups.

A project called Voice2JSON is trying to simplify the use of voice workflows. While it doesn’t provide the actual voice recognition, it does make it easier to get things going and then use speech in a natural way.

The software can integrate with several backends to do offline speech recognition including CMU’s pocketsphinx, Dan Povey’s Kaldi, Mozilla’s DeepSpeech 0.9, and Kyoto University’s Julius. However, the code is more than just a thin wrapper around these tools. The fast training process produces both a speech recognizer and an intent recognizer. So not only do you know there is a garage door, but you gain an understanding of the opening and closing of the garage door.

Continue reading “Making Linux Offline Voice Recognition Easier” →

Put APIs To Work Wth This ArduinoJson Walkthrough

May 28, 2021 by 6 Comments

One of the things this community is famous for is the degree to which people will pitch in to fill an obvious need. Look at the vast array of libraries available for Arduino as an example of how people are willing to devote their time to making difficult tasks easier, often for little more than a virtual pat on the back.

One level up from the library writers are those who go through the trouble of explaining how all these libraries work in real-world applications. [Brian Lough] recently rose to that challenge with a thorough explanation of the use of the ArduinoJSON library, a very useful but often confusing library that makes IoT projects easier.

The need for an ArduinoJSON explainer no knock on its author, [Benoît Blanchon], who has done excellent work documenting the library; it’s more of a realization that the nature of JSON itself means a library that works with it is going to be complex. [Brian]’s contribution here is sharing his insights into getting ArduinoJSON up and running in a real-world ESP32 example, and dealing with the potential pitfalls of parsing a human-readable text file that can be used to represent almost any data object using the limited resources of a microcontroller. Along with the basics, we found the warning about how pointers refer back to the dynamic JSON document object particularly helpful; the bit about using filters to winnow down a large data set was useful too.

Thanks to [Brian] for taking the time to put this valuable information out there. Here’s hoping this encourages others to share the wealth of hard-earned knowledge in a similarly clear and concise manner.

Continue reading “Put APIs To Work Wth This ArduinoJson Walkthrough” →

This Week In Security: Mysterious Mac Malware, An Elegant VMware RCE, And A JSON Mess

February 26, 2021 by 10 Comments

There’s a new malware strain targeting MacOS, Silver Sparrow, and it’s unusual for a couple reasons. First, it’s one of the few pieces of malware that targets the new M1 ARM64 processors. Just a reminder, that is Apple’s new in-house silicon design. It’s unusual for a second reason — it’s not doing anything. More precisely, while researchers have been watching, the command and control infrastructure didn’t provide a payload. Silver Sparrow has been positively found on nearly 30,000 machines.

The malware also has an intentional kill switch, where the presence of a particular file triggers a complete removal of the malware package. Researchers at Red Canary point out that this package behaves very much like a legitimate program, difficult to pick out as malware. Ars Technica got an off-the-record statement from Apple, indicating that they are tracking the situation, and have revoked the developer’s certificate used to sign the malware. It’s not entirely clear whether this prevents the malware running on already compromised machines, or just stops new infections.

So who’s behind Silver Sparrow? The observed stealth mode and other complexities suggest that this is more than a simple adware or ransomware campaign. Since it was discovered before the payload was delivered, we may never know what the purpose is. It may have been a government created campaign, targeting something specific. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Mysterious Mac Malware, An Elegant VMware RCE, And A JSON Mess” →