What’s In A Name? Tales Of Python, Perl, And The GIMP

September 18, 2019 by Sven Gregori 58 Comments

In the older days of open source software, major projects tended to have their Benevolent Dictators For Life who made all the final decisions, and some mature projects still operate that way. Guido van Rossum famously called his language “Python” because he liked the British comics of the same name. That’s the sort of thing that only a single developer can get away with.

However, in these modern times of GitHub, GitLab, and other collaboration platforms, community-driven decision making has become a more and more common phenomenon, shifting software development towards democracy. People begin to think of themselves as “Python programmers” or “GIMP users” and the name of the project fuses irrevocably with their identity.

What happens when software projects fork, develop apart, or otherwise change significantly? Obviously, to prevent confusion, they get a new name, and all of those “Perl Monks” need to become “Raku Monks”. Needless to say, what should be a trivial detail — what we’ve all decided to call this pile of ones and zeros or language constructs — can become a big deal. Don’t believe us? Here are the stories of renaming Python, Perl, and the GIMP.

Continue reading “What’s In A Name? Tales Of Python, Perl, And The GIMP” →

3D Printering: The Search For Better Search

September 5, 2019 by Tom Nardi 48 Comments

There’s no question that a desktop 3D printer is at its most useful when it’s producing parts of your own design. After all, if you’ve got a machine that can produce physical objects to your exacting specifications, why not give it some? But even the most diligent CAD maven will occasionally defer to an existing design, as there’s no sense spending the time and effort creating their own model if a perfectly serviceable one is already available under an open source license.

But there’s a problem: finding these open source models is often more difficult than it should be. The fact of the matter is, the ecosystem for sharing 3D printable models is in a very sorry state. Thingiverse, the community’s de facto model repository, is antiquated and plagued with technical issues. Competitors such as Pinshape and YouMagine are certainly improvements on a technical level, but without the sheer number of models and designers that Thingiverse has, they’ve been unable to earn much mindshare. When people are looking to download 3D models, it stands to reason that the site with the most models will be the most popular.

It’s a situation that the community is going to have to address eventually. As it stands, it’s something of a minor miracle that Thingiverse still exists. Owned and operated by Makerbot, the company that once defined the desktop 3D printer but is today all but completely unknown in a market dominated by low-cost printers from the likes of Monoprice and Creality, it seems only a matter of time before the site finally goes dark. They say it’s unwise to put all of your eggs in one basket, and doubly so if the basket happens to be on fire.

So what will it take to get people to consider alternatives to Thingiverse before it’s too late? Obviously, snazzy modern web design isn’t enough to do it. Not if the underlying service operates on the same formula. To really make a dent in this space, you need a killer feature. Something that measurably improves the user experience of finding the 3D model you need in a sea of hundreds of thousands. You need to solve the search problem.

Continue reading “3D Printering: The Search For Better Search” →

Fitness Trackers Don’t Have To Be Proprietary

August 11, 2019 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Fitness trackers have become a popular piece of consumer electronic equipment, with a range of models from a variety of manufacturers. Many of these commercial offerings, however, leave the consumer with the prospect of their data being drawn off to a cloud server and sold to the highest bidder, trading convenience for a loss of privacy. If only there were a fitness tracker offering complete control!

The OpenHAK is an open-source fitness tracker in a 3D printed wristwatch case that measures your heart rate and counts your steps, offering the resultant data for you to collect via Bluetooth. At its heart is a Sparkfun Simblee module, with heart rate sensing through a Maxim MAX30101 and step counting .by a Bocsh BMI160. It’s designed for expandability from the start with a header bringing out useful interface lines. In the prototype, they’ve used this to support a small OLED display. The result is a fitness tracker watch that may not match some of the well-known proprietary devices, but which remains completely open and probably costs a lot less too.

We’ve seen quite a few fitness tracker apps over the years, including a conversion to an EEG, and custom firmware for some commercial trackers.

Kickstarter Hack Chat

August 5, 2019 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 7th at noon Pacific for the Kickstarter Hack Chat with Beau Ambur and Clarissa Redwine!

For many of us, magic things happen on our benches. We mix a little of this, one of those, and a couple of the other things, and suddenly the world has the Next Big Thing. Or does it? Will it ever see the light of day? Will you ever build a community around your project so that the magic can escape the shop and survive the harsh light of the marketplace? And perhaps most importantly, will you be able to afford to bring your project to market?

Crowdfunding is often the answer to these questions and more, and Kickstarter is one of the places where hackers can turn their project into a product. Beau and Clarissa, both outreach leads for the crowdfunding company, will stop by the Hack Chat to answer all your questions about getting your project off the bench and into the marketplace. Join us as we discuss everything from building a community that’s passionate enough about your idea to fund it, to the right way to share your design story.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 7 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

The V Programming Language: Vain Or Virtuous?

July 23, 2019 by Ben James 92 Comments

If you stay up to date with niche software news, your ears may recently have twitched at the release of a new programming language: V. New hobby-project programming languages are released all the time, you would correctly argue; what makes this one special? The answer is a number of design choices which promote speed and safety: V is tiny and very fast. It’s also in a self-proclaimed alpha state, and though it’s already been used to build some interesting projects, is still at an early stage.

Continue reading “The V Programming Language: Vain Or Virtuous?” →

Manufacturing In China Hack Chat

July 8, 2019 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us on Wednesday 10 July 2019 at noon Pacific for the Manufacturing in China Hack Chat with Jesse Vincent!

It started out where many great stories start: as a procrastination project. Open source developer Jesse Vincent decided that messing around with a new keyboard design was a better thing to spend time on than whatever he was supposed to be doing, and thus Keyboardio was born.

Their heirloom-grade keyboards of solid maple and with sculpted keycaps are unique to the eye and to the touch, but that’s only part of the Keyboardio story. Jesse has moved further down the road of turning a project into a product and a product into a company than most of us have, and he’s got some insights about what it takes. Particularly in climbing the learning curve of off-shore manufacturing, which will be the focus of this Hack Chat. Join us to learn all about the perils, pitfalls, and potential rewards of getting your Next Big Idea manufactured in China.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday July 10 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

How Not To Get Paid For Open Source Work

July 5, 2019 by Donald Papp 47 Comments

[Avi Press] recently made a Medium post sharing his thoughts on a failed effort to allow for paid users of an open source project. [Avi] is the author of Toodles, a tool to help organize and manage TODO items in software development. Toodles enjoyed unexpected popularity, and some of its users were large organizations. It seemed that Toodles was of value to people who could afford to pay, and they might even be willing to do so if [Avi] provided a way for them to do it. It turned out that the monetizing process was far from simple, and he ultimately wasn’t successful.

Before he even started, [Avi] thought carefully about things and found that even basic and preliminary questions were difficult to answer, such as:

How many people were actually using the software on a regular basis? Were they gaining quantifiable value from it?
What exactly would someone be buying? How would they pay, and how would it get delivered to them?
How could companies be charged for the tool while still offering it freely to individuals?
Is it even ethical to accept money for a project to which others have contributed? How could money be shared with contributors? How to fairly decide who gets how much?

In short, [Avi] discovered that much of the data he felt he needed in order to make these decisions didn’t exist, wasn’t easily accessible, or couldn’t be reliably measured. His experiment in adding a license and payment system (which always seemed to need more work than it should) yielded no fruit, as there were zero paid users anyway.

Regardless of whether “difficulty in shoehorning a paid license system into an open source project” should be filed under “Feature, not Bug” [Avi] does thoughtfully present the issues he encountered. Open source and getting paid are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Octoprint is one example of an open source project that eventually navigated these waters, but that doesn’t mean it was easy, nor does it mean there are established tools and processes.