The Rogue Emperor, And What To Do About Them

November 8, 2024 by Jenny List 135 Comments

The chances are if you know someone who is a former Apple employee, you’ll have heard their Steve Jobs anecdote, and that it was rather unflattering to the Apple co-founder. I’ve certainly heard a few myself, and quick web search will reveal plenty more. There are enough of them that it’s very easy to conclude the guy was not a very pleasant person at all.

At the same time, he was a person whose public persona transcended reality, and his fan base treated him with an almost Messianic awe. For them everything he touched turned to gold, every new feature on an Apple product was his personal invention, every one of his actions even the not-so-clever ones were evidence of his genius, and anyone who hadn’t drunk the Apple Kool-Aid was anathema. You’ll still see echoes of this today in Apple fanboys, even though the shine on the company is perhaps now a little tarnished.

It’s easy to spot parallels to this story in some of today’s tech moguls who have gathered similar devotion, but it’s a phenomenon by no means limited to tech founders. Anywhere there is an organisation or group that is centred around an individual, from the smallest organisation upwards, it’s possible for it to enter an almost cult-like state in which the leader both accumulates too much power, and loses track of some of the responsibilities which go with it. If it’s a tech company or a bowls club we can shrug our shoulders and move to something else, but when it occurs in an open source project and a benevolent dictator figure goes rogue it has landed directly on our own doorstep as the open-source community. It’s happened several times that I can immediately think of and there are doubtless more cases I am unaware of, and every time I am left feeling that our community lacks an adequate mechanism to come through it unscathed. Continue reading “The Rogue Emperor, And What To Do About Them” →

Hardware: It’s Made Of Software!

December 23, 2023 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

We had the opportunity to add a new feature to our lineup: the FLOSS Weekly podcast. It’s a very long running series that covers the goings on in the free, libre, and open-source software world. It’s been co-hosted by our own [Jonathan Bennett] for quite a while now, and when This Week in Tech announced that they wanted to cancel it, [Jonathan] asked if he could keep it running over here at Hackaday.

Hackaday is hardware, though. Why would we be hosting a podcast on open software? It’s no secret that a bunch of us are open-source software fans in general here at Hackaday, but take a quick inventory of the various open projects that you use to make and hack your hardware. We use open-source compilers, libraries, and flashing tools to handle the firmware we write on open-source text editors. Heck, half of the time we even program microcontrollers in the open-source MicroPython. We design PCBs in the open-source KiCAD, do CAD/CAM in FreeCAD, and don’t even get me started in the open-source software and firmware underlying the entire 3D printing ecology. Reverse engineering? Free software, from Wireshark straight through to Ghidra.

All of this is to say, that even while we’re making or breaking hardware, we’re using open-source software to do it. So, if you’re interested in peeking behind the curtain, give the FLOSS Weekly a listen.

Phone Thermal Cameras Get Open Source Desktop Tools

July 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Whenever phone-based thermal cameras are brought up here on Hackaday, we inevitably receive some comments about how they’re a bad investment compared to a standalone unit. Sure they might be cheaper, but what happens in a couple years when the app stops working and the manufacturer no longer feels like keeping it updated?

It’s a valid concern, and if we’re honest, we don’t like the idea of relying on some shady proprietary app just to use the camera in the first place. Which is why we’re so excited to see open source software being developed that allows you to use these (relatively) inexpensive cameras on your computer. [Les Wright] recently sent word that he’s been working on a project called PyThermalCamera which specifically targets the TOPDON TC001, which in turn is based on a project called P2Pro-Viewer developed by LeoDJ for the InfiRay P2 Pro.

Readers may recall we posted a review of the P2 Pro last month, and while the compact hardware was very impressive, the official Android software lacked a certain degree of polish. While these projects won’t help you on the mobile front in their current form, it’s good to know there’s at least a viable “Plan B” if you’re unwilling or unable to use the software provided from the manufacturer. Naturally this also opens up a lot of new possibilities for the camera, as being connected to a proper Linux box means you can do all sorts of interesting things with the video feed.

The two video feeds on the left are combined to produce the final thermal image.

Speaking of the video feed, we should say that both of these projects were born out of a reverse engineering effort by members of the EEVblog forums. They figured out early on that the InfiRay (and other similar models) were picked up as a standard USB video device by Linux, and that they provided two video streams: one being a B&W feed from the camera where the relative temperature is used as luminance, and the other containing the raw thermal data cleverly encoded into a green-tinted video. With a little poking they found an FFmpeg one liner that would combine the two streams, which provided the basis for much of the future work.

In the video below, you can see the review [Les] produced for the TOPDON TC001, which includes a demonstration of both the official Windows software and his homebrew alternative running on the Raspberry Pi. Here’s hoping these projects inspire others to join in the effort to produce flexible open source tools that not only unlock the impressive capabilities of these new thermal cameras but save us from having to install yet another smartphone application just to use a device we purchased.

Continue reading “Phone Thermal Cameras Get Open Source Desktop Tools” →

Motion Canvas Helps Get Your Point Across

June 5, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 1 Comment

Generating videos for projects can be difficult. Not only do you have to create the thing, but you film the process and cut it together in a story that a viewer can follow. Explaining complex topics to the viewer often involves a whiteboard of some sort, but as we all know, it’s not always a perfect solution. [Jacob] was working on a video game and making videos to document the progress and built a tool called Motion Canvas to help visualize topics like custom shaders. A few months ago, he decided to release it as an open source project.

Since then, it has seen quite a few forks and GitHub forks with a lively showcase on the community Discord. Looking at the docs, it is pretty easy to see why. The interface allows you to write procedural animations using the async semantics of TypeScript while still offering the GUI interface we expect from our video editors. In particular, the signal system allows dependencies to be defined between values. The system runs in Node, and the GUI runs in your browser locally while you edit the files in your terminal/notepad/IDE. CSS and Flexbox are available as the video is rendered to a web canvas and then compiled into a video via FFMPEG. The documentation is quite extensive, and it’s a great example of a tool someone built to fit a need they had going on to become something a little more fantastic.

This isn’t the first time we’ve discussed how to share your projects with the world, and we’ll freely admit we have a bit of bias toward encouraging folks to document their projects.

Continue reading “Motion Canvas Helps Get Your Point Across” →

NVIDIA Releases Drivers With Openness Flavor

May 13, 2022 by Arya Voronova 27 Comments

This year, we’ve already seen sizeable leaks of NVIDIA source code, and a release of open-source drivers for NVIDIA Tegra. It seems NVIDIA decided to amp it up, and just released open-source GPU kernel modules for Linux. The GitHub link named open-gpu-kernel-modules has people rejoicing, and we are already testing the code out, making memes and speculating about the future. This driver is currently claimed to be experimental, only “production-ready” for datacenter cards – but you can already try it out!

The Driver’s Present State

Of course, there’s nuance. This is new code, and unrelated to the well-known proprietary driver. It will only work on cards starting from RTX 2000 and Quadro RTX series (aka Turing and onward). The good news is that performance is comparable to the closed-source driver, even at this point! A peculiarity of this project – a good portion of features that AMD and Intel drivers implement in Linux kernel are, instead, provided by a binary blob from inside the GPU. This blob runs on the GSP, which is a RISC-V core that’s only available on Turing GPUs and younger – hence the series limitation. Now, every GPU loads a piece of firmware, but this one’s hefty!

Barring that, this driver already provides more coherent integration into the Linux kernel, with massive benefits that will only increase going forward. Not everything’s open yet – NVIDIA’s userspace libraries and OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA drivers remain closed, for now. Same goes for the old NVIDIA proprietary driver that, I’d guess, would be left to rot – fitting, as “leaving to rot” is what that driver has previously done to generations of old but perfectly usable cards. Continue reading “NVIDIA Releases Drivers With Openness Flavor” →

Hackaday Invades The FLOSS Weekly Podcast

February 2, 2022 by Tom Nardi No comments

Regular Hackaday readers will know that we’re big supporters of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) around these parts. There’s an excellent chance you are too, as so many of the incredible projects you send our way make it a habit to share their innermost details, from firmware source code to the OpenSCAD files that generate its 3D printed components. So when our recently minted Editor in Chief [Elliot Williams] was invited to join This Week in Tech’s FLOSS Weekly podcast, he jumped at the chance to represent our little corner of the Internet to the wider world of open source aficionados. (Ed: The final version is now live! How did we get episode 666?!)

Hosted by [Doc Searls], FLOSS Weekly is known for its in-depth interviews with “the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community”, so we hope the incursion by hacker rabble such as ourselves doesn’t taint their brand too much.

It’s live streamed every Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern / 9:30 AM Pacific / 17:30 UTC, which means that by the time this post hits the main page of the site, you’ve still got time to tune in. For those of you with gainful employment who can’t slack off for an hour or so in the middle of the workweek, the recorded version will be available afterwards for your time-shifted viewing and or listening pleasure.

[Elliot] will be joined by Hackaday writer and regular co-host of FLOSS Weekly [Jonathan Bennett], making this something of a Jolly Wrencher double-feature. [Jonathan] has been providing readers with a regular peek into the other type of hacking with his fantastic This Week in Security column, and is himself a devout FOSS supporter with a particular passion for GNU/Linux. We’re excited to listen in as the trio riffs on open source at the crossroads of hardware and software, not just because it promises to be an entertaining bit of programming, but because it’s a great opportunity to introduce the world of Hackaday to the wider open source audience.

Hands-On: MNT Reforms The Laptop

August 26, 2021 by Kerry Scharfglass 120 Comments

When we met our contact from MNT in the coffee shop, he was quietly working away on his laptop. Jet black and standing thick it was like an encyclopedia that didn’t quite blend in with the sea of silver MacBook lookalikes on the surrounding tables. After going through all the speeds and feeds we eagerly got our 64 piece driver kit out to open it up and see what made this marvel tick, but when the laptop was turned over it became clear that no tools were needed. The entire bottom of the machine was a single rectangle of transparent acrylic revealing everything from sharp white status LEDs on the bare mainboard to individual 18650 LiFePO4 battery cells in a tidy row. In a sense that’s the summary of the entire product: it’s a real laptop you can use to get work done, and every element of it from design to fabrication is completely transparent.

a view of the inside of a MNT Reform laptop, showing screen and keyboard — The MNT Reform

The device pictured here is called the Reform and is designed and manufactured by MNT, a company in Berlin, Germany (note MNT stands for MNT, it’s not an acronym). The Reform is a fully open source laptop which is shipping today and available via distribution through Crowd Supply. If the aesthetic doesn’t make it clear the Reform is an opinionated product designed from the ground up to optimize for free-as-in-freedom: from it’s solid metal chassis to the blob-free GNU/Linux distribution running inside.

We’re here to tell you that we’ve held one, it’s real, and it’s very well built.

Continue reading “Hands-On: MNT Reforms The Laptop” →