A Whole Other Kind Of Graphical Programming

September 13, 2018 by Sven Gregori 31 Comments

Java isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. With all its boilerplate and overhead, you’re almost always better off with a proper IDE that handles everything under the hood for you. However, if you learn a new language, you don’t really want to be bothered setting up a clunky and complex IDE. If only you could use a simple, standard Windows program that you are most likely already familiar with. This wish led [RubbaBoy] to create the MSPaintIDE, a Java development environment that let’s you write your code in — yes — MS Paint.

If you’re thinking now that you will end up writing your program with MS Paint’s text tool and create a regular image file from it — then you are right. Once set up, MSPaintIDE will compile all your PNG source files into a regular Java JAR file. And yes, it has syntax highlighting and a dark theme. [RubbaBoy] uses a custom-made OCR to transform the image content into text files and wraps it all into few-button-click environment — including git integration. You can see a demonstration of it in the video after the break, and find the source code on GitHub.

One has to truly admire how far [RubbaBoy] went, considering the tongue-in-cheek nature of this project. And all joking aside, if you’re interested in OCR, this might just be simple enough to begin with. Or you could expand it with some text to speech functionality.
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Become The Rockstar Developer You’ve Always Dreamed Of Being

July 28, 2018 by Jenny List 6 Comments

If you have ever worked in software-related industries, the chances are that the word “Rockstar” will elicit a visceral reaction. It’s a word used by a Certain Type Of Manager for an elite software developer who’s so 1337 they don’t play by the rules of ordinary mortals. In reality it’s use is invariably an indication of trouble ahead, either from clueless startups or troublesome rockstar developers making a toxic atmosphere for the mere members of the backing band. Hackaday has a team that brings together a huge breadth of experience, and we’ve been there.

Would you like to be a rockstar developer, but without the heartache? No silly incentives, or even guitars required! [Dylan Beattie] can help, because he’s come up with a specification for the Rockstar programming language, a Turing-complete programming language whose syntax follows the conventions of 1980s rock power ballads. Of course, it’s a joke, and an excuse of some “Certified Rockstar Developer” laptop stickers, but it’s also an entertaining journey into lyrical language and compiler parsing, and the discovery that yes indeed, a singable set of classic rock lyrics can also be a compilable program.

Our particular favourite comes from the scheme used to represent numbers, as sentences in which a decimal is built from the lengths of the sentence words, and poetic licence can be employed to the fullest. The example is

 My dreams were ice. A life unfulfilled; wakin' everybody up, taking booze and pills

which line of code places the value 3.1415926535 into a variable called “my dreams”.

There does not appear to be a working Rockstar compiler at the time of writing, but we are sure that the amazing community of Rockstar developers will shortly create one. And we would be hugely disappointed were we not to hear some performative coding from spandex-clad guitar-wielding developers as a result. After all, how else will they get their work noticed!

Esoteric languages have featured before here, but they have usually been far more challenging ones.

Tables Are Turned As Robots Assemble IKEA Furniture

June 19, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 15 Comments

Hackaday pages are rife with examples of robots being built with furniture parts. In this example, the tables are turned and robots are the masters of IKEA pieces. We are not silly enough to assume that these robots unfolded the instructions, looked at one another, scratched their CPUs, and began assembling. Of course, the procedure was preordained by the programmers, but the way they mate the pegs into the ends of the cross-members is a very human thing to do. It reminds us of finding a phone charging socket in the dark. This kind of behavior is due to force feedback which tell the robots when a piece is properly seated which means that they can use vision to fit the components together without sub-millimeter precision.

All the hardware used to make the IKEA assembler is publicly available, and while it may be out of the typical hacker price range, this is a sign of the times as robots become part of the household. Currently, the household robots are washing machines, smart speakers, and 3D printers. Ten years ago those weren’t Internet connected machines so it should be no surprise if robotic arms join the club of household robots soon. Your next robotics project could be the tipping point that brings a new class of robots to the home.

Back to our usual hijinks, here is a robot arm from IKEA parts and a projector built into a similar lamp. or a 3D printer enclosed in an IKEA cabinet for a classy home robot.

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Friday Hack Chat: Making Programming Easier

May 23, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 54 Comments

There is a long history of graphical programming languages. Some people don’t like to code, and for them, graphical programming languages replace semicolons and brackets with easy-to-understand boxes and wires.

This Friday, we’re going to be talking about graphical programming languages with [Boian Mitov]. He’s a software developer, founder of Mitov Software, and the creator of Visuino, a graphical programming language for the embedded domain. He specialized in video, audio, DSP, DAQ, industrial automation, communications, computer vision, artificial intelligence, as well as parallel and distributed computing. [Boian] is the author of the OpenWire open source technology, the IGDI+ open source library, the VideoLab, SignalLab, AudioLab, PlotLab, InstrumentLab, VisionLab, IntelligenceLab, AnimationLab, LogicLab, CommunicationLab, and ControlLab libraries, OpenWire Studio, Visuino, and author of the “VCL for Visual C++” technology.

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about ways to make programming microcontrollers easier. The focus of this discussion is Visuino, a graphical programming environment. Visuino allows anyone to program an Arduino, Teensy, or an ESP simply by connecting wires and choosing some logic. Think of it as a step above the programming environment that came with the Lego Mindstorms, Scratch, or whatever else MIT was coming out with in the early ‘aughts.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, May 25th. Here’s a clock counting down the time until the Hack Chat starts.

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 Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

State Your Intentions More Clearly With State Machines

April 6, 2018 by Christian Trapp 18 Comments

To the uninitiated the words ‘State machine’ sound like something scarily big and complex. They aren’t (necessarily) and can be quite useful. In fact, state machines are no physical machines but a model of processes. They link the states a system can be in with allowed transitions. For example a media player when stopped can change to play or open another file. While playing, it can go to pause, stop, reverse, fast forward and so on. A state machine creates a map of all states and how they are connected. It is an abstract tool hat offers a graphical approach to organizing your code before actually programming.

In his video [Chris Guichet] uses a state machine to debounce a switch for a beginner friendly introduction of the concept. He then shows how to turn the hand drawn map to actual code, including a section on debugging state machines.

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Learn Programming From Ants

March 19, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 14 Comments

Humans and insects think on a different scale, but entomologists study the behavior of these little organisms, so they’re not a complete mystery. There isn’t much intelligence in a single ant or a cubic millimeter of gray matter, but when they all start acting together, you get something greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting all the intelligence or programming into a single box since that’s how we function. Comparatively, itty-bitty brains, like microcontrollers and single-board computers are inexpensive and plentiful. Enter swarm mentality, and new tasks become possible.

[Kevin Hartnett] talks about a paper researching the simple rules which govern army ants who use their bodies as bridges when confronted with a gap in their path. Anyone with a ruler and a map can decide the shortest route between two places, but army ants perform this optimization from the ground, real-time, and with only a few neurons at their disposal. Two simple rules control bridge building behavior, and that might leave some space in the memory banks of some swarm robots.

A simpler example of swarm mentality could be robots which drive forward anytime they sense infrared waves from above. In this way, anyone watching the swarm could observe when an infrared light was present and where it was directed. You could do the same with inexpensive solar-powered toy cars, but we can already see visible light.

We’re not saying ants should be recruited to control robots, but we’re not objecting to the humane treatment of cyborg bugs either. We’ve been looking into swarm robots for a long time.

Thanks for the tip, [JRD].

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Running Programs On Paper

January 22, 2018 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

It’s a simple fact that most programs created for the personal computer involve the same methods of interaction, almost regardless of purpose. Word processors, graphics utilities, even games – the vast majority of interaction is performed through a keyboard and mouse. However, sometimes it can be fun to experiment with alternative technologies for users to interact with code – Paper Programs is an exciting way to do just that.

Paper Programs is a combination of a variety of existing technologies to create a way of interacting with code which is highly tangible. The setup consists of a projector, and a webcam which can see the projected area, combined with Javascript programs running in a browser. Programs can be edited in the browser, then printed out with special coloured dots around the page. When the page is placed in the projection area, these dots identify the unique program and are picked up by the webcam, and the server executes the relevant code, projecting back onto the page.

It’s a system that creates a very tactile way of interacting with a program – by moving the page around or placing different pages next to each other, programs can interact in various ways. The system is setup for collaboration as well, allowing users to edit code directly in the browser.

The project reminds us of earlier works on DIY multitouch screens, but with a greater focus on direct engagement with the underlying code. What other unique ways exist to interact with code? Let us know in the comments.

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