python

476 Articles

Rotary Phone Takes You Around The World And Through Time – With Music

June 24, 2020 by 5 Comments

Purposely choosing obsoleted technology combines all the joy of simpler times with the comfort of knowing you’re not actually stuck with outdated (and oftentimes inferior) technology. The rotary phone is a great example here, and while rarely anyone would want to go back to the lenghty, error-prone way of dialing a number on it on an everyday basis, it can definitely add a certain charm to a project. [Caroline Buttet] thought so as well, and turned her grandma’s old rotary phone into a time-traveling, globe-trotting web radio.

The main idea is fairly simple: a Raspberry Pi connects via browser to a web radio site that plays music throughout the decades from places all over the world. [Caroline]’s implementation has a few nice twists added though. First of all, the phone of course, which doesn’t only house the Raspberry Pi, but serves both as actual listening device via handset speaker, and as input device to select the decade with the rotary dial. For a headless setup, she wrote a Chromium extension that maps key events to virtual clicks on the corresponding DOM element of the web site — like the ones that change the decade — and a Python script that turns the rotary dial pulses into those key events.

However, the phone is only half the story here, and the country selection is just as fascinating — which involves an actual world map. An audio connector is attached to each selectable country and connected to an Arduino. If the matching jack is plugged into it, the Arduino informs the Raspberry Pi via serial line about the new selection, and the same Chromium extension then triggers the country change in the underlying web site. You can check all the code in the project’s GitHub repository, and watch a demo and brief explanation in the videos after the break.

Sure, listening radio through a telephone may not be the most convenient way — unless it’s the appropriate genre — but that clearly wasn’t the goal here anyway. It’s definitely an interesting concept, and we could easily see it transferred to some travel- or spy-themed escape room setting. And speaking of spying, if [Caroline]’s name sounds familiar to you, you may remember her virtual peephole from a few months back.

Continue reading “Rotary Phone Takes You Around The World And Through Time – With Music” →

An Open Source Tool To Document Your Wiring

June 23, 2020 by 29 Comments

Most of us are familiar with the tools available to create circuit diagrams, as generally that’s the first step towards producing a custom PCB. But that about the cables and wiring harnesses that don’t live on your board? How do you easily document the rat’s nest perfectly logical wiring of your latest and greatest creation?

That’s precisely the question that led [Daniel Rojas] to create WireViz. This open source Python tool takes human readable input files and turns them into attractive and functional visualizations of where all the wires in your project are going. It can even be used to generate a Bill of Materials that documents the lengths of wire required and types of connectors needed to hook everything up.

If you’re still using pre-made cables to connect all of your components together, than you might not immediately see the benefit of a tool like this. But as we’ve talked about in the past, the creation of custom wiring harnesses is something that serious hardware hackers should become familiar with. Yes it takes more effort, but the end result is worth it. With a tool like WireViz, the creation of a bespoke harness for your next project just got a little bit easier.

[Daniel] has done a fantastic job documenting this project, providing not only a tutorial on how to feed and care for your WireViz, but a gallery of examples that shows off the kind of complex wiring the tool can help make sense of. But there’s plenty more to be done, and he’s happy to get feedback or code contributions from anyone who wants to get involved.

OTA ESP32 GUI Makes Updates Simple

June 23, 2020 by 18 Comments

One of the disadvantages of having cheap WiFi-capable boards like those based on the ESP32 is that you have to update them. If you have even a few in every room of your house, it can be a pain to pull them out and connect them to a cable for programming. Over the air programming is a great answer, and [Kevin] shows how you can control the update via a simple GUI. You can see a video demonstration of how it works below.

[Kevin] uses a ready-made OTA library to do the work, but creates a GUI configuration and downloader tool. There is a manual step to force the board into the OTA mode, which might be a mild inconvenience, but it improves security since you need physical access to the device to do an update.

Continue reading “OTA ESP32 GUI Makes Updates Simple” →

Simulate Your World With Hash.ai

June 21, 2020 by 8 Comments

We will admit that we often throw together software simulations of real-world things, but we’ll also admit they are usually quick and dirty and just dump out text that we might graph in a spreadsheet or using GNUPlot. But with Hash.ai, you can quickly generate simulations of just about anything quickly and easily. The simulations will have beautiful visualizations and graphs, too. The tool works with JavaScript or Python and you don’t have to waste your time writing the parts that don’t change.

The web-based tool works on the idea of agents. Each agent has one or more behaviors that run each time step. In the example simulation, which models wildfires in forests, the agent is named forest, although it really models one virtual tree. There’s also a behavior called forest which controls the tree’s rate of growth and chance of burning based on nearby trees and lightning. Other behaviors simulate a burning tree and what happens to a tree after burning — an ember — which may or may not grow back.

Continue reading “Simulate Your World With Hash.ai” →

Hackaday Podcast 070: Memory Bump, Strontium Rain, Sentient Solder Smoke, And Botting Browsers

June 5, 2020 by No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys bubble sort a sample set of amazing hacks from the past week. Who has even used the smart chip from an old credit card as a functional component in their own circuit? This guy. There’s something scientifically devious about the way solder smoke heat-seeks to your nostrils. There’s more than one way to strip 16-bit audio down to five. And those nuclear tests from the 40s, 50s, and 60s? Those are still affecting how science takes measurements of all sorts of things in the world.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 070: Memory Bump, Strontium Rain, Sentient Solder Smoke, And Botting Browsers” →

Scientific Calculator Whipped Up In Python

June 2, 2020 by 31 Comments

Scientific calculators were invaluable to most of us through high school and college, freeing us from the yoke of using tables to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions. Once out in the real world, it’s no longer necessary to use an education board approved device to do your maths – you can do it all on your PC instead. For those keen to do so, [AstusRush]’s latest Python work may be just the ticket!

Far exceeding the capabilities of the usual calculator apps, there’s plenty of useful features under the hood. Particularly exciting is the LaTeX display, which shows equations in textbook-quality human-readable format. There’s also a graphing suite, and capability to handle matricies and vectors. LAN chat is implemented too, useful for working in teams.

It’s a useful tool that may suit better than a full-fat MATLAB install, particularly at the low, low price of free. This is one calculator that CASIO will have to keep their nose out of!

Python Is All You’ll Ever Need In This Linux Distro

June 1, 2020 by 32 Comments

Choosing the perfect Linux distribution that satisfies your personal needs and likings can be an impossible task, and oftentimes requires a hint of Stockholm syndrome as compromise. In extreme cases, you might end up just rolling your own distro. But while frustration is always a great incentive for change, for [Josh Moore] it was rather curiosity and playful interest that led him to create snakeware, a Linux distribution where the entire user space not only runs on Python, but is Python.

Imagine you would boot your Linux system, and instead of the shell of your choice, you would be greeted by an interactive Python interpreter, and everything you do on the system will be within the realms of that interpreter — that’s the gist of snakeware. Now, this might sound rather limiting at first, but keep in mind we’re talking about Python here, a language known for its versatility, with an abundance of packages that get things done quick and easy, which is exactly what [Josh] is aiming for. To get an idea of that, snakeware also includes snakewm, a graphical user interface written with pygame that bundles a couple of simple applications as demonstration, including a terminal to execute Python one-liners.

Note that this is merely a proof of concept at this stage, but [Josh] is inviting everyone to contribute and extend his creation. If you want to give it a go without building the entire system, the GitHub repository has a prebuilt image to run in QEMU, and the window manager will run as regular Python application on your normal system, too. To get just a quick glimpse of it, check the demo video after the break.

Sure, die-hard Linux enthusiasts will hardly accept a distribution without their favorite shell and preferable language, but hey, at least it gets by without systemd. And while snakeware probably won’t compete with more established distributions in the near future, it’s certainly an interesting concept that embraces thinking outside the box and trying something different. It would definitely fit well on a business card.

Continue reading “Python Is All You’ll Ever Need In This Linux Distro” →