software

144 Articles

Learn New Tools, Or Hone Your Skill With The Old?

January 18, 2025 by 42 Comments

Buried in a talk on AI from an artist who is doing cutting-edge video work was the following nugget that entirely sums up the zeitgeist: “The tools are changing so fast that artists can’t keep up with them, let alone master them, before everyone is on to the next.” And while you might think that this concern is only relevant to those who have to stay on the crest of the hype wave, the deeper question resounds with every hacker.

When was the last time you changed PCB layout software or refreshed your operating system? What other tools do you use in your work or your extra-curricular projects, and how long have you been using them? Are you still designing your analog front-ends with LM358s, or have you looked around to see that technology has moved on since the 1970s? “OMG, you’re still using ST32F103s?”

It’s not a simple question, and there are no good answers. Proficiency with a tool, like for instance the audio editor with which I crank out the podcast every week, only comes through practice. And practice simply takes time and effort. When you put your time in on a tool, it really is an investment in that it helps you get better. But what about that newer, better tool out there?

Some of the reluctance to update is certainly sunk-cost fallacy, after all you put so much sweat and tears into the current tool, but there is also a real cost to overcome to learn the new hotness, and that’s no fallacy. If you’re always trying to learn a new way of doing something, you’re never going to get good at doing something, and that’s the lament of our artist friend. Honing your craft requires focus. You won’t know the odd feature set of that next microcontroller as well as you do the old faithful – without sitting down and reading the datasheet and doing a couple finger-stretching projects first.

Striking the optimal balance here is hard. On a per-project basis, staying with your good old tool or swapping to the new hotness is a binary choice, but across your projects, you can do some of each. Maybe it makes sense to budget some of your hacking time into learning new tools? How about ten percent? What do you think?

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38C3: Save Your Satellite With These Three Simple Tricks

December 30, 2024 by 11 Comments

BEESAT-1 is a 1U cubesat launched in 2009 by the Technical University of Berlin. Like all good satellites, it has redundant computers onboard, so when the first one failed in 2011, it just switched over to the second. And when the backup failed in 2013, well, the satellite was “dead” — or rather sending back all zeroes. Until [PistonMiner] took a look at it, that is.

Getting the job done required debugging the firmware remotely — like 700 km remotely. Because it was sending back all zeroes, but sending back valid zeroes, that meant there was something wrong either in the data collection or the assembly of the telemetry frames. A quick experiment confirmed that the assembly routine fired off very infrequently, which was a parameter that’s modifiable in SRAM. Setting a shorter assembly time lead to success: valid telemetry frame.

Then comes the job of patching the bird in flight. [PistonMiner] pulled the flash down, and cobbled together a model of the satellite to practice with in the lab. And that’s when they discovered that the satellite doesn’t support software upload to flash, but does allow writing parameter words. The hack was an abuse of the fact that the original code was written in C++. Intercepting the vtables let them run their own commands without the flash read and write conflicting.

Of course, nothing is that easy. Bugs upon bugs, combined with the short communication window, made it even more challenging. And then there was the bizarre bit with the camera firing off after every flash dump because of a missing break in a case statement. But the camera never worked anyway, because the firmware didn’t get finished before launch.

Challenge accepted: [PistonMiner] got it working, and after fifteen years in space, and ten years of being “dead”, BEESAT-1 was taking photos again. What caused the initial problem? NAND flash memory needs to be cleared to zeroes before it’s written, and a bug in the code lead to a long pause between the two, during which a watchdog timeout fired and the satellite reset, blanking the flash.

This talk is absolutely fantastic, but may be of limited practical use unless you have a long-dormant satellite to play around with. We can nearly guarantee that after watching this talk, you will wish that you did. If so, the Orbital Index can help you get started.

FreeCAD Is Near 1.0

September 21, 2024 by 48 Comments

The open-source parametric 3D modelling software, FreeCAD, is out in a release candidate for version 1.0.  If you’ve tried FreeCAD before and found a few showstoppers, it might be a good time for you to test it out again because the two biggest of them have been solved in this latest version.

First, version 1.0 finally implements a solution to the “topological naming problem”. Imagine you want to put a hole into a surface. The program needs to know on which surface to put the hole, and so it refers to this surface by name / number. Now imagine you subdivide the surface, and both subsections get new names. Where does your hole go now?  If you want to dig into the issue, the inimitable [MangoJelly] has a great video about the topo naming problem. Practically, there were workarounds, like only adding chamfers after the main design has stabilized, but frankly it was a hassle to remember all of the tricks. This is a huge fix.

The second big fix concerns assemblies.  Older versions of FreeCAD were great for making single parts, but combining them all together inside the CAD program was always janky.  Version 1.0 combines the previous two patchwork assembly workbenches into one, and it’s altogether more pleasant to use. The constraints of how two parts move when held together with an axle just works now, and this is a big deal for multi-part models.

If you’re coming from any other parametric CAD program, most of FreeCAD will seem familiar to you, but there will also be workflow differences that will take some getting used to. In trade, what do you get? Scriptability in Python, real open source software, and all of the bells and whistles for free. Now that its two biggest pain points have been addressed,  FreeCAD has become a lot easier to love. We’re looking forward to some good V1.0 tutorials in the future, and we’ll keep you posted when we find them.

Get Thee To Git

September 7, 2024 by 21 Comments

While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version control. Git works well, it is versatile, and it scales well. It is easy to use as an individual developer or as part of a worldwide team. But Git is also one of those things that people don’t always study, they just sort of “pick it up” as they go. That motivated [Glasskube] to create “The Guide to Git I Never Had.”

If you are ready to click away because you are not a software person, hang on. Git is actually useful for many different kinds of data, and there are a number of hardware projects that use Git in some form. That’s especially true if the project has some code associated with it, but there are projects that consist of PCBs, reverse engineering documentation, or schematics.

Continue reading “Get Thee To Git” →

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Hackaday Links: September 1, 2024

September 1, 2024 by 21 Comments

Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We’ve had a bunch of helium problems lately, most famously with the leaks in Starliner’s thruster system that have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft, leaving them on an extended mission to the ISS. Ironically, the launch itself was troubled by a helium leak before the rocket ever left the ground. More recently, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is supposed to feature the first spacewalk by a private crew, was scrubbed by SpaceX due to a helium leak on the launch tower. And to round out the helium woes, we now have news that the Peregrine mission, which was supposed to carry the first commercial lander to the lunar surface but instead ended up burning up in the atmosphere and crashing into the Pacific, failed due to — you guessed it — a helium leak.
Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 1, 2024” →

Putting A Pi In A Container

August 30, 2024 by 16 Comments

Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying on different computers. There are some other tricks up the sleeves as well, and this project called PI-CI uses Docker to containerize an entire Raspberry Pi.

The Pi container emulates an entire Raspberry Pi from the ground up, allowing anyone that wants to deploy software on one to test it out without needing to do so on actual hardware. All of the configuration can be done from inside the container. When all the setup is completed and the desired software installed in the container, the container can be converted to an .img file that can be put on a microSD card and installed on real hardware, with support for the Pi models 3, 4, and 5. There’s also support for using Ansible, a Docker automation system that makes administering a cluster or array of computers easier.

Docker can be an incredibly powerful tool for developing and deploying software, and tools like this can make the process as straightforward as possible. It does have a bit of a learning curve, though, since sharing operating system tools instead of virtualizing hardware can take a bit of time to wrap one’s mind around. If you’re new to the game take a look at this guide to setting up your first Docker container.

Docker-Powered Remote Gaming With Games On Whales

July 13, 2024 by 15 Comments

Cloud gaming services allow even relatively meager devices like set top boxes and cheap Chromebooks play the latest and greatest titles. It’s not perfect of course — latency is the number one issue as the player’s controller inputs need to be sent out to the server —  but if you’ve got a fast enough connection it’s better than nothing. Interested in experimenting with the tech on your own terms? The open source Games on Whales project is here to make that a reality.

As you might have guessed from the name, Games on Whales uses Linux and Docker as core components in its remote gaming system. With the software installed on a headless server, multiple users can create virtual desktop environments on the same machine, with each spawning as a separate process on the host computer. This means that all of the hardware of the host can be shared without needing to do anything complicated like setting up GPU pass-through. The main Docker container can spin up more containers as needed.

Of course there will obviously be limits to what any given hardware configuration will be able to support in terms of number of concurrent users and the demands of each stream. But for someone who wants to host a server for their friends or something even simpler like not having to put a powerful gaming PC in the living room, this is a real game-changer. For those not up to speed on Docker yet, we recently featured a guide on getting started with this powerful tool since it does take some practice to wrap one’s mind around at first.