Last December we noted the announcement of the Android App Inventor from Google. Now Google has announced the discontinuance of the project and states that they will open source the code. With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because […]
Category Archives: open source
Editorial: Our friend Microchip and open source
Microchip jumped into open source last spring with the chipKIT Arduino-compatible development boards and open compiler/IDE. They wanted to tap the existing tutorials, enthusiasm, and customer base of Arduino community, and they were going to play nice with open source. A review of the chipKIT situation today is disappointing. The compiler still replies on closed […]
Announcing an open source USB stack for PIC 18F and 24F
Good news everyone! A new free and open source USB stack is now available for PIC microcontrollers. Today we finished testing and prepared a simple echo test that works with PIC 18F and 24F. We hope a demo release will get more developers involved. A release package and overview are in the forum. As always, […]
Chronos controlled door lock
Addidis posted the above short video of his project controlling a door lock using the ez430-Chronos watch. He describes the hardware: Chipkit MAX32 , 2 Xbees, Chronos Control center, and a Chronos watch controlling a servo. (I’m gonna hot glue it to my door knob lock switch and not have to use my key any […]
PZST – an open-source Propeller IDE in development [ Version 1.0.1 released! ]
Andrey Demenev has been developing PZST – an open-source Propeller IDE. Not wanting to use Windows any more than necessary, he wanted to develop an open source Propeller IDE for use with Linux. He states: I have been always using Brad Campbell’s BST for Prop programming, and mostly was satisfied with it. But there are […]
SimulAVR
SimulAVR is an open source simulator for AVR 8-bit Attiny and ATmega microcontrollers. SimulAVR can be used either standalone or as a remote target for avr-gdb. When used in gdbserver mode, the simulator is used as a back-end so that avr-gdb can be used as a source level debugger for AVR programs. The core of […]
Free webcast: OSCON 2011
OReilly is sponsoring a free webcast entitled, “OSCON 2011: Take-aways, Trends, and Highlights” on Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 10 AM PT. Presenters will discuss their observations from the recently concluded OSCON 2011 event in Portland, OR. In this event wrap-up, OSCON co-chairs Edd Dumbill, Sarah Novotny, and Laurel Ruma will identify and discuss the […]
OsmocomBB: open source GSM software
Osmocom stands for Open Source MObile COMmunications. The crew developing the OsmocomBB (baseband) software project presented the above talk at the DeepSec conference last November in Vienna, Austria. As they describe their efforts: OsmocomBB is an Free Software / Open Source GSM Baseband software implementation. It intends to completely replace the need for a proprietary […]
Big DIY: The Year the Maker Movement Broke
Wired magazine has published an online article summarizing the progress of the Maker movement in the last year. Tim Carmody observes that the Maker movement mirrors that of the growth of PCs and punk rock. Culturally, it’s mostly already happened — just like Hüsker Dü and The Pixies figured out Nirvana’s basic hard-rock punk-pop template […]
Freescale TCP/IP protocol stack – GPL open source
Freescale has a open source (GPL) TCP/IP protocol stack: Fortunately, Freescale does have an embedded TCP/IP protocol stack, called—not surprisingly—FNET. Importantly, it is a complete, stand-alone implementation. That is, the code is self-contained and does not require an operating system or other libraries in order to function. FNET is written primarily in C, with an […]
Dangerous Prototypes: Removing third-party website tracking to protect your privacy
As of today there are no third-party website tracking services in use on this site. As geeks and Slashdot trolls we’re naturally privacy advocates. We don’t like social media tracking malware, and we don’t like to share your info with a third party. Previously we used a Google Analytics-type tracker on the blog. It was […]
RepRap Mendel build log
NBitWonder documented a RepRap Mendel 3D printer build: While the DIY websites have been abuzz about the Ultimaker 3D printer, I’ve been hard at work constructing a RepRap Mendel. I’ve been doing my best to document the complete build process as well. Via the contact form.
DARwIn-OP robot is open source
This robot kicking the beer can around in this video is known as DARwin-OP. This the result of an Open Platform Humanoid Project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech with collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University and Robotis Co., based on the […]
Arduino and open source go to sniper school
Antipasto Hardware posts this cool project demonstrating how to use an Arduino and a TouchShield to keep track of shot patterns while at the range. This is a quick video showing off the Arduino Liquidware TouchShield Slide, and Bjorn Entperprises camo case, all Open Source Hardware based, at the firing range with a Remington 700 […]
Video: Hackers vs makers
Are you a hacker or a maker? If you answered “yes”, then you understand the proposition of this video. Intel_Jim gave this talk at Ignite Intel in Portland, OR on July 12, 2011, publicly explaining what we already know: that true hackers and makers are people who like to tinker with gadgets to make them […]
GNU Radio conference 2011
The GNU Radio project has announced plans for their first conference, to be held September 14-16, 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania. What is GNU Radio? GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily-available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity […]
Gibson3d open source security software
Looking forward to the upcoming Defcon 19 conference, we note that Gibson open source software will be used there to monitor traffic. Dan Klinedinst, the project owner, writes: Some of you have seen the “Gibson” software, which models a network in 3D and shows security events on that network in real time. The code, as […]