Category: Hackaday Columns

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman chat with Andres Almiray about JReleaser, the Java release automation tool that’s for more than just Java, and more than just releases. What was the original inspiration for the tool? And how does JReleaser help avoid a string of commits trying to fix GitHub Actions? Listen to find […]
Ring buffers are incredibly useful data structures that allow for data to be written and read continuously without having to worry about where the data is being written to or read from. Although they present a continuous (ring) buffer via their API, internally a definitely finite buffer is being maintained. This makes it crucial that […]
Last time, we talked about single-PCB-design panels, all the cool aspects of it, including some cost savings and handling convenience. Naturally, you might wonder, and many did – can you put multiple different PCBs on a single panel? The answer is “yes, without a doubt!” The tool we used last time, KiKit, will not be […]
The last two years has been a particularly exciting time for KiCad, for users, casual contributors, and for the core developers too. Even so, there are many cool new features that are still in process. One bottleneck with open-source development of complex tools like KiCad is the limited amount of time that developers can devote […]
First-time visitors to Disneyworld often naively think they’re going to “do” the park in three days: one day for the Magic Kingdom, one day for Epcot, and one day for everything else. It’s easy to spot such people, collapsed on a bench or dragging exhausted kids around while trying to make their way to the […]
Friday, November 15, 2019 – PASADENA. The 2019 Hackaday Superconference is getting into high gear as I write this. Sitting in the Supplyframe HQ outside the registration desk is endlessly entertaining, as attendees pour in and get their swag bags and badges. It’s like watching a parade of luminaries from the hardware hacking world, and […]
In previous installments of DSP Spreadsheet, we’ve looked at generating signals, mixing them, and filtering them. If you start trying to work with DSP, though, you’ll find a topic that always rears its head: IQ signals. It turns out, these aren’t as hard as they appear at first and, as usual, we’ll tackle them in […]
An issue was discovered in libarchive through Google’s ClusterFuzz project. Libarchive is a compression and decompression library, widely used in utilities. The issue here is how the library recovers from a malformed archive. Hitting an invalid header causes the memory in use to be freed. The problem is that it’s possible for file processing to […]
Bad news if you bought several Insignia-branded smart devices from Best Buy. The company has decided to shut down the back end systems that make them work — or at least work as a smart device. On the chopping block are smart outlets, switches, a security camera, and an upright freezer. If you bought, say, […]
It’s official: smartphone-based VR is dead. The two big players in this space were Samsung Gear VR (powered by Oculus, which is owned by Facebook) and Google Daydream. Both have called it quits, with Google omitting support from their newer phones and Oculus confirming that the Gear VR has reached the end of its road. […]