Open sourcing everything… there's an app for that

April 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What happens if you’re a prolific developer and decide to release all of the source code from your work? Well, you should get a huge pat on the back from all interested parties. And so we say thank you to [Hunter Davis] for releasing the source code for his 70+ Android apps. But just making the decision isn’t the end of things, you’ve got actually get the code out there. And herein lies the hack. Instead of archiving and posting all of those projects he wrote a script to crawl, init, and push his projects to Github automatically.

This process is made pretty easy because of the Github API. Looks like he used version 2 for his script but you’ll want to check out version 3 if you’re looking to write your own script. His script takes the API key and username as command line arguments, then traverses his local source tree. Along the way it uses some text manipulation to sanitize the directories for use as the name of the repository. Once that’s established it steps into the directory, creates a repository, adds and commits all the files, then pushes them to Github.

Following [Hunter’s] example makes it really easy to share your code. We hope more will follow suit, putting their work out there for others to learn from and build upon.

We’ve seen some hardware hacks from [Hunter] as well. He did a bunch involving the ZipIt, as well as some work with playing games with a Dockstar.

[via Reddit]

Filed Under: misc hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Storing sketches in the cloud

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There’s a fine line between solving problems that don’t exist and solving problems that no one recognizes until a solution is found. The former shows up with housewares peddled on late-night infomercials, while the latter is summed up by [Henry Ford], “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Dave]’s method of storing microcontroller code in the cloud definitely falls into the ‘useful’ category.

[Dave] first realized the problem when he was digging around the IDEO Toy Lab and came across an orphan project, a Barbie credit card swiper. [Dave] had no idea if the firmware for this project was saved on the server, or even if the current version was available. One solution to this problem could be burning a copy of the source onto the Flash or EEPROM on the board.

There’s a problem with this idea, though: storing the source in an Arduino’s memory takes space. Thinking laterally, [Dave] realized that editing source happens on a computer, computers are connected to the Internet, so why not keep the source “in the cloud?”

[Dave]’s solution is to host the source on GitHub, and tie every piece of code to a board’s unique USB serial number. This gives every Arduno a unique ID, allows for version control, and libraries of multiple files.

This very clever addition to the Arduino IDE is up on GitHub, ready to be added to any Arduino installation. Why the Arduino IDE doesn’t already have this feature is beyond us, but that’s what you get when you want a faster horse.
Filed Under: arduino hacks Tagged With: , , , ,