Elliot Williams

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

In a marvelous college lecture in front of a class of engineering students, V. Hunter Adams professed his love for embedded engineering, but he might as well have been singing the songs of our people – the hackers. If you occasionally feel the need to explain to people why you do what you do, at fancy cocktail parties or something, this talk is great food for thought. It’s about as good a “Why We Hack” as I’ve ever seen. Among the zingers, “projects are filter removers” stuck out.

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today the annual Open Source Hardware Summit conference starts in Edinburg, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers. If you’re not in Scotland, they have a livestream on YouTube that you should check out, as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event. It’s going on right now!

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

We wrote up a video about speeding up Arduino code, specifically by avoiding DigitalWrite. Now, the fact that DigitalWrite is slow as dirt is long known. Indeed, a quick search pulls up a Hackaday article from 2010 demonstrating that it’s fifty times slower than toggling the pin directly using the native pin registers, but this is still one of those facts that gets periodically rediscovered from generation to generation. How can this be new again? First off, sometimes you just don’t need the speed.

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2025, and will be taking place October 31st through November 2nd in Pasadena, California. Supercon is about bringing the Hackaday community together to share our great ideas, big and small. So get to brainstorming, because we’d like to hear what you’ve been up to! Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries.

3 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the continuing saga of the libogc debacle. [Tom] has been interviewing some of the principals involved, so he’s got some first-hand perspective on it all – you should really go read his pieces. But the short version is that an old library that many Nintendo game emulators use appears to have cribbed code from both and open-source real-time operating system called RTEMS, and the Linux kernel itself.