Gleich zu Anfang habe ich mir meinen Stream so eingerichtet dass jeweils der aktuelle Spieler-Counter immer im Bild zu sehen war. Ich finde das einfach eine ganze witzige Information vor allem für LuckyV-Interessierte.
rechts oben – die aktuelle Zahl der gleichzeitigen Spieler auf LuckyV
Meine ursprüngliche Implementierung war etwas kompliziert – zu kompliziert um sie einfach mit anderen zu teilen.
Daher habe ich mich entschlossen den Zähler in eine eigene Windows Applikation zu verpacken die von Streamern einfach verwendet und in OBS eingebunden werden kann.
Starten und prüfen ob die Zahl auch angezeigt wird – es sollte ungefähr so aussehen:
Man kann das nun auf zwei Wegen einbinden.
Weg 1: Fensteraufnahme
In der Applikation kann man Hintergrundfarben sowie Schriftart und Farbe konfigurieren. Wenn man das erledigt hat wie man es haben will wählt man im Quellenmenü “Fensteraufnahme” und dann das Applikationsfenster.
Fensteraufnahme
Diese Quelle kann man dann wie man möchte konfigurieren. z.B. mit Filtern um bis auf die Schrift alles transparent zu gestalten oder oder oder…
Weg 2: playercount.txt
Wenn die Applikation läuft aktualisiert sie ständig eine Datei “playercount.txt” im gleichen Ordner. Man kann nun OBS so konfigurieren dass diese Datei regelmässig ausgelesen und angezeigt wird.
Dazu fügt man ein “Text (GDI+)” im Quellenmenü hinzu und konfiguriert diese Quelle so dass der Text aus einer Datei gelesen wird:
Hier kann man dann auch beliebig Schriftart, Größe und Farbe konfigurieren.
Found that nice heap of Icons that are free to use and high-quality:
Health Icons is a volunteer effort to create a ‘global good’ for health projects all over the world. These icons are available in the public domain for use in any type of project.
The project is hosted by the public health not-for-profit Resolve to Save Lives as an expression of our committment to offer the icons for free, forever.
Since a picture says more than a thousand words, I give you the result first:
my crkbd based keyboard
This keyboard design is made from the ground up as open source and naturally is fully available as a GIT repository containing everything you need to start: PCB schematics, drawing, documentation and firmware source code.
It took me a couple of months to get all the required parts ordered and delivered. Many small envelopes with parts that seemlingly are only produced by a handful of manufacturers. But anyways: After everything had arrived and was checked for completeness my wife took the hardware parts into her hands and started soldering and assembling the keyboard.
And so this project naturally is split up between my wife and me in the most natural (to us) way: My wife did all the hardware parts – whilst I did the software and interfacing portion. (Admittedly there only was to be figured out how to get the firmware compiled and altered to my specific needs)
After putting the hardware together it was time to get the firmware sorted as well. This keyboard design is based upon the open source QMK (Quantum Mechanical Keyboard) firmware.
Conveniently QMK comes with it’s own build tools – so you will be up and running in no time. Since I had purchased Arduino ProMicro controllers I was good with the most basic setup you can imagine. As the base requirements for the toolchain where minimal I went with the machine that I had in front of me – a Raspberry Pi 4 with the standard Raspberry Pi OS.
These where the steps to get going:
get Python 3 and the qmk tool installed – I’ve chosen not to use the tool setup procedure but instead go with a separate clone of the QMK firmware repository.
python3 -m pip install --user qmk
clone the QMK firmware repository and get the QMK tool running (in the /bin folder of the firmware repository – it’s actually just a python script)
git clone https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware.git
cd qmk_firmware
git submodule sync --recursive
git submodule update --init --recursive --progress
make crkbd:default
create your own keymap to work with. You gotta use the crkbd firmware options as a default for this keyboard. The command below will generate a subfolder with the name of your keymap in the keyboards/crkbd/keymaps folder with the default settings of the crkbd keyboard firmware.
qmk new-keymap -kb crkbd
build your first firmware by running the command below (note: btk-corne is the name of my keymap)
now you can flash the firmware to both ProMicro controllers. The most straight forward way for me was using avrdude on the commandline. In my case the device is added as /dev/ttyACM0 and the compiled firmware named crkbd_rev1_legacy_btk-corne.hex.
When you got all this information you need to plug in the ProMicro and trigger a reset by bridging Ground and the Reset Pin. If you added, like we did, a button for reset you can use this. After hitting reset the ProMicro bootloader will enter the state where it’s possible to be flashed. Reset it and THEN run the avrdude commandline.
(alternatively) you can also use QMK Toolbox to flash the firmware. Also works.
So now you know how to get the firmware compiled and running (if not, look here further). But most probably you are not happy with some aspects of your keymap or firmware.
By now you might ask yourself: Hey, I’ve got two ProMicros on one keyboard. Both are flashed with the same firmware. Into which of the two do I plug in the USB cable that then is plugged into the computer?
The answer is: by default QMK assumes that you are plugging into the left half of the keyboard making the left half the master. If you prefer to use the right half you can change this behaviour in the config.h file in the firmware:
You have to plug in both of them anyway at times when you want to flash a new firmware to them as you adjust and make changes to your keymap.
Thankfully QMK comes with loads of options and even a very useful configurator tool. I used this tool to adjust the keymap to my requirements. The process there is straightforward again. Open up the configurator and select the correct keyboard type. In my case that is crkbd/legacy. The basic difference between legacy and common is a different communication protocol between the two halves. This really only is important when features are used that require some sort of sync between the two haves – like some RGB LED effects. Since I did not add any LEDs to the build I go with legacy for now. Maybe I need some features later that require me to go with common.
The configurator allows you to set up the whole keymap and upload/download it as a .json file.
That .json file can easily be converted into the C code that you need to alter in the actual keymap.c file. Assuming that the .json file you got is named btk-corne.json the full commandline is:
qmk json2c btk-corne.json
Then simply take this output and replace the stuff in the keymap.c with it:
Now you compile and flash again. And if all went right you’ve got the new keymap and firmware on your keyboard and it’ll work just like that :)
So this is interesting: Normally a Windows program (executable) if you try to run it anywhere else will show a message “cannot be run here” and terminates.
Printing this message is actually done by a little program whos task is to only print out this very message. So it can be overwritten.
Michael Strehovský did exactly this, very impressively. He documented what he did to get the game “snake”, written in C#, running on DOS instead of the “does not run here” stub. In an executable file that would run both, on standard 90s MS-DOS as well as on Windows with the .NET Framework installed.
He used a quite elaborate toolchain – namely DOS64-stub.
You can read all of this in the full thread. I recommend a deeper dive, as it’s a great start to better understand the inner workings of your computer…
When you are dealing with IoT protocols, especially at hobby-level, you probably came across the MQTT protocol and the challenge to have all those different devices that are supposed to be connected actually get connected – preferably using the MQTT protocol.
Recently this little project came to my attention:
OpenMQTTGateway project goal is to concentrate in one gateway different technologies, decreasing by the way the number of proprietary gateways needed, and hiding the different technologies singularity behind a simple & wide spread communication protocol: MQTT.
OpenMQTTGateway support very mature technologies like basic 433mhz/315mhz protocols & infrared (IR) so as to make your old dumb devices “smart” and avoid you to throw then away. These devices have also the advantages of having a lower cost compared to Zwave or more sophisticated protocols. OMG support also up to date technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or LORA.
Friend OS, a modular, fully-customizable operating system accessible via any device that can support a modern web browser, or Friend’s Android and iOS apps. Friend OS leverages Internet and blockchain technologies to offer all the features of a commercial operating system, but one that gives you access to a secure and private cloud-based virtual desktop anytime, anywhere, no matter what hardware or software you use.
So what does this all mean? It’s apparently a web application scaled up to behave and be used like an operating system. It encapsulates an application and directory/filesystem like concept and essentially lives in one of your browser windows.
As long as you’ve got a supported browser, all your apps and data will be accessible through this. They claim.
It’s interesting as there is a lot of open source in there and even some docker effort made to get it running. Seems abandoned / not updated at the time of writing, but it’s a nice concept to begin with anyways.
Some things you find on GitHub are more interesting and frightening than others.
This one is both and some more. What is it you ask?
R2 Bitcoin Arbitrager is an automatic arbitrage trading application targeting Bitcoin exchanges.
So it’s buying and selling Bitcoins. And it’s doing this on different markets. On the topic of arbitrage Wikipedia has something to say:
In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices at which the unit is traded.
For example, an arbitrage opportunity is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy something for a low price and sell it for a higher price.
Now this already is the second version of the tool and already 2 years old. See it as some sort of interesting archeological specimem. Please refrain to actually so something harmful with it.
I am writing this down here because apart from it’s obvious horrors this is a good starting point to understand how these computer-trading-systems do work in principle.
Given that an architectural drawing is also included it gives all sorts of starting points to thoughts.
Also. What could possibly go wrong if a tool to buy/sell on actual markets with actual bitcoins is confident enough to include the “maxTargetProfit” configuration option. Effectively setting the top-line of profit you’re going to make!!!111
There is a free and well integrated OpenVPN client for iOS devices already. And as much as this one works quite well it’s also lacking some comfort features that are now made available through alternative iOS client implementations of OpenVPN.
OpenVPN is an open-source commercial software that implements virtual private network techniques to create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities. It uses a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS for key exchange.
Meet Passepartout. The iOS OpenVPN client that comes with lots of comfort features. Of main interest for me is that Passepartout is aware of the connection you’re currently using and can adopt it’s VPN tunnel status accordingly.
Passepartout is a smart OpenVPN client perfectly integrated with the iOS platform. Passepartout is the only app you need for both well-known OpenVPN providers and your personal OpenVPN servers.
The goal of this book is to document commonly-known and lesser-known methods of doing various tasks using only built-in bash features. Using the snippets from this bible can help remove unneeded dependencies from scripts and in most cases make them faster. I came across these tips and discovered a few while developing neofetch, pxltrm and other smaller projects.
eXoDOS is an attempt to catalog, obtain, and make playable every game developed for the DOS and PC Booter platform. Striving to find original media rather than using scene rips. This collection uses a combination of Dosbox and ScummVM to play these older titles on modern systems. All required emulators are included and have been setup to run all included titles with no prior knowledge or experience required on the users part.
This pack includes 7,000 DOS games. The focus is on games that were either released in English or are fairly easy to play without a knowledge of the native language. This is not every DOS game ever made, however it is a very high percentage of all commercial releases. There are thousands of freeware, homebrew, and shareware games that will continue to be added in future packs.
The games have already been configured to run in DosBOX. Games which are supported by ScummVM will give you the option at launch as to which emulator you would like to use.
RTL-SDR is a very cheap ~$25 USB dongle that can be used as a computer based radio scanner for receiving live radio signals in your area (no internet required). Depending on the particular model it could receive frequencies from 500 kHz up to 1.75 GHz. Most software for the RTL-SDR is also community developed, and provided free of charge.
The origins of RTL-SDR stem from mass produced DVB-T TV tuner dongles that were based on the RTL2832U chipset. With the combined efforts of Antti Palosaari, Eric Fry and Osmocom (in particular Steve Markgraf) it was found that the raw I/Q data on the RTL2832U chipset could be accessed directly, which allowed the DVB-T TV tuner to be converted into a wideband software defined radio via a custom software driver developed by Steve Markgraf. If you’ve ever enjoyed the RTL-SDR project please consider donating to Osmocom via Open Collective as they are the ones who developed the drivers and brought RTL-SDR to life.
This repo contains an annotated overlay for the Nintendo Game Boy DMG-CPU-B chip die and the extracted schematics.
This was done manually with only a few automated checks so THERE’S A HIGH RISK OF ERRORS. I’m in no way responsible if you made someone’s life depend on this and it fucked up.
Streamsheets is, similar to NodeRed, a tool to step in between MQTT data coming in and something being done with it. Just other than NodeRed it is not based on flows but on a spreadsheet that executes in it’s entirety everytime a step is made.
Streamsheets are a new spreadsheet technology specifically designed for real-time data stream processing and the opportunities of digitization and the Industrial IoT.
SwiftUI is the new cool kid on the block when it comes to iOS/iPadOS/macOS application development.
As Apple announced SwiftUI early 2019 it’s naturally only focussing on making all the declarative UI goodness available for the Apple operating systems. No non-apple platforms in focus. Naturally.
But there are ways. With the declarative way of creating user interfaces one apparently can simply start to re-implement the UI controls and have them render as HTML / Javascript…
Unlike some other efforts this doesn’t just render SwiftUI Views as HTML. It also sets up a connection between the browser and the code hosted in the Swift server, allowing for interaction – buttons, pickers, steppers, lists, navigation, you get it all!
In other words: SwiftWebUI is an implementation of (many but not all parts of) the SwiftUI API for the browser.
To repeat the Disclaimer: This is a toy project! Do not use for production. Use it to learn more about SwiftUI and its inner workings.
As RISC-V progressively challenges the existing ARM processor ecosystem it’s interesting to see more and more software projects popping up that aim that RISC-V architecture.
Here’s one project that aims to develop (and explain along the way) how to create an operating system from scratch. On top of the RISC-V specifics this tutorial also aims to teach how this all can be done in a programming language called Rust.
Keep in mind that all of this is done on a baremetal system. No other software is running.
RISC-V (“risk five”) and the Rust programming language both start with an R, so naturally they fit together. In this blog, we will write an operating system targeting the RISC-V architecture in Rust (mostly). If you have a sane development environment for RISC-V, you can skip the setup parts right to bootloading. Otherwise, it’ll be fairly difficult to get started.
This tutorial will progressively build an operating system from start to something that you can show your friends or parents — if they’re significantly young enough. Since I’m rather new at this I decided to make it a “feature” that each blog post will mature as time goes on. More details will be added and some will be clarified. I look forward to hearing from you!
Can you display VGA and play audio on a Cortex-M4 in pure Rust? The short answer is yes, yes you can! Minus the hand-unrolled assembler loop for fixing the phase error in the RGB output. But we don’t talk about that in polite company.
The Atari Joystick interface works, but two Joysticks would be more fun
The PS/2 Keyboard via the Atmega works, but the pinout was mirrored so you have to put the connector under the PCB :/
The RTC works
VGA Output works
The MIDI Out seems to work when looped to MIDI In, as does the MIDI Though.
The MIDI In seems to receive data when connected to my electronic drum kit
The Audio output seems to work quite nicely
The SD card works, but the power supply can’t handle hot-insertion of the SD card and it makes the TM4C reboot. More capacitors / some current limiting probably required.
I can load games and programs from the SD card into the 24 KiB of free Application RAM. You can interact with these games via the PS/2 Keyboard and Joystick. I can play simple games (like Snake) and play three channels of 8-bit wavetable audio simultaneously. I’ve even got a 6502 Emulator running a copy of 6502 Enhanced BASIC, if you want to go old school!
As you might know I am regularly looking into indoor-location systems and opportunities to optimize my own system (based on Bluetooth…)
Now I cam across a concept by a german company called Localino. They’ve built their own hard- and software.
Localino has its own “satellites”, also called “anchors”. The mobile receivers are called “tags” and can locate their position based on the available anchors inside a building. Anchors and tags precisely measure signal propagation delays in the order of sub-nanoseconds, resulting in centimeter-accurate location. Any person or object wearing a tag can be located.
As far as I could dig into this so far it’s based upon decawave DW1000 hardware and an older base-library of this is available as source code here.
There are someothermentions which are back from 2017 when there seemingly was a big open source portion. Some python code is mentioned but nothing available right away today sadly.
I am back again and developing some smaller APIs for my own use.
As I am learning a new programming language and framework (SwiftUI) and for my little learning project I need to also implement a server backend. Implementing a RESTful service is quite straight-forward but for testing and UI prototyping I actually want to do some testing before really setting up the server side.
To easily test RESTful calls without actually implementing anything I found that Reqres is a quite useful tool to have in the toolbelt:
Apart from some pre-set-up API endpoints with dummy data (like users, …) it also features a request mirror service.
With that you can simply throw a JSON document into the general direction of Reqres and it will put a timestamp on it and return it right away.
User space network drivers on Linux are often used in production environments to improve the performance of network-heavy applications. However, their inner workings are not clear to most programmers who use them. ixy aims to change this by providing a small educational user space network driver, which is gives a good overview of how these drivers work, using only 1000 lines of C code. While the language C is a good common denominator, which many developers are familiar with, its syntax is often much more dicult to read than that of more modern languages and makes the driver seem more complex than it actually is.
For this thesis I created a C# version of ixy, named ixy.cs, which utilizes the more modern syntax and additional safety of the C# programming language in order to make user space network driver development even more accessible. The viability of C# for driver programming will be analyzed and its advantages and disadvantages will be discussed.
The actual implementation (with other programming languages as well) can be found here.
While recording a podcast episode we briefly touched on the topic of bulletin board systems and how we both had operated our own FidoNet BBS in the 90s.
To create a bigger reflux of thoughts:
Synchronet Bulletin Board System Software is a free software package that can turn your personal computer into your own custom online service supporting multiple simultaneous users with hierarchical message and file areas, multi-user chat, and the ever-popular BBS door games.
Everything there to set-up a BBS. Maybe I really need to get out a backup of my old BBS and bring it back online?!
