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. When you go through life, there are a lot of things that you kinda understand. Or maybe you’ve not even gotten around to thinking about whether you understand them or not, and just take them for granted. Life would all simply be too complicated if you took it all sufficiently seriously. Birdsong, Bluetooth, the sun in the sky, the friction of your car’s tire on various surfaces. These are all incredibly deep subjects, when you start to peel back the layers.

And Hunter’s point is that if you are working on a project that involves USB, your success or failure depends on understanding USB. There’s no room for filters here – the illusion that it “just works” often comes crashing down until you learn enough to make it work. Some of his students are doing projects cooperatively with the ornithology department, classifying and creating birdsong. Did you know that birds do this elaborate frequency modulation thing when they sing? Once you hear it, you know, and you hear it ever more.

So we agree with Hunter. Dive into a project because you want to get the project done, sure, but pick the project because it’s a corner of the world that you’d like to shine light into, to remove the filters of “I think I basically understand that”. When you get it working, you’ll know that you really do. Hacking your way to enlightenment? We’ve heard crazier things.

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!

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. When you’re just blinking LEDs on a human timescale, the general-purpose Arduino functions are good enough. I’ve written loads of useful firmware that fits this description. When the timing requirements aren’t tight, slow as dirt can be fast enough.

But eventually you’ll want to build a project where the old slow-speed pin toggling just won’t cut it. Maybe it’s a large LED matrix, or maybe it’s a motor-control application where the loop time really matters. Or maybe it’s driving something like audio or video that just needs more bits per second. One way out is clever coding, maybe falling back to assembly language primitives, but I would claim that the right way is almost always to use the hardware peripherals that the chipmakers gave you.

For instance, in the end of the video linked above, the hacker wants to drive a large shift register string that’s lighting up an LED matrix. That’s exactly what SPI is for, and coming to this realization makes the project work with timing to spare, and in just a few lines of code. That is the way.

Which brings me to the double-edged sword that the Arduino’s abstraction creates. By abstracting away the chips’ hardware peripherals, it makes code more portable and certainly more accessible to beginners, who don’t want to learn about SPI and I2C and I2S and DMA just yet. But by hiding the inner workings of the chips in “user friendly” libraries, it blinds new users to the useful applications of these same hardware peripherals that clever chip-design engineers have poured their sweat and brains into making do just exactly what we need.

This isn’t really meant to be a rant against Arduino, though. Everyone has to start somewhere, and the abstractions are great for getting your feet wet. And because everything’s open source anyway, nothing stops you from digging deeper into the datasheet. You just have to know that you need to. And that’s why we write up videos like this every five years or so, to show the next crop of new hackers that there’s a lot to gain underneath the abstractions.

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.

You probably know Linux, but RTEMS is a high-reliability RTOS for aerospace. People in the field tell me that it’s well-known in those circles, but it doesn’t have a high profile in the hacker world. Still, satellites run RTEMS, so it’s probably also a good place to draw inspiration from, or simply use the library as-is. Since it’s BSD-licensed, you can also borrow entire functions wholesale if you attribute them properly.

In the end, an RTOS is an RTOS. It doesn’t matter if it’s developed for blinking LEDs or for guiding ICBMs. This thought got [Tom] and I to thinking about what other high-reliability open-source code is out there, hidden away in obscurity because of the industry that it was developed for. NASA’s core flight system came instantly to mind, but NASA makes much of its code available for you to use if you’re interested. There are surely worse places to draw inspiration!

What other off-the-beaten-path software sources do you know of that might be useful for our crowd?

Every time we end up talking about 3D printers, Al Williams starts off on how bad he is in a machine shop. I’m absolutely sure that he’s exaggerating, but the gist is that he’s much happier to work on stuff in CAD and let the machine take care of the precision and fine physical details. I’m like that too, but with me, it’s the artwork.

I can’t draw to save my life, but once I get it into digital form, I’m pretty good at manipulating images. And then I couldn’t copy that out into the real world, but that’s what the laser cutter is for, right? So the gameplan for this year’s Mother’s Day gift (reminder!) is three-way. I do the physical design, my son does the artwork, we combine them in FreeCAD and then hand it off to the machine. Everyone is playing to their strengths.

So why does it feel a little like cheating to just laser-cut out a present? I’m not honestly sure. My grandfather was a trained architectural draftsman before he let his artistic side run wild and went off to design jewellery. He could draw a nearly perfect circle with nothing more than a pencil, but he also used a French curve set, a pantograph, and a rolling architect’s ruler when they were called for. He had his tools too, and I bet he’d see the equivalence in mine.

People have used tools since the stone age, and the people who master their tools transcend them, and produce work where the “human” shines through despite having traced a curve or having passed the Gcode off to the cutter. If you doubt this, I’ll remind you of the technological feat that is the piano, with which people nonetheless produce music that doesn’t make you think of the hammers or of the tremendous cast metal frame. The tech disappears into the creation.

I’m sure there’s a parable here for our modern use of AI too, but I’ve got a Mother’s Day present to finish.

Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One, a DIY picture phone from the 1980s, was a monster build of a hundred ICs that also required you to own a TV camera. At that time, the idea of being able to see someone while talking to them on the phone was pure science fiction, and here was a version of that which you could build yourself.

Still, we have to wonder how many of these were ever built. The project itself was difficult and expensive, but you actually have to multiply that by two if you want to talk with someone else. And then you have to turn your respective living rooms into TV studios. It wasn’t the most practical of projects.

But amazing projects did something in the old magazines that we take a little bit for granted today: they showed what was possible. And if you want to create something new, you’re not necessarily going to know how to do it, but just the idea that it’s possible at all is often enough to give a motivated hacker the drive to make it real. As skateboard hero Rodney Mullen put it, “the biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief”.

In the skating world, it’s seeing someone else do a trick in a video that lets you know that it’s possible, and then you can make it your own. In our world, in prehistoric times, it was these electronics magazines that showed you what was possible. In the present, it’s all over the Internet, and all over Hackaday. So when you see someone’s amazing project, even if you aren’t necessarily into it, or maybe don’t even fully understand it, your horizons of what’s possible are nonetheless expanded, and that helps us all be more creative.

Keep on pushing!

It was probably Montesquieu who coined the proto-hacker motto “the best is the mortal enemy of the good”. He was talking about compromises in drafting national constitutions for nascent democracies, of course, but I’ll admit that I do hear his voice when I’m in get-it-done mode and start cutting corners on a project. A working project is better than a gold-plated one.

But what should I do, Monte, when good enough turns out to also be the mortal enemy of the best? I have a DIY coffee roaster that is limping along for years now on a blower box that uses a fan scavenged in anger from an old Dust Buster. Many months ago, I bought a speed-controllable and much snazzier brushless blower fan to replace it, that would solve a number of minor inconveniences with the current design, but which would also require some building and another dive into the crufty old firmware.

So far, I’ve had good enough luck that the roaster will break down from time to time, and I’ll use that as an excuse to fix that part of the system, and maybe even upgrade another as long as I have it apart. But for now, it’s running just fine. I mean, I have to turn the fan on manually, and the new one could be automatic. I have only one speed for the fan, and the new one would be variable. But the roaster roasts, and a constant source of coffee is mission critical in this house. The spice must flow!

Reflecting on this situation, it seems to me that the smart thing to do is work on smoothing the transitions from good enough to best. Like maybe I could prototype up the new fan box without taking the current one apart. Mock up some new driver code on the side while I’m at it?

Maybe Montesquieu was wrong, and the good and the best aren’t opposites after all. Maybe the good enough is just the first step on the path toward the best, and a wise man spends his energy on making the two meet in the middle, or making the transition from one to the other as painless as possible.

This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. Only, with the current state of LLMs, it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machine.

It’s a tempting vision, and it probably works for a lot of simple applications, in popular languages, or generally where the ground is already well trodden. And where the stakes are low, as [Al Williams] pointed out while we were talking about vibing on the podcast. Can you imagine vibe-coded ATM software that probably gives you the right amount of money? Vibe-coding automotive ECU software?

While vibe coding seems very liberating and hands-off, it really just changes the burden of doing the coding yourself into making sure that the LLM is giving you what you want, and when it doesn’t, refining your prompts until it does. It’s more like editing and auditing code than authoring it. And while we have no doubt that a stellar programmer like [Karpathy] can verify that he’s getting what he wants, write the correct unit tests, and so on, we’re not sure it’s the panacea that is being proclaimed for folks who don’t already know how to code.

Vibe coding should probably be reserved for people who already are expert coders, and for trivial projects. Just the way you wouldn’t let grade-school kids use calculators until they’ve mastered the basics of math by themselves, you shouldn’t let junior programmers vibe code: It simultaneously demands too much knowledge to corral the LLM, while side-stepping any of the learning that would come from doing it yourself.

And then there’s the security side of vibe coding, which opens up a whole attack surface. If the LLM isn’t up to industry standards on simple things like input sanitization, your vibed code probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the Internet.

So should you be vibing? Sure! If you feel competent overseeing what [Dan] described as “the worst summer intern ever”, and the states are low, then it’s absolutely a fun way to kick the tires and see what the tools are capable of. Just go into it all with reasonable expectations.