Hacking a servo to perform full rotations Servos are small motors that can rotate 180 degrees and whose position can be controlled. Some types of Servos can also rotate continuously. However, normal servos can be hacked to rotate 360 degrees. They are built with a small DC motor, a potentiometer and some control circuitry. The rotation of the motor changes the position... More
How to add Reveal to your RubyMotion app without modifying the Rakefile TL;DR; Add this lines to a file named debugger_cmds in the root of your RubyMotion app. Then run your app with rake debug=1 to have Reveal automatically loaded. [crayon-5d8500823607f985327857/] Remember to add debugger_cmds to your gitignore file. Long version Reveal is an awesome tool to debug and modify iOS views during development. However you usually... More
Compiling MacRuby on OSX 10.9 Mavericks Lately, I’ve been interested in programming language implementations in general, and LLVM in particular. You’ve probably heard of many projects based on LLVM like emscripten, rubinius, clang, rust or Rubymotion. Since I learn better by example, I wanted to have a large LLVM-based programming language codebase to experiment and tinker with. Given I’m already familiar... More
The Business Model for 3D Printer Cartridges The past CES show in Las vegas included a lot of 3D printing, and some of the industry leaders introduced new 3D printers. Some of these new models came with news regarding material cartridges. 3D Systems has always used proprietary filament cartridges with an incorporated chip very much like traditional ink printers. Makerbot is heading... More
A rare interview with Danger co-founders including Andy Rubin Danger was a company founded in 2000 by Andy Rubin, Matt Hershenson and Joe Britt, former employees of Apple, General Magic, Catapult Entertainment and WebTV among others. Not many people know abut Danger in Europe, since they were mostly known as the creators of the T-Mobile Sidekick, a very popular early smartphone. The company was... More
The day I learned about Mosaic from Marc Andreessen Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the history of the Internet and Dot-com bubble startups. Very much like a music student would learn about the life and achievements of his favorite musicians and study what made them great, learning from past successes and failures of entrepreneurs feeds my startup analyst side. These days I’m... More
Analyzing new 3D printers from Makerbot and 3D Systems CES has become the conference of choice for the two biggest personal 3D printer manufacturers to show their latest developments. I’m talking about Stratasys-owned Makerbot and 3D Systems. Makerbot Replicator Makerbot presented 3 new models in the Replicator line, notably dropping the model numbering ala Apple with its iPad. The current lineup is referred to... More
Replacing Raspberry Pi’s SD card slot and building a custom SD to MicroSD adapter Like any good geek, I have a Raspberry Pi. A few months ago, its SD card slot broke and the SD card couldn’t be held in place, leaving my Raspberry Pi useless (since the operating system lives inside said SD card). This isn’t something new to Raspberry Pi owners. I looked for a replacement part,... More
Mac OSX Shortcuts: The definitive guide There are several ways to configure shortcuts in OSX. In app shortcuts Some apps have internal preferences to set certain shortcuts. Some of this shortcuts will only work in the context of the app, some others will be global shortcuts Application Shortcuts in the System Preferences In System Preferences > Kayboard > Keyboard Shortcuts >... More
These are my weapons I have just done a fresh install of Mountain Lion, and installed all my development tools one by one. I have carefully selected the ones I really use, and installed nothing else but those. Here’s a list:*Dash: API Documentation browser. I use it mainly for Cocoa documentation, but it has compatible docsets for almost everything... More