Are there valid reasons for compressed files (zip, gzip, etc.) to spoof file size?

Zip files, GZip files, and likely others, include information about the contained file, including the uncompressed size of the file. However, when extracting these files the number is meaningless as the actual data can be muc… Continue reading Are there valid reasons for compressed files (zip, gzip, etc.) to spoof file size?

Character Generation in 144 Bytes

[Jaromir Sukuba]  has an awesome BrainF*ck interpreter project going. He’s handling the entire language in less than 1 kB of code. Sounds like a great entry in the 1 kB Challenge. The only problem is the user interface. The original design used a 4 line character based LCD. The HD44780 controller in these LCDs have their own character table ROM, which takes up more than 1 kB of space alone.

[Jaromir] could have submitted the BrainF*ck interpreter without the LCD, and probably would have done well in the contest. That wasn’t quite enough for him though. He knew he could …read more

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[CNLohr] Reverses Vive, Valve Engineers Play Along

[CNLohr] needs no introduction around these parts. He’s pulled off a few really epic hacks. Recently, he’s set his sights on writing a simple, easy to extend library to work with the HTC Vive VR controller equipment, and in particular the Watchman controller.

There’s been a lot of previous work on the device, so [Charles] wasn’t starting from scratch, and he live-streamed his work, allowing others to play along. In the process, two engineers who actually worked on the hardware in question, [Alan Yates] and [Ben Jackson], stopped by and gave some oblique hints and “warmer-cooler” guidance. A much-condensed version …read more

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Squoze Your Data

I have a confession to make. I enjoy the challenge of squeezing software into a tiny space or trying to cut a few more cycles out of a loop. It is like an intricate puzzle. Today, of course, there isn’t nearly as much call for that as there used to be. Today even a “small” microcontroller has a ton of memory and resources.

Even so, there’s still a few cases where you need to squeeze those last few bytes out of memory. Maybe you are trying to maximize memory available for some purpose. Maybe you are anticipating mass production and …read more

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Baby Monitor Rebuild is also ESP8266 Audio Streaming How-To

[Sven337]’s rebuild of a cheap and terrible baby monitor isn’t super visual, but it has so much more going on than it first seems. It’s also a how-to for streaming audio via UDP over WiFi with a pair of ESP8266 units, and includes a frank sharing of things that went wrong in the process and how they were addressed. [Sven337] even experimented with a couple of different methods for real-time compression of the transmitted audio data, for no other reason than the sake of doing things as well as they can reasonably be done without adding parts or spending extra …read more

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