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Claude Code: Creating a C++ Linter for Embedded Development

I know! I’m late to the Claude Code party but now I’m here, I’m all in. If you write C++ for microcontrollers, or edge inference, you already know that the rules are different from desktop software. No heap allocation after startup. No exceptions. No recursion on a 4 KB stack. And these constraints are not optional if you want your firmware to survive.

The problem is that general-purpose linters do not enforce the rules you need. Clang-tidy is powerful, but configuring it to catch you just used int instead of int32_t, requires writing custom checks in C++ against the AST. That is a significant investment for what should be a simple rule. I wanted something I could tweak for each project.

Read More…

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Primal Layers — Is the Ancient Brain the Future of AI?

If you are using AI at the moment, then it is probably based on a model of the human neocortex. All of the current Large Language Models (LLMs) are overwhelmingly inspired by this approach. These architectures are great at abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and language generation which are all tasks that are analogous to higher-order cortical functions. But is this the path to AGI? We don’t think it is, for reasons that will be explored in this article.

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Adding a User Interface to ChatGPT with BeeWare — Part 1

Attempting to massage user inputs and output in ChatGPT is painful. We spent hours trying to print some coloured text using LaTeX, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So much for no code development, we have capitulated and resorted to pulling at the Python Interpreter. Trying something new, we have wrapped our GPT-4 engine in BeeWare, which promises write once run everywhere functionality. This will also allow us to compare the OpenAI API vs browser GPT responses.

Read More – https://medium.com/@reefwing/adding-a-user-interface-to-chatgpt-with-beeware-part-1-852f1758fd65

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A Review of Cross Platform Development Tools and Frameworks

It is the dream of every developer to write code once and then deploy it frictionlessly to every available platform (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, …). This is of course very hard to do in practise, as each platform does just about everything differently. “Viva la différence!”

As consumers this is a good thing, and gives us options. As developers, it is a huge pain in the neck. Because this is a big problem for devs, a lot of people have had a crack at solving it. Every so often, we stray from the path of native development and are tempted by the sweet promise of “write once, run anywhere!” The problem is if you need to do anything close to the metal or complicated, you usually have to drop down into native code, which kind of defeats the purpose. There are some applications that are categorically not suited to cross-platform solutions. Anything that requires deep system-level integration, minimal latency, or specialized use of hardware features, probably falls into this bucket.

Read More – https://reefwing.medium.com/a-review-of-cross-platform-development-tools-and-frameworks-d14d572828b5

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ChatGPT — As a Programming Tool

Although ChatGPT is unlikely to be replacing programmers anytime soon, it can be a useful coding assistant. In this article, we will investigate how you can use ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) as a programming tool, and compare it to the earlier model found in the Open AI Playground (GPT-3). For simplicity, we will use mostly Python in our examples. Despite its limitations, ChatGPT is seriously impressive.

Read more at Medium…

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Age Prediction API based on First Name

I just came across an interesting API that your app can use to predict a persons age based on their first name. The API is free for up to 1000 names/day. It is called agify.io (https://agify.io/). #development

You can try it out in your browser – just insert your first name instead of “david”:

https://api.agify.io?name=david

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BirdWeather and BirdNET-Pi

BirdNET-Pi: Using AI to identify Birds from their Songs.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to identify birds from their song? Well it turns out that you can.

BirdWeather
BirdWeather is a great citizen scientist initiative that uses volunteer stations to continuously listen for bird songs all over the world. The stations use machine learning to analyse these sounds and identify birds based on their song. BirdWeather is a living library of bird vocalizations. It also provides an indication of bird visit frequency and populations around a station, apart from those which keep quiet! You can play back the recorded songs and bird detections are shown in real time on the web site.

The artificial neural network used to analyse the recorded sound and extract and identify bird songs is called BirdNET.

BirdWeather

BirdNET
BirdNET is a joint research project between The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology that is “focused on the detection and classification of avian sounds using machine learning … [with the aim to] assist experts and citizen scientist in their work of monitoring and protecting our birds”.

BirdNET-Pi

Detection Stations
There are currently only 12 stations in Australia (including me), all based on the Raspberry Pi single board computer. You can learn how to configure your own station in our latest article on Medium – BirdNET-Pi: Using AI to identify Birds from their Songs.

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Setting Up a Raspberry Pi Web Kiosk

We have a solar system and I wanted to keep an eye on our relative energy consumption and generation during the day. The SolarEdge inverter that we use has a mobile app and a web dashboard but neither refresh automatically. This article explains how I set up the Seeed reTerminal as a dedicated web kiosk to be able to monitor our solar performance in near real time. #solar #raspberrypi #webkiosk

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How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 5

There are a number of libraries that make working with the LSM9DS1 IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) easy. In Part 5 of our series on writing your own flight controller software we will focus on the IMU and in particular explain the best ways to convert the gyro rate and accelerometer force data to a roll and pitch angle. The yaw angle is then calculated using the pitch and roll and magnetometer data. This discussion, is in the context of building a drone flight controller based on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE.

Our follow up part in this series will explain how to calibrate the LSM9DS1 IMU and store the results plus use sensor fusion to improve the accuracy of the angles and overcome sensor shortfalls.

Read the complete article on Medium.

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Wire Frame & Prototyping Tools

design-evolution

Putting together a rough sketch or wire frame of your app design is always a good idea. Doing this will provide the following advantages:

  • It will assist you in communicating your idea to the developer, visual designer or others. It is much easier to get feedback on your ideas if you have a straw man to start the discussion with. The wire frame or prototype becomes your app blue print. You wouldn’t start building a house without plans (hopefully), similarly you should have a set of plans for your app.
  • It will save you money. It is a lot easier and cheaper to change something in the prototyping phase than it is once the app is finished.
  • It will save you time. Although taking the time to do a wire frame may seem like more effort, this will be repaid many times over during development and prevents false starts.
  • It will improve your design. By sketching out the design and explaining how a user will move from screen to screen it will quickly become obvious what will work and what won’t. Doing this will also prompt other ideas, work as a creative catalyst and ensure that you have thought of every eventuality.

There are many tools and resources available to help make prototyping and generating wire frames easier. Below are 26 resources which can be used to generate your wire frames:

  1. Keynotopia – Use PowePoint/Keynote to Prototype Like a Pro
  2. Justinmind – Rich interactive wireframes to define web and mobile applications
  3. Proto.io – Mobile prototyping
  4. UXPin – UX design tools built by UX designers
  5. AppGyver’s Prototyper – Turn wireframes into an interactive mobile app prototype
  6. App Mockup Tools
  7. WireKit – An iPhone app wireframe kit
  8. DevRocket – Photoshop panel plugin for iOS developers
  9. Fluid UI – Mobile Prototypes for iOS, Android and Windows Apps
  10. UI Stencils – Stencils, sketch pads and accessories for UI design
  11. App Cooker – Advanced iOS mockup generator for mobile applications
  12. Flinto – Quickly create iOS prototypes
  13. App Icon Template – App icon template for iOS 7
  14. PortKit – UX Metaphor Equivalents for iOS & Android
  15. iOS 7 Wireframe Kit
  16. SketchMirror – Preview your mobile apps directly on your devices
  17. Invision – Free Web & Mobile Mockup and UI Prototyping Tool
  18. Framer – Prototyping tool for animation and interaction
  19. Marvel – Free prototyping tool
  20. POP (Prototyping on paper) – iPhone App Prototyping Made Easy
  21. Mockabilly – App for creating mockups on iPhone
  22. Interface – Advanced mockup and prototyping for iOS
  23. Blueprint – Mockup iPad app for iPhone and iPad applications
  24. Proptotypes – Turn static designs intro a tappable iPhone prototype
  25. FieldTest – Create mobile interactive prototypes
  26. Dotted Paper