Dimitris Platis

When teaching C++ to beginners, I often find myself explaining the switch statement. It’s a simple and powerful tool that allows you to execute different code blocks based on the value of integral types. At the same time, it has some drawbacks, like the lack of type safety, forgetting a break statement, and of course, that you are limited to integral types. Drawing some inspiration from other languages and the “Overload” pattern, I created cpp-switcheroo.

Reporting errors in a way that facilitates robust handling and debugging results in more correct and maintainable code. In this free Udemy course, I will teach you how to do that with C++, from the most basic to the most modern techniques.

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣ is here and so is my first course on Udemy!

Study smarter, not harder by creating cheatsheets out of videos with skonaki.

Have you noticed how many articles on the web are just a rehash of the same news? Few organizations are able to produce original content while most others are mostly aggregating, translating and rephrasing the same news. In many cases, their main contribution is a clickbait title to make the news more sensational. My new project, sycophant, aims to automate this process by utilizing the power of OpenAI and produce, potentially, opinionated articles based on the latest news.

Introducing a GitHub Action that can save you time and effort when it comes to writing pull request descriptions. platisd/openai-pr-description uses the power of OpenAI to automatically fill in the description of your pull request, based on the title and contents. It’s like having ChatGPT help you out!

You can study, use, modify, share, and sell an open source project. The latter may sound contradicting or even controversial, however, it is inferred by one of the fundamental rights granted to you by the so-called “four essential freedoms” of free software (i.e. “The freedom to redistribute copies”) as well as by the “Open Source Definition” (i.e. “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”). In this article, we will explore the different ways to make money with Open Source.

GitHub Copilot is a tool that provides real-time suggestions while developers write code. It offers much more than code completion, a feature found in most modern IDEs. Instead, it tries to predict what the developer wants to write from a couple of lines to entire blocks of code. Internally, GitHub Copilot leverages Machine Learning models trained on an unspecified number of open source projects, hosted by GitHub. Recently, it became publicly available at the price of 10$ a month which spawned some controversy. I have been using Copilot to write mostly C++, so let’s see what the fuss is about....

Do you want to mock your software’s dependencies so that you can unit test it easily? Is refactoring with the Dependency Injection (DI) design pattern not a convenient solution or an option at all? Then keep reading and I will show you a technique, that while it should normally be your last resort, it does allow you to mock most dependencies, without DI and typically, without changes to your code under test.

The Pointer to Implementation (pImpl) idiom in C++ is one technique that allows you to hide implementation details from an interface.

Implementations tightly coupled to their dependencies are difficult to maintain, reuse and test. In this tutorial, I will show you 5 ways of refactoring with the intent to “break” tight coupling between business logic and dependencies. A good indicator over the effectiveness of a decoupling is testability: If you are able to test your class and your class only without being influenced by the inner works of the various dependencies, then you know you have done a good decoupling. Below you will find some tightly coupled code and several ways to break it away from its dependencies. The focus will...

Learn how to write reusable and testable C++ following the Inversion of Control principle. The new tutorial focuses on writing code for embedded systems (ESP32 MCU) and exercises are included for you to practice.

If you are working on a product that involves software, you may realize a considerable number of the features you build are never utilized by your users. And while some of those may be there due to legal reasons, the fact that you spent resources with little to no return of your investment does not change. To make matters worse, these features increase the system’s complexity and make the remaining ones less discoverable. Combined with the understanding that the majority of the work which goes into a product is not in functionality that sets it apart from the competition, I...

Almost everyone claims to be agile. Some “in their way”, others more formally as part of a framework. From small startups to big automotive vendors and from development teams to HR, suggesting you are not agile is the equivalent of admitting you hate puppies or something equally shocking.

In our previous apartment, the gadget I was using daily was the VästtraPi which is a Raspberry Pi device with a 7” LCD screen connected to the internet indicating the next public transport departures. Since we moved, the new layout did not make it easy to have the screen mounted and continuously powered. Since the need to know when buses and trams leave remained, so it was time to use the E-paper display I bought last summer, to create… IoTink! (IoT + E-Ink 😂)

A Google Home Mini  recently made it into the collection of gadgets I use on a daily basis for casting music, setting count down timers, reminders, recipes etc. However the capabilities the software behind it, Google Assistant, expand way beyond that. We saw how it, one day soon, could be making calls and booking appointments for you during the Google IO 18 keynote. Additionally, it is expected to be the catalyst for driver experience, as brilliantly demonstrated by Volvo Cars in the promotional video of their next generation infotainment system. It runs native Android just like your smartphone! There is so...

Always fascinated by portable, low power devices and new ways to interact with them, I was very happy to discover these LCD displays that used to be on old Nokia phones and their consumption is in the micro-Amperes range. As it often happens, I had a solution and was looking for a problem. And that is how Dialectic Ball was conceived!

If you are like me and enjoy working on microcontroller projects it is more than likely that, at some point, you wished you had additional processing power, extra pins, parallel threads and so on. One way to tackle this is to get stronger hardware and another to optimize your code. A third is to… stack another microcontroller on top and thus Moltoduino was born!

After finishing a project, I torment myself on what to make next. While riding the bus home one day, an idea struck. How cool would it be if there was a small handheld gadget, able to encrypt USB sticks and SD cards just by plugging them into it. And thus the Cryptopuck was born!

In Gothenburg we are fortunate enough to have the local public transportation company, Västtrafik, maintaining its live schedule online and providing a public API for whoever needs to query it for their own applications. Consequently, there are plenty mobile solutions that provide access to the schedule, allow you to plan your trip etc. I have a problem though. In order to figure out when the next bus is arriving, I have to take my phone out, open the application, tap on my bus stop and finally check how many minutes I have left until I miss the bus.

During the last one year and a half I have been part of a voluntary initiative between the University of Gothenburg and the 1st Gymnasium of Rhodes which aims to introduce secondary school students to STEM through Maker and T-shaped education. As the first cycle of this project comes to a conclusion, it is time to write a short retrospective experience report. Let’s take it from the beginning.

When AVR meets AR, an autonomous wheelchair is born that gets to be introduced to the Chinese Premier of the State Council, Li Keqiang, during the 2016 Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship week in Shenzhen!

Are you using a paid Wifi hotspot service, which allows you to have Internet on various spots around the country? This convenience could come at a cost! If you are not careful enough, you might fall victim to - an easy to implement - phishing attack, therefore revealing your username and password to perpetrators. What is worse, is that the essential components cost around 30$ and can be hidden in one’s pocket! Want to learn how this can be done so you can tackle such attacks? Read on….

This article is about a simple PCB that I designed and enables the user to drive four separate LEDs (or other circuits) using one signal line. It is based on the ATtiny85 microcontroller by Atmel, which drives four NPN transistors. The aim is to document this board thoroughly, as it will be (hopefully) used by future teams attending the Carolo Cup competition, from Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg.

During the last term, my team and I were not the only ones creating a vehicle, controlled by Android. A group of first year students, at the Software Engineering and Management program, of the University of Gothenburg, were also developing one of their own. They created an Android application, which enables them to draw a path on the screen with their finger. This, is interpreted as a set of driving instructions to be sent via Bluetooth to an Arduino based vehicle, that executes them and therefore follows the drawn path. Let’s see how they describe their product.

Team Pegasus created an autonomous vehicle that utilizes machine vision algorithms and techniques as well as data from the on-board sensors, in order to follow street lanes, perform parking maneuvers and overtake obstacles blocking its path. The innovational aspect of this project, is first and foremost the use of an Android phone as the unit which realizes the image processing and decision making. It is responsible for wirelessly transmitting instructions to an Arduino, that controls the physical aspects of the vehicle. Secondly, the various hardware components (i.e. sensors, motors etc) are programmatically handled in an object oriented way, using a custom...

During presentations, I avoid being stationary and generally like to walk around in order to increase the interaction between me and the audience. However, I was constantly being faced with the burden of having to go back to the laptop, in order to change a slide or tell a person sitting by the laptop to do that. Not cool!

I am organizing a workshop on ATtiny85 programming this week, so I built a model truck that can either be remotely controlled or tasked to follow a line! Read on for the story behind it, schematics, photos and videos.

In this article I will cover the basics of a remote controlled kill switch that you can deploy in your house, your embedded project, your autonomous vehicle or anywhere else you see fit! After some months of absence from this blog, during which I was engaged in some very interesting projects [1] [2] I should write about at a point, I am back for this new little gadget I made.

Lurking around AliExpress listings looking for cheap polypod, spider-like chassis to make something interesting out of, I stumbled upon this, for about 10$. The problem: it was “dumb”. All it does is to walk towards one direction, as you can see in the following video from 0:27.

It has been more than two weeks since my findings regarding the vulnerabilities of the Tenvis JPT3815W network camera. Since then, these findings were re-posted and verified by other individuals like Craig Russel and thus far it was discovered that this vulnerability exists only in the 1.1.0.5. firmware. Thankfully, Tenvis took this more seriously, especially after Craig twitted them about this issue and they promised a fix. And indeed they did issue a fix, or at least they tried to. On 4th of July, I emailed them again, inquiring about a firmware update. Here’s their answer:

Hi everyone! This is my new blog that I’ll be writing on from now. It will be mainly focused in technology news and reviews, as well other topics that could be inspiring and interesting. Tutorials, how-to’s are also on the way!