Tags: Javascript

All 3D printers require on-board code to translate textual commands (called GCODE) into movement and molten plastic. For this job, most RepRaps (and many commercial 3D printers) rely on Marlin, a compact, adaptable, and streamlined firmware. Marlin's flexibility comes from having a huge number of configurable options. In this article (and accompanying video) I'll be discussing the challenges of building a configurator to help wrangle Marlin's many options, and I'll be showing off some cool Javascript tricks in the process.

Drupal sites are great looking and perform well due to smart caching. But out of the box they still rely on reloading whole pages for site navigation. There are a few modules for applying AJAX to different elements, but none of them fully serve the needs of thinkyhead.com so I rolled my own solution. Here's the code we use to make our Drupal-style menus load their content into the content region, which should be adaptable to any site. In the future we'll look at building a module out of this code.

Making one Javascript to support many versions of Drupal can be a real chore. Each release of Drupal uses different versions of jQuery, for one thing. Drupal behaviors haven't changed much between D7 and D8, but D6 is different, and D5 doesn't even have them. How can writers of Javascript libraries deal with all this diversity? Here are some snippets to help build scripts that can support D5 through D8. Why Drupal 5? Why not?!