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Archive: Computers

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January 14, 2010

How-To: Model a skull-badge in OpenSCAD

Hack a Day's Devlin has posted a great tutorial on using OpenSCAD (Clifford Wolf's fantastic, free CSG 3D modeling program) to model Hack a Day's trademark "skull badge" from this year's CES. I posted my own (much, much more basic) OpenSCAD tutorial a couple weeks back.

Google files patent on Streetview billboard ad replacer

Google has just filed a patent application for a method to automagically detect billboards in Streetview-type imagery and replace them in real time with Google's own dynamically-generated ads. It's just a patent application at this point, so there's no way of knowing if it's actually going to happen yet. Still, an interesting idea. [via Gizmodo]

January 10, 2010

MIT wins DARPA's luftballoons challenge

A team from MIT has claimed the $40,000 grand prize in DARPA's recent social networking challenge. The prize went to the first team to successfully report the locations of 99 ten large red balloons positioned at random locations around the continental United States. MIT's strategy involved the construction of an incentivized social network in which pieces of the reward were distributed along the entire "chain" connecting the network to a person reporting the location of a balloon: the actual reporter was awarded $2000, the person who invited the reporter was awarded $1000, the person who invited that person was awarded $500, and so on up the chain. I wonder if bail bondsmen and/or police could adopt a similar strategy to locate fugitives? [via The Computational Legal Studies Blog]

More:

January 4, 2010

Graffiti Markup Language week at Fatlab

Evan Roth at Free Art and Technology writes:

Welcome to GML week @fffffat! Graffiti Markup Language (GML) is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. Gestural graffiti motion data of a tag created in GML-supported software is saved as a text file with a “.GML” extension…. a new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals.

FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including Graffiti Analysis, Laser Tag and EyeWriter to be GML compliant.

Please stay tuned to FAT all this week as we publish new GML related projects each day. There will be multiple new free software releases, open data repositories, iphone apps, robots, guest bloggers and more. GML week is now officially open for business.

December 31, 2009

Fossil tech

Artist Christopher Locke makes these cool "fossilized" versions of obsolete techno-artifacts. Shown above is Asportatio acroamatis or the common cassette tape. Christopher explains his technopaleontology:

Most of these examples were discovered in the United States, although the various species are represented all over the world. It is sad, but most of these units lived very short lives. Most people attribute the shortened lifespan to aggressive predators or accelerated evolution, but this is not necessarily true. It has been shown recently that the true demise of most of these specimens came from runaway consumerism and wastefulness at the high end of the food chain.

[Thanks, Mauricio!]

Boost a 3G signal with a saucepan

Teemu shares a quick & easy method for improving signal reception with a 3G modem using nothing but a USB extension cord + cookware. Makes sense considering similar methods employed for use with wifi adapters - mayhaps something a bit more parabolic may be in order?[via Slashdot]

December 29, 2009

Learn to write games using Python

Interested in learning how to program, or know someone who is? Then you might want to check out Al Sweigart's free book, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. Now in it's second edition, the Creative Commons-licensed book was written to help anyone, young or old, learn to program in the powerful Python language.

From the introduction:

Programming isn't hard. But it is hard to find learning materials that teach you to do interesting things with programming. Other computer books go over many topics that most newbie coders don't need. This book will teach you how to program your own computer games. You will learn a useful skill and have fun games to show for it!

This book is for:

Anyone who wants to teach themselves computer programming, even if they have no previous experience programming.

Kids and teenagers who want to learn computer programming by creating games. Kids as young as 9 or 10 years old should be able to follow along.

Adults and teachers who wish to teach others programming.

Anyone, young or old, who wants to learn how to program by learning a professional programming language.

It looks like it could be a great place for a budding programmer to start, and since it available online for free, why not check it out? [via O'Reilly Radar]

Piano that speaks!

By way of Alden Hart at HacDC comes this amazing computer-controlled analog piano that speaks, *almost* comprehensible English, when a frequency spectrum of a child reading the text of the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court is transferred to robot fingers that press the piano's keys. Creepy. Cool. [Thanks, Alden!]

Speaking Piano - Now with (somewhat decent) captions!

December 23, 2009

USB Hourglass random number generator

This is my new, favorite random number generator (old favorite: lava lamps):

It watches falling sand in an hourglass with an optical sensor. That data is sent via the Arduino USB output to the PC where it's analyzed. This entropy is useful for all your random number needs. My favorite part: when the hourglass runs dry a servo motor flips it over and it starts again.

Says maker Peter Allan:

With the USB Hourglass, the user can look at the sand falling through the center of the hourglass and monitor the randomness in the USB output data. And one can read the code line-by-line, compile it, and upload it to the microcontroller using only open-source and widely supported tools.

USB Hourglass

[Thanks, Scott Burris!]

December 21, 2009

Simavr, an AVR microcontroller simulator

Enjoy programming AVR microcontrollers, but wish there was a better way to debug your programs than blinking lights? The best option is probably be to get a hardware debugging tool like the AVR Dragon, however it has a reasonably steep learning curve. An easier option might be to use the Simavr, a new software emulator for AVR chips. In addition to emulating the functionality of the AVR microcontrollers, it has a library that you can use to emulate peripherals, such as buttons or LED screens.

Ok, anyone want to use this to add Meggy Jr. support to MAME? [via adafruit]

December 18, 2009

Futurepicture, a homebrew light field camera

Ever take a photograph, and realize after the fact that you focused on a tree in the background instead of your subject's face? Wish you could go back and fix it? Well, unfortunately you can't if you used a regular camera, however if you had a plenoptic camera it would be no problem. Instead of capturing a flat, 2D array of pixels, a plenoptic camera uses an array of microlenses to capture 4D lightfield data. This data can then be processed to create a final image that is focused on any part of the scene.

Daniel Reetz and Matti Kariluoma wanted to experiment with light field photography, but you can't really buy one of these cameras, so they built one themselves. Instead of using a single camera and microles array, however, they decided to use rapid prototyping equipment and a bunch of point&shoot; Canon cameras loaded with the SDM firmware, and the result is the Large Light Field Camera Array. Plans aren't available yet, however they are pledging to release the whole thing as an open source/hardware project. Looks great, guys! [via teamdroid]

December 17, 2009

Celebrating PC "kustom kulture" at Exploratorium

Many years ago, back in the early days of computer modding, I did a piece for Details magazine where I "predicted" that PCs would become the next generation's muscle cars. That's pretty much become the case (...er no groaning puns intended) and that's what the San Francisco Exploratorium will be celebrating in their "Rods & Mods: The Kustom Kulture of Radical Computer Modification" show, Thursday-Saturday, February 11, 12 and 13, 2010.

For three days in February, the Exploratorium showcases the innovations and outlaw aesthetics of custom computer culture at Rods & Mods: The Kustom Kulture of Radical Computer Modification. An outgrowth of the hacker community, personal computer modding was born from the need for speed and personal style. From Thursday through Saturday, February 11-13, from noon to 5pm, look under the hood of this creative subculture and explore the hacking geekery that ignited a billion-dollar design industry. Rods & Mods features a showroom of souped-up PCs, restored classics, and experimental computers, as well as workshops, presentations, and a parts swap. Modders will be on hand throughout the event to discuss their work. This event is included in the price of admission.

Rods & Mods: The Kustom Kulture of Radical Computer Modification

December 15, 2009

SPARK Project #3, Post #5

In my previous SPARK post, I created a program that sends serial port commands via an XBee transceiver to control lights plugged into a modified power strip. It was nice to see this level of functionality, but since this is my last SPARK post, I wanted to add a little pizzazz to the project. The eBox 2300 computer I am using has audio in and audio out. I thought it'd be cool if I had lights flashing in coordination with music. The more lights I have, the cooler the effect. So I grabbed several more of my hacked power strips, added some code to the Windows Embedded program, and had a nice little light show sequenced to flash along to Herbie Hancock's Chameleon.

The power strips happen to be great project enclosures for my line voltage powered electronics.

Continue on to the SPARK site for video of the flashing light array and more information about hacking power strips for XBee control!

December 9, 2009

How-To: Make a wooden keyboard enclosure

This great tutorial on building a wooden keyboard case is just the tip of the iceberg at Matthias Wendell's impressive "woodworking for engineers" site. [via Hack a Day]

December 8, 2009

DIY telepresence RC car

Charles Palen writes in to share his RC telepresence car. By combining a remote control car, netbook, and his homebrew USB-based RC Interceptor, he was able to create a robot that could be controlled over a WiFi connection. To make it a telepresence car, he used the open source Red5 Flash server to stream video to and from the bot.

I'd like one of these to use to spy on my cat when I'm not at home. What would you do with one?

SPARK Project #3, Post #4

In my previous post, I finally started to make some progress with my Windows Embedded CE project. I was able to get a simple test application running which could send and receive messages via a serial port on my iCop eBox 2300 computer. I first sent messages to a host computer using an RS232 crossover cable. Once I confirmed that there were no problems sending and receiving messages or changing the baud rate, I cut the cable and plugged in a pair of XBee modules in place of the crossover cable. I wasn't ready to install custom device drivers in my Windows Embedded CE operating system image, so I used an XBee serial explorer ordered from SparkFun to connect an XBee to the eBox computer. After confirming that everything was working as expected, I was ready to modify the serial port test application to run my wireless light controller.

The secret sauce is my home-brew Arduino clone running from a capacitive power supply.
More about that next week!

Before I continue, I want to briefly reflect on some of the steps required to get my program to finally work. I initially suspected that I had a serial port buffer overrun problem, since I couldn't send messages longer than 16 characters. When I noticed that my serial port test program would hang at the end of a serial port transmission of any length, I started to think that the problem may be interrupt related instead of buffer related. If the serial port call was waiting for a "buffer empty" signal before it returned control to my program, hanging at the end of a transmission meant that it never got that signal. Since I had been editing a number of serial port settings in the BIOS and registry while trying to disable or reroute serial debugging messages, I might have inadvertently modified a critical registry key. Rather than retrace my steps and restore the factory settings, I started with a clean copy of the BSP to build the operating system image. I had also notice that many of the build directories for my Visual Studio 2005 installation were pointing to a more recent version of Visual Studio on my computer. After mapping all the directories to the correct location, I rebuilt the operating system using clean copies of all the drivers and BSP.

Finally, everything worked flawlessly when I tested the new operating system with the simple Visual Basic serial port terminal example from Samuel Phung's Windows Embedded CE 6.0 online resources.

Follow along at the SPARK site!

Power outlet with USB charging ports

You can pre-order yours now at Fastmac. Supposedly they will ship "in early 2010." Or you could just make your own. If you try it, remember Louie the Lightning Bug: "You gotta play it safe around electricity." [via Slippery Brick]

December 7, 2009

OpenFrameworks for magic projection

Zach Lieberman's been working with the Virtual Magician on Magic Projection 1.0, an OpenFrameworks-based projection system for interactive magic shows. Very cool!

More:

The EyeWriter

December 5, 2009

PCB collage screensaver via Flickr feed

Jeff of mightyOhm uses OS X's built-in RSS screensaver to keep up with the Printed Circuit Boards Group he admins on Flickr. Of course the feature will work with any Flickr feed (including our own). Commenters on Jeff's post point out that Picasa can be used for similar results on Windows machines. Nice - this gives me reason to once again run a screensaver.

December 3, 2009

Google Public DNS

Pt 2367
Google Public DNS - handy... just remember 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 - my ISP's DNS is always slow, this one and OpenDNS are better. There is a lively debate in the comments about how freaky it may or may not be to give google this type of access/control, etc of your internets, join in!

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