S/PDIF Digital Audio on a Microcontroller
A few years ago, I implemented an S/PDIF encoder object for the Parallax Propeller. When I first wrote this object, I wrote only a very terse blog post on the subject. I rather like the simplicity and effectiveness of this project, so I thought I’d write a more detailed explanation for anyone who’s curious about [...]
Ramona Flowers subspace purse
I’m pretty new at this, and this was my biggest sewing project so far. The piping around the edges got kind of messed up in places, but overall I’m happy with the results. Front: Two layers of green denim with heavy interfacing Rear and sides: Two layers of green denim with medium interfacing Strap: Three [...]
Sewing Machine Update: LCD
I had a rather cute 128×128 Nokia 6100 knockoff LCD that I wanted to use with the project. It’s inexpensive, not a bad quality/price tradeoff, and they’re pretty easy to interface with. Spark Fun already has plenty of drivers on their page for different microcontrollers. But of course, not a Propeller. And after searching through the Parallax forums, I couldn’t find any existing driver that was open source, fast, and that actually worked with my LCD.
Embedded Bluetooth for $2
This is a continuation of my experiments in bit-banging full-speed USB on the Propeller. I have the basic host controller working reasonably well now, so I started trying to do something a bit more “useful” with it by implementing a simple Bluetooth stack on top of it. Bluetooth and USB are both quite complicated, and [...]
Hacking a Digital Bathroom Scale
People all around the internet have been doing cool things with the Wii peripherals lately, including the Wii Fit balance board. Things like controlling robots or playing World of Warcraft. But what if you just want one weight sensor, not four? The balance board starts to look kind of pricey, and who wants to deal [...]
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Another Reason to Beware Bargain Basement Bluetooth
I was debugging a Bluetooth-related problem on a Windows...
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Graphics in VMware Fusion 3 and Workstation 7
I work on the graphics virtualization team at VMware....
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X-10 SmartRemote
I’m not even sure why I built this at all. I guess I did always have a childhood fascination with making things that seemed professional in some way. A simulacrum of some expensive piece of A/V equipment, or simple computer games that came in a shoe box with construction-paper cover art. This is another ancient [...]
Kiwi
Another nostalgic post about an old project that I’m purging from my closet… This time from late-1999 through mid-2000. The Kiwi was a rather ambitious built-from-scratch Linux PDA that I spent my high school years on. My original goal for this project was reminiscent of the One Laptop Per Child project. I liked typing my [...]
LEDboard/144
This is a 9×16 LED matrix I made by hand back in 2004, with LEDs I had left over from another, even sillier project. It has a USB interface powered by a PIC16C765 microcontroller, one of the first to feature a built-in USB device interface. This video post is something of a eulogy for the [...]
Duct tape RFID tag #1
This is just a messy first prototype, but I recently tried making an AVRFID tag on a substrate of duct tape. The first attempt involved: An upside-down strip of duct tape, as the base for everything else to stick atop 100 turns of AWG 40 magnet wire around a ~66mm diameter form, which I then [...]
CIA.vc service is down indefinitely
For those who haven’t seen it: CIA.vc is a web service I started about 8 years ago, as a way of Open Source projects tracking code changes in real-time over the web and IRC. This is probably going to come as a surprise to most of you reading this, but today I’ve taken the CIA.vc [...]
Neon Scope
It’s so hard for me to clean up my office. I’ll see a random collection of objects that I’m supposed to be sorting, putting away, and/or throwing in the garbage.. and I can’t help playing with them instead. This time the objects in question were an old CCFL backlight inverter, a neon flicker-flame bulb, and [...]
Cheap and easy Android to Propeller bridge
This is a quick plug for a spiffy project that M. K. Borri (spiritplumber) has been building using my usb-fs-host object. He’s connecting an Android phone to a Propeller microcontroller, emulating the ADB debug protocol on the µC, and using this as a communication bridge in order to control robots from the phone. He has [...]
S/PDIF Digital Audio on a Microcontroller
A few years ago, I implemented an S/PDIF encoder object for the Parallax Propeller. When I first wrote this object, I wrote only a very terse blog post on the subject. I rather like the simplicity and effectiveness of this project, so I thought I’d write a more detailed explanation for anyone who’s curious about [...]
Cube64 GameCube to N64 Adaptor
Enjoy retro N64 games, but can’t stand the controller? That’s the situation I found myself in about 7 years ago, back in 2004. So I built an adaptor, to use Game Cube controllers on the N64. (tl;dr… Cube64-DX on Google Code) The adaptor hardware is very simple- all you need is a PIC microcontroller. I [...]
Perler Bead Robot Ideas
This was originally going to be a comment response to Tim’s blog entry, Scanlime’s Perler Bead Hopper Sorting Suggestion: I was looking at Scanlime’s 3D Printed Vibrating Perler Bead Hopper: [video] and I was thinking how best to sort out the different color beads. I thought that if scanlime used one main hopper with the [...]