Zen photon garden

Lately I’ve been spending more time working on creative projects. I would say focusing on creative projects, though sometimes focus seems counterproductive. As a project hurtles toward one goal, it leaves a trail of sharp edges and unanswered questions that lead to completely new projects. This happened recently. In the course of designing a triangular pixel grid prototype... Read More

How we built a Super Nintendo out of a wireless keyboard

I wrote a guest article for Adafruit about the story behind the new Sifteo cubes: In today’s world, video game consoles have become increasingly complex virtual worlds unto themselves. Shiny, high polygon count, immersive, but ultimately indirect. A video game controller is your gateway to the game’s world—but the gateway itself can be a constant reminder that... Read More

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 the gritty details. This is a recent video by Nick at... Read More

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 layers of green denim Star: Blue and black felt Hardware:... Read More

Sewing Machine Update: LCD

Life has been super crazy lately, and I haven’t taken much time out lately for hacking on projects. This weekend, though, I finally got that magic combination of time and motivation back, yay. The occasion: I still owe my boyfriend some cute plushies. Oh, and perhaps I want to try sewing myself a skirt. (Maybe someday I’ll even make a North Skirt). But for any of that,... Read More

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 this project is implementing only tiny fractions... Read More

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 with Bluetooth if you don’t have to? I’ve had a couple... Read More

DIY Sewing Machine Retrofit

The story behind this project is a bit overcomplicated. That’s all below, if you’re interested. I made a video to explain the final product: Back Story This all started when I bought a sewing machine for making fabric RFID tags a little over a year ago, and started using it to make cute plushy objects. Well, as much as I like making plushy objects, I haven’t actually... Read More

Temporal Hex Dump

After building some hardware to trace and inject data on the Nintendo DSi’s RAM bus, it became obvious pretty fast that there’s a lot of data there, and (as far as I know) no good tools for analyzing these sorts of logs. The RAM tracer has already given us a lot of insight into how the DSi works by virtue of letting us inspect the boot process, the inter-processor communication,... Read More

DSi RAM tracing

It seems like a lot of people have been seeing my Flickr photostream and wondering what I must be up to- especially after my photos got linked on hackaday and reddit. Well, I’ve been meaning to write a detailed blog post explaining it all- but I keep running out of time. So I guess a “short” blog post is better than nothing. The executive summary is that I’ve... Read More