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 project. I have been trying to simplify and unclutter my life lately, and to that end I’ve been having to recycle, donate, or throw out a lot of things.... Read More
Trying out Skeinforge Support Material
This is a quick photoblog and a video to document my first experience with using the support material options in Skeinforge. This was on my Makerbot Thing-o-Matic with a MakerGear stepper extruder, 0.35mm nozzle, and aluminum/kapton heated build platform. The model I’m printing is Yoshi, the familiar Nintendo character. I cleaned up and subdivided the original low-poly model in Blender, ran it through the Netfabb cloud for good measure, then... Read More
Propeller Bluetooth Stack Demo
After going months without a lot of time for working on my hobby projects, I finally had a few free days to work on debugging my embedded Bluetooth stack for the Propeller. I got it working well enough to demo a Serial Port Profile device, implemented using only a Propeller Demo Board and a $2 USB Bluetooth dongle. Original blog post More about the bit-banging USB host Forum thread Source code Read More
Gitaroo Man + DDR Pad
As much as I like the long, complicated projects that involve weeks of soldering, gluing, coding, tweaking, re-tweaking and debugging, it’s really refreshing to occasionally do something cool with no more than an hour or two of work. This mini-project was my boyfriend’s idea. It’s an experiment in cooperative two-player Gitaroo Man, played using a gamepad for attack/charge and DDR pad for defense. For those who aren’t familiar... 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, and most of the code that runs on the system. But all of... Read More
Robot Odyssey Mouse Hack 1
Yesterday I spent some more time reverse engineering Robot Odyssey. This was a great game, and it’s kind of a nostalgic pleasure for me to read and figure out all of this old 16-bit assembly. So far I’ve reverse engineered nearly all of the drawing code, big chunks of the world file format, and most of the code that’s responsible for moving around objects on the screen. So, I thought I’d try manipulating some of that data.... Read More
Robot Odyssey: 4-way low latency flip flop
Robot odyssey rocks. Also, I didn’t realize that you could upload a video captured with VMware Workstation directly to Youtube. It’s pretty neat that they support our video codec. Here’s a video of a chip I was just designing, a low-latency 4-way flip flop. Read More
The Kilowatt Clock
I thought I’d try putting together a YouTube video to show my latest crazy project. As usual, the schematic and firmware is in Subversion. Read More
Helicoptering
I’ve been remiss in my duty as blogger extroardinaire. A new hobby, and I haven’t yet informed the world! For the past couple months, I’ve been fascinated by R/C helicopters. As far as I can tell, this all started when I was at Fry’s drooling over the Lego Mindstorms in the toy aisle. The abundance of toy helicopters caught my eye. I didn’t buy one right then, but the thought was planted in my mind. I have been exposed... Read More