phooky

SPUR OF THE MOMENT COMBINATION HACKFEST AND BAKE SALE*

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Mar 092011

In honor of the successful final mission of the storied Space Shuttle Discovery, we’ve decided at great personal expense to have a last-minute Space Shuttle Discovery** Memorial Hack Fest at NYC Resistor this Saturday, March 12th, from 4:30 to 11 pm! Stop by with your crazy in-progress projects and help them progress! We’ll be having a show and tell at the end of the evening, so stick around and make things move, blink, and buzz!

*We will be selling pre-fried packets of exotic Ramen noodles at the attainable price of one dollar.

**Special thanks to the anonymous NASA employee who managed to snag us one of the hubcaps. We’ll make a plaque!

Badge Hacking at HOPE

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Jul 172010

Travis Goodspeed and others designed a very, very sweet little MSP430-based badge for this year’s HOPE. It allows the OpenAMD project to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing by broadcasting a unique ID. However, we’ve discovered that there are some people, like Travis himself, who aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could help out by being Travis, too? Well, now you can! Opendopple is a cute little modification to the stock firmware that allows you to clone others. Just trigger the rightmost general I/O pin, and it will clone the ID and sequence number of the next packet it can find. Resetting your badge will restore your original ID.

You can find the source here. Read the readme, and have fun!

Quickie Hack: DXF Parabola

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Apr 112010

Zach needed a parabola in QCAD, so I whipped up a quick script to generate DXF parabolas. Source inside.

March Madness Backlog: Microcontroller Pixel Font

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Mar 222010

It’s been a while since we had a March Madness post, so here’s a little snippet from this past weekend: a script for processing small pixel fonts for use in 8-bit AVR applications. Like this:

I couldn’t find any free 7-pixel-high fonts that I liked, so I whipped one up in GIMP. Here’s the source image that I generated the font from:

Getting a raw B&W image into a usable format after the cut.

March Madness: Spherify!

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Mar 042010

I can’t just sit on the sidelines glowering at all the happy coders all month. Here’s my first code snippet for the month: spherify!

It’s a simple little python script that uses an image file as a heightmap, maps it on to a sphere, and spits out an STL file. It can be charitably described as “crude”. Usage:

Usage: spherify.py [options] source

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPATH, --output=OUTPATH
                        output to given path
  -r RADIUS, --radius=RADIUS
                        radius of lowest point in mm
  --height=HEIGHT       additional radius of highest point in mm

You’ll need to have the python imaging library installed to use it. Source after the break.
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Old Video Games

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Feb 042010

Before there was Mario Kart, there was Mystery Cart:

Shelby found this Atari 2600 cart lodged in the floor under an eighty-pound steel plate at the new Resistor space. Other than a ’78 copyright, there’s no indication of what game it might be. Anyone care to make a guess before we hook it up and read the ROM?

Le manipulateur automatique est arrivé!

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Nov 182009

Charles picked up the robot arm Kurt was getting rid of tonight. Thanks, Kurt! It’s beautiful. We took it apart, and took pictures.

Numitron Clock

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Oct 052009

Just before he silently stole away on a secretive mission to distant lands, Ranjit left a hoard of lovely obsolete electronics at the lab. Among the treasures were a couple of old counting units with 7-segment incandescent displays, sometimes called numitrons. I’ve turned this one into a simple clock.