NYC Resistor

This has been around for a while but I’m just getting around to posting about it. The Resistor iPhone App is good for on the go Hardware Hacking. The typography is annoying and unnecessary (comic sans?!) but it’s useful and easy to use.

This is a great new product SparkFun is selling. It’s called the ScreenKey RGB Graphic Button and is described on the site as follows: ‘The RGB24T can be programmed to display any text or graphics on its 36×24 pixel display. The programmable backlight can illuminate the graphic display with many different colors. With a simple microcontroller, you can change the display and backlight once the button is pressed. It’s an on-the-fly configurable, multicolor, multidisplay button!’

Here is the link to the Example Code so you can play with it and have some fun. More info at screenkeys.com

Here is another great console application that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. This text based browser supports up to 256 colors (but due to the limitation of your console, it will most likely be 16 colors.) and displays web pages really well. In fact, on some non-large screen phones, I’d rather have this as my browser.

It also supports mouse clicks, which is great if you’re on a page with a large number of links. It even supports scrolling with the middle mouse wheel.

Some cool features that are rare in the console world are the ability to parse mild Java script, a download manager, and support for tables/frames.

It’s also extremely small and immune to shock sites. The browser’s most common use is to look up help information after an X server crash. I also use it a lot over ssh when I don’t want to download something locally and then upload it to my server. It is especially useful when the server requires authentication before getting the file.

Maybe not as useful as HTOP, but it’s still handy if your tired of white backgrounds that hurt your eyes. –Link

I thought I’d make the first Software post to the blog. And since I am always on the hunt for good console, non-GUI, based applications to make my life easier, I thought I should share one of my findings.

For those of you who use ever used Linux or Unix in an environment where you only had access to a terminal, and you wanted to see an overview of system resources, you have probably used top. Top is nice little task manger that displays whats running, and its memory, cpu, owner and so on. But its ugly and a bit hard to understand. It looks something like this:

I don’t like it at all, and searching for a something to replace it, I found HTOP. Their website doesn’t really glorify how great this tool is, and their screen shots are blah, so here is one of mine.

As you can see everything is pretty =). Shows you what all yours cores are doing, even in my beefy 8 core machine. The ownership of a process not only by the user, but by another process which called it. It also supports mouse clicks (one of the few terminal applications that do). And can be customized completely to your liking for each user on your system. In public spaces people are often wowed by it, because it looks so kick ass, especially in full screen.

It took some time to understand what the colors in the graphs were, so I’ll label them here. Red is system usage, blue is idle usage, and green is user usage.

This has been an application I have used almost daily for the past year. Its also a rare sight, as most console applications lack in the level of control that htop gives you. Enjoy it!

I’m currently exploring adding an accelerometer to a project I am working on. The most difficult part so far is figuring out how much tilt you should allow before executing an action. Accelerometers can be extremely sensitive, which is great for mainstream applications like the Wii and Nike running sneakers but I need much less sensitivity. That said, I found a great Processing application to visually show what your Arudino and accelerometer are doing, and how fast they are moving.

Click here to see the example

I found this cool site with lots of Wii and Atmel AVR controller hacks called Wind Meadow. There isn’t really much info on who runs it, other than some posts by ‘Chad’, but there are some great tutorials. Out of all the great hacks and projects worth looking at is definitely the ‘Wiimote Controlled Firefighting Robot’. ‘Chad’, also has a great tutorial (code included) showing you how to hookup a Wiimote to a microcontroller. If you’re wondering why there is so much interest in doing this vs just buying an accelerometer, it’s because the Wiimote costs $39 and there are lots of goodies inside including a 3 axis accelerometer which is $40 alone from most electronics sites. Anyway, check out the site when you have a chance.

http://www.windmeadow.com/

People often complain about the number of i/o pins available on the arduino microcontroller. There is a very simple solution for this that anybody readily using microcontrollers has probably considered: a parallel to serial shift register. This is probably one of the most useful tutorials I’ve seen started by Carlyn Maw and NYC Resistor’s own Tom Igoe on how to use them. This page is an excellent resource. shift register tutorial

Yes, I know what you are thinking: “that’s so obvious, its right on the arduino website.” I know right? Well good, then I won’t have tell you where to look the next time you are wondering how to read data from 8 switches while only using 3 pins on the arduino. This leaves you 10 i/o pins on your board.