Trammell came across a cache of punched paper tape recently. My immediate impulse was to create the most primitive tape reader possible. Thusly: The rig is composed of a Teensy++ 2.0, eighteen red LEDs, eighteen resistors, and a few bits…
So, once in a while, I wake up feverish in the middle of the night, screaming “CLAMPS! I NEED MORE CLAMPS!” Oh, you too, huh? It’s your lucky day! Or rather, this coming Sunday, April 7th is your lucky day,…
These are seven layers of a backlight from an old laptop LCD. The amount of optical engineering required to produce a nice, even glow from an edge-lit panel is impressive. (Be careful if you’re taking one apart yourself– until recently…
As midnight approached this New Year’s Eve– as champagne bubbled from uncorked necks and we all prepared for the coming year in various postures of revelry or bleak resignation– I grappled silently with the pivotal question of our time: “How…
A quick reminder– there’s no craft night this Thursday, November 22nd, due to ectoplasmic containment issues corresponding to an influx of angry turkey ghosts. Happy Thanksgiving!
Heading to Toorcamp? Take a second to cast around your hackerspace, workshop, or trash heap and grab any interesting-looking ROMs you come across (or just any sufficiently interesting/old PCBs). I’ll be there with one of Trammell’s incredible super-tiny readers, a…
Last week I posted a screed about that peculiarly modern variant of grave-robbing, ROM-dumping. That was the Why; this post is the How. Dumping the contents of a ROM onto your computer is surprisingly simple. All you need to get…
Hey, you know what’s great? Numbers. Everybody loves numbers! I love numbers, you love numbers. Numbers are the best. But you know who doesn’t love numbers? Laptop manufacturers, who are horrible trolls with hearts of coal. They are so opposed…
CHANGING TO ISOCRATIC MODE OF OPERATION ABORTS GRADIENT AND LEAVES EVENTS IN THEIR CURRENT STATE There are incoherent, mumbling ghosts everywhere. A lot of the time they look like this. These are 80’s-era erasable programmable read-only memories, or EPROMs. They…
Did you manage to get tickets to Burning Man this year? Seriously? Congratulations! Now light them on fire and get your ass to ToorCamp instead. There are plenty of prescriptions for summertime fun. You can go to the best indoor…