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Hack A Day (6 unread)

Kaossilator on the cheap

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 5:00pm MDT by James Munns

We recently stumbled on a way to turn a regular laptop into a poor man’s Kaossilator. Using the touchpad of your laptop, some PureData software, Touchpad2MIDI and a couple custom patches, [zenpho] has set everyone up to create that crazy electronic music that kids listen to these days. But what was that? You cant afford [...]
A Black Box Mystery

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 4:00pm MDT by James Munns

One of the members of the SomethingAwful forum recently found a black project box on the street (as seen above), with no idea what the thing did. After (hopefully) making sure there were no explosives, [noapparentfunction] posted a picture online to see if someone could figure it out. According to them, this is what the [...]
Human Tetris: object tracking on an 8-bit microcontroller

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 3:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Elaborating on an item previously mentioned among last weekend’s Cornell final projects list, this time with video: For their ECE final project, [Adam Papamarcos] and [Kerran Flanagan] implemented a real-time video object tracking system centered around an ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Their board ingests an NTSC video camera feed, samples frames at a coarse 39×60 pixel resolution (sufficient for simple [...]
Hack a Day’s Dictionary of Questionable Utility™

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

We frequently receive inquiries from eager readers asking how they can best get started in electronics and computer projects. Countless great books have been written on these subjects, and of course now there’s our answers.hackaday.com site. But there’s a difference between being “book smart” and being “street smart.” What are the terms that you really need to know [...]
Minimalist AVR programmer is just fab!

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 1:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Whether you’re burning a new bootloader to an Arduino board, or doing away with a bootloader to flash Atmel chips directly, an in-system programmer (ISP) is an indispensable tool for working with AVR microcontrollers. If cost has held you back, it’s no longer an excuse: FabISP is a barebones USB-based AVR programmer that can be pieced together [...]
Button mapping for all

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 8:02am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Tim] came across a Kotaku story about a handicapped gamer who’s starting an Internet petition for button mapping features in all games. First of all, watch this guy play Modern Warfare 2 with a stock control, he’s got some mad skills. We’d normally be looking for a hardware solution like this PS3 Frankenstein controller or [...]