Category: hardware
trumpWap – Make the web great again
Remember when almost every image on the internet was trump?
With trumpWAP, we can make the web great again. This is huge.
Plug in the trumpWap and on day-1 you’ll get between 20% and 90% more trump (depending on your browsing habits). It’s that simple.
Continue reading for more examples of trumped up websites & apps, a perfunctory video demonstration, and info on getting your own trumpWAP!
Bigger is better: Build an Arduino-powered monster scrolling LED sign for about $15 a foot
Would you do with a massive full color animated LED display? How about…
- Read your Tweets in giant 140 char gulps from a block away
- Add English sub-titles to the Eiffel Tower
- Display a live-updating, 45 digit long countdown of the number of atoms left in the known universe
What if you could build the display however long you needed it, for only about $15/foot?
What if it was really easy to build and used everyone’s favorite low cost micro-controller so you could easily change the software to do whatever you wanted?
Well you can! Read on for details and perfunctory video!
Parallel Processing Arduino Style – Make Massive NeoPixel Displays With Nanoscale Concurrent Computing
We’ve already seen that it is possible to drive thousands of WS2812B NeoPixels with a lowly Arduino using careful bit-banging. But what if we could bang out 8 bits at a time rather than sending them single file? Could it be possible to drive 8 times as many strings (or get 8 times the refresh rate) from our Arduino by processing bits in parallel? It would be like having a tiny pipelined GPU render engine inside our Arduino!
Read on to find out the results of a quick proof-of-concept test!….
New GE C-Sleep Smartbulb Teardown- Part #1
Making a smart color-changing light bulb is not that hard, but making one that is cheap to mass produce is hard. At $10 per bulb (delivered!), the new GE C-Sleep bulbs are amazingly cheap, especially considering they include a Bluetooth radio.
For Part #1, let’s look at the physical design and construction of these fancy bulbs!
AVR Coding Challenge: How many ways can you twiddle this bit?
The canonical way to set the interrupt bit on AVR is the sei (enable interrupt) instruction, but there are many creative and devious ways to set a bit.
Before you click more, see if you can think of every possible way to set the I bit in SREG, then read on to see if I missed any!
Getting Real – Using Blind Send SPI to Turbocharge the Adafruit DotStar Libraryspi,
Last time, we experimented with spiritual blind-sending as a way to theoretically speed up SPI on AVR. While there were lots of fancy oscilloscope traces and impressive demo code, there is nothing like an actual, real, practical application to get people excited. Read on to see how much faster we can make the already highly optimized AdaFruit DotStar library with a little blind-sending action… (spoiler alert – the answer is lots more faster!)
Continue reading
SPI with a Blindfold On- speed up by letting go and trusting the machine
Constantly checking to see if the coast is clear feels responsible, but it wastes cycles. Sometimes it is better to leap (or load) without looking. With a little hand-coded assembly, we can run our AVR processor lock-step with the SPI hardware and blindly dump new bytes into it at precisely the right moment. Because we don’t spend any time reading and testing status bits, we can increase the maximum throughput by more than 20%. If the prospect of screamingly fast yet perfectly safe SPI turns you on, read on…
Continue reading
Inductive power on the cheap – Philips Imageo Tea Light Teardown
How can Philips sell a set of 6 inductively rechargeable LED lamps with charger and glass holders for less than $80 retail? It takes some careful and clever value engineering. Let’s crack one open and see if we can figure out what tricks and techniques they used!
Ghost Guitar – Self Strumming Strings
Normally fingers provide the force needed to set a guitar’s strings vibrating, but with some simple electronics we can make a self-strumming guitar that plays itself without any moving parts at all. It is better than magic- its physics! Click on for a full explanation of how it works and a video of the ghost guitar rocking itself out (it really does make some creepy and spooky sounds)…
Plates vs Coils – An alternative approach to wireless power transmission
Inductive power transfer is all the rage. There are now easy chips that do all the hard work for you. It even came built-in on my new phone!
But what about capacitive power transmission?
How come I’ve never seen a product that uses plates rather than coils? Is capacitive power transfer possible? Practical? Let’s break out a roll of tinfoil and find out!