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In College I remember rifling through my now tattered yellow Texas Instruments TTL Reference Book. Texas Instruments has been constantly developing interesting products and is holding an event called eTech Days where they will hold a number of online technical training sessions. It is going to be held tomorrow (November 17th), so have a look at the lineup, register and enjoy some interesting sessions tomorrow. I am looking forward to checking some of them out and hope to see some of you there! Via: HG Forum "On November 17th, 2009, please join us to interact with experts from Texas Instruments, TI Developer Network and the open source community, in technical training sessions and in the E2E Community forums. A full schedule can be found below, and see the Getting Started links to the right. Click here to register for the live training and we’ll see you on November 17th. |
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PyroElectro has built an interesting motor Optical Motor Encoder system that allows a sled to move back and forth using optical feedback to know where the sled is. A L298 DC Motor Controller is used to drive the simple DC motor that is used to precisely position the sled. You may remember this CD-ROM Read Head Actuator Head Scratcher article from earlier in the year where I was wondering how a simple DC motor could be used to precisely position a CD-ROM read write head. "The goal of this tutorial is to create a way to know where the ‘stage’ is, accurate to about 1/4” using optical encoding. The stage is controlled via a 12v motor so we will use an L298 motor controller for controlling the motor via a 18F4520 PIC. The PIC will use hardware PWM generators to output the correct frequency & duty cycle. The PIC will also take the analog input from the IR detector diode to keep track of how far the stage has moved via an internal analog to digital converter (ADC)." |
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Music selection is usually a boring process. It usually involves some common interface such as scrolling through titles on a portable player, using a remote for your stereo or a mouse on your computer. With this RFID Music Selection called the RFiDJ from Roteno Labs music is represented by tiles and the tiles graphically represent the music that can be expected. I can think of lots of opportunities for developing this much further into a very immersible system. Have a tap sensor so that a tap on the tile will play the next randomly selected song by that artist. I think having this at a party and have a system where guests can add their favorite song to a playlist is also something that would be very interesting! "The RFiDJ project is my first attempt at an application in Imperceptible Computing. After work I like to listen to music/radio for a bit to unwind. This usually involves logging into my HTPC and selecting a playlist. For this project I attempted to change how I interact with my music and HTPC. Using RFID tags and photo frame coasters I am attempting to simplify the interface to my music." |
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The prize this week is a loupe magnifier. This contest will run for one week (Nov 14 – 20, 2009) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:
The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries. ———————————–———- Added December 1, 2009 The item to guess was a Universal Joint The winner is Andrew S. (There were 81 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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It is nice to think that what we have in our head, and take for granted is a fantastic machine. Data centers across the country are using power like it is going out of style however when you put it into perspective that a computer with our brain power would use 10 megawatts of power we still have the data centers beat hands down. "According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb." 
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Morten Bentsen, a 17 year old from Norway made a system that would show him the quality of his internet connection at a glance. If you are into online gaming this could be something useful. "I recently made an indicator to show the status of my internet connection. It consists of a small VB.net application, which pings a certain site with a set interval (both user-changeable, and sets the DTR-pin of a serial port (port name is changeable) depending on the ping-answer. The DTR-pin goes to a small mosfet, which controls a small telecom relay. The relay is switching 24 volts to the LED-panels this is great for LAN-parties, because the participants can easily see if they are the only one who dont have internet, or if the whole party has lost it. There is one problem though, when I watch videos at youtube, the lights are blinking, because youtube is using all my bandwidth. (yeah I know, my internet connection sucks |
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Instead of purchasing a new iMac Dremmel Junkie opted to add some new features to his original iMac G4 such as a touch screen! "Because the monitor connects to its controller through a proprietary connector its difficult to use with upgraded equipment. My solution was to put a shelf on the back for the connectors. I then upgraded it with a surface acoustic wave touch screen, its high resolution does not distort the image at all." |
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