Turn your Playstation 3 into Linux-based Lab Equipment

posted Sep 11th 2008 9:00pm by
filed under: home entertainment hacks, misc hacks

In a two-part series called “PS3 Fab-to-lab” on IBM’s awesome developerWorks website, [Lewin] explains how to use the Cell Broadband Engine in a PS3 to create an audio-bandwidth spectrum analyzer and function generator. The set up consists of Yellow Dog Linux, an NTSC television, and an external USB sound card to provide the inputs of the spectrum analyzer and the outputs of the function generator. The sound card driver is written to simply capture or send the info in question (audio range only) and the NTSC television as the graphical interface. This hack involves a lot of coding with hardly any example code provided. The article is more of a guide than anything. If anyone gets this working, let us know!

[via Digg]

[photo: Malcom Tredinnick]



10 Responses to Turn your Playstation 3 into Linux-based Lab Equipment

  • Liam says:

    With more example code, I could replace half of my lab equipment with a PS3…

  • Is there any particular reason this is being done with a PS3 and not say, a very cheap 2nd hand dell?

  • Andrew says:

    The picture looks like it’s actually running Ubuntu Linux!

  • njakol says:

    @michael, yes it’s because of the very powerful cell-processor
    that the ps3 have.

  • @Andrew says:

    It is running Ubuntu linux. The PS3 has been running Ubuntu since 7.04 and also runs Fedora Core, Yellow Dog, OpenSUSE 11.0 and Gentoo.

  • Wow good stuff, thanks for the good read.

  • I read two times, printed out and hung it on the fridge. Yes, indeed, should understand this too long!

  • Nice article about the playstation 3. thanks :)

  • XBox Support says:

    Haha, gotta love Linux. This is awesome!

  • Leave a Reply

    XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

    Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web as well as hacking related news.

    Send us your hacks










         




    Hacks

    Resources