Hackaday Links: October 16, 2011

Spinning DNA animation using sprites

[James Bowman] shows a way to use sprites to simulate parts of DNA moving in 3 dimensional space. The animations are driven by an Arduino board and Maple board, which allows a comparison of the processing differences between the two. [Thanks Andrew]

Tiny Pong

This Pong game is so small (translated), you’ll be fighting over who gets a closer view of the screen.

More CNC halftone pieces

[Christian] made a bunch of halftone pictures with a CNC mill. He took the concept from [Metalfusion’s] halftone projects and ran with it. He even posted some video of the machining process (turn down your sound before viewing this one).

Most useless machine

[Jumbleview’s] take on the most useless machine makes the entire lid shut off this rocker switch, instead of using a separate arm for the task.

7400 rectifier

[Noel] is using a couple of 7400 chips in an unorthodox way to form a full-wave rectifier. They’re not powered, but instead used for the internal diodes. It’s his entry in the 7400 contest.

9 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: October 16, 2011

  1. kind of overkill to use 7400 chips as diodes.

    leds act as diodes if you connect them wrong they dont work.

    it may be possible to limit the current and connect directly to ac source.

    some really cheap led night lights or led based power saving bulbs may do that in effort to keep costs down.

    i will bet that is what is going on inside of led based christmas tree lights .

    not much more than resistor to limit current and maybe led as the diode.

    the internal diode i think is to protect the chip from static so it can be used by experimenters and to bleed off speed robbing static so the chips can switch faster.

  2. I did a little research when I did my 1.1″ pong watch… I think this beats the previous record holder — it was 0.2″ while this is 0.185″. The one I saw (not well publicized) had aprox 320×240 resolution & it looked really nice – you had to play it under a microscope. The kicker was that the processor and entire screen was in a package about a cubic centimeter.

    1. Really, the gameduino is a stellar little device, and James Bowman never ceases to impress me with some fine touches (like really transparent quality control procedures where you can see the test results of your device on the web, a nifty stack-overflow style forum, nice graphical posters showing the design of gameduino).

      At the Open Hardware Summit this year, he actually used a gameduino instead of a computer to run through his slides. Perfect.

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