Day: January 13, 2012

Hackaday Links: January 13

January 13, 2012 by 18 Comments

An 8×8 LED Matrix Game Grows Up:

[Pixel Land] is an iPhone game similar to [Super Mario Brothers] using a virtual array of 8×8 pixels. This wouldn’t normally be interesting, but we’ve actually featured “this” game as an 8×8 LED matrix game.

How to Drill Golf or Ping-Pong Balls:

Drilling golf or ping-pong balls is not easy.  This simple drill press fixture makes that job easier and repeatable. So the next time you want to make lots of diffusers for your LED board, this might be a good device to consider!

The PICkit 2:

If you’ve ever wanted to get into PIC programming, possibly the PICkit 2 would be for you. [Ray] has written a review of his first experiences with setting it up and programming.

Mr Bitey is hungry for resistors!

Is light industrial machinery a hack? It’s a hard thing to define, but if so [Mr. Bitey] would meet the qualifications.  It also meets the qualifications of having a great video, and name, so be sure to check it out!

A [Snap Circuits] Programmable Robot:

The robot pictured above on [Instructables] was built using [Snap Circuits], with parts that literally snap together. A neat concept, this construction set seems to fall somewhere between traditional Legos and push-in breadboards.

An E-paper Information Panel

January 13, 2012 by 19 Comments

With all the Kindles and Nooks we’re bound to find at yard sales and thrift shops in the coming years, this might be useful. [Chris] made a door-mounted e-paper display to keep himself up to date on recent events.

The hardware comes from an e-paper development kit [Chris] and his friend [Deian] were given a few years back. The dev kit sat in a dusty drawer until [Chris] decided to do something with it. With his door looking like a suitable palette, [Chris] decided to make an information panel that displays the date, his calendar, the weather, and a few RSS feeds.

There was already a Gumstix single board computer attached to the e-paper display, so [Chris] wrote a few scripts on his server and upload information to the paper display. The server renders the display as a PNG image at 800×600 resolution, converts it to PGM and compresses it for the Gumstix. There is a script running on the Gumstix to download the image from the server every five minutes and put it up on the display.

With the awesome readability and low power consumption of e-paper, we’re surprised we haven’t seen a project like this before. Guess we’ll have to wait until Kindles start showing up at flea markets.