Hackaday Links: August 11, 2013

While we’re not much for fashion hacks, we’re reasonably impressed with [Karolina]’s faux Chanel bag made of chips. Apparently a grid of black squares is one of Chanel’s trademark looks, and a thousand or so QFP chips makes for a reasonable substitution.

News of the death of our retro edition has been greatly exaggerated. [Brandon] got an old Apple IIe up on the Internet and loaded up our retro edition, so we’re sort of obliged to mention him. He’s using a Super Serial Card connected to an OS X box running lynx. With getty running, he can shoot the output of lynx over to the Apple. Awesome.

Take an old Yamaha organ, convert the keyboard to MIDI, throw in a few Arduinos, thousands of LEDs, and a handful of bubble machines. What you end up with is the bubble organ, as seen at the Bass Coast Festival last weekend. If you want a hands on, you can also check it out at the Rifflandia festival in BC, Canada this September.

Some guy over on reddit created the smallest Arduino in the world. We’re looking at a rank amateur here, though. I’ve been working on this little guy for the last 18 months and have even created an open source cloud based github design for the production model. It’s less than half the size of a Digispark, and also Internet of Things 3D interactive education buzzword buzzword.

[Moogle] found an old Super 8 camera at an estate sale. No big deal right? Well, this one is clear, and it uses light-sensitive film. Your guess is as good as ours on this one, but if you know what’s up, drop a note in the comments.

One day [John] decided he would put a PC inside an old G3 iMac. After a year, it’s finally done. He took out the CRT and replaced it with a 15″ Dell monitor. The G3 was discarded for an AMD, and the internal speakers and slot-load CD drive still work. It’s a really, really cool piece of work.

17 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: August 11, 2013

  1. The clear film camera is a display model for retail stores. A common scam on Stanley Rd, Hong Kong was to sell these to unsuspecting tourists as a deluxe model. The tourist wouldn’t realise the mistake until they got home and it was too late to exchange. The store got these for nothing so it was money for jam.

    1. Sad to hear these were used to scam customers! :-o

      I work w/ a guy who was with Kodak for a very long time, and he said about as much sans the scammery (that’s a word right?): The clear models were produced for marketing purposes to show off the internal mechanisms, kind of like how car dealerships prop the hood open to show off the engine bay.

    2. I don’t suppose they’d work if you painted them black? As in, they at least had the clockwork or electric motor or whatever? Hm maybe they miss out on the lens, that’s a relatively expensive part.

      What is it with the Chinese anyway? I realise that most Chinese aren’t thieves or conmen, but why are most thieves and conmen Chinese?

      I know Europe and the USA had their day in the 19th Century with snake-oil and wood-shavings in food and suchlike. So maybe the Chinese government needs to use some of it’s famous inhumane and unaccountable justice on people like that. Long-term and even short-term, their country as a whole loses out from not being trustworthy in business.

    3. Super-8 stock came in sealed, light-tight cartridges. You didn’t ever (unless you were processing at home) open the cartridge or expose any more than the 1.5 frames of film visible at the gate. You can, and I have frequently done so, change cartridges in full sunlight.

      They aren’t 100% light-tight, but there’s no reason, as long as the optical path was “standard”, with no light leakage from the sides, that a clear camera wouldn’t work just as well as an opaque one.

      Super-8 is lovely, but getting film is harder and harder these days. For the more hack-minded, though, super8 frame size is almost identical to that of a 1 1/8 compact camera CCD sensor, IIRC.

        1. I rather think that’s the point he was trying to make. I’m pretty sure the barest of requirements to make an ‘arduino’ (meaning arduino-compatible) would be the micro programmed with some version of the arduino bootloader plus whatever hardware was actually required to make it work like a conventional arduino, that being at the very least (to my knowledge) a reset button and an LED.

          I myself have a smallish board that has the aforementioned button, a 10 pin ICSP header, and an ATmega168-PU; but I’d scarcely call it an ‘arduino’, even if there is an boards.ini available for just such a platform.

  2. At what point does an “Arduino” stop being such and just become an Atmel micro? I feel as though dev boards have their use but one really needs to know how to interface a bare chip directly. A microcontroller with a crystal soldered to the pins is NOT a dev board!

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