Hackaday Links: July 9, 2017

Doom is now running on the ESP32. This is some work from [Sprite_tm], and the last we heard about Doom on the ESP32 is that there was a silicon bug or something. Now we’re knee deep in the dead on a tiny WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled microcontroller.

Loading animations have a long and storied history. What originally began as an hourglass quickly turned into a hand counting to five and progress bars. There were clocks, the Great Beach Ball of Death, and now loading animations are everywhere. However, the loading animation has still not been perfected — until now, that is. This is a fidget spinner loading animation. It’s beautiful.

Just a quick reminder that a Minecraft scholarship exists. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but there is a scholarship from the Klingon Language Institute for studying any language, and last year’s winner built a redstone computer from scratch,

[8bit generation] recently released a documentary, about the rise of Atari. Easy to Learn, Hard to Master is about the rise of Atari under [Nolan Bushnell]. Now [8bit generation] is working on a new documentary: Firing Steve Jobs. The [Steve Jobs] story is fascinating, and no matter what you think of him, he probably knew what he was doing.

Want to build and sell some hardware? Over on Tindie, we’re taking a look at some of the most successful designers of custom crafted hardware. This time it’s [Albertas Mickėnas] of Catnip Electronics who has sold five thousand soil moisture sensors.

You can just go out and buy a CNC machine, but that doesn’t quite underscore the difficulty in getting a CNC machine running. Our ‘ol pal [Jeremy] recently picked up a Romaxx CNC machine and put together a video of its commissioning. There’s a lot of work here, from building a shelf/stand for a rather beefy machine to cutting into the bed for t-tracks, and figuring out how dust collection is going to happen.

Before there was KiCad and Eagle and a ton of web-based PCB design tools, there was Autotrax. Want to know what PCB design and GUIs look like in DOS? I did a walkthrough for designing a small PCB in the DOS version of Autotrax late last year. There are thousands of designs locked up in discontinued EDA suites, and [Erich] has a way to revive them. He’s developed an Autotrax/Easytrax layout import/export plugin for pcb-nd. Now legacy Protel designs can be imported into software released in this century. This is really cool, and you can check out some screenshots here.

14 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 9, 2017

        1. Don’t feel bad about your writing:

          The word “the” can easily be replaced by a colon “:” when referencing a noun, however it cannot be used in a particle sense, i.e. the pointer at the beginning of a sentence, nor when marking relative terms or relative nouns with the “the” particle…

          “Kickstarter page”, has no relative terms in the following sentence:

          “They explain it on the kickstarter page”

          Thus the following compression is still readable:

          “They explain it on: Kickstarter page”

          whereas:
          “The explanation is on the kickstarter page”

          wouldn’t quite sound right to colon-ify the 2nd “the”

          The colon then gets interpreted as the word “the” in reference to the word “it”

          Also can be used like this:

          “it:”
          “it is this…”

          Albeit not proper and/or politically correct “queens” English, It is however a form of signature writing that can help you prove if you wrote something or if someone else is blagging their way into your shoes.

          Signature writing:
          I do it all the time!

          On the other hand: professionally written articles should have minimal informal writing and be kept as close to formal scripting and grammar of said language as possible.

          1. *ANTI grammar nazism:
            The encouragement in the relaxation of writing…Also encouraging a self signature styling writing.

            The engrish lang’ is such a dinamiiq language… Enjoi-it BOI!!!!

  1. Doom on everything!!!!

    Should of had the fidget spinner in the link below it as the loading screen/logo for the Doom loading screen instead of random snow… or after the random snow for the sake of a loading screen, that

      1. Hmmm… Possibly:
        Program the thing when it powers to emulate a flashrom for a Lenovo T400 and giving out the libreboot+seaBIOS firmware payload…. Boot a Macro$haft Bimbows OS and use a program acting as a “Windows BIOS updater” so to speak as to “Flash” all JPG screenshots as fast as possible to this emulated ROM… Read the JPG or whatever format you chose and write it to a screen…. make sure they are screenshots of the Crysis game uploaded in realtime-ish.

        Oh and for buttons…. read the “Firmware” back and check for modified bits in a reserve area for the button signals… have the flash reader signal a virtual controller what buttons are being emulated for the game.

        Some work cut out for someone….

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