How to write your own Minesweeper solver

minesweeper-solver

We think we have found project that will take over our holiday free time. [Bai Li] just published an excellent article about writing a program that can automatically solve the game of Minesweeper. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Minesweeper gives you a grid in which land mines have been randomly placed. As you click on boxes to … Read the rest

Hacking BodyBugg fitness sensors to get around subscription fee

This arm cuff is a sensor package which logs data whenever you’re wearing it. It records accelerometer data, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response. That data can then be analyzed to arrive at figures like calories burned. But… The company behind the device seems to have included a way to keep the cash flowing. Once you buy it you can … Read the rest

8x8x8 LED cube and the board that drives it

Check out the LED cube which [Thomas], [Max], and [Felix] put together. But don’t forget to look at that beautiful PCB which drives it… nice! But hardware is only part of what goes into a project like this one. After the soldering iron had cooled they kept going and wrote their own software to generate patterns for the … Read the rest

Controlling Google TV from a Raspberry Pi (or other networked devices)

Google TV is a network connected television. It does what you would think: plays television programs, streams media from the internet, and allows you to open URLs on your TV. But one nice feature is that it can also be controlled over the network rather than just via an IR remote. Google publishes apps which make this simple with a … Read the rest

μJ, a Java virtual machine for microcontrollers

[Dimitri] sent in a project he’s been working on that implements a Java Virtual Machine purely in C, and is easily portable between microcontrollers such as the AVRs and PICs we normally see, ARM devices, and even the lowly 386.

Before going into the ‘how’, [Dimitri] first covers why he wanted to run Java bytecode on a microcontroller. Basically, … Read the rest

Bringing Java to the world of microcontrollers

C is a beautiful language perfectly suited for development on low-power devices such as the 8-bit microcontrollers. With newer, more powerful ARM microcontrollers making their way onto the market and workbenches around the world, it was only fitting that Oracle got in on the action. They released a version of Java targeted at these newer, more powerful microcontrollers called Java Read the rest

POE home automation control panel

poe_home_automation_control_panel

[Scott] wrote in to share a project he is currently working on, a home automation system that relies on Power over Ethernet. While he’s not completely finished, he’s made some great progress, and the work he has done so far definitely piqued our interest.

Part of [Scott’s] design relies on some reverse engineered Blackberry screens we showed you a while … Read the rest