Hackaday Links: February 28th, 2013

Xbox 360 control for a toy heli

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[Jason] leveraged the IR control libraries for Arduino to use an Xbox 360 controller to fly his Syma S107G helicopter.

Windows 7 running on Raspberry Pi

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Why, oh god why? Well, the guys at Shackspace got their hands on a laser cutter that can only be driven with a Windows program. Their solution was to run Win7 on RPi as a virtual machine.

Twin-servos for your third hand

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After growing tired of constantly flipping over the substrate being held with a third hand [Nidal] came up with a better way. He mounted his third hand on two servo motors so that it can be positioned with a joystick.

Depopulating SMD resistors

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If you’ve ever tried to remove small surface mount resistors or capacitors with an iron you know it can be tricky. Take a look at the technique that [Scott] uses to remove the components.

Photographing the die of MSP430, Z80, PIC, and several other chips

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Here’s the latest work from [Michail] on photographing the die of various chips. You may remember reading his previous post on decapping chips with boiling sulfuric acid.

32 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: February 28th, 2013

    1. Link broken, probably as in server overloaded.

      Read it in google cache. Apparently the editors here didn’t.

      NO, the article is NOT about running Windows on the Pi, virtualized or not. It IS about running Windows in a VM elsewhere, and seamlessly extending the USB port to the Pi. Still quite cool; just not what the headline says.

        1. Cached site: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bORR5TWVOjYJ:shackspace.de/%3Fp%3D3859+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk

          Yes, the server pooped, working on that :x

          And as correctly noted already this is not running win7 or a VM _on_ the Raspi, but rather connecting _to_ a VM running Win7.
          The executive summary of the project:
          – Raspi starts remote desktop client
          – Connects to VM running Win7
          – The laser cutter USB interface is forwarded using USB IP
          – Even shorter: (lasercutter, keyboard, mouse, monitor) raspi network win7 in VM via remote desktop

  1. They must be using the Raspberry pi to log into a virtual machine hosted on another computer. That’s like saying you are running windows on your ipad every time you VNC into a host. Don’t get me wrong though! I love the idea of replacing all those thin clients with a tiny pi.

    Maybe I’m just nitpicking :P

    1. Your not nit picking, just point out a good point, HAD is getting known for misleading titles .

      I myself got excited, then let down, yet again.. Not a bad project, but I was let down by the misleading title!

      1. To be fair: the misleading title is not just here on HAD; the original article’s title is just as misleading. The truth is found a ways into the article itself.

        “Actually read the article before trolling? Why, I haven’t done that since before Slashdot…” :-)

      2. the site is down i cant judge but im guessing they simply skimmed the article
        i mean they must get 100+ requests a day!

        i mainly clicked on it to see how humorously slow it would be … running an X86/X64 platform on an RISC ARM wont let you play crysis 3 any time soon …

    1. I’ve had situations like this where the controller machine was virtualized with an inadequate USB passthrough. I’ve also had situations where, because of licensing, we couldn’t build another machine and V2P wasn’t working out. I’ve also had situations where the controller machine couldn’t be in the same room as the USB target (once, even, where the controller and USB target were in different states).

      USB over IP on a RasPi is great if the RasPi can handle the traffic. I’ve always been reduced to using an old P3 as the intermediary, but look forward to using a RasPi the next time a need for USB over IP comes up.

    1. Not really helpful when you’re in the process of tuning your design tho.

      2 cheap soldering irons make for a nice “hot tweezer” too. Works for pads directly tied to the ground plane and big SMD (tantalum cap, diodes etc…)

  2. The scans of the IC’s are beautiful, but they confuse the hell out of me, Can someone explain how electricity doesn’t jump those tiny gaps and just fry the whole thing? They look like mini logic gates… I’m so awestruck right now I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it…

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