Hackaday Links: October 20, 2013

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Winter is coming. We’ve see those gloves in stores made specifically to work with your smartphone. [hardsoftlucid] isn’t buying it. He made his own version using… well, you just have to see it.

Here’s an eBookmark for a real book. What? Well, you know how an eReader does a great job of keeping your place between reading sessions? This is an electronic bookmark for paper books which uses LEDs to show you where you last left off reading. [via Adafruit]

[Thomas Brittain] wrote in to share his BLE Module and Pulse sensor updates. Both were featured in a recent Fail of the Week column and the latest iteration takes them from fail to functioning!

You may be able to get a free XMOS xCORE starter kit. The company is giving away 2500 of them. [Thanks Tony]

After learning about custom labels for microcontroller pinouts from [John Meachum] we’re happy to get one more helpful tip: a breadboard trench is a great place to hide axial decoupling capacitors.

A bit of cutting, solder, and configuring lets you turn a simple gamepad into a 4-controller interface for MAME.

Many of the Hackaday Staff are into Minecraft (between Let’s Play videos, running servers, and building computers in-game it’s a wonder we get anything done around here). We restrained ourselves by not making this video of a Restone circuit Blender animation on your desktop into a full front page feature. [via Reddit]

 

15 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: October 20, 2013

  1. That XMOS giveaway caught my eye.

    What got me even more: The RPi support implies general linux support for programming the thing. That makes me very happy. (This is further supported by the fact that they use a custom version of GDB for their debugger)

    Also, 500 MIPS for $15? That’s pretty impressive.

    1. Any info on what type of architecture this thing is based on? Entirely new? I’m just wondering, since developing a completely new multicore, probably memory coherent uC architecture is complex and I never heard of them before.

  2. Winter is coming? we have to get through spring, summer, and autumn first – stop being northern hemispherochial ;-) (and that is if the bush (wild) fires don’t get us first. Our Christmas snow is likely to be white ash!). Six white boomers, snow white boomers racing Santa Clause through the blazing sun – on his Australian run…

  3. I can’t be the only one annoyed by this can I?

    “… well, you just have to see it.”

    Led me to believe that it was going to be made of something strange, rather then some aluminium foil on a glove, it barely even looks like a prototype to prove a concept.

  4. The development tools are available for Win/Mac/Linux (java based) here.
    https://www.xmos.com/support/downloads/xtimecomposer

    The source code for the same is here, in several pieces.
    http://www.xmos.com/products/design-tools-source

    This is making me very happy. This chip looks amazing, and cheap too! (The dev board they’re giving away only costs $15. Closest thing I can think of to compare it to is the propeller, which is slower and more expensive)

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