Hackaday Links: November 9, 2014

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After many years of searching, [Dan Wood] finally got his hands on something he’s wanted for the past twenty-two years: an Amiga 4000. No, it’s not the queen bee of Amiga land – that honor would fall to the 68060-equipped 4000T, but [Dan]’s 4000 is decked out. It has a 256MB RAM expansion, Ethernet, USB, and a Picasso IV graphics card that gives it better resolution and color depth than most modern laptops.

[Pistonpedal] has a fully automatic pneumatic can crusher that is far too cool to be wasted on a case of Keystone. A funnel at the top guides the cans in to be crushed one at a time and ejected into a garbage can underneath. Great for recycling.

Coming over from ‘normal’ programming into the world of embedded development? [AndreJ] has the AVR C Macro for you. It’s a great way to get away from all those ~=, |=, and &=s that don’t make any sense at all.

[CNLohr] has a reputation for running Minecraft servers on things that don’t make any sense at all. The latest build is a light up redstone ore block equipped with an ESP8266 WiFi chip.

Oh, the Hackaday overlords and underlings are in Munich for this little shindig we’re doing. If you in town for Electronica come on down. If you have a copy of Neil Young’s Trans, bring it to the party.

18 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: November 9, 2014

    1. I think that’s getting into “toothpaste box blowing” story territory, you could hook up a capacitance sensor, or a scale, or some other odd setup when a puff of air would work.

  1. I LOLed at the modulo macro. #define MODULO(x, y) ((x) – (((x) / (y)) * (y)))

    I can understand that noobs can have a hard time grasping bit manipulation stuff like the need to invert the mask for clearing a bit. But Modulus? That’s just a standard arithmetic operator like +-*/.

    But he get points for not making a #define ADD and #define SUBTRACT -macros as well. :-)

  2. A word of warning about the macros library: It’s licensed GPL3, and since you have to link it right in to your code, that means that your own code has to be licensed GPL3 as well. A poor choice of license, in my mind.

    Also, the MODULO macro (why?) evaluates its arguments more than once, so don’t pass it anything with side-effects.

  3. Oh my gosh… Logical operations? Those should be learned before even writing a line of code… People forgot that before starting embedded programming they should also learn some digital electronics

    1. THIS. So many bad coders out there. Fortunately they hate us hardware guys and remind us just what peons we are every chance they get. I think your ability to retain a job as a coder just has to do with using polysyllabic bs and blaming non-existent conditionals and revisions.

  4. If I’m not mistaken, the Picasso IV outputted video at 1280x1024x24. 1600×1200 with 16 bit color depth if you could deal with the interlacing.

    Certainly impressive but not as much as a modern laptop.

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