We saw a lot of interesting gear at Maker Faire last weekend and thought we’d highlight some of those projects this week. [Josh Boughey]’s Stribe was originally inspired by the monome 40h. It features of 16 columns of 64 LEDs for a total of 1024 individually addressable lights. Even with all those LEDs, PWM control means it can run off of USB power. 8 spectrasymbol softpots are used between the columns for user input. It’s really quite an amazing feat for being [josh]’s first board design. All of the circuit designs and firmware are available. Check out Flickr for more photos from this weekend.
Author: Eliot1332 Articles
Weekend Links
Friend of Hack-A-Day, [Dan Kaminsky], started off last weekend right by putting Rick Astley everywhere on the internet. ISPs routinely hijack mistyped URLs and [Dan] showed that an attacker could inject code into any unresolved subdomain, essentially taking over every site the ISP’s customer tried to reach. I doubt many companies would be happy to know their websites were being misrepresented.
The week wasn’t going so well for another friend of ours as he found himself back in court for allegedly inventing the entire satellite piracy industry.
BoingBoing TV featured the Graffiti Research Lab this week as they prepare for the New York premier of GRL: The Complete First Season. GRL encourages you to pick up your copy today… before they’ve even started selling it.
While you’re over at The Pirate Bay you might as well ask them where to get the leaked copy of Grand Theft Auto IV… or you could just wait a few days and buy it like a normal person. We do recommend you bide your time by checking out the GTA 4 leaked gameplay videos, GTA 4 walkthrough, and GTA 4 cheats.
ToorCon Seattle 2008: Lightning Talks
The second ToorCon Seattle got off to a quick start last Friday with a round of Lightning Talks at the Public Nerd Area. Each talk was limited to 5 minutes and covered a broad range of topics. Some talks were just supplying a chunk of information while others were a call to action for personal projects. Here are a few of the talks that we found interesting.
Sony XEL-1 OLED Teardown
[bunnie] just happened to be at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose on exactly the right day to witness the live teardown of a Sony XEL-1 OLED TV. The XEL-1 is Sony’s flagship OLED panel that’s only 3mm thick… and $2500 for just an 11-inch screen. [bunnie] was able to take quite a few shots of the components as they were passed around. He pointed out a few interesting bits about the construction. There seems to be quite a bit of thermal material on the display to prevent “avalanche thermal failures” (which I’m guessing doesn’t look as cool as it sounds). OLED displays are completely transparent and their legendary contrast ratio is just a result of the dark backing material. The mainboard seems to be a bit of overkill for this TV and [bunnie] concludes that it’s just the standard image engine architecture from Sony’s Bravia line put into a smaller package.
Hack-A-Day Is Hiring!
It’s true, as much as [Will] and I like being a scrappy two person shop with a ‘never say die’ attitude, and penchant for fist pounding after successful compiles, we need more people (MOAR even). We’re looking for a few more contributors to help out with the daily posting, digging up the extra obscure, and especially the how-tos we’ve started to get back into.
This is a paid, freelancing position that requires professionalism, consistency, and reliability. We want to hear from people that are passionate about software/hardware hacking and growing Hack-A-Day. To apply, send the following to jobs@hackaday.com
- A short bio about yourself
- 3 example daily posts written in the style of Hack-A-Day
- 3 how-to ideas you could personally execute. For examples of work we’ve done in the past, look here, here, here, and here.
- A couple sentences on how you would improve the site either through features or content
- Any additional reasons why you would make a good fit for Hack-A-Day
Please do not send any attachments, especially not pictures of your sweet ride. An aversion to capital letters is not required, but definitely encouraged.
[picture courtesy of fbz]
Notacon 2008: Dropping Humanity In Non-places
[Nate Graham] gave a presentation on what he considers ‘new media art’, the convergence of art and technology. He covered quite a few great examples of what new media art is from many categories: a mower that creates pixel art, Cory Arcangel’s famous Super Mario Clouds hack, a whale hunt whose photo capture rate depended on the participant’s heart rate, the bike based SMS printer for protests.
Continue reading “Notacon 2008: Dropping Humanity In Non-places”
Notacon 2008: Circuit Bending Will Get You Laid
[Pete Edwards] and [Fred Owsley] openly admitted that the title was the most thinly veiled audience-bait ever constructed. Nevertheless, they poured through a great talk covering the basics of circuit bending and some of the pieces they had built over the years. Fred said that what attracts him to circuit bending is the hands on approach to something very scientific i.e. he can figure out how to construct an interesting circuit by rubbing his finger along the back of the board. As far as where to start: always a battery powered device and use the toy store as a last resort. You’re going to tear the thing apart so why pay for it? Dumpster diving, garage sales, swap meets, and flea markets are all places to look. Parts don’t need to be anything better than grab bag either. They suggested an easy first step is dropping the operating voltage of your device and seeing how it reacts. Pete and Fred had several examples of devices they’ve modified: Speak & Spells, Casio SA keyboards, Barbi karaoke machines, and the voice changing gas mask pictured above.
The Bent Festival for circuit bending is coming up soon if you’d like to see more. You can also check out these links for more information on circuit bending.
