Toorcamp: The American Hacker Camp

Toorcamp is all wrapped up after four great days of talks, hacking, and parties. Located in Neah Bay, Washington, Toorcamp was a four day event modelled after European hacker camps. This is the second time Toorcamp has been run, and it’s clear that both the organizers and attendees know how to throw an awesome stateside hacker camp.

The camp featured talks, including keynotes by [Joe Grand] and [George Dyson], and villages for hardware hacking, lock picking, crafting, and welding. Workshops ranging from Arduino for Total Newbies with [Mitch Altman] to Wifi Hacking with [Darren Kitchen] let attendees get their hands dirty in a variety of activities. Hackerspaces and other collectives set up fantastic campsites featuring full kitchens, ham radios, questionably legitimate wifi networks, and bike jousting.

Some of the highlights include a giant laser that required FAA approval to fire into the sky, an elaborate tribute to the classic arcade game Robotron: 2084, and a working hand-held Tesla Gun. Stay tuned for coverage about these hacks and more.

If you missed Toorcamp, you’ll be glad to know that the organizers plan to run it on alternating years, which means the next one will be in 2014. You should also check out Toorcon San Diego in October and WorldToor in Antarctica. It looks like Toorcamp will only get better with time, and Toorcamp 2014 should be a great open air hacking event that you won’t want to miss.

Control Giant Fireballs With Your Mind

[Matt Oehrlein] and [Ed Platt] from the i3 Detroit hackerspace created the Mind Flame project. The project uses Electroencephalography (EEG) sensors from NeuroSky to measure the user’s concentration level. When you’re concentrating hard enough, the Mind Flame launches a giant fireball, which probably breaks your concentration pretty quickly.

Propane is accumulated in tanks, and then released past a hot surface carbide igniter. It looks like an Arduino is used to open the valve, and the result is a massive fireball controlled by your brainwaves.

The Mind Flame was demoed at the Detroit Maker Faire as a competition. Two participants face off to see who can concentrate the hardest and make the device launch three fireballs first. In the future, they want to incorporate new competitive elements. One example is placing wooden houses in the line of fire, and letting opponents try to burn down their adversary’s house before their’s is set ablaze.

You can check out an interview about the project here.

[Via Make]

Making Music With Tennis Balls And Lego

We’ve seen a lot of interesting MIDI controllers, but this one uses some unconventional materials. The World’s Coolest Keystroke, built by [Audiobody], is made from a combination of tennis balls, Lego bricks, servos, and switches.

When a tennis ball is lifted up, a Lego arm is actuated. It looks like a servo is used to move the Lego arm so it hits a switch. An Arduino is used to detect this and send a message to their computer.

They use the device to control Ableton Live and play different clips depending on which tennis ball was removed. It’s an interesting way to control sound with a tactile interface, and it looks pretty nifty.

After the break is a short video of the device in action, but [Audiobody] says that they will be releasing more information soon. We’re looking forward to seeing other interesting controllers that they have in the works.

[Via Make]

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Moving An FPGA Project From VGA To DVI-D

It’s fairly easy to create VGA with an FPGA using a simple R/2R DAC. As [Mike] points out, this requires a lot of IO pins, and many development boards only support 8 bit VGA. Analog VGA is being replaced with DVI-D and HDMI on many devices nowadays, so it would be nice to port projects from VGA to DVI-D.

To address this, he’s come up with a simple DVI-D implementation in VHDL. The result converts RGB and sync data for VGA into DIV-D. Since DVI-D and HDMI both use the same signals for video, this can be connected to either input on a monitor or TV.

This implementation is shown displaying a test pattern on the Pipistrello development board, which features a Spartan 6 LX45 FPGA, but the project was written to be portable to other vendor’s FPGAs. With the right connector and a fast enough clock speed, this project should help move a project from 8 bit VGA to glorious 32 bit color.

TI Launches C2000 Launchpad (featuring Billy Mays)

The Texas Instruments MSP430 Launchpad is pretty popular in hacks, likely due to its low price. TI has recently released a new C2000 Launchpad device that offers more power and peripherals for $17. This board uses the C2000 Piccolo processor, which is meant for DSP applications.

Also included is an unrestricted version of the Code Composer Studio IDE and the controlSUITE software package. You can also run the free SYS/BIOS RTOS on this board. It’s nice to see TI providing a lot of free, non-crippled tools that could be used to power some pretty advanced hacks.

Most MSP430 Launchpad Booster Packs should be compatible with this board, and TI has a new layout for Booster Packs that use the additional pins. There is a C2000 specific LED Booster Pack available now for $30. There are also specifications for building your own Booster Packs for the C2000.

TI has released a slightly cheesy promotional video that features a [Billy Mays] like performance. Check it out after the break.

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