Tandy Color Computer (CoCo3) Color Video Playback

April 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[John W. Linville] wrote a digital video player for the Tandy Color Computer (aka TRS-80). The decades-old hardware performs quite well considering the limited resource he had to work with. This is the second iteration of his player, and can be seen after the break playing a promo video for CoCoFEST 2011 where he’ll show it off in person.

In the most recent thread post (at the time of writing) [John] shares the methods used to get this running. FFMPEG is used on a modern computer to process the source video by separating the audio into an 8-bit 11040Hz file, and it generates several PPM files with the proper video frame rate. ImageMagick takes it from there to convert the PPM files to a bitmap format. It also processes each frame for differential changes, reducing the size to fall within the available bandwidth. They are then interleaved with the audio to produce the final format. Video is 128×192 with rectangular pixels. [John’s] already used it to watch such classics as War Games on the antiquated hardware.

Continue reading “Tandy Color Computer (CoCo3) Color Video Playback” →

Cotton Candy Just The Color You Like It

April 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Hit the web to order up your custom-color cotton candy from this machine (translated). A computer monitors a web interface for an incoming order, then pushes commands to an mbed microcontroller which dispenses three different colors of sugar to whip up your custom shade of the cottony delight.

In addition to the sugar dispensing system, the candy maker itself is also a do-it-yourself design. It looks like the most difficult part of this project was getting this component right. They’ve got a collection of videos documenting the multiple attempts on the road to success. Once dispensed, the colored sugars make their way into a spinning metal cylinder where they’re heated by the flame from a butane candle lighter. Eventually the team manages to get cotton candy to form but we can’t help but feel like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel with this one.

[via Make]

DoJ And FBI Now Issuing Command To Botnet Malware

April 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 65 Comments

Looks like the FBI is starting to get pretty serious about fighting malware. Traditionally they have attacked the servers that activate and control botnets made up of infected computers. This time they’re going much further by taking control of and issuing commands to the botnets. In this instance it’s a nasty little bug called Coreflood, and they’ve been given permission to take the yet-unheard-of step by a federal judge.

An outside company called Internet Systems Consortium has been tapped to do the actual work. It will call upon the malware on infected computers and issue a command to shut it down. That falls short of fixing the problem as Coreflood will try to phone home again upon reboot. This gets back to the initial problem; we won’t ever be able to stop malware attacks as long as there are users who do not have the knowhow (or simply don’t care) to protect and disinfect their own computer systems.

How long do you think it will be before some black hat comes up with a countermeasure against this type of enforcement?

[via Gizmodo]

Larson Scanner Using 7400 Series Logic Hardware

April 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[RandomTask] is sharing a Larson scanner he built a few decades ago. These days you can whip one of these up using an Arduino in under an hour. He mentions this, but we agree that for nostalgic purposes there’s nothing like implementing the scanning LED effect using hardware.

Often called a Cylon Eye (after the television show Battlestar Gallactica) or referred to as the lights on the front of Kitt (the car from Knight Rider), the effect doesn’t just involve switching LEDs on and off in the proper order. A true Larson Scanner fades the LEDs as the bright point moves away from them, resulting in a tail that dims over time.

This implementation uses a 555 timer as the clock signal, allowing for speed control through a potentiometer. A counter chip, J-K flipflop, and line decoder all work with each other to address the movement of the brightest light. The fading effect is managed via a capacitor and resistor for each LED. The video after the break shows the pleasing result of this setup.

Continue reading “Larson Scanner Using 7400 Series Logic Hardware” →

Capacitive Touch Sensor Shield For The TI Launchpad

April 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

Texas Instruments just released a product they call the Capacitive Touch Boosterpack which is basically a touch-sensitive shield for the Launchpad. The video after the break shows an unboxing and demonstration of the product which TI is launching with a $4.30 limited-time price tag. The red PCB itself has a capacitive touch button in the center, surrounded by a touch-scroll wheel, which is centered in a proximity senor that takes up the rest of the board. There are also nine LEDs which look like they’re soldered on the underside of the board, through routed holes that mount them flush with the top surface. The pack also comes with a new MSP430 microcontroller, the G2452, which has 8 KB of flash memory and takes care of calibrating, reading, and processing signals from the board thanks to the software package that goes along with the add-on kit.

Looks quite nice. There’s a heck of a lot of information in the documentation for this hardware. We do wish it was a bit easier to find board layout information, but we’re sure it’s there somewhere.

Continue reading “Capacitive Touch Sensor Shield For The TI Launchpad” →

Interactive Sun Exhibit Uses 3D Projection Screen And Kinect

April 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

A few common components come together to make this interactive museum exhibit that teaches about the sun (translated). It uses three main physical components to pull this off. The first is a custom projection surface. It’s a hemisphere of the sun with a slice cut out of it. This is presumably coated with the paint you’d use to turn a wall into a projection surface. Software translates a projected image to map correctly on the topographic surface, resulting in what you see above, with a Kinect for user input.

Take a look at the video embedded after the break to see how the exhibit works. It instructs patrons to stand on a pair of footprint markers on the floor. This positions them at the proper range from a Kinect depth camera, which translates their outline into cursor commands. By moving a hand around they can explore the different parts of the sun.

We’re in love with how easy this type of interaction is becoming. Granted, there’s a fair amount of work that goes into to the coding for the project, but the physical build is quick and relatively inexpensive.

Continue reading “Interactive Sun Exhibit Uses 3D Projection Screen And Kinect” →

Zork On The Microtouch

April 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Rossum] just finished porting Zork over to the Microtouch. This hardware, which he originally designed, is now available for purchase through Adafruit. It’s a tiny 320×240 TFT touchscreen, driven by an AVR ATmega32u4 microcontroller. The device draws power from a lithium battery, and also boast a USB connection and a MicroSD slot.

The hack here is getting Zork to run with the limited resources available on the device. [Rossum] needed to emulate the Z80 processor, but didn’t want to use extra hardware in the way that [Sprite_TM] did when he emulated a Z80 using an AVR. Instead, this is based on a stripped-down implementation of Frotz. The final code is too big to fit on the chip along side of the bootloader. This means you’ll need to use an ISP programmer in order to flash this example to the chip. We’re pretty sure that AVRdude can program the ATmega32u4, so pretty much any ISP (including an Arduino) can be used to do the programming.