Bringing The Game Boy Camera Into The 21st Century

July 8, 2021 by 6 Comments

The Game Boy Camera is probably one of the most limited-specification digital cameras to have been mass-marketed, yet it occupies a special position in the hearts of many because despite being a toy with a paltry 128×128 monochrome sensor it was for many the first camera they owned. [Matt Grey] was among those people, and was always frustrated by the device’s inability to export pictures except to the Game Boy printer. So after having bodged together an interface a decade ago but not being happy with it, he returned to the project and made a wireless carrier for the camera that allows easy transfer through WiFi to his mobile phone.

Inside the slab-like 3D-printed enclosure lies a GBxCart RW Game Boy cartridge reader, whose USB port is wired to a Raspberry Pi Zero on which are a set of scripts to read the camera and make its photos available for download via a web browser. At last the camera is a stand-alone unit, allowing the easy snapping and retrieval of as many tiny black and white images as he likes. There’s a video showing the device in action, which we’ve placed for your enjoyment below the break.

This camera has appeared in so many projects on these pages over the years, but we’re guessing that the work on whose shoulders this one stands would be the moment its workings were reverse engineered.

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Electric Land Speed Racing Can Be Lightning Fast

July 8, 2021 by 4 Comments

Land speed racing is a pursuit of ultimate speed above all else. Most cars typically run on huge, flat salt pans, and racers run flat out for miles in a straight line, attempting to push their machines to the limit. Like most motorsports, the history of land speed racing has traditionally been centred around internal combustion, but electric racers have long been out there chasing land speed records as well.

The Need For Speed

At the most famous land speed trials, such as Bonneville’s Speed Week, speed runs take place over miles and miles of open salt, with timing traps along the way to determine competitor’s speeds. These tracks are long enough that acceleration is of little concern, which is of great benefit to electric runners. Additionally, only one or two runs is required to set a record. This means that heavy batteries aren’t always needed, as the distance a competitor must travel is short, and even if the batteries are heavy, it doesn’t excessively affect top speed.

With an eye to that, land speed competitors in electric classes are typically classified into weight classes. This is due to the fact that bigger, heavier battery packs can deliver more current, and thus potentially have a performance advantage over lighter vehicles. Thus, typical classes run by most salt flats competitions involve the E1 class, which allows for vehicles under 1100 lbs, the E2 class, for vehicles up to 2200 lbs, and the E3 class, which is for anything 2200 lbs and above. The FIA also publish their own set of classes, again separated by weight, though to a much more granular degree.

Procedures for setting records vary depending on the venue and the record in question. Local records at salt venues like El Mirage can typically be broken with a single run faster than the standing record, while Bonneville Speed Week competitors must set a higher average speed across two runs on two consecutive days. FIA records differ again, and are perhaps the most stringent, requiring competitors to set a faster average across two runs in opposite directions, set within an hour of each other, to attempt to minimise the effect of wind on the result. Things can sometimes get confusing, as many FIA records, for example, are set at the Bonneville salt flats, but not actually in Speed Week competition or by Speed Week rules. Continue reading “Electric Land Speed Racing Can Be Lightning Fast” →

C64 Demo, No C64

July 8, 2021 by 24 Comments

Never underestimate the ingenuity of the demoscene. The self-imposed limitations lead to incredible creativity, and, the range of devices they manage to get their demos running on never ceases to amaze us. But we never thought we’d see a C64 demo without one central component: the C64.

Full disclosure: [Matthias Kramm]’s demo, called “Freespin”, does need a C64 to get started. The venerable 6502-based computer runs a loader program on a 1541 disk drive.  But from then on, it’s all floppy drive. And [Matthias] has laid bare all his tricks.

The video below shows the demo in full, including a heart-stopping on-camera cable mod. By adding a single 100 Ω resistor, [Matthias] turned the serial clock and data lines into a two-bit digital-to-analog converter, good enough to generate signals for both black and white pixels and the sync pulses needed for the display.

No demo would be complete without sound, and Freespin’s tunes come from controlling the drive’s stepper motor, like a one-voice Floppotron.

Watching nothing but a floppy drive run a cool demo is pretty amazing. Yes, we know there’s a full-fledged computer inside the floppy, but the bit-banging needed to make this work was still mighty impressive. It might be cool to see what you could do with multiple drives, but we understand the minimalistic aesthetic as well. And speaking of tiny little demos:  the 256 bytes of [HellMood]’s “Memories” or [Linus Åkesson]’s “A Mind is Born” still leave us speechless.

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Dial-a-SID Is A Glorious Chiptune Jukebox

July 8, 2021 by 8 Comments

Old-school rotary telephones aren’t particularly useful for their original intended purpose in this day and age, but they’re great fun to hack into new projects. [Linus Åkesson] has done just that, with his Dial-a-SID jukebox build. (Video, embedded below.)

The build installs a Raspberry Pi 3 inside the body of the telephone, running a SID chip emulator and loaded up with the High Voltage SID Collection. The Pi inside outputs sound to an external stereo system for playing chiptunes at a party.

The real party piece, however, is that the handset can be lifted and the telephone dialled in order to listen to and select tracks for the playlist. Tracks can be selected by individual codes, by composer, or even by year. In the event the playlist grows empty, the default behaviour can be set to keep playing random tracks in the meantime.

With over 2000 hours of SID music inside, it’s unlikely the Dial-a-SID will run out of tunes anytime soon. We’d love to see a similar interface used for a jukebox hooked up to a modern streaming service, too. If you build one, let us know! Alternatively, consider hooking up your rotary phone to your smartphone. Video after the break.

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Hamster Trades Crypto Better Than You

July 7, 2021 by 19 Comments

The inner machinations of the mind of cryptocurrency markets are an enigma. Even traditional stock markets often seem to behave at random, to the point that several economists seriously suggest that various non-human animals might outperform one market or another just by random chance alone. The classic example is a monkey picking stocks at random, but in the modern world the hamster [Mr Goxx] actively trades crypto from inside his hamster cage.

[Mr Goxx]’s home comprises a normal apartment and a separate office where he can make his trades. The office contains an “intention wheel” where he can run in order to select a currency to trade, and two tunnels that [Mr Goxx] can use to declare his intention to buy or sell the currency he selected with the wheel. The wheel is connected to an Arduino Nano with an optical encoder, and the Nano also detects the hamster’s presence in the “buy” or “sell” tunnel and lights up status LEDs when he wants to execute a trade. The Nano also communicates with an intricate Java program which overlays information on the live video feed and also executes the trades in real life with real money.

Live updates are sent directly both on Twitter and Reddit, besides the live Twitch stream of [Mr Goxx] we linked above. The stream only shows his office and not his apartment, and he’s mostly active at night (Berlin time). But we can’t wait for his random walks to yield long-term results which can be analyzed for years to come. In the meantime we’ll see if others have been able to make any profits in crypto with any less-random methods.

Drink Water On Schedule Or Else Flood Your Desk

July 7, 2021 by 47 Comments

How much water have you had to drink today? We would venture to guess that the answer is somewhere between ‘absolutely none’ and ‘not not nearly enough’. You can go ahead and blame poor work/life balance — that’s our plan, anyway — and just try to do better. All this working from home means the bathroom situation is now ideal, so why not drink as much water as you can?

But how? Well, you’re human, so you’ll need to make it as easy as possible to drink the water throughout the day. You could fill up one big jug and hoist it to your mouth all day long (or use a straw), but facing that amount of water all at once can be intimidating. The problem with using a regular-sized vessel is that you have to get up to refill it several times per day. When hyper-focus is winning the work/life tug-of-war, you can’t always just stop and go to the kitchen. What you need is an automatic water dispenser, and you need it right there on the desk.

[Javier Rengel]’s water pomodoro makes it as easy as setting your cup down in front of this machine and leaving it there between sips. As long as the IR sensor detects your cup, it will dispense water every hour. This means that if you don’t drink enough water throughout the day, you’re going to have it all over the desk at some point. [Javier] simply connected an Arduino UNO to a water pump and IR sensor pair and repurposed the milk dispenser from a coffee machine. Check it out in action after the break.

Of course, if you aren’t intimidated by the big jug approach, you could keep tabs on your intake with the right kind of straw.

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A Plastic Injection Machine You Can Use At Home

July 7, 2021 by 25 Comments

3D printing is all well and good if you want one of something, but if you want lots of plastic parts that are all largely identical, you should consider injection molding. You can pay someone to do this for you, or, in true hacker fashion, you can build an entire injection molding setup in your own garage, as [Action BOX] did.

The build relies on a pair of beefy 3hp motors to drive the screw-based injection system. These are responsible for feeding plastic pellets from a hopper and then melting them and filling the injection reservoir, before then forcing the hot plastic into the mold. Further stepper motors handle clamping the mold and then releasing it and ejecting the finished part. A Raspberry Pi handles the operation of the machine, and is configured with a custom Python program that is capable of proper cycle operation. At its peak, the machine can produce up to 4 parts per minute.

It’s an impressive piece of industrial-type hardware. If you want to produce a lot of plastic things in your own facility, a machine like this is very much the way to go. It’s not the first machine of its type we’ve seen, either! Video after the break.  Continue reading “A Plastic Injection Machine You Can Use At Home” →