The Raspberry Pi Becomes A Form Factor

November 6, 2013 by 61 Comments

Despite the cries for updated hardware, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been playing it cool. They’re committed to getting the most out of their engineering investment, and the current board design for the Raspi doesn’t support more than 512Mb of memory, anyway.

What you see above isn’t a Raspberry Pi, though. It’s the Carrier-one from SolidRun. All loaded out, it has a system-on-module with a quad core ARM Cortex-A9, 2GB of RAM, 1000 Mbps Ethernet, USB host ports, eSATA, and LVDS display connector, a real time clock, and everything else you get with a Raspberry Pi, header pins included. It’s all the awesomesauce of the newer ARM boards that will still work with all your Raspberry Pi hardware.

If you’re thinking this is a product announcement, though, think again. The folks at SolidRun are merely using this Raspberry Pi form factor board as a prototyping and development platform for their CuBox-i device, In its lowest configuration, the CuBox-i1 is still no slouch and would be more than able to keep up with the most demanding Raspberry Pi applications.

Still, though, a hugely powerful board with lots of I/O is something we’d all love, and if SolidRun gets enough complaints praise, it seems like they might be willing to release the Carrier-one as an actual product.

Hackerspacing In Europe: Conclusion

November 6, 2013 by 22 Comments

Wow! What a trip. In just over one week we travelled nearly 2000 km and visited 13 hackerspaces in 10 different cities in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands. However that was only the tip of the iceberg — there were dozens more hackerspaces in the area, and we wish we had the time to visit them all! The hospitality of the hackerspaces was amazing. Thank you so much to all the spaces we visited! If you missed some of tours, you can see the them all here.

  1. Chaosdorf (Dusseldorf, Germany)
  2. Garage Lab (Dusseldorf, Germany)
  3. ACKspace (Heerlen, The Netherlands)
  4. HSBXL (Brussels, Belgium)
  5. Whitespace (Gent, Belgium)
  6. Void Warranties (Antwerp, Belgium)
  7. Open Garage (Antwerp, Belgium)
  8. MadSpace (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
  9. De Ontdekfabriek (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
  10. Revelation Space (The Hague, The Netherlands)
  11. Technologia Incognita (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
  12. Hack42 (Arnhem, The Netherlands)
  13. Stratum0 (Brunswick, Germany)

Did you enjoy these tours? Is there anything you’d like to see more of? The style of the tour? Other things to focus on? Let us know in the comments!

Writing A FUSE Filesystem In Python

November 6, 2013 by 21 Comments

photo

Have you ever thought a particular project could be better if you could just control the file access directly? [Stavros Korokithakis] did, specifically for a backup program he was working on. What followed was the realization that writing a FUSE filesystem, particularly in Python, isn’t as complicated as it may seem. Really, through the power of open source, the heavy lifting has already been done for us. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’ll need to install fusepy. From that point, you simply need to define the filesystem methods you will be using.

Python isn’t going to win any speed contests in the filesystem space, but that isn’t really the point. Using this technology opens up a huge opportunity for new ways of accessing data. If you let your mind wander, you can conceive of encrypted filesystems, seamless remote data access, new key-value storage designs, etc. Perhaps even more interesting is the idea of using Python to communicate with a physical device… maybe a proc filesystem to keep track of your robot telemetry? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

We had success using [Stavros’] example script on Linux and OSX. (Fair warning if you’re on a Mac, the pip version of fusepy seems to be linked against fuse4x rather than OSXFUSE, but once you’ve got the prerequisites installed, you’re golden.) We didn’t have a Windows machine to test. Can anyone confirm if the same is possible there?

Furbies Sing Queen At Fresher’s Faire

November 5, 2013 by 10 Comments

kent-furby

The University of Kent has their own hacker space, called  [Maker Society]. Every year the school holds an orientation for new students called the Fresher’s Faire. The [Maker Society] display at this year’s Fresher’s Faire included a group of partially clothed Furbies singing the classic Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. This isn’t our first run in with Bohemian Rhapsody and hacked hardware.

The [Maker Society] started by doing some internet research and reverse engineering a first generation Furby.  The Furby itself is a marvel of cost reduction. All the doll’s functions run from a single motor and a cam system. A limit switch tells the on-board microcontroller when the cam is at the zero position. An optical encoder keeps track of the cam as it moves. The [Society] replaced Furby’s internal microcontroller with an Atmel ATMega328. This allowed them to use the Arduino programming environment.

Many classic Animatronic systems use an audio recording for motion. Typically a stereo recorder would perform double duty. The first track would contain the audio for the animation. A second track would contain audio tones corresponding to movement of each of the degrees of freedom of the doll being animated. Because the two tracks were on the same strip of magnetic tape, the audio and movement would always be in sync. Multitrack tape record and playback systems added even more flexibility to this type of system.

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Finding Shiny Pokemon Automatically

November 5, 2013 by 18 Comments

In case you’re not up to speed with the world of Pokemon, nearly every species of this game’s titular creatures have a ‘shiny’ variety – a differently colored sprite for each pokemon. As far as gameplay goes, they’re exactly the same as their non-shiny brethren, but the shiny varieties are so impossibly rare not many players have seen them. [dekuNukem] over on Youtube has come up with a great way to find these shiny Pokemon automatically with the Hackaday reader’s favorite tools – an Arduino and a few parts from Sparkfun.

The build hinges on the fact that all shiny pokemon have a short animation whenever the player encounters them in the wild. This setup uses a fishing rod, so an Arduino Micro first presses the Y button to cast the rod, while the ‘duinos ADC listens to the audio signal until a bite is indicated.

A light sensor taped to the bottom screen of the 3DS then measures the amount of time the screen is blacked out. The extra animation for every shiny pokemon means this blackout period is about half a second longer. If the Arduino doesn’t see a shiny, it ‘runs away’, but if a shiny is detected a buzzer sounds to tell the extremely lazy pokemon trainer they have a shiny on their line.

From the video, it took about 36 minutes to find a single shiny pokemon, and about 8 shinies in the three hours of testing this rig has under its belt.

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Retrotechtacular: World’s First Color Movie

November 5, 2013 by 21 Comments

world's-first-color-movie

It’s surprising how often a brilliant idea is missed out on until years after the fact. In this case the concept was seen publicly within ten years, but the brilliance of the inventor has been appreciated once again after 110 years. It’s a color movie which was filmed around 1901 or 1902 but it sounds like the reel wasn’t shown in its full color grandeur until 2012 when the National Media Museum in the UK started looking into the history of one particular film.

The story is well told by the curators in this video which is also embedded after the break. The reel has been in their collection for years. It’s black and white film that’s labeled as color. It just needed a clever and curious team to put three frames together with the help of color filters. It seems that [Edward Turner] patented a process in 1899 which used red, green, and blue filters to capture consecutive frames of film. The patent description helped researchers put image those frames — also using filters — to produce full color images like the one seen above.

The press release on the project shares a bit more information, like how they determined the age of the film using genealogical research and the fact that [Turner] himself died in 1904. The process didn’t die with him, but actual evolved and was exhibited publicly in 1909. This, however, is the oldest known color movie ever found.

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