Take a few moments and browse this gallery from the Library of Congress. Tasked with the job of preserving the roughly 150 million historical items, they are constantly developing new methods using bleeding edge technology. There is an odd balance of some of the oldest documents in tandem with some of the newest technology evident in these pictures. From doing spectral scans of ancient books to laser mapping warped phonographs, everything must be preserved and documented.
We’re not sure how we missed [Jack Eisenmann’s] 4 bit TTL CPU when we were tipped off the first time, but we’re glad it was sent in again for us to feature it.
41 different ICs (mostly TTL) come together to comprise the DUO 128 Elite. While the architecture is a little different than what we’ve seen before, using “nyckles”, the DUO 128 Elite still works perfectly. Catch a video of some example programs, including pong, after the divide.
[Thanks Marc G-C]
[Tim Williams] likes to heat things up with this induction heater he built. At peak it can use 1000W and as you can see in the video, that’s more than enough power to heat, burn, and melt a plethora of different objects. The case design uses a center divider to isolate switching noise from the magnetic field with the whole unit housed in aluminum because it won’t heat up from stray magnetic fields. He’s selling plans and kits in case you want one, but we just don’t know what we’d use it for.
There’s a million tutorials out there describing how to use shift registers. If you’re just getting into embedded systems you should know how to use them as they allow you to take three microcontroller pins and expand them virtually without limits. This is due to the serial-in parallel-out nature of these integrated circuits. A key feature of these chips is the ability to overflow, or cascade to the next chip which is what provides the expansibility.
Protostack just published a tutorial that uses this hardware to interface sixteen LEDs using two shift registers. The explanation is short and to-the-point with easy to understand code examples. There’s also something to be said for their crisp and clean breadboarding work.
Take a look at how they do it and then use the concept to make a fancy clock or reduce the pins needed to drive a display.
There’s a loaded gun but its got only one bullet. Spin the cylinder, point at head, and pull the trigger. The game’s not over until the bullet is used and a player is done. This game’s got a twist though, the cylinder has at least one million chambers.
The Flash_Destroyer is testing the limits of EEPROM rewrites. It fills that little eight-pin chip with data, then verifies what has written. When it finds and error the game is over. The chip is rated for one million rewrites but while we were writing this it was already well over two and quarter million. We usually prefer to be creators and not destroyers with our hacks but there’s something delightful about running this chip into the ground. See the startup of this device after the break and click through the link above to see a streaming feed of the progress.
[Sprite_TM] outgrew the features of the cheap unmanaged TL-SG1005D switch he was using on his home network. Instead of buying a new and much more costly switch he cracked the cheap one open and found that the RTL8366SB chip inside possessed the ability to work harder but was crippled for sale as a low-end model. It wasn’t as easy as that oscilloscope firmware upgrade we saw a while back. He had to add an AVR ATmega88 to send I2C commands to the switch. Turns out that the I2C protocol wasn’t standard and after much head scratching he found some Linux drivers for the chipset that gave him enough info to send the configuration commands he needed. Now he’s go the managed switch he needed for his VLAN for the cost of a microcontroller and some wire.
Just snap off the corners and this business card can be used as a mass storage device. Well sort of. The tab left over has four traces on the back to make it USB compatible. The PIC 24FJ64GB002 microcontroller on the card registers as a storage device and launches [Ramiro’s] resume and a cover letter loaded as an HTML file. He’s made it as useful as possible by including access to the SPI and I2C bus connections but he’s also included some firmware to act as a data logger or an oscilloscope. At about 5 euros a piece you won’t be distributing these willy-nilly but it’s not too much more than handing out breakout boards with your name all over them.
