[Travis Goodspeed] has updated his syringe based logic probe that we covered earlier. Instead of soldering to the outside, he’s using silver wire shoved into the core of the needle. A nice side benefit is the safety cap now fits. Inside the syringe are two LEDs that indicate current direction. The sharp needle makes it a lot easier to hit small traces.
Via [ladyada], [Raijuu] combined some ideas from [Ladyada]’s boarduino and [evilmadscientists] Atmel business card created his own single sided (for easy etching) project board for ATMega8/128 projects. You can tell that the design is an expression of frustration from past projects; We can definitely appreciate features like separate power and multiple sockets on each pin. (We’d probably consider adding some soldering points to allow for permanent connections.)
We spotted [Kerrin Mansfield]’s lovely solar engine on ladyada’s rantings. It uses 16 1/8th inch solar cells to collect power. At night, an orange LED pulses at .2Hz. He doesn’t have a specific write up on the construction, but from the component layout, it looks identical to [Gareth Branwyn]’s schematic in Make 08, which you can find in the PDF.
ISPs have recently become very aggressive towards their customers. They’ve been blocking or altering traffic to prevent you from using specific programs or protocols. Google’s Senior Policy Director recently stated that they’re developing tools to allow people to detect ISP interference. A couple other groups have been building tools as well: The Network Neutrality Squad just released the second beta of their Network Measurement Agent. The tool currently detects spoofed packets by monitoring the round trip time of the connection; early reset packets will have lower than average RTT. If you want to go more in depth, the EFF has published a guide for using Wireshark to do the detection. We’ve even heard rumors of people building tools to tunnel a session inside of one that looks completely different.
[photo: nrkbeta]
Engadget recently posted a story about a flexible tactile display that can be wrapped around any part of the body and give haptic feedback to the user. The research team from Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University that developed the device are focusing on applications like Braille for the visually impaired or transmitting tactile data to a remote user, but this is just the beginning; the applications for wearable haptic feedback are wide open.
Continue reading “Wearable Haptic Devices Bestow Sixth Senses”
Normally driving an LCD requires seven connections to pins on the display, but by using a shift register, [Phillip Warner] at Arduino Playground was able to drive an LCD using only 3 wires. The method is cheaper than a serial LCD, but you’ll mainly save yourself a lot of effort and time by using it.
[Warner] used a HEF4094 chip to group the lines together and a variable resistor to control the contrast. A zip file with the requisite code to make this work can be found in the post.
[via YourITronics]
Nokia LCDs have been a popular choice for hardware projects for quite a while. [Ramandeep] published a how-to on interfacing the 1100 series LCD with a PIC controller. The 1100 features easily soldered contacts and a backlight, making it an good choice for adding an LCD to your project.
