looks like our favorite critters from 4th grade are serving a new purpose. musically that is. the hampster movements are captured by mini-midi controllers of some sort, then fed into whatever you please. a synth rack, a keyboard, and roland tr-900. The possibilities are endless. It uses 6 hampsters, and a C-based controller that react to their movement. pure genius.
Sure you know that Disco Stu from the simpsons has got all the moves, but what if you don’t and want to kick it like travolta? then there’s only one option: head up to MIT and check out their LED Disco Dance Floor. This thing is comprimised of 1,536 LEDs made by 20,000 hand soldered connections. that’s a lot of work. it can produce 4,096 colors, can be controlled through XMMS, handles 30fps, and the best part is that it’s 128 square feet. Yes. It’s a very impressive dance floor that has insane capability. there is a log kept which is very detailed and explains the process and how it became a technical nightmare. they made custom PCB controllers to use it and soldered day and night to complete it for a dance they were having. in the end it was pulled off and quite successfully. they also have an “epilogue” telling what changes they made after the dance to improve it. that’s MIT for ya.
thanks to everyone who sent this in.
i’m really liking this one. A game modder who’s not even very good at programming (he keeps mentioning this) decided to make his own game out of the Super Mario Brothers (SMB) NES cartridge. He wrote the assembly (god help us all) to basically make clouds scroll across the screen and just clouds. The process shows how the graphics are contained on one chip and the code is on another. Also shown, is how to rip the chip out, re-program it with your code, and then how to shove it back in and make it work. You can see the final result by clicking here. We’d also love to see someone take a shot at this and to see what they could come up with.
just think about how much energy you waste when you pound your heels into the ground while walking or jogging. you exert a lot of effort fighting gravity to lift your foot and body from the ground, only to let gravity take over, allowing your body to fall forward onto your heel again and wear another layer from the sole of your sneaker.
the kind folks at the mit media lab decided to do something about this. by placing a piezoelectric element or a rotary magnetic generator into the heel of your shoe, you can effectively recycle some of your strut and use it for a mobile device.
it’s like regenerative braking for your feet.
benjamin heckendorn of portable playstation 2 fame has been working on a prototype for a mass produced portable atari 2600, code named ‘phoenix’.
it has a 3.5″ screen, takes 6 aa batteries, uses standard atari game cartridges, and will someday allow me to play hours and hours of joust and moon patrol on international flights.
ben recently started a phoenix blog to help us stay on top of the latest phoenix development news. thanks for the tip jesse!
let me ask you something. haven’t you ever wanted to build your very own guitar amp out of an old video game system? of course you have. well now you can start out with the dreamcast guitar amp. basically, it’s pretty easy, doesn’t require any soldering, and takes a lot of patience.
if you dare attempt this rockin project, read on.
i recieved an email from owen the other day:
fellow hackologists may be interested in a year and half long project of mine to build a computer controlled sheet metal cutting system. It uses a 100 watt CO2 industrial laser.
there are some videos on his site showing the co2 laser milling machine in action. it’s absolutely fantastic. just the control system itself is pretty intense. if you are interested in doing something like this, you should also check out his blog that chronicled the whole contruction.
i’m pretty sure i need one of these.
update: apparently i can’t spell (thanks pedant). i was thinking it was z for zippy.
