Does anyone else find it a little ironic the electronic retailer SparkFun is advocating scripts to help Digikey have a Sort By Price function? Regardless, to reiterate now Firefox (and we hear Google Chrome too) users with the Greasemonkey plugin can sort Digikey items. Personally, some of us here are just Mouser fans at heart.
[Thanks Charper and Mohonri and Satiagraha, image credit Make]
This XKCD comic takes a playful swipe and almost everything, including the Arduino. We’ve heard people claim that we have some sort of favoritism toward Arduino, and we don’t. People just submit a LOT of projects with them. But there is one point that we’ve seen a few times that should be addressed. In our categories we have an “Arduino hacks” section. That will not be going away, again, because we get so many submitted. However, shouldn’t we also add some categories for other stuff? Should there be a “pic hacks” category, or maybe just “microcontroller hacks” category?
Let’s not making this an Arduino bashing thread. Instead, give us some good ideas on other categories you would like to see for sorting.
[via littlebirdceo]
On April first Sony rolled out new firmware for the PlayStation 3 that removed the ability to install Linux on the system by blocking a feature called OtherOS. Now a class action lawsuit has been filed against the company for its actions. It doesn’t take an attorney to figure out that they removed features that were a major selling point for the system. As mentioned in our previous article, the ability to use an exploit to access the hardware doesn’t mean that every user installing Linux on the system plans to do so. The suit asserts that users had no opportunity to negotiate the System Software Licensing Agreement which is only presented to a purchase after the sale is made. The lawsuit is availble in PDF from from IGN.
Who knows where this one will end up. The suit seeks an injunction against the removal of the OtherOS feature as well as compensatory damages. No matter what happens, we still think the removal was a bad move on Sony’s part.
[Thanks Shueddue]
Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center.
ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes walking the expo. With the economy now turned sour, the show floor lately is just a bit smaller and the focus more businesslike. Still, nestled between components intended to sell by the millions and oscilloscopes costing more than some cars, one can still find a few nifty technology products well within the budget of most Hack a Day readers, along with a few good classic hacks and tech demos…
[W1VLF] is on a quest to communicate over long distances with a 9 kilohertz transmitter. He built this giant coil with that in mind. A round concrete form was used as a base and wound with magnet wire by hand. We’d recommend building an automated winding device, but this method seems to have worked. Operating at 50 Watts on the air-core coil at 8.97 KHz he was able to pick up the signal at a distance of 5 kilometers. It’s not breaking any overall distance or portability records, but on a project like this the quest is where the fun is at.
[Thanks Drone]
The Winduino II uses fins to pick up the movement of the wind and translate it into music. Each fin is attached to the main body using a piezo vibration sensor. The signals are processed by an Arduino housed inside and the resulting data makes its way to a computer via a Bluetooth connection to facilitate the use of Max/MSP for the audio processing. Included in the design is an array of solar panels used to keep the battery for the device charged up. Hear and see this creative piece after the break.
A while back, we announced that we would be bringing new features to Hackaday. One in particular that garnished a lot of interest was our question answer type thingy. Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, that has not happened yet. Without divulging too much into the secret machinery that lies underneath Hackaday, I’ll just say that we(the writers) don’t necessarily have control over all aspects of the site. An example would be the copyright. Yes, we finally got it updated. Thanks for all of your emails. No, none of us had access to that part of the site, so don’t bother letting us know how simple that change should have been.
We are as eager as you to see some good ideas and good feedback flowing through this site, so we’re going to start a regular post, entitled “Ask Hackaday”. This isn’t entirely new, we’ve done it before actually. This is just to let you know that we intend to do it regularly, and to set some ground rules. “Ask Hackaday” will mostly center around you, our readers, and your ideas. We will publish a question, and possibly our thoughts, but the main content will be your responses. We have a huge collective of intelligent creative readers and it would be a shame not to tap into that pool of knowledge. When you are offering an answer, be thorough, give details, and please be kind.
Send your questions to askHAD@hackaday.com for consideration. They will be chosen based on a complicated system of random number variation involving furry woodland creatures and how we feel at the moment that we read them. Do not get offended if you question does not get published. We get tons of questions already and we don’t intend to publish them all.
