Eye-Fi Teardown

February 1, 2009 by Eliot 44 Comments

eye-fi

[les robots] had a defective Eye-Fi card on his hands and when a replacement was sent, he was told to destroy the original. What better way to ‘destroy’ something than opening the case? The Eye-Fi is an SD card with a builtin WiFi radio so it can upload images while remaining in camera. One version uses Skyhook’s location service to geotag photos. You can see a few photos of the dismantled card on Flickr. The board is manufactured by Wintec. The wireless side is handled by Atheros’ ROCm, the same low power Radio-on-Chip module you would find in a mobile phone. The flash memory comes from Samsung and the antenna is along the back edge, where it has the best chance of getting signal.

Cat5 Camera Flash Extension

January 17, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

extension

Network engineer [Mario Giambanco] recently purchased a cable to move his flash off camera. Unfortunately, it ended up way too short for his purposes. Instead of purchasing a slightly longer proprietary cable, he decided to employ what he had around him: a lot of cat5e cable and ethernet jacks. He cut the cable close to the center in case things didn’t work out and he’d need to repair it. His post on building the custom ethernet flash extension cable goes into heavy detail to make sure you get it right the first time. He’s tested it using both five and 50 foot pieces of cable with no apparent lag.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen cat5 repurposed: composite video through cat5, vga cat5 extension, and cat5 speaker cables.

[via Lifehacker]

UK Raid Seizes 1,800 Flash Cartridges

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 46 Comments

dscart

South Wales Police raided a store in Cardiff seizing 1,800 Nintendo DS flash carts. The devices can be used for playing pirated games or running homebrew software. In the UK, the carts are illegal under the Trademarks and Copyright Acts. The 21-year-old suspect had imported the devices and was selling them both online and in-store. He had over 1,000 devices in his home. Many of them packed and ready to ship. Official statements by the Entertainment and Leisure Publishers Association claim that the hardware irreparably damages the DS handhelds.

[via Joystiq]

Genetic Programming

December 8, 2008 by Eliot 46 Comments

monalisa

[Ron Alsing] wanted to try out some genetic programming, so he created a simple test problem: Could you render the Mona Lisa using just 50 semitransparent polygons? The program starts with a random DNA sequence. It then mutates and compares itself to the original image. If the mutation is closer, it becomes the new sequence. The final image he shows looks pretty good after 904,314 iterations.

[prunesquallor] pointed out a genetic algorithm project of his own. It’s a flash program to evolve a car. The car tries to get as far as possible on a set terrain without the passenger circles hitting the ground. The wheel size and positions can change along with the spring length, constant, and damping. A graph tracks the best performance along with the mean. He’s planning on building a version that lets you change the parameters.

[via Waxy]

Nintendo DSi Gets Its First Flash Cart

December 3, 2008 by Eliot 41 Comments

ak2i_power_on

A month ago, we reported that Nintendo’s new DSi portable didn’t work with any of the current crop of flash cartridges. Things didn’t look good for homebrew. Here we are a month later and looking at the release of the Acekard 2i. It’s the first DSi compatible flash cartridge. The features appear to be identical to previous versions and we expect other manufactures will be updating their product lines in short order. You can find a video of the Acekard 2i after the break.

These carts may exist because of pirates, but we happily use them for homebrew. There are a lot of great programs out there; here’s a list of 24 apps that are dedicated to music creation. You can run Linux on it too. It’s as easy as copying a file to a flash drive. If you have a DS and aren’t using homebrew, you’re wasting it. We’ll be picking up a DSi as soon as they’re in the US (they’re region locked).

Continue reading “Nintendo DSi Gets Its First Flash Cart” →

YouTube Testing Even Higher Quality Videos

November 21, 2008 by Eliot 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22]

YouTube, purveyor of some of worst looking flash video is finally getting their act together. We posted the other day about embedding videos using &fmt=18 to get higher quality YouTube videos. It seems the awesome knob has now been turned up to &fmt=22. All of the previous tricks should work, just use 22 instead of 18. This all depends on the highdef version being available. Now they just need to get rid of the grainy preview images.

Augmented Reality In Flash

November 19, 2008 by Eliot 35 Comments

Digital Pictures Interactive has put together a great augmented reality demo. Unlike many others, it’s entirely Flash based, so there’s no install necessary. Print out the custom symbol and try it out for yourself in your browser. Augmented reality refers to any mashup that combines computer generated content with a live video stream. We see great potential for this technology and the large number of consumer webcams would certainly help consumer adoption. Video demo embedded below. Continue reading “Augmented Reality In Flash” →