Hackaday Links: Sept 15, 2012

September 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Very tiny keyboard

The idea behind the iControlPad2 is pretty simple – just take the slide-out keyboard from a phone, discard the phone part, add two analog sticks and a D-pad, and put Bluetooth in it. It makes for a very small keyboard perfect for controlling a Raspi, a home media server, or even a phone or tablet. I think it’s cool, anyway.

I mustache you a question. Where’s the Hawaiian Shirt?

At her local hackerspace, [Akki] heard someone pronouncing Raspberry Pi as, “Raspberry pee eye.” Of course this joke needed to be taken to its fullest absurdity, so [Akki] gave her Raspi a [Tom Selleck] mustache. Slightly better than the Googly Eyes Arduino shield.

Not giving a Flip about proprietary batteries

When powering a Flip video camera, [Dan] had two choices: regular AA batteries, or a proprietary battery rechargeable through the USB port. When the rechargeable battery is inserted, it closes a small switch telling the Flip it can recharge these batteries. Wanting to put his own rechargeable batteries in his camera, [Dan] closed the switch with a little bit of cardboard, thus allowing him to use his own NiMH rechargeable batteries.

Building operating systems from scratch

A while ago we posting something about a Cambridge professor putting up a tutorial for developing an operating system from scratch on the Raspberry Pi. [Joey] decided to follow these tutorials and has a blog dedicated to his adventures in OS development. It’s not a custom UNIX-inspired OS yet….

Put a quarter in, get a goldfish

[Yooder] over on Reddit spent a week turning a gumball machine into a fish tank. A very nice build that is now home to a few neon tetras. Check out the imgur album for a full build walkthrough.

Zzstructure Emulator

July 12, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

[John Ohno] has been working on a zzstructure operating system written C since January. [John] realizes not many people know what a zzstructure is, so he posted a demo of his project. [John] has also put all the code online.

A zzstructure is both a hypertext and operating system unlike anything we have today. You could say that when it was first conceived in 1960 it was 100 years ahead of its time. [John]’s implementation of zzstructures operates on a 256-dimension grid and functions a lot like a multidimensional forum thread. Although that’s a lot to wrap your head around, it can probably best be explained by [Ted Nelson], the creator of zzstructures.

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64-bit OS Written Entirely In Assembly

May 27, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 112 Comments

The folks at Return Infinity just released a new version of their BareMetal OS, a 64-bit operating system written entirely in assembly.

The goal of the BareMetal project, which includes a stripped-down bootloader and a cluster computing platform is to get away from the inefficient obfuscated machine code generated by higher level languages like C/C++ and Java. By writing the OS in assembly, runtime speeds are increased, and there’s very little overhead for when every clock cycle counts.

Return Infinity says the ideal application is for high performance and embedded computing. We can see why this would be great for really fast embedded computing – there are system calls for networking, sound, disk access, and everything else a project might need. There’s also ridiculously small system requirements – the entire OS is only 16384 bytes – lend itself to very small, very powerful computers.

With projects that are computationally intensive, we think this could be a great bridge between an insufficient AVR, PIC or Propeller and a full-blown linux distro. There’s just some questions about the implementation – we feel like we’ve just been given a tool we don’t even know when to use. Any hackaday readers have an idea on how to use an OS stripped down to the ‘bare metal?’ What, exactly, would need 64 bits, and what hardware would it run on?

Check out the Return Infinity team calculating prime numbers on their BareMetal Node OS after the jump.

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Microsoft Unveils Open Source Multi Core OS

October 1, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 62 Comments

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A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.

[via Engadget]