Annoy Your Sound Guy Even More

November 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

“I can’t hear myself in the mix,” “yeah, man, I’ll be there at 8,” and “dude, we need like four more mics.” Each and every one of these words is documented in actuarial tables and doesn’t bode well for your sound tech’s risk of a stroke. Luckily, there’s an even better way to kill your sound guy and this time, it’s actually pretty clever.

[@dop3j0e] at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace came up with the Noiseplug. It’s a very small build that could almost fit into a quarter-inch jack. It’s all SMD with a tiny ~~(unknown)~~ ATtiny9 microcontroller powered by a watch battery.

The music coming out of the Noiseplug is really interesting. All the code on the microcontroller is a one-liner written in C. Similar ‘algorithmic chiptune’ programs can be run on any PC: check out these three examples.

These potential entries to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest throw chars into an 8-bit PCM stream. Piping the output of these programs to /dev/audio would generate an actual song – written entirely in one line of C.

Of course, [@dop3j0e] could have made his Noiseplug a little less annoying, but sound techs are underappreciated for a reason, right?

Check out the Noiseplug in action after the break along with a few one-liner C songs.

Continue reading “Annoy Your Sound Guy Even More” →

Ants Duke It Out In The AI Challenge

October 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

All of those orange, cyan, and yellow dots represent digital ants fighting for supremacy. This is a match to see who’s AI code is better in the Google backed programming competition: The AI Challenge. Before you go on to the next story, take a hard look at giving this a try for yourself. It’s set up as a way to get more people interested in AI programming, and they claim you can be up and running in just five minutes.

Possibly the best part of the AI Challenge is the resources they provide. The starter kits offer example code as a jumping off point in 22 different programming languages. And a quick start tutorial will help to get you thinking about the main components involved with Artificial Intelligence coding.

The game consists of ant hills for each team, water as an obstacle, and food collection as a goal. The winner is determined by who destroyed more enemy ant hills, and gathered more resources. It provides some interesting challenges, like how to search for food and enemy ant hills, how to plot a path from one point to another, etc. But if you’re interested in video game programming or robotics, the skills you learn in the process will be of great help later in your hacking exploits.

Program An Arduino Using Your Sound Card

September 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 86 Comments

audioino_programming_arduino_with_sound

[Chris] wrote us to share a neat technique he has been using to program the Arduinos he uses in his projects. He likes to build bare bones Arduino clones rather than sacrifice full dev boards, and instead of programming them via traditional means, he is using his computer’s sound card.

He builds a simple dead bug Arduino (which he calls an Audioino) using a handful of resistors, a pair of caps, an LED, a reset switch, and most importantly – an audio jack. After burning a special audio bootloader to the chip, he can connect the Arduino directly into his computer’s speaker port for programming.

Once the microcontroller is connected to his computer, he runs the IDE-generated hex file through a Java app he created, which converts the data into a WAV file. With the Arduino put into programming mode, he simply plays the WAV file with an audio player, and the code is uploaded.

He says that this method of programming comes in handy in certain cases where he builds things for friends, because they can easily update the software on their own without a lot of fuss.

Making The Case For In-circuit Debugging Tools

August 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

in_circuit_debugging_of_pic_microcontrollers

If you are in the market for a PIC microcontroller programmer, you may want to consider a model with an In-Circuit Debugger (ICD). [Rajendra] put together a great tutorial on using an ICD when debugging PIC firmware, which makes a pretty convincing argument for owning one.

In his tutorial, he happens to be using a MikroElektronika PICflash2, but he says that there are plenty of other ICDs out there if you are not keen on this particular model. The PICflash2 not only acts as an ICD, but as the name suggests it works as an ICSP as well.

[Rajendra] walks us through a short debugging session using some simple code that reads data from an LM34DZ temperature sensor, displaying the results on an LCD screen. While he isn’t actually hunting for bugs, he does show how easy it is to step through the PIC’s code one statement at a time, evaluating variables and registers along the way.

[Rajendra] does point out that using an ICD does occupy a few I/O pins while running, limiting your resources just a bit. We think that being able to debug code as it runs is pretty reasonable tradeoff if you don’t necessarily need each and every pin available for use.

Official Kinect SDK Released

June 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Microsoft just released the beta of the Kinect for Windows SDK. Although, “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products” it appears Microsoft have changed their tune and released APIs for C++, C# and Visual Basic seven months after the Kinect was officially hacked.

We’ve seen libraries being developed since the launch of Kinect, culminating in the OpenKinect project. The Microsoft release covers the same ground as the OpenKinect project, and will hopefully improve on attempts to get audio out of the Kinect.

We’ve seen Kinect hacks run the gamut from telepresence, to robotics, to 3D modeling, so the Kinect seems like a great tool in the builder’s arsenal. The Kinect is a wonderful tool, and even though most of the functionality has already been replicated by the open-source community, it’s nice to know there’s official support for all the great projects we’ve seen.

LED Build Monitor Helps Keep An Eye On Your Servers

April 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

In his line of work, Hackaday reader [Pedantite] often has to monitor the build status of several continuous integration servers throughout the day. One afternoon, he got the idea to install a set of stop lights in the office in order to monitor the status of the servers, but filed it away as a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” project.

After some time had passed, he was bitten by the idea bug again and decided he would build a physical device to display the status of his build processes. This time around, he brainstormed on a smaller scale and the result is the “Indictron” you see above.

He built a simple LED board made up of four rows of four LEDs to display the build processes. Different LEDs are lit depending on the project’s current build status as well as the results of the previous build. The board uses an ATmega88, and interfaces with a compiler watchdog application using a virtual USB package made specifically for AVR micro controllers.

The end result is a simple, yet useful status board that “just works”. He does not seem to have code or schematics posted on his site at the moment, but we’re pretty sure he would share them upon request.

If you’re interested in a bit more of [Pedantite’s] work, check out his “Good Times” parental timer we featured last week.

Build Your Own SOIC Progamming Clip

November 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Pyra] was looking for a way to reprogram some ATtiny13 microcontrollers in a SOIC package. He’s re-engineering some consumer electronics so adding an ISP header to the design isn’t an option. He had been soldering wires to the legs of every chip but this is quite tedious. What he needs is an adapter that can make physical contact with the legs just long enough to program new firmware. After looking around he discovered that a PCI socket can be used as a progamming clip (translated). It shares the same pitch as a standard SOIC package but is not wide enough for the chip. He cut out 4 rows of the socket and the section of motherboard it was soldered to. Then he made a cut down the middle of the plastic and bent the two sections apart. The image above illustrates this, but not shown are the eight wires that he later added to connect to the device.

We wonder if this can be adapted to program SOIC parts without removing them from a circuit board. That would be a handy tool for finishing up the LED lightbulb hack.