Live Full Motion Video On A Peggy

[Windell] was stoked enough to send us [Jay]’s sweet hack on [Windell]’s Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Peggy 2.0 kit. [Jay] added serial input and hacked quartz composer on his mac to light up all 625 LEDs with live motion video. If you were jealous of the Metalab’s giant LED display, now you can have your own – smaller and cheaper.

EMSL has recently supplemented this awesome device with their Arduino Library for Peggy 2.0. It is a program library that contains various animations and demonstrations of how to draw on a Peggy. Download and enjoy them as they are or tweak them to test out some of Peggy 2.0’s capabilities.

Wide Angle Lens For The ATC2K Video Camera


We just ordered up a new ATC3K video camera from Oregon Scientific for some, uh projects. (No, not our new porn site.) If you’ve got one of the older ATC2K cams, you can mod it a bit to avoid dropping another C-note on the new model. [Carlos] wrote up his mod to remove and replace the original narrow lens with a wide angle fisheye lens. The install requires some significant effort and some case modding – probably not a good idea if the waterproof feature is dear to you.

Hackit: The Bronco Table


While attending LA SIGGRAPH Maker Night, we got to talk to [Brett Doar] about his Bronco Table. The table is meant to make life more difficult by bucking off anything that’s set on top of it. Right now, it uses a tiny piezo mic to listen for the impact and then drives three leg motors in a random pattern. He envisions later generations either running away or following you intently when something is set on them.

The main problem with the current design is that you have to hit the table hard enough to make a noise the mic can pick up. The ideal solution would be able to detect anything, no matter what the material or how forcefully it was set down. How would you detect objects being placed on the surface (table doesn’t have to be wood)?

Hacker Conference Videos


Almost every security conference we’ve attended in the last year has uploaded videos from their speaker tracks. Explore the archives below, and you’re bound to find an interesting talk.

[thanks, Dan]
[photo: ario_j]