S1axter's Tech Log of Crazy Stuff
s1axter
Circuits, electronics, hacks, software, firmware and anything else cool
s1axter posted on Wed. September 13th 2006 at 09:28 PM PST. (Main Post!)
Have a CD? Have an empty cereal box? Why not make a spectrometer?
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/astro/html/spectrometer.html
Jerry Xiaojin Zhu did just that with his hacked together CD spectrometer . A spectrometer is a tool used to measure properties of light. Some interesting information can be obtained just by looking at the spectrum given off by different light sources such as a high pressure sodium lamp, CRT display or neon signs. The material that gives off or reflects the light can be determined by dark lines in the spectrum and gaps in the colors. While this is a little over my head and not really computer or hardware related, some geek out there loves this stuff, plus it’s made from a cereal box, that right there makes it cool.
Build one yourself and try it out, the person who emails me the craziest light source gets a cookie
Here’s the wikipedia page on spectrometers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer
s1axter posted on Tue. September 12th 2006 at 08:09 PM PST. (Main Post!)
How ubergeek are you? If you search the net looking for CPU schematics so you can make backgrounds you are cool in my book but most would label you "strange".
Well for those cool people out there I have stumbled across Stanford's VLSI Microprocessor Historical Data page. Complete with microprocessor stats including clock speed, die size, cache size and even images of microproc layouts. Next plan, backgrounds!
Here's the link:
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/group/chips_micropro.html
You might want to check out the main VLSI folder, there are some cool pages there too.
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/
UPDATE: As promised backgrounds (not tooo bad I think)
Intel 4004 - Intel4004(1280).jpg - Intel4004(1024).jpg - Intel4004(800).jpg
Zilog Z80 - z80(1280).jpg - z80(1024).jpg - z80(800).jpg
s1axter posted on Tue. September 12th 2006 at 05:09 PM PST. (Main Post!)
"Never say that nothing good comes out of computer games..." This is the opening line from an article posted on embedded.com yesterday about a combo Cell & AMD computer expected to come out around end of 2007 or beginning of 2008.
The main goal for the new supercomputer (Roadrunner) is to combine the power of the IBM cell processor, designed for the Playstation 3, and AMD Opteron CPUs to break the Petaflop barrier. FLOPS is a unit of computer performance measure and is an abbreviation for Floating Point Operations Per Second. A petaflop is 10^15 FLOPS. If it took a person one second to calculate a single FLOP (e.g. 3.14159 * 2.0) what this computer could do in one second would take a human 31,709,791.984 years...wow! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaflop )
According to the article, "IBM's Blue Gene/L is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, peaking at more than[only] 280 teraflops." Quite a large step from where we are now.
As always, here are wikipedia links:
IBM Blue Gene computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
IBM Cell CPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor
AMD Opteron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron
Original article: http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192700705
Enjoy
s1axter posted on Mon. September 11th 2006 at 03:33 PM PST. (Main Post!)
HackADay ( http://hackaday.com ) is always on top of the latest news. This project was just finished up a few days ago.
Any modder and some game enthusiast will know Ben Heckendorn ( hhtp://www.benheck.com ) as the king of console modifications. Achievements of his include a portable NES, SNES, and Atari Laptop. Well for the past three months Ben has been working hard on cramming a full XBox 360 into a laptop form, complete with hi-def LCD, keyboard, DVD drive and all connectors. This is truly a feat.
Here is the original HackADay article.
I'm posting this a little early because it's gonna be popular. Ben Heckendorn has been up to his tricks again. This time he built a 14 pound, water cooled 17 inch XBox 360 aluminum cased laptop. It's got all the outputs you could ever need. This one is very good. He was kind enough to write up the build and do a nice photo shoot. Oh, this is very, very nice.
Links:
http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/x360_page_1.htm (Description)
http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/x360_page_5.htm (Photos)
http://skytroniks.com/benhell/mirror/x360_page_1.htm
(Mirror since benheck.com goes down when something like this breaks)
s1axter posted on Sun. September 10th 2006 at 10:16 AM PST. (Main Post!)
If you run Linux, chances are you already know you can add some really cool program extensions to the main X session and whatever window manager you choose. Here is a project that aims to provide a new way to interact with the windows on your desktop.
The project is called Luminocity ( http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity ) and a nice blog from one of the developers can be seen here http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots . There is not clear description on either pages that describes exactly what luminocity is but all is clarified within two seconds of watching one of the videos. Think of a window as a piece of paper tacked on a wall (the wall being the desktop). When you move the paper the physics of the universe move the paper and it wobbles. That wobble effect is kinda what luminocity is aiming for. Take a look at the videos, who knows this might be the de-facto standard for window movement in the future... "Keyboard[static window movement], how quaint"
s1axter posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST. (Main Post!)
Well I finally put up a new poll. Nobody has posted anything on the forum in quite a while. I wanted to get some feedback on what visitors to the site would want to see more of. It only takes a second to vote, please do, it will make me happy and when I'm happy I post more stuff, thus the number of votes is almost directly proportional to the number and frequency of posts. Or you can not...
That's it, more stuff to come this weekend, I promise
Update: Sept 3rd.
I was wondering why there were no votes on the poll as it is the main way I determine the traffic and direction of the site. I was testing things and found that the vote script wasn't even there...oops. It's fixed now. :-)
s1axter posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST. (Main Post!)
ZeWrestler passed on the link to the LCD overhead article to a friend of his. Seems like his friend is quite a big DIY home theater person and is building a projector from http://lumenlab.com/ . Lumenlab is a small business providing parts and information for those looking to build a home theater projector. If you want to build a quality projector you should take some time to check out this site. What makes the overhead LCD projector work is the light source, the lens on the overhead body and the lens on the arm. If you are going to make one of these yourself you are going to need to collect all these parts. Some surplus stores either real or online might be a source of some cheap parts, but for the real quality lenses and stuff, take a look at lumenlab.com
s1axter posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST. (Main Post!)
Have a old LCD? Can you get your hands on an overhead projector? Graft them together and make a LCD projector on the cheap!
From the main article:
"LCD:
The donor LCD was a 15inch Sony LCD native resolution of 1024x768. The unit worked fine when I got it, which is what got me thinking of doing this.
Overhead:
The overhead is a $10 bargain I picked up today from the University surplus store."
http://gi.phoenixarisen.com/projectView.php?projID=13
I also added some more pictures to the TRAFFIC project from last post. You can view that project here:
http://gi.phoenixarisen.com/projectView.php?projID=4
Later :-)
s1axter posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST. (Main Post!)
What do you get with a friend's old LCD, a $10 overhead from a surplus store and a little time? An LCD projector of course!
I've been patiently awaiting the day when I acquired an LCD and found a cheap enough overhead to make one of these. Hack247 ( http://www.hack247.co.uk ) has a bunch of LCD projectors people have hacked together in their spare time. Finally I can say I have one too.
LCD:
The donor LCD was a 15inch Sony LCD native resolution of 1024x768. The unit worked fine when I got it, which is what got me thinking of doing this.
Overhead:
The overhead is a $10 bargain I picked up today from the University surplus store. It was marked at $40 but I wasn't going to pay that. This is where it doesn't hurt to talk to the people working there. I asked the guy at the desk if they had any broken overheads since the vertical arm has most of the important stuff anyway (Lens, Mirror, focus, etc). After the guy looked at me like "Why in the hell would you want a broken one?" he took a look around, didn't find anything, pointed to one of the oldest ones and said "10 bucks, it's yours". When dealing with non-technical people who don't know what they have, always act like it's just something trivial, like a stage prop or something. If you walk in and say "Ooooo, oooooo, how much, how much" before you can say "how much" again it will be $50.
This is getting long, I will make another post about how it goes together. Later!
Note: I am not claiming that I was the first to do this. My inspiration came from years of seeing these pop up on hardware site across the net, and more reciently Hack247 http://hack247.co.uk . I am also not going to claim I have the best projector...I don't...not by a long shot. The one thing I do claim is that for $10 I can watch movies on the wall of my apartment, which is enough for me, lol.
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