Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’ve got a lot of interesting stuff queued up, but I lack the time to play around with it. But I promise to get to them soon and blog/twitter/flickr/blip.tv all about them:

Chemistry set

I’ve been helping out with the editorial work on Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, so I picked up a basic glassware/lab gear set from Home Science Tools.

Hydra

Andre Lamothe, creator of the Hydra, sent me a Hydra SD Max for review and evaluation. The back story behind this is that I tried, and failed miserably to build one of these after he gave me the prototype Hydra SD to help me demo the Hydra at Maker Faire. I did get enough XP in soldering to level up, but not before ruining my Hydra prototyping card.

Mach 64 Programmable Logic Starter Kit

This is also something Andre sent to me, to evaluate and review for Make. This is the sort of thing I’d fall into for 3 days.

Sun SPOT development kit

Sun sent one of these along to me for evaluation and review. They make Cylon eyes at you when you turn them on. They are full of all sorts of good stuff: Zigbee wireless (can I get it to talk to an XBee?), accelerometer, battery, temp/light sensor. The price may seem steep, but you get two sensor boards and a base station. It’s pretty much ready to roll.

XBee breakout board for the Make Controller

Everything in my house will be talking to everything else very soon now.

There’s much more than that, though: I’ve got so many unbuilt kits, I haven’t hacked the XO in weeks, etc. I’m going to have to hold an open house soon and invite Providence area geeks to help me hack this stuff!

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to my desk to find my Mac frozen. When I rebooted, the hard drive started making horrible noises, so there was no question that my 200GB Hitachi drive had crapped out. Fortunately, Time Machine had my back, and the good news is that I dusted off the 250GB HM250JI Samsung drive I had written off a while back. I had installed it in my MacBook, but it was slow to the point of being unusable. And as it turns out, this was a bug. I wouldn’t have known this if my hard drive hadn’t crashed, because I’d been using the 250GB drive in an external enclosure, where it behaved fine, if a little slow. Well, one firmware update later, and this drive is zipping along. It’s not a blazing speed demon, but it’s in the sweet spot for performance/capacity that I had hoped for when I bought it!

I was planning to make a MiniPOV Cylon Jack-O-Lantern, but I remembered I didn’t have a MiniPOV at home. I placed an order for one to remedy this, but I figured the order wouldn’t get here in time for Halloween, so I whipped something else up instead. It’s a Jack-O-Lantern that’s designed to look like it’s got a flickering candle in it… until you get up close. It has a proximity sensor and brings the LEDs up to maximum brightness as soon as you get near it. The source code is based on an example from Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which I now keep on my bench within reach of all my Arduino boards. I wrote up an Instructable that shows how to do it. Now I need to figure out what to put the electronics in for the next holiday. I think stuffing it in a turkey could be a remarkably bad idea.

Remember the classic rainbow effect in so many Atari games and demos? I dug around for some information on how to do it, and distilled it into a mini howto on the recently launched Hackszine Blog. So break out your favorite 8-bit Atari computer or emulator, and get ready for some type-in fun!

I’ve been working on a little piece of code to pull down RSS feeds and display them on a small LCD attached to the controller. It’s pretty basic now; it just looks for stuff inside of <description> tags and pulls it out. You can see the gory details at my Making Things Member Page.

I recently picked up an XGameStation Pico, which is a small video game system you can build and program yourself. I’m going to be coming up to AS220 around 2:30pm, and I’ll set up a little work area where I can assemble the unit, and if the darn thing works, I’ll even plug it into the projector for some big-screen neo-retro action before the Geek Dinner. Feel free to come along and watch, help, or give me moral support when I mess something up beyond repair!

P.S. If you have a Parallax SX-Key and a KeySpan 19HS USB/Serial adapter, bring it along. Those are the two accessories I forgot to order until last night (and without them, we’ll only be able to run the default video game that’s pre-flashed onto the system).

If you’re going out to the Maker Faire, be sure to drop by the Hacks booth and say howdy. I’ll be bringing some goodies related to a few of our hacks books, and there will be plenty of toys you can mess around with.

OpenSPARC Goals: “To significantly increase participation in processor architecture development and application design by making cutting-edge hardware IP freely available.” Getting the obvious Bart Simpson reference out of the way quickly (how long do you figure before they reword that first bullet point?), I’m wondering how someone like me could hack this? I can’t fab chips in my basement… yet. But Qemu emulates a SPARC. Is there an opportunity for SunSource there? An emulator does not need to be full speed to be useful. (via Smart Mobs).

I just hacked a PS/2 keyboard plug into my Commodore 64
30-in-1 Direct-to-TV joystick. It’s really easy. Here are
the instructions I used, and Here are the
pictures I took.

I’ve been using a Sharp
Actius for those times when I need Windows XP or when I want to
travel light. But I’ve been frustrated by my apparent lack of ability to
control LongRun’s power management behavior. I recently found some utilities that let me see
the CPU speed, and it cemented my frustration: when I unplugged the
power adapter, I got a flat 300MHz.

Well, this morning I was messing around with the Control Panel Power
settings, and set it from “Max Battery” to “Portable/Laptop”, and even
when unplugged, I found it was speeding up to 1GHz when it needed it.
All this time, I thought that the Power Options control panel only
controlled the timers (sleep, display off, and disk spindown).