SGI 10,000 core concept (6)
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Eliot Phillips (517)
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In a bold move, Silicon Graphics has decided to see how much crap many cores they can shove in one box. The Molecule is 10,000 core rackmount machine designed to leverage low cost consumer CPUs like the Intel Atom. It emphasizes high memory bandwidth and throughput between CPUs. While this sort of space efficiency is interesting it’s certainly going to take some serious cooling to get designs like this off the ground. [via Hacked Gadgets]
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Braden said:
Yes, but where did the disks go?
Case prototyping (1)
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5 days, 17 hours
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[Deviant Ollam], lockpicker and beverage cooling contest host, was recently in Vienna, presumably for DeepSec. While there, he stopped by the Metalab hackerspace and checked out their RepRap rapid prototyping machine. You can see video of his visit above. He had them construct a custom fitted cover for the flash of his point and shoot camera. That’s what we love about rapid prototyping. Many of the projects we cover here solve a particular problem, but ...
Overhauling LED marquees (4)
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In a previous job, [sprite_tm] was responsible for wrangling many different LED text ad marquees. The hardware was fairly simple and he always figured they could be pushed much further with a little work. He recently acquired ten 32×16 LED displays a decided to see what he could do with them. By the end of the project, he had full motion video running on the display. This is a great project to read up on ...
Scratch built RFID tags (9)
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[nmarquardt] has put up an interesting instructable that covers building RFID tags. Most of them are constructed using adhesive copper tape on cardstock. The first version just has a cap and a low power LED to prove that the antenna is receiving power. The next iteration uses tilt switches so the tag is only active in certain orientations. The conclusion shows several different variations: different antenna lengths, conductive paint, light activated and more.
Messing with barcodes (15)
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1 week, 4 days
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[nico] just received his credentials for an upcoming conference. On each badge, there’s a 2D barcode with the participant’s bio and contact info. These are meant to be scanned by vendors for future contact. [nico] isn’t so interested in that and plans on updating his personal info by generating a new barcode. To this end, he’s collected a number of links to help out barcode hackers. He used the SWIPE toolkit to identify the format ...
Kill A Watt teardown (3)
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Come on, folks. If we keep tearing apart everything that’s handed to us, we’ll never get nice things. SparkFun got their mitts on two Kill A Watts and proceeded to plug them into everything and then dismantled them to see how they work. The Kill A Watt keeps track of how much power is used over time. The largest load they found was their soda machine using 500W (should probably add a motion sensor to ...
Official Arduino ethernet shield (7)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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Arduino has just released an official ethernet shield. It’s based on the same WizNet W5100 chip that was used in the tiny ethernet board we covered earlier. The W5100 handles the full IP stack and can do TCP or UDP with four simultaneous sockets. The board has a power indicator plus six LEDs to debug the connection. It works with the standard ethernet library. The reset button resets the shield and the Arduino. The SD ...
A very power suit Halloween (5)
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2 weeks, 6 days
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We spent our Halloween dressed as an irate traveler as we flew cross country, but it looks like a lot of people were having much more fun. [flaming_pele!]’s Aliens power loader is one of the best costumes we’ve seen yet. He built it by referencing a 1/12th model kit and a lot of photos. The final costume is about 80% full size which gets it under their 8 foot ceilings. There’s a video of the ...
Adafruit Arduino sale (2)
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3 weeks, 6 days
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With the release of the Arduino Duemilanove, Adafruit is trying to shift out some old stock Arduino Diecimila by offering 10% off. [amk] noted that the new Duemilanove is not so much an upgrade as an Arduino with a new hat. The only changes were autoselecting power and a cutable reset line. The best part about the Adafruit sale is they’re offering Atmega328s preloaded with the Arduino bootloader as a $5 upgrade. The Atmega328 gives ...
LED Life and Charlieplexing (1)
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4 weeks
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Yesterday, we featured [Andrew]’s orientation aware camera. We want to highlight another one of his projects: LED Life. It’s a 6×5 LED matrix playing Conway’s Game of Life. He used the low power MSP430 like our e-paper clock. The best part of the writeup is his explanation of how Charlieplexing works. Microcontroller GPIO pins generally have three possible states: output high, output low, and input. This combined with the directional nature LEDs and some creative ...
Sticky tape emits x-rays (7)
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Wired posted a gallery covering an interesting phenomenon. When you unroll regular sticky tape it emits visible light, but what was recently discovered is that under vacuum it actually emits x-rays as well. They’re still trying to nail down the cause. Have a look at the gallery of UCLA’s research lab to see what kind of equipment you need to unroll tape in a vacuum.
Björk teaches you about electronics (4)
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As we often suspected, [Björk] is quite the technical mastermind. In the video above, she teaches you about the ins and outs of her television. We think she’s making a strong bid as the next person to join Prototype This! Her hacking philosophy is the same as ours: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
Art From Code: Generative Graphics (1)
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[Keith Peters]‘ blog Art From Code is devoted to his beautiful graphics from computer source code, also known as generative art. Although [Peters] is reluctant to reveal his source code, algorithmic graphics can be created with the help of tools like ActionScript, Flash, and Flex. There are some great tutorials that can start you on the path to making your own evocative art. [via Neatorama]
Lasercut RepRap kit (4)
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The RepRap is a self-copying 3D printer. The project has published plans for creating a lasercut acrylic version of the device. They call it a RepStrap since once assembled it could produce printed plastic versions of the machine components, bootstrapping true RepRaps. The plans are available for Ponoko an on-demand product service, and it would cost ~$380 if you used their service. The plans are free, so you could get them manufactured by other means. ...
XKCD inspires YouTube feature (3)
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Who knew that a silly comic strip could be so influential? XKCD’s strip focusing on the inanity of YouTube comments inspired someone to actually add the Audio Preview feature to YouTube. It’s provided us with much amusement, especially where one commenter mentions that the “preview of my own post sounded moronic!” Speech synthesis software is nothing new, of course. While it’s not the most sophisticated software, it’s an invaluable resource to those with disabilities, language ...
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Jason said:
Life mimics art!
Strunk & White can apply to programming (1)
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Kimberly Lau (102)
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1 month, 1 week
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The Elements of Style by [William Strunk, Jr.] and [E.B. White] has long been a favorite of English majors and great writers. [James Devlin] suggests that it can also be a good reference for programmers. With just a few changes in wording, the same guidance that applies to good writing can apply to good coding. For example, [Strunk] and [White} emphasize the importance of structural design to writing. Replace "writing" with "programming", and the principles ...
How-to: Make an e-paper clock from Esquire magazine (3)
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Ian Lesnet (29)
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1 month, 1 week
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If you’ve never heard about electronic paper, crawl out from under that rock and read up on the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle. E-paper is a flexible display made of color-changing beads that mimic ink-on-paper for easy daylight reading. The revolutionary thing about e-paper is that after it’s set, it stays that way without additional power. This sounds great in theory, but Esquire’s cover is the first time everybody can afford to hack an ...
ATM skimmers with SMS (1)
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Kimberly Lau (102)
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1 month, 2 weeks
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You may want to be more careful where you put that ATM card. There are now ATM skimmers with SMS notification. ATM skimmers are placed over real ATM slots and the information off the cards as they’re inserted. The new models will send the skimmed information via SMS notifications to a phone that’s attached to a computer. This solves the problem of scammers needing to retrieve their skimmers without attracting the attention of police. ATM ...
