Hacktastico!

Unlike the majority of picture frame hacks on the internet, this guide from Hack A Day teaches users how to build and program a digital picture frame from scratch. This is a great tutorial because it not only teaches the reader how to build the frame, but also teaches some useful functions like reading from SD cards, PIC programming, and working with common graphical LCDs.

“We set out to build a 100% DIY, scratch-built digital picture frame. Our frame has a 12bit color LCD, gigabytes of storage on common, FAT-formatted microSD cards, and you can build it at home.”

This project presents bit-twiddling and PIC programming in a more accessible fashion than many other tutorials on the net with a great end result.

Additional fun with digital pictures frames can be found here.

Wow.

I’m pretty sure that sentiment is shared by everyone who attended the 2009 FRC Kickoff event yesterday. The new challenge, Lunacy, looks like it will put both the veterans and newcomers on even footing because it’s like nothing FIRST has done before.

The challenge this year is to navigate the surface of a simulated crator on the moon and fill the opposing alliance’s robots with special ball-like objects. The game will be extra-tricky because the surface of the playing field is a slippery plastic and every robot is required to use special wheels that when coupled with the plastic floor have a coefficient of friction of 0.05 (static) and 0.04 (dynamic). This looks to be a great engineering challenge.

I may post more about this year’s FRC event as the season progresses. To follow a team as the season wears on, visit OregonCityRobotics.com For more information about FIRST, visit usfirst.org

Update:

I had some major problems that ened up with me having a non-functioning live blog on this site and all my posts being redirected to Twitter. I’m very sorry about this. Here are the contents of the kickoff live blog.

7:01am

Introductions have finished, live feed in t minus 70 seconds

7:03am

The challenge from JFK? Man on the moon? What does it all mean?

7:04am

Tom is obsessed with the idea that it involves spaceships. Could he be on the right track?

7:06am

FIRST chairman makes his annual opening address. He introduces Paul Hodes, congressman from New Hampshire

7:12am

Wow, the growth of FIRST worldwide is astounding. There are teams in Israel, Germany, Great Britain, Chile, and a number of others

7:13am

Chairman’s award has a new requirement: video footage of team’s work. This is definitely a change

7:15am

The work MOE (team 365) has done is really incredible. They are a great example of what FIRST is all about.

7:21am

The 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 as been mentioned numerous times. It must be a space game this year. Side note: the crowd of 300+  here are silent

7:26am

Oh wow, a partnership with Lockheed Martin has produced a simulation program for the new season. Cool beans

7:31am

The new documentary that’s soon to come looks really cool. Team 2550 might even have a cameo!

7:40am

Dean Kamen (founder of FIRST and inventor of Segway) has finally come on stage

7:42am

As always, Dean’s message is really compelling. He always drives the point that it’s not about the robot, its about making the world better

7:51am

Dean’s passion really fuels FIRST. One can only wish to have this sort of passion for anything, really.

7:54am

Dean: “FIRST is full of contradictions” how true. It’s amazing what lays in the balance. Knowledge, fun; wide-spread, personal

7:59am

Dean throws a hint: “sliding down a slippery slope.” crowd begins to talk amongst self

8:06am

Dean’s homework assignment: keep track of alumni.

8:14am

Introduction to the new control system. National Instruments’ CompactRIO system. It seems really advanced. I can’t wait to see what comes out

8:19am

Uh oh, the satellite signal died. 300+ people are upset. No one knows if the feed problem is local or from NASA itself

8:24am

Problem solved. It seems a wire was crimped by a door. Woody Flowers (MIT prof.) is now talking about the great mentors FIRST has

8:30am

Woody is demoing a strange weight contraption. The tension is building for the unvieling of the new game

8:31am

The new game is: an empty field?

8:32am

The name of the game is Lunacy

8:35am

Everyone is in awe.  Super slick surface combined with strong player interaction. This will be a good competition

8:41am

Everything has changed. The whole system has changed. There will be few penalties. I’m still stuck on the whole super slick ground

8:50am

On the screen: recap of new rules and rule changes. In the crowd: talk of the new challenge and ideas are bubbling

8:50am

Access code for manual: 1GiantLeap4FRC

This is kind of short notice but I’ve decided that I’m going to live-blog the FIRST FRC Kickoff, Saturday, January 3rd. I will be bringing you live coverage of the Portland Metro kickoff event as this year’s challenge is unveiled.

For those who don’t know, FIRST is an organization devoted to getting kids interested in science technology, engineering, and math. To do this, FIRST has turned learning into a sport with robotics. FRC is the high-school level robotics competition that I participated in during my senior year of high school.

Each year, teams are given six weeks to design, build, and program a robot that competes with other robots in a specific challenge. The challenge is announced on the first Saturday of each year in a satellite broadcast shown worldwide during the kickoff event.

This is the beginning of a hopefully reoccurring segment called Found Hacks, where I bring up some cool hacks and mods I’ve found on other websites.

Today’s Found Hack is from spritemods.com [via HackedGadgets]. It presents step-by-step instructions on making a hardware dongle that attaches to an HP printer and changes what the display reads.

“A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC.

For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I’ve got dozens of this type laying around and theyre cheap enough, so I decided on this one.”

This is a really cool hack and I can’t wait to try it out.

Also: There is a software hack to do this sort of thing over a network. It’s a little less safe because you could mess things up pretty bad.

I just placed my order for an ioBridge module and a couple of helper boards and I couldn’t be more excited.

If you are unaware, the ioBridge is a fairly new device – still in beta according to the website – that allows users to easily interface their projects with the web. This ease of use has been achieved by creating a main board that interfaces with the web and a number of smaller function boards to interface with the various I/O a user may choose to interact with.

Despite being a relatively new technology, the ioBridge has already been put to work in a couple of pretty amazing projects, namely the twittering toaster and an iPhone-controlled dog feeder.

One of the great strengths that the ioBridge seems to offer is its straightforward web interface. Being more of a hardware hacker myself, piecing together a web interface would probably be the most time consuming and least professional aspect of my project. After looking at what ioBridge offers its developers, I’m happy to say that my next project might actually look good to the outside world.

I can’t wait to post about the projects that will stem from this device.

As a budding fixie rider, I’ve often  found myself searching Craigslist daily for the best deals on parts for the bike I’m building. This is kind of cumbersome because I have to scan through a whole bunch of posts before I find something that’s actually close to what I’m looking for. I figured that there had to be a better way for me to keep track of what was popping up in craigslist.

The answer is RSS feeds.

An RSS feed is sort of like the updating headlines you sometimes see on news websites. We will be using RSS feeds to keep an updated list of a certain search term on Craigslist. This method can be applied to any RSS feed in particular, but a tutorial on this use was requested of me. To start, go to your local Craigslist site and type in the search bar what you want to keep track of. For this example, I’ll use turntables.

First go to your local craigslist site and type in whatever you’re looking for in the search box to the left.

Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the orange RSS button on the lower right. Also, if you wanted to track only those items in a certain price range, you could do so by typing in your range at the top of the page before clicking the RSS button.

You will then be brought to a new page that will look a bit different than the normal Craigslist page. Make sure you’re using Live Bookmarks, then click the “Subscribe Now” button.

A small window will pop up asking you what you’d like to name the feed. I’d suggest something short, but descriptive because you will only be able to see about 16 or 17 characters once it’s in you toolbar.  Finally, check to make sure that the folder selected is the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder. This way, you wont have to dig through your bookmarks to find your feed.

Click subscribe.

Congratulations, you now have an auto-updating Craigslist RSS feed!

This is my first post. Hopefully this is the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between my thoughts and the internet.

Also: a link to my website