brainwagon

Two years ago, I complained that MLB.TV’s black out rules basically robbed them of a chance to get $120 of my hard earned cash in exchange for a product which they supply to others in the U.S., but which they refuse to sell me. Fast forward to today, and nothing has changed: I still can’t […]

Okay, a diversion from my regular topics. And that’s what computer games are for me: a diversion. I play them because I like to be diverted from my work and from even my normal bits of hackery and play. I tend to play games with a strong story component, like the Zelda games on Nintendo, […]

50 years ago today, American astronaut John Glenn completed three orbits of the earth aboard Friendship 7. Glenn would later become Senator, and would return to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-95 crew, becoming the oldest person to fly into space. These three orbits started fifty years of an American […]

Yesterday I was looking (sadly unsuccessfully) for some BPW32 photodiodes that I know I have somewhere, when I ran across some of 434 Mhz transmitter modules from Sparkfun (now a retired part) that I had never used. These little $4 transmitters are commonly used for remote-keyless access or similar applications. They have just four pins: […]

Roger, G3XBM built a simple beacon for light communication using a K1EL beacon keyer chip and a handful of other components. I didn’t have any of those chips around, but I did have some Atmel ATtiny13s lying around. I hacked this simple program together to send Morse code in two different ways: on pin PB1 […]

Thanks to John, who pointed out that this post was mangled. Fixed now. I wasn’t going to mention this one, but Dave, Chris and Jeff over at The Amp Hour brought it up on their most recent podcast, but other than Jeff’s somewhat enthusiastic declaration that he thought it was BS, I don’t think they […]

Last night’s hacking adventure was inspired by a couple of recent posts from Roger, G3XBM having to do with light based communication. The first was his simple beacon design: it’s just a keyer chip, a MOSFET, a voltage regulator, and some (beefy) current limiting resistors. Roger used this beacon to do some non-line-of-sight communications via […]

Okay, I finally got some time to record a video about a simple little webserver project I hacked together earlier this week. My wife Carmen got me a Nanode kit from Wicked Device around Christmas. These are Arduino compatible development boards which include a Microchip ENC28J60 Ethernet device to enable web connectivity. One slight drawback […]

Okay, today is February 6, which means that my revolvermap that you can see over in the left margin has been up one entire year. Right now, it’s showing 148,950 visits since it’s inception. I suspect a couple of thousand of those are actually me, but I’m pretty happy that so many people stumble their […]

Ken Boak was nice enough to gift me with a pair of Nanodes when he was out visiting last month. Much to my embarrassment, I haven’t had much time to play with them, so tonight I tried to do a bit more research to figure out how I could use them in some more advanced […]

A couple of my projects have used the tiniest of the Atmel ATtiny chips: the ATtiny13. I have written one or two programs in assembler for these chips, but I prefer to work with avr-gcc whenever possible. What’s amazing is that you actually can use a sophisticated C compiler to generate code for such a […]

Fellow hacker Eric Smith has released the code for an 8080 simulator. I spent a few hours hacking my own 8080 emulator a few months ago, and at least got it to run Tiny BASIC, but I was never quite successful in getting it to boot CP/M. Among some of the problems were that I […]

In response to my previous post, @xek replied: https://twitter.com/#!/xek/status/163442298456260608 Well, the fact is I had heard of doing that. It’s not really hard to rig something that will convert the RS232 level from the GPS into TTL levels for the Arduino. It just takes a single transistor inverter: you rig an 10K resistor from the […]

I used to be an electrical engineer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. (If you don’t get this, google for “arrow in the knee”, and guess what Xbox game I spent the morning and afternoon playing instead of working on something cool.) I’ve had a number of projects that could benefit […]

This is a very cute hack that does something which I thought was impossible: an implementation of an FM transmitter that has exactly two components: a battery and an ATtiny45 microcontroller. It’s brilliantly obtuse and cool: Sprites mods – AVR-based FM-transmitter – Intro, theory The basic idea is to trick the internal oscillator of the […]