brainwagon

I’m intrigued by various uses for embedded processors, and so are my readers. I hadn’t seen this particular microcontroller board before, the “Teensy”, which is very similar to the Arduino, except that it is uses an ATMEL AVR chip with a direct support for USB. The link also points at a nifty interface to “soft […]

I’ve been interested in old computers for quite some time, so I was pleased to run across this link: Using a PDP.

The Arduino is a cheap little microcontroller, but you can use it to do some interesting audio effects. Check out the following Lab3 – Labor für experimentelle Informatik

A few years ago, Tom Duff and I each wrote an emulator for the PDP-1 so we could play the original version of Space Wars! I learned a lot about old computers in the week or so it took me to do, and I must admit that I’ve retained a fascination for old computers ever […]

Here’s a way to turn an ATMEGA168 into an Arduino compatible controller with a minimum of external components. arduino-standalone « Conversations with spaces

This is just completely nuts, an 8 bit computer constructed entirely from 12 volt relays. It consumes 12 amps at 13.5 volts (160 watts). Hilarious. [tags]Retrocomputing,Hacks[/tags]

Well, Steve is still up there, but the big news (as yet unreflected on the Apple website) is the announcement of a new Intel based iMac. It will apparently come in the same sizes and prices as previous G5 iMacs, but will use Intel’s new CoreDuo processor that was plugged by Intel so heavily at […]

Check out this video on Google showing an overclocked AMD Duron vaporizing. They clocked it up in both frequency (3.8ghz) and I believe also significantly over voltage, but still, pretty amazing. They just didn’t let the magic smoke out, they literally destroyed the chip. The most daunting challenge facing computing isn’t speeding up computers, it’s […]

Linksys has sold a bazillion of the old WRT54GS routers. It’s probably due in some small part to the many alternative firmware upgrades you can put on the device to increase its capabilities in a number of innovative directions. The most recent versions of these devices are somewhat less hackable though. The series 5 devices […]

This dive into the world of retro computing has rekindled my interest in field programmable gate array technologies. I found this page which contains interesting FPGA based CPU designs. Mostly marked as a bookmark to re-examine later.

Dave went out and bought himself a couple of those single use, $25 camcorders that CVS is selling these days, and hacked them to allow download of video. What is even better, he snapped video of the project and made it available for download. Caveat: it appears to be encoded in some kind of Quicktime […]

Broadband Reports has this cool overview of where residential networking is likely to go in the next few years. I’m currently stuck on cable modem because we are too far from the phone switch for DSL, but it is good to see what might be possible in the next few years.

Here is an interesting early paper on the justification, implementation, analysis and use of random number generators, written in 1959. The resulting machine generated about 5000 bits per second, not bad! Via Boing Boing. By the way, random numbers are still cool.

Real World Technologies lists an interesting article about the AMD K8 processor and its previously unnoticed ability to patch its own microcode. Apparently AMD has used this to repair a couple of bugs in the processor in the past, but nobody really noticed it before. A couple of quotes from the article: The ability to […]