Archive for category: Hacking

Recommendations for tech to create a virtual hacker space?

April 14, 2016 | Hacking, Mad Science, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Most of my hacking occurs in a vacuum: where I sit in my living room or in my home office and toil away silently on projects which occasionally get documented here, but which all too often are just my way of passing the time. On the way to work, I was asking myself what I […]

Two bits of hardware on order…

December 19, 2015 | Embedded, Hacking, Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, Small Linux Computers | By: Mark VandeWettering

Yes, my fascination with cheap computing devices continues. I’ve got two bits on order at the moment. First is the Pine A64 from Kickstarter. This one won’t be showing up for a while, but seems to be a pretty nice piece of kit. You can think of it as a competitor for the Raspberry Pi, […]

More ESP8266 Experimentation: Giving it the Boot…

April 4, 2015 | Arduino, Hacking, LED, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Got a chance to play around a bit more with the ESP8266 tonight. I dug out a nice little dual output power supply board that I had got from tautic.com with the hope that it would eliminate some of the erratic behavior that I had observed before. Sadly, that didn’t seem to solve my problem. […]

Building a distributed satellite ground station network (or not…)

January 3, 2012 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, Hacking, Rants and Raves | By: Mark VandeWettering

My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I really think aren’t helpful at all. Questions like: Why didn’t you just buy X instead of building your own? Didn’t somebody do that years ago? Why are you playing with […]

Lunch with Ken Boak, the Nanode, and the evolution of the Arduino platform

January 3, 2012 | Arduino, Hacking, Microcontrollers, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak, who happened to be on an unrelated visit to the Bay Area this week. We exchanged brief messages for the first time a couple of weeks ago, as I was intrigued with his idea […]

Sprites mods – CP/M on an AVR

September 5, 2011 | electronics, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve always been fascinated by emulation and virtual machines, as well as retro-computing: resurrecting the old machines of my past. I never owned an old CP/M machine, but there are still some neat projects where people construct there own, and simulators like SIMH and YAZE-AG are good software simulators. But what I always wondered was […]

Magnetic core memory reborn… on an Arduino????

May 11, 2011 | Computer Science, electronics, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

I may have mentioned before, I’m kind of old. One measure of how old I am is the fact that I’ve actually programmed machines that used core memory. Real core memory. Little ferrite donuts on arrays of wires. Some time ago, I remember running across this awesome blog post from “Wayne’s Tinkering Page” which showed […]

More hackable hardware: Installing OpenWrt on Seagate DockStar HOWTO

September 10, 2010 | Hacking | By: Mark VandeWettering

I have a suprising fascination with devices that can be reflashed with custom firmware. I have an old NSLU2 from Linksys. I have more than a couple WRT54Gish routers that run DD-WRT and Tomato. I have a Canon SD1100 that runs CHDK. I have an ASUS router that runs OpenWRT. And here’s another possible hackable […]

Zounds! Sounds!

August 11, 2010 | Computer Science, Hacking, Music, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Tom and I have been discussing some early hacking efforts, probably spawned in part by my re-reading of Levy’s Hackers. A couple of days ago, this resulted in me pondering the mysteries of Minsky’s circle algorithm (still ongoing), but today it drove me to an early interesting sound algorithm documented in the legendary HAKMEM, ITEM […]

Using a PDP

February 11, 2009 | Computer Science, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

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

Arduino Realtime Audio Processing

January 15, 2009 | Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

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

Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation “Kit”

December 30, 2008 | Hacking | By: Mark VandeWettering

Okay, it’s not really a “kit”, it’s just some directions on how you can wire some commonly available gadgets (like a Nokia 6100 LCD panel or a piezo speaker) to an Arduino board and make a nice little demonstration board. Some good ideas in here. Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation Kit | Popular Science.

Re-animating the PDP-11/70

December 16, 2008 | Computer Science, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

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 […]

MERL – TR2003-035 – Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs

November 12, 2008 | Hacking | By: Mark VandeWettering

A novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital I/O pins and a single current limiting resistor. This technique is first applied to create a smart illumination system that uses a single LED as both light source and sensor. We then present several devices […]

DIY Projection clock

February 1, 2006 | Hacking, Link of the Day | By: Mark VandeWettering

Courtesy of the Make Blog, go surf over and check out these instructions for building your own projection digital clock.  The idea is pretty simple: modify a  cheap digital watch from the dollar store by mounting a couple of bright LED lights behind the LCD display, and then use a lens to focus the enlarged […]