Archive for category: Hacking
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 […]
5 comments
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, […]
1 comment
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. […]
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 […]
2 comments
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 […]
2 comments
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 […]
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 […]
1 comment
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 […]
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 […]
3 comments
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.
1 comment
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
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.
Tags: Arduino, LCD, Nokia |
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 […]
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 […]
1 comment
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 […]
1 comment
I suspect the world would be better if that percentage were even greater.
Apparently 15% of all web traffic is cat related. There's no reason for Brainwagon be any different.
Thanks Mal! I'm trying to reclaim the time that I was using doom scrolling and writing pointless political diatribes on…
Brainwagons back! I can't help you with a job, not least because I'm on the other side of our little…
Congrats, glad to hear all is well.