brainwagon

Okay, I’ll confess: I’ve spent a bit too long playing Minecraft, both on a shared server, and even by myself in single player. I find it kind of soothing to create models, rather like playing with blocks or legos. But Eric Haines (a long time friend, and one of the people who was most influential […]

I’ve been a fascinated observer of indoor model airplanes for years, so this little RC controlled blimp strikes me as one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in a while. It’s just a 10g payload, suspended by an ordinary 14″ balloon filled with helium. Very cool. MAKE | How-To: “Sub Micro” R/C Blimp

I keep looking for cool projects where people build small computer and microcontrollers, more or less from scratch. Today, I ran across FIGnition: FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from the moment you switch it on. It […]

Happy Halloween everyone! I’ve kind of got zombies on the brain, which is better I suppose than having zombies munching your brain. I blame it all on the crew for the Zombie Tech podcast, despite their excellent taste in guests. Luckily, there is all sorts of good information on what to do in a Zombie […]

It seems that lots of people I know have been working on radio and computer controlled drone aircraft. I just recently found Mark Harrison’s blog, and he’s got a bunch of cool things. For instance, he linked to John Decker’s See How It Flies, an online textbook on the principles of flight. Very cool stuff. […]

At various times, I’ve wanted to set up a little webcam server, but hadn’t really found a program which combines ease of use with versatility. But today, I found a mention for the program “Yawcam”, a Windows only webcam software written in Java, and decided to give it a try. Bingo! It works pretty well! […]

While researching some information on the old CP/M operating system (don’t ask) I found Herb Johnson’s excellent retrotechnology.{com,net} website. It’s chock full of good information on old Apple Macintosh systems, S-100 systems, and cool virtual exhibit on the PDP-11. Bookmarked for later consumption: tons of good information. http://www.retrotechnology.com, .net/. Addendum: It’s amazing how often I […]

I’m interested in low cost computing. Like the kind of computing that costs what a Blu Ray disk costs. For a while, that’s been something like the Arduino, which has a 16Mhz 8 bit processor. But the Raspberry Pi is something else: a proposed computer which plugs into an HDMI port for display, uses USB […]

I think I saw this a couple of years ago, but Doug Conroy seems to have made some progress on his implementation of a PDP-10 on an FPGA. It now can apparently boot ITS. I’m more interested in the prospect of running TOPS-10 so I can relive my early days, but booting ITS is pretty […]

Anyone who has seen my projects on the Atari 2600 might reasonably conclude that I have a thing for retro computing. The saying goes “it is no virtue to do with more, what can be done with less” and I can’t think of someone whose projects have embodied that more than demo coder Linus Akesson […]

Most of the websites that I link to are related to specific topics or projects. But every once in a while, you find one that has a bunch of good stuff that matches some of your esoteric interests, and you wonder how one person could do it all. Inspired by Jeri Ellsworth’s latest video showing […]

IRC and Minecraft buddies Atdiy and whisk0r have been doing some cool videos on making cigar box guitars, some kind of neural network stuff, and more recently: some introductory electronics videos. After winding inductors and making their own capacitors in previous episodes, they get around to making their own foxhole radio just using a blued […]

The problem with working some place with lots of intelligent people is that it is increasingly hard to maintain one’s sense of superiority. Today, I tip my hat to Inigo. He has a very cool demo here, where he creates a program by creating and editing a small image in photoshop, saving it as a […]

Scanning some of the usual RSS feeds, I saw this link to an interesting little laser paper cutter project, driven by Arduinos and a couple of EasyDriver stepper motor boards, and uses parts salvaged from a DVD-R board: Pocket laser engraver. Not as useful as full fledged laser cutter, but a neat project nonetheless.

I’ve done a couple of Atari 2600 projects in the past: my Pong clock and my Enigma Machine simulator. To make physical realizations of these projects, I relied on some boards that I bought a few years ago from AtariAge, but when I checked a few months ago, it appeared that they had stopped selling […]