brainwagon

Yesterday’s surfing churned a couple of interesting links on the subject of speech synthesis and computer singing. I wasn’t really explicitly looking for this stuff, and can’t reconstruct what led me here, but I thought I’d archive this here. The first is a link to a formant based speech synthesizer in just 150 lines of […]

Here is a nice little receiver project which has many features that are similar to the ones I noted as desireable in my post earlier today. Cascode 7 Experimental Receiver Noted for future examination.

When I was young, I used to tune into KEX 1190 in Portland during the Christmas season when they would play episodes of “The Cinnamon Bear”, a classic 1937 radio serial about Judy and Jimmy and their quest to catch the Crazy Quilt Dragon who has stolen the Silver Star on the top of their […]

The Wobbulator is a pretty nifty little video modification gadget. Basically, the idea is that by adding a couple of extra magnetic yokes at odd angles to the conventional yokes on a black and white display tube and driving them with a frequency synthesizer, you can create all kinds of amazing patterns. The results are […]

A very nice looking little CNC mill that looks like it would be very nice for milling pc boards and the like, and costs $100 to make. I’ll have to look at this carefully in the future. Mantis 9.1 CNC Mill – Make Your Bot!. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlDpZl-QIAA

Yesterday I blogged a bit about someone who implemented a 16 bit ALU in the game Minecraft. It wasn’t really apparent to me how the game elements were used to implement logical gates. Naturally, a bit of searching on the web revealed the secrets: Redstone circuits – Minepedia – The Minecraft Wiki!.

On hack-a-day today, I saw this interesting link to a small hydroelectric generator. I’ve been interested in DIY/non-centralized generation of electricity for quite a while (without actually developing any serious knowledge about it, mind you) so I found the idea rather interesting. Paul taps water from a stream and uses it to feed a 2 […]

As part of the “How To Make (Almost) Anything” course at MIT, David Carr designed and built a very simple 3 axis mill, that seems entirely adequate for milling PCBs and light materials. While it may not be the most precise, it’s very clever. Nifty $90 CNC Mill, by David Carr.

I admit it: I’m an old timer. When I first was learning about Unix and C programming, I was sitting in front of a TVI 912 terminal (if I was lucky) or an ADM-3A (if I wasn’t lucky) that was connected to a VAX-750. I’m not overly nostalgic, but I do continue to work in […]

I like trebuchets. Former Pixarian and RenderMan engineer Dan apparently located some plans for building small trebuchets from the Hila Science Camp: The Hila Trebuchet. And here’s a short YouTube video showing him test firing four of them. Cool! Bonus video (unrelated to the above): Dan also posted a link to this video, showing video […]

Just saving this link after someone reminded me that I could use a decent cheap stereo microscope for some of my electronics assembly work. These seem very reasonably priced. Student Low Power | Lowest Price Microscopes.

I’m mostly resistant to nostalgia when it comes to computing. Let’s face it, the iPhone has way more impressive capabilities than the desktop machines I was using just a few years ago. But occasionally I do want to take a step back and revisit those heady days of yesteryear, when I would sit in a […]

BibliOdyssey is a terrific blog which posts incredible images from old books that have entered the public domain. By way of example, check out this awesome collection of images of “extinct monster”, megafauna and dinosaurs. Very nice images, such as the giant sloth on the right. If you like old illustratons, check it out, then […]

Old timers may remember Byte magazine, and Steve Ciarcia’s column therein. Steve went on to publish Circuit Cellar magazine, an electronics magazine which is more or less dedicated to embedded computer systems. Byte books published a book of his called “Build Your Own Z80 Computer”, which now can be downloaded in its entirety with Steve’s […]

More “don’t ask” links. I was tinkering with emulators again, and ran across this comprehensive page on the Z80 and the various DRI operating systems that ran on it. Nice emulators and lots of software and archived information. Z80pack – Z80 Emulator and Crossassembler for UNIX Addendum: The Z80/CPM were CPU/Operating systems back in the […]