Science Projects

This isn’t an FPGA emulating Mario Bros., it’s an FPGA playing the game by analyzing the video and sending controller commands. It’s a final project for an engineering course. The ECE5760 Advanced FPGA course over at Cornell University that always provides entertainment for us every time the final projects are due. Developed by team members [Jeremy […]

There’s a Method to My Desk’s Madness @ NYTimes.com. Even the most modular, bland work space tends to succumb to the tastes or personality of its inhabitant. How can it not? The average office worker spends nearly six hours a day sitting at a desk. In the first of an occasional column, we take a close look at how successful people organize their work spaces. Their answers have been edited and condensed. Our founder and engineer, Ladyada, has her desk in this New York Times feature today!

Flickr: Maker Media’s Photostream. Some great ones in there!

If you program microcontrollers probably find yourself writing same functions over and over again. If you are smart enough, you simply write generalized functions that may be reused in other projects. But in many cases it happens that we write and forget. Here are several simple code snippets that may be useful in some cases. Some of the mare written by Rob Faludi with addition by Alasdair Allan. void blinkLED(byte targetPin, int numBlinks, int blinkRate) { for (int i=0; i The code snippets include blinking LED with predefined rate and duration, sounding buzzer at desired frequency and duration, checking free RAM, connecting to WiFi and working with EEPROM. Not much actually, but you are free to build up your own database and probably share with others.

freaklabs’s tweet/photo from Maker Faire.. It looks like a TOR box!

With the new blinds in hand, the job turned out to be not quite as simple as one might expect

Mobile Mirrors: Manequins Covered in Mirror Shards by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen @ Colossal. Mobile Mirrors: Manequins Covered in Mirror Shards by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. The mirror surfaces of the mannequins turn our gaze back onto ourselves, forcing us to become aware of our own bodies and consumption habits. This way revealed, we can see ourselves as part of a much larger system, as complex and chaotic as ever the sculptures’ reflections on the walls.

How two Valve engineers walked away with the company’s augmented reality glasses @ The Verge. Three months ago, celebrated video game publisher Valve did something completely out of character: it fired up to 25 workers, in what one employee dubbed the “great cleansing.” At the time, co-founder Gabe Newell quickly reassured gamers that the company wouldn’t be canceling any projects, but it just so happens that one project managed to get away. Valve was secretly working on a pair of augmented reality glasses… and those glasses are still being built by two Valve employees who lost their jobs that day. Former Valve hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth and programmer Rick Johnson spent over a year working on the project at Valve, and have been putting in six days a week, 16+ hours a day on the project ever since. “We believed in it… that this is going to change the way that people interact with computers and play games,” says Ellsworth. “This is what I’m going to build come hell or high water. It was just a no-brainer that when we were not at Valve… we just had to do it.” They formed a company, Technical Illusions, to commercialize the tech. This weekend, they flew down to Maker Faire to show their crazy prototype to the world for the very first time. This is what Jeri has been working on!

Electronics show and tell with G+ On-Air hangouts every Saturday at 9:30pm ET. Want to show a project on an upcoming show and tell? Leave a comment on the show and tell announcement on Adafruit’s G+ page: http://google.com/+adafruit —————————————-­- Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ —————————————-­-

Welcome Arduino Yún – the first member of a series of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux. Massimo Banzi announced it some minutes ago during his annual “The state of Arduino” presentation at Maker Faire Bay Area:  Arduino Yún  is the first of a revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux. Yún means “cloud” in chinese language,  as the purpose of this board to make it simple to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.