s1axter posted on Tue. May 8th 2007 at 10:45 PM PST
For those visitors who stopped by before 2007 they should remember the old blue/black style GI had. Well we have another more "fun" style to show today.
I like the current look of the site, however sometimes it seems a little boring and lacking color. We're engineers not graphic designers :-P. Right now there are three looks to the site.
We have no idea what looks better so I put up a poll. Vote on it and let us know what you think. You can also post on the forums! If we get enough votes, we will put some serious time towards refining that style.
The blue/black and retro styles are not finished, so don't expect perfect CSS.
s1axter posted on Sun. May 6th 2007 at 07:39 PM PST
Beam robots always looked cool to me. Beam robots are usually simple solar circuits that have a specific response to stimulus, such has running away from light.
I've always wanted to make 2 or 3 and have them run around my desk at work. I was browsing youtube today and found some cool beam-bot videos and figured I should post them for all to see. Also have some URLs that can explain a little more about beam robotics.
s1axter posted on Wed. May 2nd 2007 at 10:48 PM PST
So I got bored tonight and started going though my box-o-cables and came across an old Apple bus mouse I had gutted years ago. I always wanted to turn it into a garage door opener but never got around to it. Well, coincidently the garage door opener for my apartment parking is the perfect size to sit inside the mouse with room for a switch.
After some probing around the opener PCB, I found two easily accessible leads for the main switch, and used wirewrap to trace them out of the unit. Wirewrap around the terminals seemed easier than soldering them. With a $1.15 tube of Krazy Glue, a nylon washer and a PCB stand off, I got the switch just below the button so when screwed together it had about the same throw as the original mouse. I also tapped a lead from the LED on the board and ground to wire up a new LED where the old mouse cable went.
I took some pics, so take a look and remember, you would be amazed at what you can do with “junk”.
Interesting find, as you can see in the pics the unit has a PIC16F54C. If I had some better tools than a multimeter and a collection of screwdrivers I would have tried to dump the code from the PIC; a project for the future :-P
s1axter posted on Wed. May 2nd 2007 at 12:42 AM PST
I’m not a big fan of re-posting something that’s splashed all over the net. However with the rally from the Slashdot post of the HD-DVD encryption key I figured why not support free speech?!
For those out of the loop, the "key" in question is a sequence of numbers that can be used by software players to play HD-DVD videos, this also means they can be copied. Stories about the key on digg.com were quietly removed; other sites that posted the key are totally down. Today Slashdot.org ran an article about the key and within seconds people were posting it in comments. Just like AYBABTU years ago, the 16 hex-pair sequence was all over the net, tons of digg articles and posts on almost every site I have feeds for. The revolt over censorship was so strong another article was posted today on the digg articles being removed. It’s very interesting to see the dynamics of geeks on the net in a situation like this.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
firewire posted on Tue. May 1st 2007 at 06:07 PM PST
I was just browsing the net the other day and I came across this wonderful little object. The Plaice is a Programmer, Logic Analyzer, and In-Circuit Emulator all in one. This sucker is powerful, it has a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA and a 32-bit Harvard RISC MicroBlaze on board. This handy little device is even 10/100 ready. I dont even know where to start with the hardware this thing packs. All I have to say is check it out (and I want one).
s1axter posted on Mon. April 30th 2007 at 09:03 PM PST
Saturday I went to a meeting of the Robotics Society of Southern California in Fullerton, CA. I hadn’t been to a meeting before and I was expecting to see some really cool stuff since they have a hallway following robot contest coming up. Well, I was a little surprised because only two other people showed up, one other guy who had never been there before, and this guy John who is a club veteran. It wasn’t a total letdown since John had his hallway robot brains with him, so I figured I would take some pics on my phone and post them here.
The controller runs an Intel 8031 (ROM-less 8051) microprocessor with 64K of RAM. The program to control the steppers, LCD and other peripherals was burned to the 256K (I think) EPROM. The system also had an 82C55 general purpose I/O chip with three 1byte bi-directional ports. They keypad is sweet, board mounted with 12 pins, one for each key; I stopped by the electronics shop in Fullerton when I left and made sure I picked up one.
I was quite impressed with the design, I usually don’t see systems with separate RAM, storage and proc, it’s mostly microcontrollers for ease of use. The other monthly meeting for the club is usually bigger and I plan to swing up to that in two weeks. I’ll try and get some more pics of John’s completed bot and the others when the competition runs.
s1axter posted on Sat. April 28th 2007 at 10:15 PM PST
Read Geeksinside’s review of Linux Appliance Design from No Starch Press:
"A week and a half ago I received Linux Appliance Design by Bob Smith, John Hardin, Graham Phillips and Bill Pierce, published by No Starch Press. This is one of No Starch’s latest titles and was released in the beginning of April....When a friend asked me what was in the book I gave him the response, "Everything you need to make a sweet daemon with any interface you want". This is exactly what Linux Appliance Design is ..."
Geeksinside Style Vote
S1axter's Tech Log of Crazy Stuff
For those visitors who stopped by before 2007 they should remember the old blue/black style GI had. Well we have another more "fun" style to show today. 
Beam robots always looked cool to me. Beam robots are usually simple solar circuits that have a specific response to stimulus, such has running away from light.
I’m not a big fan of re-posting something that’s splashed all over the net. However with the rally from the Slashdot post of the HD-DVD encryption key I figured why not support free speech?!
Read Geeksinside’s review of Linux Appliance Design from No Starch Press:
