TopHatHacker

I grew up with a laptop. My dad has always been a computer programmer, back since high school. He always had some hand me down laptop I could play with, normally “throw outs” from the government. Those throw outs weren’t anything to scoff at.. Where my dad worked at, they weren’t allowed to sell old tech or give it away. They HAD to throw it away: thrown away right into my lap.

That being said, I’ve learned to type on a short keystroke, tightly grouped keyboard. I’ve never had much use for a number pad so when I look for a desktop keyboard I try to find the same attributes. I currently own a Logitech Dinovo Edge keyboard and it’s beautiful. It certainly adds to the sleek office environment the modern workplace demands. I’m looking to upgrade though, to a Logitech Illuminated Bluetooth keyboard that supports 3 simultaneous bluetooth connections. That’ll make coding for Android a breeze. I always put in keyboard shortcuts to menu items anyways so to just switch over to an Android device to test a program would be quick and efficient.

A side note, Apple has the same keyboard style and if I’m not mistaken, you can’t purchase a number pad on a stock wireless Apple keyboard these days? I think it’s gone the way of the Buffalo Doritos’s.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Well last night I wrote a “greasemonkey” script to integrate Instagram into my twitter feed. I didn’t mention this in the last post, but they haven’t integrated it most likely because Instagram only supports http and not https. At any rate, I made another quick script: HackADay in my twitter feed! Yes, I’m that lazy. Now I don’t have to leave the page to show the most recent hackaday post. This actually works on any link that the @hackaday username posts.. And now that I think about it, if you change the username or take out the username check, whenever there is a link in the tweet, you can display it in an iFrame in the expanded window. I’ll post both versions below.

UPDATE: the second script here that displays any link is AWESOME!! It’s a quick and dirty hack and sometimes get’s screwed up if you use the “collapse all” button on twitter but I’ll fix that when I get a minute soon.

Continue reading →

There are a few people on twitter that I follow that insist on posting Instagram photos. Probably because they’re big apple users, or maybe because they like the look. Either way, I hate clicking on external links in my twitter feed to just look at a picture that might not even be worth it. (Though the two people that post photos I want to see tend to use Instagram) So, 20 minutes + jQuery + me being really lazy gives us this new user script. I used Chrome with the TamperMonkey extension

Necessity might be the mother of invention, but laziness is the mother of the invention of great scripts.
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Your remote has two main features:

• send commands to addressable nodes you’ve installed at work, home, and in the car
• send a ‘beacon’ every 10 seconds or so that lets all receivers in the area know that you’re around.

To set the stage,
let’s first explain the relationship between the remote and the receivers. The receivers are small devices that you can place throughout your life to do specific tasks electronically controlled by the remote. You can turn on a light, change the volume on your stereo, or even unlock a door. Each receiver has an address, and is constantly listening for the remote to say it’s address. If the address of the device is not in an incoming packet, the following data packet is discarded (or repeated when in a mesh network). Each remote also has a device address, so you can differentiate between more than one remote in a multi-remote system.
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A friend and I are trying to make a signal analyzer similar to the Huntron Tracker 2000 and why not make a prototype with the Pi? We made our own Pi to breadboard adapter, and we chained 2 shift registers together (what we need for our project). LED’s are wired up for now just to show us what’s happening. As for programming, this has certainly been an adventure these last 2 nights brushing up on my C and learning python. I am of course no pro, but so far I’ve made a very basic GUI that sets 16 bits and with the C python module I made, shifts them out over GPIO. Continue reading →

I signed up for the Deconstruction contest over at http://thedeconstruction.org/

I did the Redbull challenge a while back and made a sweet cannon. I’m doing this on my own this time (basically did the first time)

My team name is Solus Ruptor and that stands for “alone, the one who breaks or violates”

Good luck to all the teams!

I got some chipKit32′s in the mail today, and the first thing we did was test if it was really faster than the normal Arduino. We put the ArduinoMegaADK on the scope, and all we did was flip a bit from High to Low and got 65khz ish. Here’s a picture of the scope with the Uno32:

And the wave form is a little off so we set the bit high twice in a row, to add a little time on the back end and here’s what it looks like:

Ya that’s right, 350Khz! Somewhere in the documentation it said the Uno32 was 4 to 170 times faster.. that’s kinda a wide range..

Well we were given this as part of the chipkit32 contest so we’ll see what we can do

I found this little doodad at the checkout counter today of the grocery store for $1.50, figuring there’d be some little circuit that I could exploit.. or at least look at.. but nope! just a single flickering LED.. how long have these ‘random’ flicker LED’s been out? I knew about the flashy ones.

Well I got my raspberry pi in the mail yesterday, and one of the issues I had right off the bat was the ugly SD card sticking out the side. Why couldn’t they use micro or even mini SD? (is mini around anymore?..) Well until I get around to using the soldering iron and fitting my own micro SD card slot on the board, I figured this would work. I cut away parts of the SD card adapter, and folded the pins back, it holds the SD card well and its tucked in, out of the way. One less piece sticking out that I can break off.

I’ve been having alot of fun lately starting up my Electronic Repair business, and I’ve had the opertunity to work on some really cool stuff. a few weeks ago I was working on a Moog motor controller card from a Piston Bully snow cat, and this week I fixed an underwater camera. Yesturday, I took apart my old bass amp from high school.. It was a squire 18 Watt Amp and it had great sound for a solid state amp. It died. Well it didn’t really die as much as it just didn’t work. Upon inspection of the insides I found the problem very quickly …  So I got 3 of these little bad boys from DigiKey just in case I blow another one. $1.67 each! Does anyone know if you can stack these?