DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

David's puzzle on April 6th was a lot of fun to work with.  If you want to see my answer, read the first few pages of:

http://joseph-baker.com/DorkBotCPuzzleOverview.pdf

Portland Dorkbot had a booth at the Bay Area Maker Faire this year. Here's my first proper invention, the HypnoLamp, alongside the Editor's Choice award that we received:

Many factors helped birth the HypnoLamp: At Toorcamp 2012, I learned to program microcontrollers. Jeff of OlyMEGA blessed me with addressable LED strips, at the aforementioned event. Jeff was also at the Portland Mini Maker Faire, showcasing (among other things) glass Ikea lamps with LEDs inside. I decided to build my own version!

[This post is originally from my blog. I'm bringing this spectrum analyzer to Darren Kitchen's Hak5 event at OMSI this Saturday (2013/05/25).]

Here's some details of my radio spectrum analyzer hack at Maker Faire. But first, a quick video of the hack in action:

The Dorkbot booth at Maker Faire worked out really well.  Here's a couple good photos Zach took:

This is the right-hand side, with my extremely bright OctoWS2811 Arduino library demo triggered by stomp pads.

This is the center with Tom's Bee counter, Zach's Hypnolamp, and Tara's soldering demo in the center, viewed over the top of Jared's VFD display spectrum analyzer (and FPGA Robotron not visisble in this photo).

Click "Read more" for more pictures, source code and other stuff

The Arduino IDE editor's lack of support for X11's select-paste mechanism has always annoyed me.  Well, I finally got around to adding it.  Especially for helping people with their Arduino troubles (which I do every day), it's so very nice to finally be able to quickly select-paste between Arduino and forum messages, email, terminal windows, etc.

This is a Unix/X11 feature.  Mac & Windows do not have anything similar.  But on Linux it's so very fast and convenient.  This tiny little feature really makes me happy.  :-)

Update: Arduino 1.0.5 now has this feature on Linux.  It's not mentioned in the release notes, but if you try select-paste, it now works properly even without installing Teensyduino.

Over the last couple weeks I've been working on a automated test system for Teensyduino, which someday will verify nearly all the Arduino functionality on every board and also test most of the Arduino libraries.  Here's what my first try looks like.

Click "Read more" for another photo, a bit of discussion about how this works (and what doesn't work so well), and a peek at what will be my second attempt.

Thanks to everyone that presented (especially the new folks during OpenDork) and to thanks to everyone that came out! 

Glenn Phillips, Self Balancing Robots (http://glennselectric.blogspot.com/):

Church of Robotron (http://churchofrobotron.com)

Slides

Video from the Open Mic Surgery Event.

These videos never made it to the site, I'm fixing that now!  Thanks to everyone that came out!  (Mouse over blank area below to trigger video loads.)

Use MAME's debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games

For the Church of Robotron's installation at Toorcamp 2012, we needed to be able to trigger physical events when game events happened in Robotron 2084. A quick summary for context:

• We had an Altar that contained a Linux box that ran MAME and Robotron 2084
• We had joysticks that acted as HID devices
• Player would kneal down and play the game. As events happened in the game (player death, human death, lasers firing), we would trigger physical events.

We choose to use MAME's debugger to detect game events and notify other pieces of software when they happened. This is a quick tutorial for others (and a reminder to ourselves) if you're interested in doing similar things. We're going to find out how to detect player death!

A few months ago I was feeling inspired to create a nice countdown timer.  With the next Dorkbot open mic only days away, I finally had the motivation to actually put it together...

Click "Read more" for photos, source code, schematic and other info.