Category: gEEk
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Cubeternet 2MP UVC webcam teardown
For my pick and place project, I picked up a pair of too-good-to-be-true webcams: the Cubeternet no-name UVC webcam. For this project, there is a lot to like: 2MP resolution (claimed, at least), built-in LED ring, cross-platform UVC interface, hand-adjustable focus and a legitimate glass (no polycarbonate) lens…for $16! Alas, my review of this cam…
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Image segmentation for PnP optical placement
Quick ‘n dirty (but working!) image segmenter for randomly-strewn part identification. About 1 page worth of scripting takes an image of objects on background, determines which part is the background, determines the outside contour of each object and numbers each as a separate object. Now that it’s known where to look for one specific object,…
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Pick ‘n Place Head
This weekend I got some parts in and put together a preliminary placement head for my open-source pick ‘n place project. My requirements are that it be buildable with off-the-shelf parts (ideally same-source, to save on shipping) and no special equipment, allow +/-180 degree rotation while maintaining an undisturbed vacuum, and support interchanging of the…
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Toward an open-source Pick and Place machine
So, there’s some really cool, empowering stuff going down these days with regard to manufacturing. Cartesian machines (i.e. CNC mills) are relatively simple to build from off-the-shelf parts; there are a bajillion people doing this and plenty of ready-made open-source designs available. More recently, hobbyists have gotten in on designing open-source rapid prototypers (3D printers);…
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Throwies overtake Kendall/MIT station sculpture
Blinking RGB LED throwies adorn the “Steaming Globe” sculpture near the Kendall/MIT station just after the 4th of July fireworks show. No idea how this could have happened. Kids had a blast pulling them off and throwing them back onto the globe (and each other!). The whole rest of the night as we walked around,…
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Fun with MIDI, CNC and vector maths (mid2cnc.py)
More playing: Castlevania end credits Tetris Mario Bros. theme Update: I fixed up the script to pull (usually) proper timing from the MIDI, threw together some minimal documentation and released it to the public (see link below). Downloads mid2cnc.py, sparse documentation and samples Basically, it’s possible to compute a combination of (distance, feedrate) along an…
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(Also: An experiment…)
In the last post, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is…
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Optical Mouse Hacks: 2D Micropositioning using cheap mouse cameras
Optical mice work by pointing a tiny cheap camera at the surface of your desktop, tracking the motion of ‘interesting’ points in the surface texture (woodgrain, imperfections, highlight/shadow) as the mouse slides around over it, and converting this to an X and Y motion. An LED is used to light the surface beneath the sensor,…
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NinBendo (cont’d): Zero-knowledge, realtime music tweaking example
This is a followup to this post. Quick video example of finding and bending the music data that plays during Super Mario Bros. 3’s World 1 map, using the FCEUX emulator’s advanced 6502 debugging features. Full-screen if you’ve got it – the video did not survive compression well, and I don’t feel like investing hours…
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NinBendo – circuit bending by corrupting 8-bit game code.
Yeah, back in junior high I had not enough friends and too much time, and discovered that keying in random Game Genie codes would sometimes cause a NES game to (harmlessly) glitch out in interesting ways. :-p Some codes just locked up the game (drat!), while others caused screen glitches, messed with colors, and rearranged…
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Better Better DXF Output for Inkscape (layers!)
I started using Inkscape, a sweet open-source vector graphics program, to produce (and/or steal from the internet and convert) designs suitable for carving on the CNC as Inkscape has a plugin to export the file as a .DXF. Converting some files, I discovered the current export script does not correctly handle all types of transforms,…
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Cypherpunk’s Wet Dream meta-entry
I once said that this blog would eventually reach a point where any possible entry could be expressed as a sum of references to previous entries. In this case, it’s this one, this one and this one. I have maintained that a point will be reached where plain old ordinary Web sites will be forced…
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Trance vibe vs. Windows Vista x64
So I have started getting support emails – “Hey, how do I get your hardware to work in Vista?” Seeming invariably to be the 64-bit version. That’s weird, as far as I know there is a 64-bit build of the drivers included… Of course, you may have correctly guessed that as an IT semi-professional, I…
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VMWare Player Network driver (and video, SCSI, etc.)
Problem: After installing some operating systems such as Vista* in a virtual machine (i.e. as a ‘guest’ OS) under VMWare Player, they cannot access the internet because they don’t have a driver for VMWare’s virtual network card. Solutions: This driver (and many others such as SVGA, SCSI, sound) are available in the ‘VMWare Tools’ package.…
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Tease…
It’s not quite finished yet, but here are some pictures of what I’ve been working on this week, when not making you-know-whats in my basement dildonics facility.
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Petty Joule Thief
You might be familiar with the original Joule Thief, a simple, homebrewable step-up converter often used to drive LEDs (with Vf of several volts) from a single 1.5V battery, or extract the last remaining juice from a battery that’s too dead for use in most real-world gadgets. The basic Joule Thief can suck power from…
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Weatherball
Last night I finished throwing together a workable version of the Weatherball, currently displaying a color code at the end of my flagpole to indicate whether tomorrow holds any interesting weather. Apparently cities and radio stations have been doing it since the 1950s, but now I have my own! The data is grabbed from the…
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Assembler Interpreter for microcontrollers – sane?
I’m thinking of how much work it would be to write an assembler interpreter in PIC assembler. Probably sounds like the dumbest idea in the world, right ;-) I’ve been toying with this idea lately for sort of futureproofing microcontroller-based designs, and adding some new possibilities for specific applications (polymorphic / self-modifying code, security applications,…
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Fixing Dell Precision T3400 USB not working
This is an update to a previous rant about the mysterious Windows XP “Dee-Dunk” error (and the novel concept of presenting an “error message” when an error condition exists), possibly in conjunction with broken or intermittent USB functionality. This post is mainly for Googlers – my friends are more than welcome to skip it. I…
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WinLIRC stuff
Yes, it means I’m hacking around on a MythTV setup again. LIRC is Linux Infrared Remote Control, a program for receiving keypresses from a remote control (TVs, etc.) on the computer, and/or blasting out simulated remote-control keypresses. WinLIRC is the same thing, for a Windows box*. Its documentation is a bit lacking however, so this…