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Quake on an oscilloscope
A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 93 posts.
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From Gongkai to Open Source
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
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Adventures in Piano Building
Turning a mouse house into a musical marvel.
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Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
Let’s end this debate once and for all. Humans can see frame rates greater than 24fps (although plenty of people will argue that they can’t on the internet). I’ll explain more in a future post if necessary, but let’s take that as read.
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High speed M&M sorting machine
M&M sorting machine using electro magnets to send the M&Ms down the correct chutes. Uses an Arduino with a Bluetooth module to control the magnets.
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24-Bit vs. 16-Bit Audio Test – Part II: Results and Conclusions
A blog for audiophiles about more objective topics. Measurements of audio gear. Reasonable, realistic, no snakeoil assessment of sound, and equipment.
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Zusie – My Relay Computer
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
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6 GHz frequency modulated radar
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
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How speakers make sound
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
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Hard disk hacking
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. The video of that talk (minus the first few minutes) is now online .
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Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
While I'm a hacker of all kinds of electronics things by night, my day job is being a software developer. That mostly means sitting in front of a computer all day, entering code, debugging, etcetera. You probably can imagine my main weapon of choice to tame all that code is my keyboard: I'm usually happily tapping…
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Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen
An experiment to understand how the discrepancy between logical and native screen dimensions on the iPhone 6 Plus affects rendering quality.
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68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
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The Flying Nimbus – A high-power, self-balancing transportation contraption
What does a recycled (heavily used) go kart tire, an action-packed three-phase servo drive and a gyro/accelerometer have in common?
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Building a simple VGA-adapter for an 8-bit self made computer
(Update 2014-10-30: Due to some interest in this project, I added schematics for the GALs)
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Making a brain for my model plane
I am making a brain for my model plane so that it can fly by itself. I could have bought an off-the-shelf kit but I wanted to build it myself to understand how everything works from the ground up.
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Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile memory
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs . What's that about?
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Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
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Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
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The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
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How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
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Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
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How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
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Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
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Building Pulse and Bloom, an interactive biofeedback installation at Burning Man
Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur , a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch , beautiful control for the smart home.