Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

DIY Coprocessors For The Game Boy Color

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Back in the olden days, when video games still came on cartridges, the engineers and programmers making these carts had a lot of options. One of the most inventive, brilliant, and interesting cartridges to come out of the 90s was Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. Star Fox featured a coprocessor chip, the Super FX, that was effectively a GPU used to draw polygons in the frame buffer. Without this, Star Fox wouldn’t be 3D, Yoshi’s Island wouldn’t be as cute, and there wouldn’t be an always-on processor in your computer with the potential to spy on everything you do. …read more

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The Travelling Hackerbox Is Going International

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Over the last year, Hackaday.io has seen an incredible project. It’s a migratory box of random electronic junk, better known as the Travelling Hackerbox. The idea behind this mobile electronic surplus store is simple: receive the box, take out some cool electronic gizmos, add some of your own, and send it on to the next person on the list. It is the purest expression of the hacker aesthetic, all contained in a cardboard box.

Last week, the Travelling Hackerbox appeared at the Hackaday Superconference where it was torn asunder. Its silicon and plastic innards were spilled for a badge hacking …read more

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Orange Pi Releases Two Boards

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A few years ago, someone figured out small, cheap ARM Linux boards are really, really useful, extremely popular, sell very well, blink LEDs, and are able to open the doors of engineering and computer science to everyone. There is one giant manufacturer of these cheap ARM Linux boards whose mere mention guarantees us a few thousand extra clicks on this article. There are other manufacturers of these boards, though, and there is no benevolent monopoly; the smaller manufacturers of these boards should bring new features and better specs to the ARM Linux board ecosystem. A drop of water in …read more

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Hackaday Links: November 6, 2016

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Here’s a life protip for you: get really, really good at one video game. Not all of them; you only want to be good – top 10% at least – at one video game. For me, that’s Galaga. It’s a great arcade game, and now it’s IoT. [justin] has been working on publishing high scores from a Galaga board to the Internet. The electronics are actually pretty simple – just a latch on a memory address, and an ESP8266 for comms.

On with the mergers and acquisitions! Lattice has been sold to Canyon Bridge, a Chinese private equity firm, for $1.3 …read more

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Hackaday Links: November 6, 2016

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Here’s a life protip for you: get really, really good at one video game. Not all of them; you only want to be good – top 10% at least – at one video game. For me, that’s Galaga. It’s a great arcade game, and now it’s IoT. [justin] has been working on publishing high scores from a Galaga board to the Internet. The electronics are actually pretty simple – just a latch on a memory address, and an ESP8266 for comms.

On with the mergers and acquisitions! Lattice has been sold to Canyon Bridge, a Chinese private equity firm, for $1.3 …read more

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After The Prize: A Libre Space Foundation

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The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware build-off on the planet, and with that comes some spectacular prizes. For the inaugural Hackaday Prize in 2014, the top prize was $196,418. That’s a handsome sum, and with that, the right hardware, and enough time, anything is possible.

The winners of the first Hackaday Prize was the SatNOGs project. The SatNOGs project itself is very innovative and very clever; it’s a global network of satellite ground stations for amateur cubesats. This, in itself, is a huge deal. If you’re part of a student team, non-profit, or other organization that operates a cubesat, you only …read more

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New Part Day: Pynq Zynq

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FPGAs are the future, and there’s a chip out there that brings us the future today. I speak, of course, of the Xilinx Zynq, a combination of a high-power ARM A9 processor and a very capable FPGA. Now the Zynq has been made Pynq with a new dev board from Diglent.

The heart of this board, is, of course, the Xilinx Zynq packing a Dual-core AARM Cortex A9 processor and an FPGA with 1.3 Million reconfigurable gates. This is a dev board, though, and with that comes memory and peripherals. To the board, Diglent added 512MB of DDR3 RAM, a …read more

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New Part Day: Pynq Zynq

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FPGAs are the future, and there’s a chip out there that brings us the future today. I speak, of course, of the Xilinx Zynq, a combination of a high-power ARM A9 processor and a very capable FPGA. Now the Zynq has been made Pynq with a new dev board from Diglent.

The heart of this board, is, of course, the Xilinx Zynq packing a Dual-core AARM Cortex A9 processor and an FPGA with 1.3 Million reconfigurable gates. This is a dev board, though, and with that comes memory and peripherals. To the board, Diglent added 512MB of DDR3 RAM, a …read more

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Beyond The Prize: Eye Driving Wheelchairs

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For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we opened up five challenges for hackers and tinkerers to create the greatest hardware in five categories. We asked citizen scientists to build something to expand the frontiers of knowledge. We asked automation experts to build something more useful than the Internet of chocolate chip cookies. In the Assistive Technologies portion of the prize, we asked our community of engineers to build something that would open the world up to all of us.

While this year’s Assistive Technologies challenge brought out some great projects, there is one project from last year that must be mentioned. …read more

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Variable Thickness Slicing For 3D Printers

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With proper tuning, any 3D printer can create exceptionally detailed physical replicas of digital files. The time it takes for a printer to print an object at very high detail is another matter entirely. The lower the layer height, the more layers must be printed, and the longer a print takes to print.

Thanks to [Steve Kranz] at Autodesk’s Integrated Additive Manufacturing Team, there’s now a solution to the problem of very long, very high-quality prints. It’s called VariSlice, and it slices 3D in a way that’s only high quality where it needs to be.

The basic idea behind VariSlice …read more

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