Novena Open Source Laptop
Last updated: 30 Apr 2014 - 21:06
The idea of an open source laptop makes me feel the same excitement I felt using Linux for the first time over a decade ago.
Earlier this month Andrew "bunnie" Huang, hacker of the Xbox (read the book) and creater of the Chumby announced a crowd funding campaign for his Novena open-source laptop. I'd heard about the project before and liked the design. In fact I have several almost identical system level designs in my engineering notebook waiting for me to have the time and money to make one myself. Since it is unlikely I'd ever get around to building anything that costly or complex on my own I'm really excited to hear that I can buy one of someone else's design.
Announcing the OggBox Project
Last updated: 14 Aug 2012 - 22:03
The OggBox is a simple, hackable open hardware music player. It's a pocket sized device, about the size of a smart phone which can play or record open formats to or from an SD card. It will support Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and WAV files, but has only been tested on Ogg so far. The hardware was designed in KiCAD and all the files are available to download and use (CC-BY-SA).
OSHW Logo for Kicad PCB Milling
Last updated: 01 Mar 2012 - 21:38
I've been tinkering with some simple PCB layout jobs in KiCAD over the last couple of weeks. (Hopefully they'll be worth posting here if I can get them finished!) One of these boards is probably going to be cut out on a PCB mill, so it's not going to have a solder mask or silk screen. I wanted to still have the Open Source Hardware logo, there's a big selection available at http://www.oshwa.org/open-source-hardware-logo/ including downloadable modules for KiCAD but they're all silk screen logos, so I went about creating a copper only logo.
How not to build a RepRap
Last updated: 24 Dec 2011 - 16:03
Actually I have a working RepRap now so it isn't all bad, but there are plenty (too many?) guides about what to do to make a RepRap, I thought I'd just point out the problems and mistakes I made building mine.
ChipKIT: Conway's Game of Life on VGA, now with more colours
Last updated: 04 Nov 2011 - 20:46
Life With More Colours: The classic Conway's Game of Life with different colour pixels indicating time since birth/death.
If you haven't already, check out my ChipKIT implementation of Conway's Game of Life because I'm not explaining all that again! In this version there are some subtle changes to it that make it more pretty to watch, although arguably more confusing to see what's going on.
ChipKIT: Conway's Game of Life on VGA
Last updated: 03 Nov 2011 - 22:08
Life: Classic version of Conway's Game of Life using a chipKIT UNO32.
After the success of the ChipKIT pong demo I started to think about the ways to improve the graphics output and came up with the idea of a coarse pixel display. This is a more traditional pixel based display where a rigid grid is displayed on the screen rather than the more vector based display that I had used previously. This demands more of the CPU time because it has to copy the pixels to the display manually as there is no DMA on the UNO32, rather than only having to display the colour for a tiny fraction of each display line like the pong game did.