Still unicycling, yeah, that's right! STILL!
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Aaron Bieber
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Recent Activity
- Touchscreen scooter computer
[Kurt's] scooter computer started off as a way to use a couple of LEDs to show the battery charge on his hog. It was based on a Arduino and used a voltage divider to judge how much juice was left. But then he ran across a touch-screen OLED shield for the Arduino and the project started to take off. Now he’s got battery, temperature, real-time clock, and GPS running through the slick-looking display. It may not be a full-blown motorcycle but it gives the computer interfaces we’ve seen for other bikes a run for their money.
[Thanks Mowcius]
~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader - iOS update to ship next week, fix death grip issue?
I’ll believe this when I see it: there are reports that the death grip phenomenon is actually the result of a software error. I’d heard this going around yesterday, but the more specific issue seems to be that the device goes to no signal mode when it should just be switching frequencies. And holding the phone in the “wrong” position aggravates this tendency.~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader - TI makes a big bid for the hobby market
This morning Texas Instruments unveiled Launchpad, a development platform for their low-cost MSP430 line of microcontrollers. We’ve seen these chips before, most notably in the ez430 Chronos sports watch. We see this as a bid for the hobby market currently enjoyed by Arduino, PIC, AVR, and others. TI’s biggest selling point is price, but we’re going to wait to share that with you. Join us after the break to see what the package offers, then decide if the price is right.
What is it?
We received a contact request on our tip line from a public relations firm on behalf of Texas Instruments. The video conference paired us with one of their engineers who took us through the details of the package, mentioning the low price tag every minute or so. Launchpad is a programming and development board for the TI MSP430. It has a machined DIP socket that can accept chips with up to 20 pins. All of these pins are broken out to the header ports on either side of the board, which resemble the Arduino layout to us. Good news, unlike the Arduino the header spacing falls into the 0.1″ divisions necessary to interface with common protoboard. TI is also looking for community involvement, pushing thier Lunchapad Wiki to help you get stated and asking that you add you knowledge as you find success with the 16-bit platform.
What’s inside?
Each Launchpad device comes with a whole lot of goodness. In addition to the board itself you get a 0.5 meter USB cable, two pin headers and two pin sockets for the pin breakout pads, two different MSP430 microprocessors (MSP430G2211 and MSP430G2231), and two free IDEs; Code Composer Studio 4 and IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart (note that the latter has a 4K or 8K code limitation depending on the processor used).
Price
Hands down TI is trying to make price the biggest issue with this release. The presentation we were given included the price in large red numbers on seven of the thirteen slides. So here it is: Launchpad will set you back four dollars and thirty cents. And for now shipping is included.
Conclusion
It’s important to note that we haven’t had the board in hand yet. That being said, for $4.30 it’s worth the risk just to get the USB cable and a couple of processors. We’re amazed that they’ve beaten back the price to this point and delighted that you get the programmer and two microcontrollers, not to mention the other components. We like the fact that they didn’t develop an alternative language like Arduino did for the AVR controllers. This makes it easy to clear the hurdle of setting up a programmer, IDE and toolchain, and get right down to developing in C. After all, the chips are dirt cheap and quite powerful. You may remember 3000 of them from a project we saw over the weekend.
We’d imagine the initial demand will be quite high and hope they have the stock to keep up.
Update:
Unboxing Video
Demo Application Video
~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader - Edit a google doc with vim
$ google docs edit --title "To-Do List" --editor vimGoogle just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with.
Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual
This specific command courtesy of lifehacker:http://lifehacker.com/5568817/
Though all can be found in manual page linked above.
by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)
~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader - O no!
This animation is a pretty good lesson in chemistry … but I’m not sure it’s all that safe for little kids.
No, that helium atom was not me in middle school. But I never dated the Hydrogen twins either. I guess my life is a little bit more Boron than Oxygen.
Tip o’ the O2 tank to BIL Chris Setter.
~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader - Strawberry Shortcake Riding A My Little Pony After Killing The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
This is a painting by artist Finch depicting Strawberry Shortcake riding a My Little Pony after killing all the Ninja Turtles. Frightening. And why is there a Rubik's Cube stuck in Leonardo's shoulder? Is that supposed to be some sort of social commentary? Something about puzzle toys being the Achilles' Shoulder of modern society? I'M NOT GRASPING AT STRAWS YOU'RE GRASPING AT STRAWS. I want a bendy one. I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!
Picture [slightlywarped]
Thanks to Neill, who's only solace is knowing the turtles are all attending that great pizza party in the sky.
~1 year on
qbit's shared items in Google Reader
