Travis Goodspeed and others designed a very, very sweet little MSP430-based badge for this year’s HOPE. It allows the OpenAMD project to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing by broadcasting a unique ID. However, we’ve discovered that there are some people, like Travis himself, who aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could help out by being Travis, too? Well, now you can! Opendopple is a cute little modification to the stock firmware that allows you to clone others. Just trigger the rightmost general I/O pin, and it will clone the ID and sequence number of the next packet it can find. Resetting your badge will restore your original ID.

You can find the source here. Read the readme, and have fun!

It’s been a while since we had a March Madness post, so here’s a little snippet from this past weekend: a script for processing small pixel fonts for use in 8-bit AVR applications.  Like this:

I couldn’t find any free 7-pixel-high fonts that I liked, so I whipped one up in GIMP.  Here’s the source image that I generated the font from:

Getting a raw B&W image into a usable format after the cut.

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Before there was Mario Kart, there was Mystery Cart:

Shelby found this Atari 2600 cart lodged in the floor under an eighty-pound steel plate at the new Resistor space.  Other than a ’78 copyright, there’s no indication of what game it might be.  Anyone care to make a guess before we hook it up and read the ROM?

Just before he silently stole away on a secretive mission to distant lands, Ranjit left a hoard of lovely obsolete electronics at the lab.  Among the treasures were a couple of old counting units with 7-segment incandescent displays, sometimes called numitrons.  I’ve turned this one into a simple clock.

Thanks to Charles for the spare pushbuttons, Ranjit for the original unit, and Evil Mad Scientist for the protoboard.

Light bulb + coat hangers + canvas scrap + percolator + 2 hours = table lamp win.