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Hackable Christmas Presents?
An Anonymous Coward asks what many of you may start thinking about in another month...if you already haven't: "While sitting thru various classes..I started wondering today what I'll drop hints to people with money for what
to get me for Christmas..I want something to hack on and with..but preferably in the sub $300 dollar category. Remember the fun of hacking things like the C64 or
Spectrum or whatever? A fun home machine to hack on.. preferably not a PC (though I know you can get them in that price range) but something a little different. A cheap ARM or Mips based machine or something. Suggestions from anyone?"
Now that would be an awesome toy to hack on. You could make some pretty durable robots with that.
Add some extra hardware to allow it to understand simple commands, then you could almost make a usable home robot.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
MAME on an XBOX.. super cool! http://www.otakunozoku.com/xbox/index.html
Hackable toys...
Want some programable robots? how about just robot arms? then here.
Still more robot resources... (I am looking for killer robotic laser-beam eyes, if anyone has a link...)
Hackable portable DVD player, (might break the price limit though)
whoops, coffee's done...
Build one. Start poking around on Pricewatch, buy the parts, and build it. It may sound daunting if you've never done it before, but it is amazingly easy. I recently built myself another machine for $329 + shipping. Helps if you have things like an extra monitor (or KVM switch). Things are getting cheap nowadays. Celerons are less than $50, RAM is practically free.
You can get a Sun Blade 100 for less than a $1000.
The Blade 100 is a fine machine, it has a
64-bit Sun UltraSPARC-II CPU (500MHz) inside,
an IDE disk, CD-ROM drive and even a soundcard!
It makes a perfect 64-bit workstation. Don't
bother with a Sun monitor though, they are too
expensive for no good reason; you'll be better
off with a normal PC monitor.
The CPU is not particularly fast for everyday
tasks, but floating point and integer maths
performance rocks ("openssl speed" beats an
Intel PIII 600MHz by a factor of three!)
A very nice Christmas gift indeed.
Then, hack it:
We've already got various customization hacks worked out. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to:
Supplies are dwindling. You may want to go ahead and by one (or four) now.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.
:-)
:) ]
Here's some programming-palm linkage:
Lisp (scheme)
waba -- micro JVM (~71k), quite cool if you're into Java
extra classes and tools that work with waba, really nice data storage classes for example
a ui gen program for waba, written in waba
super waba, a bigger derivation of waba
waba community site
[yeah, I've been having lots of fun with waba
All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Alright, usually I wouldn't post something like this, but you may want to wait until Tuesday afternoon before submitting your holiday wish list to your significant other.. Why you ask?
Apparently, Apple is planning to announce some "breakthrough Digital Hub" device.. There's a lot of speculation floating around, and rumors that Apple's iTunes, Quicktime, and "another unnamed project" group are responsible for whatever this thing does.. I'm going to spread anything specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple releases a consumer machine based on a combination of the cube and the iMac to replace the iMac.. WHo knows what Apple's up to, but I'd pass this along so you aren't kicking yourself for turning in the list a day early..
these guys are selling $179 Celeron 433 machines with 32 megs of ram, 10.0G hard drive, a 40x cd-rom, USB mouse, and USB keyboard. Ports are USB only and it isn't very upgradable... it has no built-in ethernet or the ability to install any internal cards of any type (no pci/isa/agp slots at ALL) but it's only $179. heh. Oh, and it's got a pink handle to boot. here is a direct link to the product page.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Is the machine I always considered the ultimate hacking challenge. It's pretty unorthodox with it's vector display and gives a great perspective on the road PC technology could have taken. Also there's lots of info on it, because nearly everyone that has one uses it as a hacking project.
I've been eyeing up Intrinsyc's CerfCube. It cost $379 but it's worth a look. There was an thread on /. a couple months ago so maybe some /.ers can give you some first hand feedback.
Or maybe you want to consider Buy Nothing Day. If so, get you Christmas Gift Exemption Voucher here.
Its been hacked to access its serial port, add a programmable cartridge, and give it a new o/s! A SDK is scheduled to be released by year's end by the manufacturer, Tiger Electronics, which has stated it will encourage hacking.
Hacking ICybie
I-Cybie Fan Site
Wishbook.com has them for $149.99
The Game Boy Advance and Color (especially) are inexpensive and very well documented. The GBA has an ARM processor
I can speak from experience. GBA is a joy to program for; it's much like programming an MS-DOS PC in C, as once you get your libraries done, everything else is pretty smooth. Start here for tools and documentation, and go here for hardware, specifically the MBV2 cable (load 256 KB programs directly into GBA's RAM) and the Flash Linker (load up to 128 Mbit (16 MB) programs into a flash cartridge). However, try to buy them sooner rather than later, as Nintendo will try to sue the makers out of existence, claiming that the devices are suitable "only for piracy" and ignoring the homebrew development scene.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Good story, only it's not true! :)
http://www.snopes2.com/holidays/xmas/cross.htm
I've just bought a used TiVo for $100. New units go for between $100 (for a unit that's good only with DirecTV) to $500 or so. Hackable and new sub-$300 TiVos might include a 20-hour unit from Best Buy (IIRC) and a 30-hour unit from here.
Before going further, let me say just what a TiVo is. The one-sentence description is that it's a digital video recorder; it records TV shows to a hard disk much like a VCR records TV to a tape. This description doesn't do the device justice, though. To begin with, if you buffer your live TV through the TiVo, you can get VCR-like effects, such as pausing live TV, performing instant replays, rewinding, and running something in slow motion. You can then hit a button to catch up to the live broadcast during a boring stretch (like a commercial). The devices get even more interesting if you subscribe to the TiVo service, which is $10/month or $250 for a lifetime subscription. When you do this, the TiVo device calls in using a built-in modem once a day and downloads TV listings. You can then search them to find programs you want to watch (no more need for TV Guide or the like). You can tell the TiVo to record specific shows, or entire series. In the latter case, the TiVo will do so even if the show changes time slot (but not if it's rescheduled at the last minute, say because a sporting event runs over). You can tell it to search for shows or movies by title, actor name, and so on, so if you like, say, Sandra Bullock, you can feed that name into the unit and it'll record all her films that it finds in the listings. You can tell the TiVo to record "suggestions," which are programs that match your profile of likes and dislikes that it builds up if you give ratings to shows.
Anyhow, TiVos are very hackable. They run on Linux, and use a 50MHz PowerPC CPU. Among other things, you can add or replace a hard drive. You might therefore get a low-end TiVo and expand it to over 100 hours capacity for the cost of an 80GB hard disk. You can also add an Ethernet card to connect the thing permanently to your LAN. (Even without the Ethernet card, you can get a bash prompt or PPP connection over its serial port.) There's a TiVo hacking FAQ available. It's a bit outdated in some important ways, but it's a good way to get a feel for what you can do with the device.
FWIW, I've not yet hacked my TiVo in any way (I've had it for just a few days), but I plan to upgrade the hard disk and get a serial connection going within a week or so.
The Tuxscreen is ARM and only $99!!
go to tuxscreen.net