With two open drive bays and some careful plexiglass work, it's the perfect place for a Siamese fighting fish (betta). Add some lighting; I'm sure fellow geeks would appreciate the "betta tester."
Since it'll be nice and warm, you could instead use it as a terrarium...and keep a small tarantula in there. You will have 100% guaranteed that no one will ever feel tempted to mess with your computer again, especially if they are female.
Another idea, that preserves ventilation: use two sheets of plexiglass and make an ant farm. Be sure to back light with red LED's or cold cathode.
How about a Q job? Any international spy...uhm, geek, could use a computer with hidden access to a handgun, or perhaps an emergency Mountain Dew. The right key combination send a command to the drive bay doors, and the top one swivels up, the bottom swivels down.... Voice recognition, "HAL, open the pod bay doors!" I once wrote an application that used a voice recognition SDK, I had several commands programmed in there and ST:TNG computer acknowledgement sounds, so I could walk into the room and: "Computer," "Current time!" . Despite all that, I'm not as geeky as one might think.
If my extra bays weren't being used for cooling, I'd probably just install a Cardbus/CompactFlash/Firewire/video access panel, but you asked for something creative....
Yeah...how about a Shoutcast stream and a request queue. And the company would have to own all of the CDs...wait a minute.
The company could do the streaming broadcast, but would have to pay royalties. Unless they gave every employee the same set of CDs. That would certainly be a morale booster!
Yeah.... I recommend painting houses. People are willing to pay good money, especially if you can do indoor work. Plus it's usually quiet, you can listen to the radio or puzzle over some engineering problem while working. You can step back and take a break without someone yelling at you. Very stress-relieving as you get into the dab-swish-swish-swish rhythm, and when the job is done you can admire the finished product with a nice check in your hand.
I brush off kids in Best Buy or Circuit City like flies. If they don't know whether the warranty is any good, they don't know if ANY product in the store is any good.
A friend shut up an over-eager saleskid REALLY QUICK one day. He was buying a new TV, and the kid kept pushing and pushing the warranty. Completely pleading with him to get the warranty, it's the best thing ever. My friend set the remote down and turned to the saleskid: "So what you're saying is, I need the warranty because this $500 TV will probably break within the next two years?" Silence.
Well, kind of inspired by telerobotics and more inspired by ripping toys apart...;-)
Ripped a Nintendo R.O.B. apart and turned it into a robot webcam, goal being to make one in the minimum amount time and effort. Ended up grossing 12% of the school's traffic one week (this was back when robot webcams were rare). Still have it: Voila....
Since moved on to designing bigger and better versions, but the old R.O.B. was fun.
I downloaded the Nouse, and the Bubble Frenzy demo. My webcam was already on top of my monitor, so all I had to do was run the program.
All you do is calibrate it by centering your nose in the image and clicking. The program draws a green box around your nose and follows it...it's pretty hilarious. Good oblique lighting seems to work best, too dark or too light and the box will want to follow your chin or ear. Overall, pretty reliable and lots of fun.
I loaded up the Bubble Frenzy game, which at first looks like a DOS-era Frozen Bubble. The Nouse worked fine...added a bit of challenge, levels I'd laugh at in Frozen Bubble were suddenly difficult. It's hard to keep track of the pointer when your head is moving. It was pretty fun, someone walked in and saw me playing, apparently just hitting the space bar while tilting my head from side to side.
I had a neck injury a while back in a car accident though, and all this motion started to bring on a little soreness. I had to quit after about 20 minutes of Nouse-ing, about the same effect as an hour of driving.
On the same subject, for the first time this winter, it warmed up over freezing the other week! And boy, those flies came from nowhere, there were three in the kitchen! Where were they, and how did they survive?
Circumnavigation is best done with a ship. Do you plan on rafting the Ducati over the oceans, or driving on the sea floor?
Oh...and your G3 will be dead in 18 months. And if the vibration doesn't kill it, nothing will. And...just get an inverter and run 12volts to the saddlebag. You don't have to leave it plugged in all the time.
I agree with the "do it for fun, not to save money" point.
However, I could build a completely custom USB keyboard for less than $140 NOT counting labor. Everyone knows hobby time is worth $.0025/hour anyway.;-)
It would be up there in price, around $80 to $90 since the circuit board would be custom. That's only if I had someone else make the board, though. Guess I could etch my own board.
Anyway, all that would be required: one of the many cheap ($3-$5) USB-capable microcontrollers, some trivial encoding logic, and keyswitches. I'd probably go with surplus opto-interrupters and spring-loaded buttons on a custom panel. Easier to do if you have access to a CNC machine.
The benefit? Using the HID device standard, your button-box can become anything. Keys mapped anywhere, even macros depending on how fancy you get with the firmware. Could also add some more status lights, or outputs to control the coffeemaker.
The first thing someone will do with their camera phone: take a picture of a mouthful of chewing-in-progress food. Then laugh endlessly when the picture comes up on the overhead.
After that gets old...no, I don't want to think about it. They'd better enclose the bathroom with a grounded wire mesh shell.
Embedded devices are becoming increasingly powerful, and are expected to do more. Have you ever looked into the capabilities of new high-end stereo receivers? It's almost exponential from year to year.
A lot of functions normally requiring a full computer are being moved into embedded devices. It makes it a lot easier to port in an application, if it uses an OS you're already familiar with.
Linux adds another layer of compatibility over the base OS. For optimal speed, yes, you'd want to tweak every line for the target hardware. But the hardware cycle is so fast, that sometimes it's nice to let someone else specialize in the performance tweaks. Lets you concentrate on functionality.
There's already a million ways that this is being done, but an open and high-quality (yet to be seen) alternative is always welcome.
Erm...nothing about USB is "trival." It might seem that way if you've never been down-and-dirty with the firmware.
That said, I highly recommend the MC68HC908JB8 for a hobbyist USB development platform. You can get the package in surface-mount or a small DIP, it's easy to wire and code for, and the tools are good and free. It's a low-speed device, but for control applications like this it's more than adequate. Turn the ball into a funky keyboard too.
Don't use a Basic Stamp. They're overpriced and low on performance. The interpreter really takes the zing out of the microcontroller...say, in a similar way that certain OS's can change the operation of your desktop computer....
Really, you can get a small PIC (since that's where most of the hobbyist development resources are right now) in a 16-or so pin package you can toss on a Rat Shack breadboard. Get one with an onboard UART and life gets even simpler. The next step is to write code to take a string of values, and PWM a few pins according the the values. After that, everything depends on the computer side.
My room at school had indicator LEDs (one mounted in the door peephole - go figure) for new email, and a robotic webcam running off a 486 webserver.
If you want to get fancy, use USB.
I have a PIC board (way overspecced for this application, of course) and two USB boards on my desk right now, that could do the task with an hour of coding and soldering a few LEDs.
The temperature gradient is not that large. The freezer section of your refrigerator can maintain a temperature gradient of over 100 degrees in a several cubic foot box. The CPU cooler only has to deal with one tiny hotspot.
Slashdot Mirror
With two open drive bays and some careful plexiglass work, it's the perfect place for a Siamese fighting fish (betta). Add some lighting; I'm sure fellow geeks would appreciate the "betta tester."
Since it'll be nice and warm, you could instead use it as a terrarium...and keep a small tarantula in there. You will have 100% guaranteed that no one will ever feel tempted to mess with your computer again, especially if they are female.
Another idea, that preserves ventilation: use two sheets of plexiglass and make an ant farm. Be sure to back light with red LED's or cold cathode.
How about a Q job? Any international spy...uhm, geek, could use a computer with hidden access to a handgun, or perhaps an emergency Mountain Dew. The right key combination send a command to the drive bay doors, and the top one swivels up, the bottom swivels down.... Voice recognition, "HAL, open the pod bay doors!" I once wrote an application that used a voice recognition SDK, I had several commands programmed in there and ST:TNG computer acknowledgement sounds, so I could walk into the room and: "Computer," "Current time!" . Despite all that, I'm not as geeky as one might think.
If my extra bays weren't being used for cooling, I'd probably just install a Cardbus/CompactFlash/Firewire/video access panel, but you asked for something creative....
Yeah...how about a Shoutcast stream and a request queue. And the company would have to own all of the CDs...wait a minute.
The company could do the streaming broadcast, but would have to pay royalties. Unless they gave every employee the same set of CDs. That would certainly be a morale booster!
Someone would collect and not share...until they had their own Library of Congress to measure data by.
That, or sell the books on eBay. Free money.
Yeah.... I recommend painting houses. People are willing to pay good money, especially if you can do indoor work. Plus it's usually quiet, you can listen to the radio or puzzle over some engineering problem while working. You can step back and take a break without someone yelling at you. Very stress-relieving as you get into the dab-swish-swish-swish rhythm, and when the job is done you can admire the finished product with a nice check in your hand.
I brush off kids in Best Buy or Circuit City like flies. If they don't know whether the warranty is any good, they don't know if ANY product in the store is any good.
A friend shut up an over-eager saleskid REALLY QUICK one day. He was buying a new TV, and the kid kept pushing and pushing the warranty. Completely pleading with him to get the warranty, it's the best thing ever. My friend set the remote down and turned to the saleskid: "So what you're saying is, I need the warranty because this $500 TV will probably break within the next two years?" Silence.
Well, kind of inspired by telerobotics and more inspired by ripping toys apart... ;-)
Ripped a Nintendo R.O.B. apart and turned it into a robot webcam, goal being to make one in the minimum amount time and effort. Ended up grossing 12% of the school's traffic one week (this was back when robot webcams were rare). Still have it: Voila....
Since moved on to designing bigger and better versions, but the old R.O.B. was fun.
Ha...parents are equally innovative.
This is all that is required to fool THAT little plot:
*ring*
I downloaded the Nouse, and the Bubble Frenzy demo. My webcam was already on top of my monitor, so all I had to do was run the program.
All you do is calibrate it by centering your nose in the image and clicking. The program draws a green box around your nose and follows it...it's pretty hilarious. Good oblique lighting seems to work best, too dark or too light and the box will want to follow your chin or ear. Overall, pretty reliable and lots of fun.
I loaded up the Bubble Frenzy game, which at first looks like a DOS-era Frozen Bubble. The Nouse worked fine...added a bit of challenge, levels I'd laugh at in Frozen Bubble were suddenly difficult. It's hard to keep track of the pointer when your head is moving. It was pretty fun, someone walked in and saw me playing, apparently just hitting the space bar while tilting my head from side to side.
I had a neck injury a while back in a car accident though, and all this motion started to bring on a little soreness. I had to quit after about 20 minutes of Nouse-ing, about the same effect as an hour of driving.
You could read my response to one of my other posts to find out what I meant by that, lame reason as it is.
On the same subject, for the first time this winter, it warmed up over freezing the other week! And boy, those flies came from nowhere, there were three in the kitchen! Where were they, and how did they survive?
Correct. If they pay people in other countries cheaper: FINE.
But take the extra money and invest it back in the company! Hire more R&D! Develop and expand!
Instead, the extra cash goes directly into higher management, the only ones not doing any actual work.
I was being a little snide, and referring to the fact that they can claim deductions for family members...of which they could have many.
A bit prejudiced, I know, but this whole thing is really ticking me off.
Duh! Everyone knew that the market was fine. It's better and growing.
And everyone knew that IT was still strong.
It's just that the jobs are changing hands over to our friendly nontaxed foreign visitors.
Circumnavigation is best done with a ship. Do you plan on rafting the Ducati over the oceans, or driving on the sea floor?
Oh...and your G3 will be dead in 18 months. And if the vibration doesn't kill it, nothing will. And...just get an inverter and run 12volts to the saddlebag. You don't have to leave it plugged in all the time.
Well, at this point Saddam knows exactly what is happening, after experiencing it firsthand on Wednesday.
The Iraqi military is currently disorganized and shows no sign of any top-level leadership.
Until they run a phone line to Hell, Saddam is going to have to stay out of this one.
???
Do you know what you're talking about?
No.
I agree with the "do it for fun, not to save money" point.
;-)
However, I could build a completely custom USB keyboard for less than $140 NOT counting labor. Everyone knows hobby time is worth $.0025/hour anyway.
It would be up there in price, around $80 to $90 since the circuit board would be custom. That's only if I had someone else make the board, though. Guess I could etch my own board.
Anyway, all that would be required: one of the many cheap ($3-$5) USB-capable microcontrollers, some trivial encoding logic, and keyswitches. I'd probably go with surplus opto-interrupters and spring-loaded buttons on a custom panel. Easier to do if you have access to a CNC machine.
The benefit? Using the HID device standard, your button-box can become anything. Keys mapped anywhere, even macros depending on how fancy you get with the firmware. Could also add some more status lights, or outputs to control the coffeemaker.
The first thing someone will do with their camera phone: take a picture of a mouthful of chewing-in-progress food. Then laugh endlessly when the picture comes up on the overhead.
After that gets old...no, I don't want to think about it. They'd better enclose the bathroom with a grounded wire mesh shell.
Plenty.
Embedded devices are becoming increasingly powerful, and are expected to do more. Have you ever looked into the capabilities of new high-end stereo receivers? It's almost exponential from year to year.
A lot of functions normally requiring a full computer are being moved into embedded devices. It makes it a lot easier to port in an application, if it uses an OS you're already familiar with.
Linux adds another layer of compatibility over the base OS. For optimal speed, yes, you'd want to tweak every line for the target hardware. But the hardware cycle is so fast, that sometimes it's nice to let someone else specialize in the performance tweaks. Lets you concentrate on functionality.
There's already a million ways that this is being done, but an open and high-quality (yet to be seen) alternative is always welcome.
$5 or less plus a handful of components vs. $50-$70 for something slower and not as flexible....
I'd like to stay on the cheaper side.
I feel the same way you do, about PICs. I don't like their instruction set. The HC08 is much, much better for comparable feature sets.
seen in a microcontroller, it's cheap, it's fast, and you can get them with HUGE amounts of prgram memory (up to 128K).
Which in this case, he absolutely does not need. AVR is horrible overkill for this. I'd be looking for a 16 or even 8-pin PIC or Motorola HC08.
Erm...nothing about USB is "trival." It might seem that way if you've never been down-and-dirty with the firmware.
That said, I highly recommend the MC68HC908JB8 for a hobbyist USB development platform. You can get the package in surface-mount or a small DIP, it's easy to wire and code for, and the tools are good and free. It's a low-speed device, but for control applications like this it's more than adequate. Turn the ball into a funky keyboard too.
Don't use a Basic Stamp. They're overpriced and low on performance. The interpreter really takes the zing out of the microcontroller...say, in a similar way that certain OS's can change the operation of your desktop computer....
Really, you can get a small PIC (since that's where most of the hobbyist development resources are right now) in a 16-or so pin package you can toss on a Rat Shack breadboard. Get one with an onboard UART and life gets even simpler. The next step is to write code to take a string of values, and PWM a few pins according the the values. After that, everything depends on the computer side.
My room at school had indicator LEDs (one mounted in the door peephole - go figure) for new email, and a robotic webcam running off a 486 webserver.
If you want to get fancy, use USB.
I have a PIC board (way overspecced for this application, of course) and two USB boards on my desk right now, that could do the task with an hour of coding and soldering a few LEDs.
"Pull!"
*BLAM*
"Can you hear me now?"
*maniacal laughter*
It's all a matter of pressure and materials.
The temperature gradient is not that large. The freezer section of your refrigerator can maintain a temperature gradient of over 100 degrees in a several cubic foot box. The CPU cooler only has to deal with one tiny hotspot.