Hacker News Reader

mafuyuon Gamebuino: a retro portable game console project based on Arduino

There are a ton of these type of Arduino devices on the market[0], although this one seems pretty featureful.

I think for something like this to be successful, it needs to be low cost, open-source, and have strong libraries and documentation for beginners. Products like this also tend to have a small, tight-knit community of enthusiasts. Holding a contest with prizes is often a good way to pull in users.

Seems like a very cool project!

[0]:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardEsplora

http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/10...

http://www.arduboy.com/

http://belogic.com/uzebox/index.asp

mafuyuon Adventures in Sourcing and Building an ErgoDox

Thanks!

The Massdrop price seems pretty fair, especially considering that I was able to get a discount on a few things and had free access to a laser cutter.

I haven't looked into tents, but they seem interesting. Getting used to reaching the far thumb keys takes a bit of work. Seems like it might make gaming awkward, though. What design did you use to make the tent?

mafuyuon Ask HN: What are some nice electronics courses that blend theory and practice?

I think the Student Manual more or less stands as its own text. Obviously, there are some complements to TAOE, but I don't think it's necessary for the manual. TAOE is more like a cookbook than a textbook; it makes for a great reference but I wouldn't recommend trying to learn directly from it.

If you're curious, I have some scans that you can use to preview the book.

mafuyuon Ask HN: What are some nice electronics courses that blend theory and practice?

I highly recommend the Student Guide to the Art of Electronics: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/...

The book covers the basics of both analog and digital, and focuses on developing intuition without getting _too_ bogged down by theory, with accompanying labs/projects. I took the course taught by the author of the book before going to school to study the same subject area, and it helped me develop intuition and general electronics knowledge in a way no other course has.

If you want preview of the book, e-mail me and I can send you some scans.

mafuyuon Seattle Police hackathon to redact video streams recorded by police cams

He is talking about the privacy of the patients, not of the cops.

mafuyuon Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

The problem with FRAM is that it wears very quickly. That's why it hasn't seen wider use.

mafuyuon Dronecode – Open source UAV platform

It's difficult to get the real-time processing and performance you want for a quadrotor control loop with Linux. You usually want to write firmware or use an Real-Time OS.

mafuyuon Poll: A browser without tabs?

I just use tree style tabs in addition to Vimperator on Firefox.

mafuyuon Drone Shield – senses the presence of drones via acoustic detection

I've found it's the propellers themselves that cause the noise, not the PWM junk on the motors.

mafuyuon Building Pulse and Bloom, an interactive biofeedback installation at Burning Man

You can buy reasonably small amounts of leaded solder of DigiKey. I would recommend it over SparkFun. That said, every solder paste has an expiration date and will go bad if not stored appropriately.

mafuyuon The Data From Comments to the FCC About Net Neutrality

Identical link submissions count as votes for the original post instead. It's likely that as your post gained traction elsewhere, other users submitted the same link to HN.

mafuyuon Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

Chrome is much better than Firefox in terms of security, as the Chrome team has put a huge amount of time into it.

mafuyuon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

I just finished working on BoosterBot, an entry for the Texas Instruments Intern Design Challenge!

It's a robotics daughterboards for TI Launchpads.

http://hackaday.io/project/1845-BoosterBot

http://youtu.be/I0JuGvbfIIE

mafuyuon Ask HN: Our iPad game hit top 30 in free games, how do we keep the momentum?

Hi Matt! Grats on the success of your game.

I would recommend making a subset of the levels free and having the rest be IAP or a separate purchase. Then, make it free for a limited time, and try to get some blogs to cover you and promote your app on social media at the same time. This type of model only really works if you have critical mass, but it seems like you're off to a good start.

Good luck!

mafuyuon Find Developers and Designers for Side Projects

It happens whenever you scroll into a new section of the page and the JS animations trigger while you're scrolling.

mafuyuon Find Developers and Designers for Side Projects

I'm browsing using Firefox 30.0 and the front page is lagging when scrolling. Using my scroll wheel lags and my fan even spins up when I grab the scroll bar.

No issues in Chrome, however.

mafuyuon Surface Pro 3 Review

The trackpad issue is probably from how Microsoft rolls their own capacitive trackpad solution and the capacitance from your leg is causing issues. My Type Cover 2 would also have issues when my fingers got sweaty. The way to fix it would be to reconnect the cover so that it would recalibrate. I've heard the Type Cover 3's trackpad is leaps and bounds above the previous two in terms of usability, though.

mafuyuon Unblinking Eyes Track Employees

Reminds me of the sci-fi novel "Manna". It's worth a read: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm.

From Wikipedia:

"Manna is meant to be a thought-provoking read or conceptual prototype rather than an entertaining novel (see exploratory engineering for more on such writing). The novel shows two possible outcomes of the 'robotic revolution' in the near future: one outcome is a dystopia based around US capitalism and the other is a utopia based upon a communal and technological society in Australia. Essentially, the two differ in that lower-class humans in the dystopic society have been left unmodified and are controlled by AI "managers" to the point of slavery, while humans in the utopian society more directly and efficiently participate in the management of the society as a whole and most or all willingly accept implanted AI aids."

mafuyuon Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit

Oops, thanks. The correct link should be: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

mafuyuon Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit

It's great that Lattice is coming out with even cheaper FPGA dev board options. The bare-bones student dev kits from Altera and Xilinx are typically around $70, but $25 is a low enough price for hobbyists and beginners to begin experimenting as well.

I'm not too sure about the USB stick form factor, though. I have Texas Instrument's F2013 dev board[0], which is also a USB stick-type device. It's adorable; it's cute; and it has everything you need on-board (both the emulator and target), but you end up not being able to do anything very useful with it (unless you get very creative[1]). Hack-A-Day seems to agree[2].

Part of the reason this eval board is so cheap is that most FPGA evaluation boards have a bunch of peripherals that you can toy around with. My worry is that the lack of peripherals, low number of I/O pins, and the USB form factor might work against the product. That said, it does have an IrDA transceiver, which should enable some cool demos like acting as a TV remote.

If you're looking for a cheap FPGA board to use as part of a greater project, take a look at Lattice's iCE40-HX8K Breakout Board[3]. It's double the price, but it has all the basics and has tons of I/O to use. You can see Mike from mikeselectricstuff use it in his iPod Nano LCD project here: http://youtu.be/IIR1Bw8T_vM .

[0]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

[1]: http://forum.43oh.com/topic/248-ezprobe-ez430-based-logic-pr...

[2]: http://hackaday.com/2011/01/30/hands-on-with-ez430-f2013/

[3]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

mafuyuon Trashing Chromebooks

The name of the game with ARM devices is often support and stability. There are plenty of ARM boards out there with just barely enough driver support to get Ubuntu running, let alone hacking it on yourself. Like the post said, Chromebooks already come with good hardware and software support.

mafuyuon Nod - Touchless Interaction

I'm excited for these type of wearables as input devices for head-mounted HUDs/AR. Google Glass currently uses voice recognition and a capacitive strip, which is fine, as Glass is only for briefly looking up information. As AR develops, it will need more complex input methods, and I see these as some vague possibilities:

* Hand/wrist/arm mounted input (Nod, Myo, watches, chorded keyboards, etc...)

* Eye-tracking (technology exists, but needs to be miniaturized and developed further to fit within a glasses frame)

* Head movement (tiling your head, winking, etc.)

* Computer Vision (ie. AR develops enough to use your hand in front of you to intuitively interact)

mafuyuon [dead]

Please don't run any binaries from this page.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TrueCrypt#RE:_TrueCrypt.2... :

Give the nature of the "archival site" (truecrypt.org redirects to truecrypt.sourceforge.net) I suspect that TrueCrypt's website may have been compromised and this is a clever attempt to hack into people's machine. I say we wait for official word other than the website before claiming it's discontinued. —f3ndot (TALK) (EMAIL) (PGP) 19:29, 28 May 2014 (UTC) Hum, don't think it was hacked somehow. First, most of the page teaches how to migrate data. Second, the only available download is a "new" version, 7.2, that only allows you to decrypt data. Installing and running it on your computer won't open any kind of network connection. It doesn't create any new files, hidden files, nor modifies your registry. And don't think there'll be a official communication other than the official website, since the authors weren't known. Don't think there'll be a way to check if anyone claiming "I'm the TC author" will be provable. I'd take the official announcement as serious. Noonnee (talk) 19:49, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Noonnee, there are many reasons to consider this suspect: (1) the URL redirects to truecrypt.sourceforge.net. (2) The SIGs provided in the new binaries do not validate. (3) The keys provided do not validate under Web of Trust. (4) The timing is bizzare since there's an initiative to audit truecrypt and this is counter to the developers' Modus Operandi. (5) No other official information anywhere else? No. This is highly suspicious. We should wait for additional sources. —f3ndot (TALK) (EMAIL) (PGP) 19:53, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Noonnee: if that's true, you might want to post a malwr.com analysis of the file to verify your claims. Additionally, more evidence would be prudent before taking the claim as serious, imo. 173.13.21.69 (talk) 19:57, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

mafuyuon Still Starting Up

Appending '?share' to the URL will do it as well.

mafuyuon Ask HN: Screenshot Saturday

If there is community interest, I definitely would!

I love the Pibow, by the way. ;)

mafuyuon Ask HN: Screenshot Saturday

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/538662/20140424_003.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/538662/20140424_006.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/538662/dorkbotboard.png

https://github.com/hylian/arducard

Just soldered this up. It's a small e-paper device with USB, buttons, a real-time clock, FRAM, an ATmega32u4, and a rechargeable battery.

I'm trying to get USB CDC virtual serial up right now, so that I can test and debug the rest of the board, but it's proving to be a bit difficult...

mafuyuon Is the Toilet Free?

As others have said, Hack-a-Day is great for inspiration, and MAKE is great for beginners (although falls short once you gain more experience). MAKE has a bunch of great intro books to Arduino, etc. in both paper and eBook form I'd recommend checking out.

I'd recommend buying an Arduino and some basic parts and a breadboard to toy around with. The Arduino.cc Playground (Wiki) has some great resources for interesting projects. You could also buy a MAKE book and an accompanying kit, although the kits tend to be a bit overpriced.

If you're interested in a bit more thorough understanding of electronics, I would recommend checking out the Students Guide to the Art of Electronics. You can find a pdf floating around online and buy the book to support the author (who is an amazing teacher)! It runs through all the basics of analog and digital electronics while keeping it interesting and the math to a bare minimum.

mafuyuon Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware

Shame too, as it was a nice piece of hardware.

You can see a great teardown and explanation of the internals from mike at mikeselectricstuff here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xdajSS_cOU

mafuyuon Become a Glass Explorer on Tuesday April 15

The purpose of the incredibly high cost is to add a big artificial barrier to entry for a beta product. It limits the users to the people who really care about it and the wearables movement (and have the money!) It also allows Google to provide excellent customer service/support for Glass Explorers, which is important for Glass's image and collecting feedback.

I'd say that this one-day gimmick is a good sign that Google is slowly trying to introduce more Glasses to the public for a full release sometime this Fall (not around now, as many were speculating). The actual BOM cost for the current Glass seems to be around $200, so hopefully the official product will be considerably cheaper. That's what I'm waiting out for.

mafuyuon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

Thanks!