Winner of Name that Ware July 2008!

September 14th, 2008

Good guesses from everyone who played last month! Frankly, when I got this user-submitted ware, I was stumped myself. I was thinking nobody would guess it exactly, but the last entry from Keegan is dead-on correct: it is a touch screen lighting control console, by ETC Products. A lot of people had guessed home automation or HVAC controls, and in fact they were quite close to being correct with those guesses. What I want to know is how did Keegan know this:

“Unison has a unique labeling style (everything has a ‘Tested By’ sticker, every programmable chip has a thermal label with version and checksum)”.

That’s a very interesting piece of knowledge, and a great clue. Good job! email me to claim your prize.

Thanks everyone for playing!

Quake on Chumby

August 29th, 2008

xobs, a developer at chumby, showed me one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while on a chumby: a full port of Quake. He got the whole thing running under SDL and hacked up the event layer so that the accelerometer (tilting) is used to move in the game, the bend switch is used to fire, and a touch anywhere on the screen is used to jump/activate items. So now you can hug a Linux computer and frag bad guys at the same time. Practical? no. Cool? yes.

Below is a video of the loading screen plus a quick sample of the gameplay.

[flashvideo filename=http://files.chumby.com/hacks/quake_gameplay.flv /]

As you can see the frame rate is very playable on this little 350 MHz ARM9 i.MX21 CPU, although I had a little trouble holding the camera and playing at the same time, while finding a good angle for filming. I never really equated chumby in my mind with a video-game capable system like this, but that’s the joy of open source — people will do things with the hardware that you never expected or had in mind when you designed it. I love it!

You can find out more about how he did it in the chumby developer forum, and if you own a chumby you can download a USB dongle image that lets you play it (and if you don’t own a chumby, you can get one). And, xobs was fastidious about keeping compliant with the GPL and immediately posted the source tarball as well for you to peruse.

Name that Ware July 2008

August 18th, 2008

The Ware for July 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

This is just one board out of a couple in the system, but I figure this should be enough for people to nail it, given the quick success rate of past competitions.

This is again a user-submitted ware, this time from an anonymous reader of the blog! It’s pretty cool actually to be getting ware submissions now, because I get to play the game a bit myself while reviewing and preparing the photos for posting :-).

Winner of Name that Ware June 2008!

August 18th, 2008

The ware for June 2008, provided courtesy of xobs, is a “Kitchen Sync” expansion card from the ’90s, used with the Video Toaster. The Kitchen Sync is a sync generator for video signals, and it includes two independent time base correctors.

I love retro hardware like this — brings me back to the day when garage startups could really build and market hardware products that made a difference. Thanks for playing!

The winner for June 2008 is Stern! email me to claim your prize. Drew (winner from May 08) — I will send your prize out soon. Sorry it took so long, I recently got back from a long business trip to China and I’m slowly getting my head above water level.

Name that Ware June 2008

July 19th, 2008

The ware for June 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

The flip side of the daughtercard is shown below:

Thanks to xobs for the wonderful piece of retro-Ware!

Sorry for the late posting again — I’ve been in China running around. If you ever find yourself on the way to visit the Foxconn compound near Shenzhen, I have one piece of advice for you: pack your own lunch. Until now, I’ve had pretty decent food in most of the factories I’ve visited (3CEMS actually has quite delicious food), but for some reason the food at Foxconn is awful and I’ve been ill the past two days.