Category: Computer

Lava lamp project, part 3 — mk2

Recent­ly, I stum­bled upon an adver­tise­ment for this object. It is a gad­get called Blink(1), which can be plugged into a USB port and which has two col­or LEDs, one on top and one on the bot­tom, that can be con­trolled by a piece of com­put­er soft­ware to show any col­or in any bright­ness. The gad­get is cost­ing around 40 swiss franks and it has a nice piece of con­trol soft­ware, which can be used to make the gad­get light in many dif­fer­ent use­ful ways. For exam­ple, IFTTT (If This Then That) can be used to make it light in var­i­ous col­ors upon giv­en con­di­tions, or URLs, files or scripts can be called to define col­or com­bi­na­tions, or a mail­box can make it light up if a giv­en num­ber of new mails arrive, or if the mail of your sig­nif­i­cant oth­er arrives or if the mail has a cer­tain sub­ject line. Or you warn of a low bat­tery, or when the CPU load exceeds a cer­tain percentage.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 3 — mk2

Lava lamp project, part 2 — firmware

In part 1, I described the hard­ware of my project of a com­put­er con­trol­lable lava lamp. In this sec­ond part, I want to dis­cuss the nec­es­sary firmware, which is the soft­ware nec­es­sary to teach the Picaxe Micro­con­troller the desired functionality.

We need to keep two areas in focus:

  1. We need to be able to read the desired col­or val­ues from the USB ser­i­al port, defin­ing the desired inten­si­ties of the col­ors green, red and blue.
  2. These desired val­ues have to be turned into actu­al light in desired col­or and inten­si­ty. This means, the LEDs have to be turned on.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 2 — firmware

Lava lamp project, part 1 — hardware

I want­ed to build a device that can light in dif­fer­ent col­ors, and where the col­ors can be con­trolled from a com­put­er. My idea was to hook it up with a com­put­er, who then should sig­nal some state by light­ing the appro­pri­ate col­or. For exam­ple, while build­ing and com­pil­ing a pro­gram, the lamp should blink in blue col­or. When the build is fin­ished, the lamp should light either in green (when the build ran fine) or red (when some­thing went wrong).

I found the lava lamp shown to the right, which is equipped with a col­or-chang­ing LED and is pow­ered from USB. I bought one and intend­ed to mod­i­fy the con­trol­ling elec­tron­ics to my purposes.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 1 — hardware

Deutsche Firma entwickelt starke Handybatterie mit einer Lebensdauer von 20 Jahren

The youth sec­tor is what makes up the largest pop­u­la­tion of inter­net users. Accord­ing to the lat­est study by Yahoo! and ad agency Carat Inter­ac­tive, teens and young adults choose to go online rather than watch tele­vi­sion or talk on the phone. The study, which was enti­tled Born to be Wired, found out that peo­ple aged 13 to 24 spend an aver­age of 16.7 hours a week online, exclud­ing e‑mail. Most of the gad­gets that teens use are lap­tops and mobile com­put­ers. The trend is expect­ed to go up and if that hap­pens, expect to hear clam­our for longer-last­ing bat­tery. The biggest hin­drance for any­one who wants to be in front of their lap­tops or mobile com­put­ers is the gad­gets’ bat­ter­ies. And a Ger­many com­pa­ny might just have found a solu­tion to this peren­ni­al problem.

Come 2015, teens will have more time on the inter­net, any­time and any­where they want. Ger­man indus­tri­al firm Youni­cos and renew­able pow­er util­i­ty com­pa­ny Wemag AG has recent­ly signed an agree­ment that will put up a 5 MW lithi­um-ion bat­tery park in West Meck­len­burg. The bat­ter­ies will be sup­plied by Sam­sung SDI and each unit will come with 20-year guar­an­tee. For starters, lithi­um-ion is a type of recharge­able bat­tery that is com­mon on portable gad­gets. This includes smart­phones and lap­tops. The first batch of the bat­ter­ies is expect­ed to be fin­ished by 2014 and among the firsts that will have them are peo­ple from Schw­erin.
With a 20-year guar­an­tee on your bat­tery, no need to wor­ry if the gad­get over­heats. You will be able to do your thing as long as you want to. You can play World of War­craft, pok­er, Assassin’s Creed or oth­er com­pelling video games all day. Video gam­ing is one of the biggest rea­sons why teens are locked on com­put­ers. One of the games that peo­ple (most­ly young adults) play on mobile com­put­ers is pok­er. The online ver­sion of the card game has this imper­a­tive effect that is also felt on RPGs. Pok­er games on web­sites like par­ty­pok­er are nat­u­ral­ly excit­ing and fun that some peo­ple don’t notice they have been in the game for five straight hours. There are also web­sites that offer tour­na­ments that give peo­ple the chance to qual­i­fy for big pok­er stages name­ly the Euro­pean Pok­er Tour, World Series of Pok­er, and World Pok­er Tour. Some of these tour­na­ments fol­low a marathon for­mat that can last for up to 24 hours.

Aside from the inter­net users, anoth­er par­ty that will ben­e­fit on the Li-on deal is Sam­sung. There’s a big bat­tle on smart­phones. Philip Hierse­men­zel from the said Ger­man firm said that “Sam­sung SDI’s 20-year guar­an­tee will be the game chang­er” and that it will make the com­pa­ny more “bank­able.”

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