HackniacHACKS
project list
ti_83_plus_uart
2010-4-4
About a month ago I started learning assembly programming for the z80 processor in the TI-83 plus and TI-84. One of the things that I had in mind to do with the new skill I was acquiring was giving the calculator the capability to communicate over its link port using Universal Asynchronous Transmit Receive (UART) protocol, which is used by many of the devices, modules, and integrated circuits that I use in my projects...
ti_touch
2010-4-2
I just got my TI calculator UART code working almost perfectly, so I thought I would celebrate and make a nice touch screen mod for my calculator. It turns out that the Nintendo DS touch screen is an almost perfect size for the calculator, and you can just stick it to the screen and plug it in...
typewriter
2010-4-1
Back in the time of the ancients typewriters were common. My mom happened to have an electric example of such a device that she held onto from that era. Months ago my little brother carried down from the attic and proclaimed it his. It didn't really work, but the sound and feel of typing on it were really nice...
barnacle
2010-3-30
The TI-83 plus is a beautiful machine for the most part, and I love my compatible TI-84 plus. Having the ability to whip out the little device and type out a TI-BASIC program in a few minutes that could be a game, an experiment, or a proof-of-concept implementation of an algorithm I am working on is awesome and very fun for me...
synthesizer
2010-3-28
I love the idea of old computers. I haven't gotten my hands on any to play around with so I can't say I really love them directly. However, all that beeping, whirring, dithering, chirpy music, tape, and paper really fires my imagination...
w1525
2010-3-20
The other day my mom forced me to go to the local Habitat for Humanity store to look at some chairs she found for our kitchen. When I was there I unearthed a beautiful W1525 word processor, which I was able to purchase for $10 because the person in charge of the store thought it was junk...
ram_flier
2010-2-13
This project was started during an unexpected 6 day winter vacation (due to snow). The idea is to allow the user of a TI-84 calculator to scroll through the entirety of the calculator's RAM visually and be allowed to modify values. The ultimate goal is a full hex editor for the calculator with support for modifying and analyzing the RAM of other running programs...
plotter
2010-1-26
I saw a bunch of Youtube videos featuring plotters and printers and laser cutters that people had created which got me really excited about these XY drawing things that can cut/draw/print crazy shapes in a very evidently mechanical way that captures the imagination (at least mine), which inspired me to go hunting on Ebay...
respeaker
2010-1-23
For Christmas this year I received this little toy called the "YadaYadaYada" that lets you record a short sample of sound and then play it back while pitch bending it in real time. It is a lot of fun to play around with, and my brothers and I spent hours pretending to be robots and helicopters, using it for our sound effects...
robot_computer
2009-11-15
I can't explain why this came to be. The other day I brought my ancient dead laptop back to life for the fourth time. I was thinking about turning it into a robot platform, but then today I saw a cardboard box in the trash. This crazy project just poofed into my head...
blog_engine
2009-11-15
My old blog engine was horrible. It was tough to maintain and difficult to write articles with. I am constructing this new system to allow my ideas to prosper more freely on the web.
It is set up like this: The whole thing is written in PHP...
legoAIM
2009-11-14
Meeting at my house for my school's robotics club did not go as planned, only one person showed up. We worked on a bot for a bit, but then we drifted into other activities. That day I had rereading a wonderful book that I received for Christmas one year on advanced Lego NXT programming, so I got the old brick out and we got to hacking...
isomage
2009-10-23
I've been having fun processing pictures in strange ways lately, so I decided to look around my drawer of old programs that I abandoned. I found a simple system that I came up with for displaying isometric 3 dimensional images, and have modified it to work with images...
ditherer
2009-10-22
In my Information Engineering class at school we did an activity involving dithering. We were supposed to create an image using MS Paint of anything we wanted using the principles of dithering. That meant that whatever image we came up with had to be black and white and drawn in dots of varying sizes...