June 29th, 2008
This is for Mac OS X only, sorry folks.
I saw the funny command line interface to speech at Nerdlogger. Try this to play some tunes:
say -v Cellos "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo"
If you are brave enough, copy’n'paste the snippet below, replace USER and PASSWORD with your twitter account and it will read out loud the latest tweets of your friends.
curl -s -u user:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml | grep "<text>\|<screen_name>" | sed -e 's/ä/ä/' -e 's/ö/ö/' -e 's/ü/ü/' -e 's/<text>\(.*\)<\/text>/\1 from /' -e 's/<screen_name>\(.*\)<\/screen_name>/\1. . . . /' | say
Still a one liner 
Posted in misc, macbook | 4 Comments »
June 20th, 2008
Some days ago I received my new PCBs. This time I tried Sparkfun’s BatchPCB. BatchPCB is a specialized service to enable even smallest orders. They collect some smallers orders and have them produced in a batch at Gold Phoenix. So the smallest order is a square inch.
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Posted in PCB | 2 Comments »
June 14th, 2008
LCDs are often used in microcontroller projects. Most used are these green character displays with two or more rows to display menus, status or debug messages. With mass production of mobile phones, color LCDs get that cheap, that they can be used as replacement.
Some time ago I ordered a Nokia 6100 LCD including breakout board from Sparkfun. To test the display, I hacked a kind of small digital picture frame, that fetches pictures from Flickr. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in avr, LCD | 12 Comments »
May 3rd, 2008
This is a new version of my Tengu clone. This time on a printed circuit board (PCB). I have them produced by Olimex and I am very pleased with the quality. The PCB worked on the first try and has some minor issues only.
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Posted in avr, led, sound, PCB | 32 Comments »
April 4th, 2008
Today my first PCBs arrived. Hooray! For me, this is definitely like reaching the next level in DIY technologies.
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Posted in avr, PCB | 8 Comments »
March 15th, 2008
BlinkM is a smart LED, developed by Tod E. Kurt from ThingM. In a way it is a cousin of the Programmable LED. It is a microcontroller with an attached RGB LED. The idea is to implement PWM to control the color and brightness of the LED and put it in the controller. That means you have an abstraction level to make your programming easier. You can simply order “fade to red” or “fade to blue”.
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Posted in led, sensor, Arduino | 4 Comments »
February 20th, 2008
TV-B-Gone is pure subversive fun. If you don’t know it, it was invented by Mitch Altman and it is a universal TV remote control with a single button, the power button. You can only switch TVs off. No longer dumb advertisements everywhere you go. Just switch them off. Extra portions of fun in a MediaMarkt.
Just another fine device, well suited for DIY.
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Posted in avr, led | 5 Comments »
February 3rd, 2008
You know you could buy notebook sleeves in every size and color. But how many selfmade notebook sleeves have you seen?
What do you need to make one?
- A wetsuit
- Velcro
- A sewing machine
I got my material from a shop that sells surf equipement. They were so kind to give me three old surf jackets for free. Some zippers were broken or a bit rusty but the neopren was fine.
I don’t own a sewing machine but my mom has one. 
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Posted in macbook | 13 Comments »
January 7th, 2008
Arduino is a great prototyping platform and most of you probably know already about it. If not, check out the Arduino pages and the Arduino playground and dive into it.
A couple of month ago I ordered my first Arduino board. It was one of the Diecimila revision. As I often try something on my breadboard, I found out, that it can get troublesome to connect the Arduino with the breadboard over and over again. Others found that out as well and have solutions for that. An Arduino clone that snaps nicely onto your breadboard, e.g. Boarduino or RBBB.
So what to do if these boards are far away across the ocean and it is holiday season everywhere? You may have guessed it, we build it on a prototype board.
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Posted in avr, Arduino | 10 Comments »
December 30th, 2007
Thilo and I have been in Berlin for the last three days from 27th to the 29th, attending to the 24c3. It has been the first time for me beeing there. The 24c3 is one of the biggest events in Germany and Europe where geeks and hackers get together to talk, to hack and to have fun. It is a pitty, that I found out that late that there is such a cool event every year taking place only some hundred kilometers away. Anyway, I will be there again next year.
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Posted in misc | No Comments »
