What camera do you give to someone who already has too many? A camera that shouldn’t exist! An optical mouse is essentially a high frame rate, a low-resolution camera designed to track features on the surface of a desk/mouse pad. A quick raid of my parent’s home turned up an old dirty optical mouse. Inside was a ADNS-2610 mouse sensor featuring a tiny 18*18 pixel array.
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Instead of simply buying a nice function generator for £100-200 with lots of important features such as variable amplitude, DC offset, arbitrary functions, etc. We can build one with maybe £25 of materials and a lot more labor without those very useful features.
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Did you know you can get a microcontroller in a 6-pin SOT-23 format? Well several MCU manufactures make them including Microchip’s PIC series, of these PIC10F320 are smaller than a grain of rice and not nearly as tasty. As to be expected you don’t get much in them with only 256 words of program space and 64 bytes of general memory storage. But with an instruction speed of 4MHz we are just fast enough to output PAL/NTSC video by bit bashing a tristate IO pin connected to a couple of resistors. So lets try to implement Conway’s game of life (GOL) in the smallest physical space!
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This is just a quick post about my old Solid State Tesla Coil (SSTC) project. This by far my most dangerous project as it uses high voltage, RF interference and mains voltage! Can produce 10-15cm arcs and scares the hell out of my housemate. Made in the case of an old PC PSU. Uses a few 3d printed parts to hold circuit boards up, support the primary winding and is the tube for the secondary winding. The secondary tube was printed in vase mode and then extra support was added in later for rigidity. Finally the secondary was coated in for generic clear coat varnish to give a little extra protection.
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This shadertoy script is running a ray matching algorithm with a series of affine transformation to generate fractals. To get an ‘infinite’ fractal plane I use transformations that leave the fractal with cubic symmetry, then using a modulus operation only the x and y coordinates I copy the fractal over an infinite grid. If transformations that generate the fractals are slowly modified over the x-y plane then it allows the surface to slowly change over the surface. This creates a changing fractal landscape to explore.
