Acekard have unveiled their latest flash-cart, which is compatible with the new Nintendo DSi. Unlocking the handheld for homebrew tinkering, such as running PMP software, ebook reader and unofficial games, as well as supporting cheats and game saves, the Acekard 2i is functionally the same as its DS predecessor but simply adds DSi compatibility.
Demo video of the Acekard 2i in action after the cut
Although commonly associated with pirated software, flash-carts also give console owners more flexibility in how they use their handhelds and legitimately-obtained games. The Acekard 2i can be used to store game save-files directly to a microSD card, removing memory capacity as an issue limiting save points, as well as running backups.
It will also let you use Action Replay cheat codes, if you’re not as impressive in a particular title as you’d like to be. The DSi is not yet available outside of Japan.
When I look for gifts for a lot of my friends, the most important thing on my mind is finding things that are hackable. Is the gift modifiable, open source, and fuel for future projects? Does it teach you something? These are essential qualities in a hacker gift.
In this guide, you'll find a collection of gadgets, books, and gear that have carefully been selected for their fundamental hackability and technical awesomeness.
The list starts off with an obvious gift candidate, the open source/open hardware Arduino.
The Arduino has quickly become the platform of choice for hardware hacks and physical computing projects requiring a microprocessor. The devices are cheap, fun to program, and there's a healthy community of Arduino hackers publishing both software libraries and hardware add-ons. For many applications, you'll want to check out the Arduino Duemilanove, which is compatible with snap on "shield" daughterboards like the robot friendly MotorShield or the XPortShield ethernet adapter. A lot of projects can also benefit from the ultra small footprint and breadboard compatible Boarduino, which you can assemble yourself for only $17.50.
A great gift idea for someone who's new to Arduino is the Arduino Starter Kit. It's currently backordered, but if you order quickly you can still get one in time for Christmas. It includes an Arduino Duemilanove, a huge pile of electronic goodies, and the book Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe.
When mashup artists The ECC (Evolution Control Committee) needed a faster way to trigger any of hundreds of loops in their live shows, they ditched the mouse and instead hacked together a rear-projection touchscreen. Rather than some of the DIY multitouch displays we’ve seen before, the ECC setup uses two Wiimote controllers and a pair of custom LED gloves.
Demo video of the system in action after the cut
The setup is based on an earlier project by Johnny Lee, and relies on two Wiimote controllers fixed either side of the projector. On the gloves there’s a thimble with an infrared LED (for the Wiimote to see) and a blue LED (for the user to see); pressing the thumb and forefinger together lights up both and the Wiimote translates that into a mouse-click.
Those clicks activate different samples and loops in music app Ableton Live. It’s far faster to jab at different elements than it is to mouse between them, hence the ECC can create their overlaid music in real-time.
The problem with bleeding edge devices is that they quickly become old and irrelevant. Replaced with the latest gizmo, old smart phones and PDAs tend to find their way to a drawer or a landfill after about 2 or 3 years.
It's not that most of us want a throwaway society. It's that most of the gadgets we buy are designed to expire, with hardware that cannot be user serviced, batteries that cannot be easily replaced, and with firmware and software stacks that cannot be modified to accommodate the future. Proprietary. Closed. User subjugating. Stupid.
One half of the solution is to choose open hardware and open source whenever you have the choice. The other part of the solution is to hack your closed devices to do your bidding. Thankfully, there are a lot of people working hard to make the latter possible, and you can run Free Software on everything from Palms to iPhones.
We caught this note from Hans-Christoph Steiner on the dorkbot nyc mailng list. He's currently working on a project called Reware, which is attempting to bring a common hacker-friendly Linux distro to a variety of PDAs:
We've been working at Eyebeam since July on making it easy to hack old devices and run new software on them. We now have our first Reware HOWTO video, showing the basics of how to use a Reware image yourself, then it illustrates some of the Pd patches we've made.
Coming soon, a image for running Pd, Python, and Lua programs on PDAs, as well as a HOWTO for making Pd patches for 1-5G iPods. The key idea is to turn old PDAs, mobile phones, etc. into something like an Arduino, where you can easily upload your own code to the device.
Currently Reware supports several Palm devices, but with iPods on the radar and a number of Pocket PCs that can run Linux, there's a lot of potential here. Just think about all those 200-400MHz ARM processors just waiting for something interesting to do.
This Guitar Hero mod posted by Youtube user Egyokeo blew my mind. A MIDI drum kit and some custom software on a PC send button-press input via the Xbox Input Machine (XIM) hardware to an Xbox running Guitar Hero.
Since I injured my middle left finger playing Guitar Hero 2 way too much when it came out, I've been dying to get back to playing it. But my finger hasn't healed. I was holding the neck too tightly on the X-plorer guitar controller and it hurts to bend it anymore. I've never had an injury playing the drums, so I thought "wouldn't it be great to be able to play Guitar Hero on the drums?" So I thought about how that might be accomplished... researched, implemented, borrowed, and here I outline the finished product.
Here's the whole chain of what's going on:
Me banging on my drumKat MIDI drum pads
drumKat MIDI Out to MIDI/USB adapter to PC
PC running my own custom MIDI Hero software
MIDI Hero calls into XIM which sends input to the Xbox 360 console
To make the songs playable with two-sticked drum input, some of the pads simulate multiple button presses for the 3 note chords and an input buffer on the PC automatically holds all notes until just before sending another hit event. You could tweak the setup to use a MIDI keyboard or even a MIDI guitar.
There are a lot more details on Egyokeo's site as well as the blog maintained by XIM creator OBsIV. Unfortunately, there are no instructions for actually playing like this. I'm pretty sure it involves secret ninja stuff.
The iPhone dev team, hard at work as usual, announced a successful iPhone Linux port today. It's still at a very early stage, but the kernel boots on first and second generation iPhones and the first generation iPod touch. A framebuffer driver and a working Busybox installation point to an exciting open source future:
What we have:
- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.
What we have in openiboot (but hasn't been ported yet):
- Read-only support for the NAND
What we don't have (yet!):
- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support
If you're a Linux hacker and want to pitch in with the porting process, hop on the #iphonelinux IRC channel at irc.osx86.hu.
This DIY bamboo frame is absolutely beautiful. Appropriate, since it appears to have hand crafted with love for a significant other. Aaron writes:
The ride quality is TOTALLY SWEET! I realize that I have a bit of a bias, but truthfully I have ridden very few bikes that felt nicer. The bike seems to float over bumpy road surfaces, almost as if it were on giant baloon tires, but nope, they are just 700x23 clinchers pumped hard as rocks. My big worry was that I had not gotten the frame alignment right, but that seems dead on too; riding no-handed is no problem. Oh yeah, and it corners like a fricking roller coaster and it accelerates as fast as anything I've ever ridden. Maybe that's due to the fact that it weighs only 16.5 pounds! I had no idea that it was going to be so light and honestly did a full on "YESSSS!" complete with double fist pump when I hung it on the scale.
There isn't a huge amount of info about the build process, suffice it to say that it began with harvesting carefully selected bamboo and ended with over 100 hours of epoxy and carbon fiber work.
The Bamboo Bike Project is a collaboration between scientists and engineers at The Earth Institute at Columbia University and a bicycle builder at Calfee Design. The project aims to examine the feasibility of implementing cargo bikes made of bamboo as a sustainable form of transportation in Africa. The ultimate goals of the project are:
1.To build a better bike for poor Africans in rural areas.
2.To stimulate a bicycle building industry in Africa to satisfy local needs.
Ralf Ackermann sent us a tip on using the Myvu Crystal headset in conjunction with a wearable computer. The Myvu glasses were designed to block out the rest of the world for private iPod video watching, but its VGA resolution and device compatibility makes it pretty suitable for tearing apart.
The consumer myvu crystal HMD (sold as a nice though still somewhat
"socially unacceptable" 2 eyepiece video output device for the ipod and
other devices generating a PAL/NTSC signal can be modified into a much
smaller 1 eyepiece version. This one works very well with a multitude of
devices like a Parallax propeller, a Nokia N95 via TV out or a Archos
PMA 430. It is thus well suited as the core of "another wearable computer".
Ralf's project is still a work in progress, but it's a reminder that most of the hardware required for a wearable is now commonly available. Considering most of us already carry a sufficient computer (iPhone, N95, G1, etc.) around with us all the time anyway, it's only a matter of time before a HMD design is made cool enough to dodge the social stigma.
Acekard have unveiled their latest flash-cart, which is compatible with the new Nintendo DSi. Unlocking the handheld for homebrew tinkering, such as running PMP software, ebook reader and unofficial games, as well as supporting cheats and game saves, the Acekard 2i is functionally the same as its DS predecessor but simply adds DSi compatibility.
