Today a photo of the Nintendo 3DS development timberland board was leaked. There's not much interesting about it except for the fact that it looks as if there will be one wide screen on it and an analog stick. I'm pretty sure those two were added so that a game like Monster Hunter could be made for the machine. It will be interesting to see how the widescreen will work for future Konami galge titles on the platform.It's interesting that of all things a galge manga adaptation is giving mangaka difficulties. It shows how unique Love Plus is and I'm glad they are going in this unique direction.The other day I was walking around Ikea for some reason or another and I noticed this cool LED thing called the Dioder. It consists of 4 strips of 9 bright RGB LEDs with a control box and a bunch of cabling allowing you to arrange the LED strips in many different configurations. The Dioder has three modes. The first lets you cycle through some preset colors with the button. The second will automatically cycle through these colors. The third fades colors. The lights are not individually addressable so they are all the same color at any given time. The modes are selected by holding down a single button for different lengths of time while a buzzer beeps to let you know what mode wow goldyou are in. At $50 its a little expensive but I immediately thought it looked hackable so I bought one.
It sat around the house for several days as World of Warcraft Gold I debated what to do with it and waited for a bit of leisure time. I knew I couldn't just install it as intended. That wouldn't justify the $50. So like any good hacker I did some googling to see what others had done. I did find some "hacks" but they consisted of "hey look I put these lights on my TV" or "here they are in a box, isn't this cool." I'm sorry, I may be a geek snob but using something pretty much the way it was intended is not a very cool hack.So the debate went on. I cracked the control module open by removing the four screws and found a fairly simple circuit. It consists of three transistor pairs which drive the red, green and blue LED lines, a piezo buzzer, a button, a 5v regulator and a 12F629 PIC microcontroller. The circuit has only the three LED driver channels and that is why the LEDs are always the same color. I thought about building separate RGB drivers for each of the for LED strips so I could get four colors at once but in the end I decided that building new drivers circuits from scratch would take much more time than I wanted to invest in this project. Finally, I decided the simplest thing I could do, that was still "cool", was to interface the controller with my computer to control juicy couture handbagsthe LEDs. Anything is cool when it's connect to your computer right?
Unfortunately the PIC 12F629 does not have a serial port so I decided to piggy back one of my favorite little microcontrollers on top of the PIC, the ATTiny2313. This chip has plenty of IO lines, PWM, a serial port, is pretty easy to use and I happened to have some lying around and some prototyping boards already made up for them. The ATTiny2313 firmware is fairly simple. It listens on the serial port at 38400 baud with no parity 1 stop bit and 8-bit data. When it receives a command it recognizes it sets values for the red, green and blue PWM pulses. The firmware uses the ATTiny2313's built in hardware PWM in 8-bit mode. The PWM is very fast prototype board an produces lighting which is much less jittery then the original Dioder. The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories whipped up an elegant little kit that includes an ATmega168 AVR Micro-controller, 4 or 5 discrete components, and a circuit board.The Atmel AVR micro-controllers are awesome. They cross three particular barriers to entry that I arbitrarily chose prior to screwing around with micro-controllers.I had simple animation up and running within a couple of hours, most of that time being consumed by dealing with the now fixed USBTiny programmer bug. Not much longer after that and I had a pretty neat line based animation.
