Out on the dragstrip, the last vehicle you’d expect to be crushing BMWs and Ferraris is a 1972 Datsun. But John Wayland’s White Zombie is anything but ordinary. The electrified Datsun 1200 does 0-60 in a jaw-dropping 1.8 seconds.
The two-door coupe sports a dual-armature 9″ series-wound electric motor that was especially built for Wayland. Its battery pack is 192 lithium-polymer cells totaling to 355 Volts and 22.7 kWh of energy. The vehicle has a 90-mile range and it is even street legal. With over 500-plus horses, it’s no surprise the Zombie takes a quarter-mile in just ten seconds.
Ok folks, there was an earthquake in NYC now there is a hurricane heading this way. We will keep everyone updated if for any reasons orders cannot ship over the weekend or early next week. Stay tuned to the blog, twitter and g+ ! Here is a real time tracker from the NY Times. We have provisions, we’re 4 floors up and mosfet the cat has a life vest if needed. Google-like map here…
Computer hackers are frequently denigrated as mere digital pranksters. But some are now finding they have the power to change the world for good…
Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II tried to suppress them for being “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”. It was in the coffee houses that information previously held in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th century, when English public life was transformed.
NEW PRODUCT – Graphic ST7565 Negative LCD (128×64) with RGB backlight + extras. This graphical display looks fantastic, at a great price! This display will add the ultimate cool to your project, with a black negative display that has a full RGB LED backlight. You can control with PWM to make any color you can imagine, and it will look stunning with the black inverted (negative) background.
Four mounting holes and a blank 11 pin 2mm-pitch labeled breakout on the side – we just soldered some wire to each hole as shown in the photos, its very easy. (The LCDs have no wires soldered in when we ship them)
Bonus! We’re including a free 4050 level shifter chip so that you can safely use it with your favorite 5V microcontroller
Advantages!
Lower cost than KS0108 LCDs
Serial interface uses only 4 or 5 digital pins
Low power, full-color RGB LED backlight
Visible in daylight without backlight
Works perfectly with 3V logic
Challenges!…
3.3v power and logic means a level converter is needed for 5V Arduinos (we include this part when purchasing from us)
Microcontroller must buffer display – uses 1Kb of RAM. This means you must upgrade to a ATmega328 if you are using an Arduino with a ’8 or ’168
Four mounting holes and a blank 11 pin 2mm-pitch labeled breakout on the side – we just soldered some wire to each hole as shown in the photos, its very easy. (The LCDs have no wires soldered in when we ship them)
Bonus! We’re including a free 4050 level shifter chip so that you can safely use it with your favorite 5V microcontroller
Advantages!
Lower cost than KS0108 LCDs
Serial interface uses only 4 or 5 digital pins
Low power, full-color RGB LED backlight
Visible in daylight without backlight
Works perfectly with 3V logic
Challenges!…
3.3v power and logic means a level converter is needed for 5V Arduinos (we include this part when purchasing from us)
Microcontroller must buffer display – uses 1Kb of RAM. This means you must upgrade to a ATmega328 if you are using an Arduino with a ’8 or ’168
TUTORIAL: Arduino Hacks -Burning bootloader chips using an Arduino. A lot of people start learning about microcontrollers with an Arduino but then want to build their own projects without having to sacrifice their dev board. Or maybe they want to make their own Arduino variant, that is compatible with the IDE. Either way, a common problem is how to burn the bootloader onto the fresh AVR chip. Since AVRs come blank, they need to be set up to be Arduino IDE compatible but to do that you need an AVR programmer (like the USBtinyISP).
The good news is that you can burn bootloader using your existing Arduino with only a little bit of work. There’s even a minitutorial on the arduino.cc site
This tutorial is an extention of that tutorial. First we’ll show how you can make a permanent bootloader-burner by soldering a 28-pin ZIF socket to a proto shield and use the PWM output line of the Arduino to generate a clock. This will let you ‘rescue’ many chips that have been set to the wrong type of oscillator, or change ones that are set from external oscillator (most Arduino bootloaders) to internal (such as the lilypad).
Many people ask what we use for our shipping system (We use Endicia for postage services) but there are other options, a maker posted in our forums asking about Endicia vs Stamps.com and very quickly Eric from Stamps.com joined in and is answering questions!
So! Post up in the forums if you’d like to learn more about their services – they are answering questions! This is the future folks! Companies participating directly with prospective new customers in forums like ours!
If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you know that half the fun is putting it all together. The other half is gradually losing the support of your friends and family as you slowly slide down the rabbit hole of paranoia and stop bathing and eating in favor of constructing ever more intricate tinfoil hats, but putting it together, that’s were everyone gets hooked. With that in mind, Tamiya, a Japanese plastic model company, put together its “Put It Together” ad campaign featuring plastic model sets of famous conspiracy theories.
Rob Malda, a/k/a CmdrTaco, the creator and longtime editor of Slashdot, has resigned:
After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it’s finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it’s time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don’t have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.
As with Steve Jobs’ resignation, this is certainly the end of an era. I started reading /. my sophomore year in college. For a while it was the only place I went for tech news, and I still read the email digest every day. It’s hard to imagine it without him — I wish him well.
“When I was in high school Steve Wozniak and I, mostly Steve, made this little device called a “TV JAMMER” it was this little oscillator that put out frequencies that would screw up the TV. Woz would have it in his pocket and we’d go in to like the dorm at Berkeley where he was going to school and a bunch of folks would be watching like Star Trek and he’d screw up the TV, somebody would go up to fix it and just as they had their foot off the ground he’d turn it back on! If they put their foot back down on the ground he’d screw up the TV again, within 5 minutes have someone like this [Steve Jobs posing all pretzel looking] for the rest of the Star Trek episode.” – Steve Jobs
Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs on Wednesday resigned as chief executive of Apple Inc in a stunning move that ended his 14-year reign at the technology giant he co-founded in a garage.
End of an era, sad news – full letter here. One of our favorite original hacker CEOs.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
We’ve updated the library we wrote for the cute Nokia 5110 displays in the shop. The library now supports contrast adjustment, and inherits from print so you can write code like this:
// draw a string at location (0,0)
nokia.setCursor(0, 0);
nokia.println("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet");
// draw other characters, variables and such
nokia.println(0xAB, HEX);
nokia.print(99.99);
nokia.println('%');
nokia.display();
ZenCart Zensday – Text box length limits! Each week share different parts of our shopping cart system many use these in their own “Adafruit” like kit businesses. This week… Here’s a quick way to limit the length of customer comments on your invoices using javascript. Essentially, this is just a script to limit the size of a textarea element. This can be handy when you need to make sure a text field doesn’t have too much text in it…
We were earthquaked yesterday and figured today would be a safe day to do some site updates, and then we had a brief site outage at the time time. We figured we broke the site, but it wasn’t us, we swear! There was a short outage at our host. Very rare but happens. Every site goes down once and awhile, but we wanted to say how once again how great our provider is, servint! they had updates, tweets and we knew exactly what was happening. Things like this happen, how a company handles issues is what is important to us!
Here is our previous maker-biz article about who/why we picked them.
Website Hosting. After hearing about Dangerous Prototype’s search&move to a new hosting provider, we thought we’d post up about our hosting experiences! We currently use ServInt for our hosting provider. They’re what we would classify as a ‘full service’ provider. Basically they own the computer, the pipe and do all the management including backups. We get root shell access and install whatever we’d like. When we have any problems (including stuff like upgrading software or installing something) we open up a ticket.
We push over a terabyte a month, running our shop, hosting files, videos and tutorials and its been pretty much flawless. We started with the low cost VPS service and did that for a few years, now we have a dedicated server and its managed to live through many ‘slashdottings’ with no problems. We’re still wary of ‘cloud’ services – our needs are pretty consistant so we’d rather have a single server that can provide for our needs. If our traffic increases dramatically we may move to a cloud service for image or video caching, we’ve done that before when were were on a constrained provider and that helped us keep transfer costs down.
The 6th Brompton World Championship was held on Sunday 21st August, in glorious sunshine; for the fourth year in a row it was held as part of the Breast Cancer Care Bike Blenheim Palace Festival of Cycling.
We have a Brompton Bicycle (it’s the company “car”) – handy for trips in NYC and you can fold the bike and bring it inside!
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