Gearfuse

What’s a programmer to do. Buy a hard-to-find LED strip? Most likely. He’ll then probably spend weeks hacking it so he can interface it with an Arduino. Afterwards, the LEDs will fade in and fade out for weeks to come, as our hero desperately tries to make sense of all this. After meeting with a friend, our hero and his companion work together to release a library for said LED strip. The day ends and they both breathe a sigh of relief. They hack to live, they live to hack. Hit the link to see it in action.

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Retro computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom’s historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. It’s the 37th anniversary of the world’s first single chip, customer-programmable microprocessor, the tiny Intel 4004. It was the Japanese calculator maker known as Busicom which later introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor.

So, in light of this historic event, Bill Kotaska decided to craft this re-creation of the historical machine which is capable of running the software from the original Busicom ROMs. Fancy yourself a computer historian? Bill’s got you covered as he provides schematics and photos of his re-creation at the unofficial 4004 web site, provided below.

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The name is a bit odd, I have to admit, but this looks like one fun toy for the DIY enthusiast out there. It’s called the Meggy Jr RGB and it’s a programmable handheld console that features an 8×8 LED matrix made up of wonderful colored lights. It uses an ATMega168 microcontroller, similar to that of the Arduino. In fact, you can use Arduino code to program the Meggy Jr. With six buttons available, you could end up making a game or an audio interface with this thing.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a whole write up on it and how it can be used. It’ll be available next week.

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Sometimes a normal mouse just won’t cut it. When you’re going to be spending the next three weeks of your life farming gold because you’ve already reached the max level in World Of Warcraft, you’re going to need a mouse that’s not going to flake out on you.

Enter SteelSeries’ new World Of Wacraft themed gaming mouse. It’s got the armor of an armadillo with the mass confusion that encompasses 15 programmable buttons. It also offers 16 million variations of flashing lights to keep you up during those all-night raids you’ll be doing. It’s due out next month for $90, so you better get on top of it before the rest of your guild does.

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