Category: homebrew
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Viruscraft tangible hardware prototyping: etching PCBs
While we experiment with new fabrication techniques in order to shorten supply chains (with a philosophy of collapse in mind), electronics is problematic. Components can be salvaged and reclaimed but a particular problem is printed circuit board manufacture. Like many we have tended to outsource this work to China, where the costs allow us to…
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More PPU coding on the NES/Famicom
After getting sprites working in Lisp on the NES for our “What Remains” project, the next thing to figure out properly is the background tiles. With the sprites you simply have a block of memory you edit at any time, then copy the whole lot to the PPU each frame in one go – the…
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A 6502 lisp compiler, sprite animation and the NES/Famicom
For our new project “what remains”, we’re regrouping the Naked on Pluto team to build a game about climate change. In the spirit of the medium being the message, we’re interested in long term thinking as well as recycling e-waste – so in keeping with a lot of our work, we are unraveling the threads…
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Neural Network livecoding and retrofitting ZX Spectrum hardware
An experimental, and quite angry neural network livecoding synth (with an audio ‘weave’ visualisation) for the ZX Spectrum: source code and TZX file (for emulators). It’s a bit hard to make out in the video, but you can move around the 48 neurons and modify their synapses and trigger levels. There are two clock inputs…
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Spork Factory: evolving a light follower robot
Continuing with the structured procrastination R&D project on evolvable hardware, I’m proud to report a pretty decent light following robot – this is a video of the first real-world test, with a program grown from primordial soup chasing me around: After creating a software model simulation of the robot in the last post, I added…
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Evolvable hardware
I’m modding a robot toy for the next Spork Factory experiment, the chassis provides twin motor driven wheels and I’m replacing it’s brains with a circuit based on the ATtiny85 for running the results of the genetic algorithm, and a pair of light dependant resistors for ‘seeing’ with. Here’s the circuit (made in about 20…
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SuperCollider Symposium
I had a great couple of days at the SuperCollider symposium, starting with a gameboy performance with Till Bovermann and ending with a talk on BetaBlocker with him and Tom Hall. As an outsider to the community (I have contributed code, but I’m not a regular user of Supercollider) it was interesting to pick up…
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Betablocker @ SC2012 livecoding night
I’m travelling to London this weekend to appear as a guest performer with Till Bovermann at the SuperCollider Symposium livecoding night, alongside livecoding all stars Benoit and the Mandelbrots, Thor Magnusson, Alo Allik and Yota Morimoto. Till and I will be collaboratively performing using the betablocker virtual machine, Till running it at audio rate inside…
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Betablocker rehersal
Dave & Till – Betablocker live coding (cuts) by LFSaw
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BetaBlocker DS test tones
After a week of heavy development on Germination X, and with a fast approaching performance, it seemed the time to dive back into Gameboy DS homebrew and get the bits and pieces of assembler code I’d been playing with together into something I could build more sounds from. After getting the low level stuff working…