Category: howto
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Penelopean robotics (part 2)
Penelopean robotics are about rebuilding technology in the woven cosmos. You can read more about the theory in part 1, but roughly our aims are to: Embody Penelopean technological practice – they should be easily undone (taken apart) so they can be understandable, self documenting and repairable. They are not automated looms, but must eventually…
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Stackable hexagon prototype boards
We are working on a lot of hardware projects at the moment as we are interested in how to to rebuild technology from various alternative starting points. It seems most “off the shelf” hardware has converged on increasingly inaccessible and conservative forms, but luckily (and probably not due to entirely unrelated reasons) at the same…
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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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Adventures with FM sound and the YM2612
So I’ve been getting a into FM synthesis lately, and after giving the TX7 a spin I’ve been really wanting to try evolving sounds for the later synth chips Yamaha made for games consoles and soundcards. At that point in history FM was one of the only realistic ways you could synthesise complex sound as…
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Debugging midi bytes with sonification
I’m currently working on some hardware for interfacing a Raspberry Pi 3 with MIDI. You can of course use a normal USB audio interface, and there is a ready made MIDI Hat module for the Pi already – but I only need MIDI out, and it shouldn’t be a problem to come up with something…
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My first buffer overflow exploit
I know worryingly little about the world of computer security – I’ve probably written a huge amount of exploitable code in my time, so it’s a good idea as a programmer to spend a bit of effort finding out more about how our programs can be compromised in order to gain awareness of the issues.…
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Foam Kernow crypto ‘tea party’
Last night we ran an experimental cryptoparty at Foam Kernow. We’d not tried something like this before, or have any particular expertise with cryptography – so this was run as a research gathering for interested people to find out more about it. One of the misconceptions about cryptography I wanted to start with is that…
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Tanglebots workshop preparation
It’s workshop time again at Foam Kernow. We’re running a Sonic Kayak development open hacklab with Kaffe Matthews (more on this soon) and a series of tanglebots workshops which will be the finale to the weavingcodes project. Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we’re using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes…
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How to warp a tablet loom (/neolithic digital computing device)
Tablet looms have some interesting properties. Firstly, they are very very old – our neolithic ancestors invented them. Secondly they are quite straightforward to make and weave but form an extremely complex structure that incorporates both weaving and braiding (and one I haven’t managed to simulate correctly yet) – they are also the only form…
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Organisation hacking (part 2)
Time for the next installment in my attempt to document the sometimes opaque world of setting up a company, based on experiences founding Foam Kernow. As before ‘I Am Not A Lawyer’, as they say – so no substitute for proper legal advice here, and any corrections would be most welcome. See part 1 about…