Simon Willison’s Weblog

A Turing Machine. Someone finally built a real turing machine—and it’s beautiful. All calculations are carried out on a tape, which has 1s and 0s written on it by a robotic dry-erase marker. Hypnotic.

# 29th March 2010, 2:28 pm / hardware, turingmachine

bunnie’s blog: OLPC XO-1 (via) Bunnie Huang critiques the hardware design of the OLPC XO-1.

# 12th January 2008, 9:39 am / bunniehuang, hardware, olpc, xo1

Johnny Chung Lee: Projects Wii. Awe-inspiring hardware hacks built on top of the Wiimote, including a dirt cheap interactive whiteboard and a head tracking system that turns a normal display in to a 3D VR environment.

# 23rd December 2007, 9:23 am / 3d, hardware, hardware-hacking, johnny-chung-lee, make, vr, wii, wiimote

OLPC: Give 1 Get 1. The long rumoured “buy two OLPCs, donate one to the third world” scheme is actually happening. I plan to get one; the robustness, battery life and WiFi range should make for an excellent conference / outdoor machine.

# 24th September 2007, 11:07 am / charity, conferences, hardware, olpc

TechShop: Geek Heaven. Like a fitness club for people who make stuff: a ridiculous amount of exciting hardware (including laser etchers, robotic milling machines and a 3D printer) and trainers on hand to show you how to use it all. Sadly it’s in Menlo Park which is a bit of a trek from Brighton.

# 14th September 2007, 9:55 am / guykawasaki, hardware, menlopark, techshop

BBC Olinda digital radio: Social hardware. Schulze and Webb made a social radio prototype for the BBC; the IPR will be under an attribution license so manufacturers can run with it without asking for permission first.

# 20th August 2007, 9:47 pm / attribution, bbc, digitalradio, hardware, jack-schultz, matt-webb, olinda, radio, schulzeandwebb, socialradio

Arduino. Open source hardware hacking. It’s way easier than you would think.

# 17th May 2007, 6:30 pm / arduino, hardware, open-source

From Pixels to Plastic. Awesome talk given by Matt Webb at ETech, on the emerging culture of Generation C, cheap hardware prototyping and physical extensions to the online world.

# 30th March 2007, 11:09 am / etech, generationc, hardware, matt-webb

Mono-based device wins Best-of-Show at CES. “The Sansa Connect is running Linux as its operating system, and the whole application stack is built on Mono, running on an ARM processor.”

# 17th January 2007, 11:21 pm / ces, hardware, linux, mono, open-source