DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 2

Welcome back to this episode of "Why isn't this working?" This week, we have the DJ Hard Drive Turn Table. When we left off, we weren't getting accurate directional readings from the drive. Needless to say, that kinda sucked. So I took it to an oscilloscope to figure out what was going on with the output of the op amps. It turns out it was a really weird problem.

Virtual Reality Using Your Computer as a Controller

I've been playing around with ThreeJS more and more now and I'm still not getting the hang of it. But I still enjoy using it even though I'm struggling through the darkness. I wanted to do something with its VR capabilities, but I also didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to get a decent VR headset. So I did the next best thing. I broke out my cardboard and played around with it. The results weren't Vive quality for sure, but for $15, it's exceptional what you can do with it. Unfortunately, it's hard to control something like this without a controller like the Vive. So I did something like Oculus did - made the computer the controller - but I did it without wires.

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 1

There are tons of tutorials on how to do this on the internet. The hard drive is an amazing part to do this with because the motor and bearings are so smooth and provide very low resistance of rotation while still being light. It could also turn itself (having a motor and all) and, best of all, it was free because my roommate dropped it and it stopped working. Which is a shame because it was 2.5TB. Regardless, I knew what I wanted to do with it almost immediately.

Quick Computer Teardown

I was moving out of my apartment, but I didn't want to take these two computers I found in the dumpster. At least, not all of them. The big bulky cases were stupid to take with me, so I decided to tear them down and see how compact we could make it while still keeping it reasonably usable. These were two old computers, but I imagine I could do something fun with them at one point.

Render Farm - 3D Edition!

A few months ago I wrote a simple render farm in PHP using imagemagick. But it could only deal with very simple animations in 2D space. What if we could deal with complex scenes in 3D space? And, what if instead of using hacky HTTP transactions to move data back and forth, we used Socket.io to form a true protocol? Well, that's exactly what we're going to do here.

Unraveling Samsung PC Studio 3's SMS Database

Back in the days of flip phone popularity, Samsung was a very popular name. My first phone was a Samsung SGT-T339 (T-Mobile exclusive). This got me through middle school, so as you can imagine the text message functionality was used a lot. Sagas of he said/she said nonsense and other various 7th grade nonsense. I was not above it by any stretch of the imagination. Being as I was (and still am) addicted to archiving everything, I used a program called Samsung PC Studio 3 to unload my text messages when it got full. The database was in some nonstandard format. I wanted to convert it to something I could open in excel, like CSV. So it's time to reverse engineer!

Make Your Own Firebase

You read right. We're going to be duplicating what I think is the best part of Firebase (before Google made everything the coolest part): the real time database. This is really neat because essentially every client will have the same copy of an object in the database, essentially removing the need to keep asking the server for updates. We're going to be copying the very basics of this behavior, but it can be extended way beyond what we're doing here.