Cobra from the Icecrew got his hands on some Led scrollers.
But they only had a windows program to controll these, so we started some reverseengineering.
First we had to make a serial cable. (Now we could easily use a logic analyser with protocol decoding)
Next i made a sniffer .. because we only had a windows program to control the display. So we used a windows machine to control the display by serial, and using a read line to a linux machine to stiff the serial traffic
After some tinkering .. we got this
So we wrote some software to control it using Linux
Somewhere start 2002, i made a tool for playing darts. Well … keeping score and history
I was multiuser, multigame with statistics and undo. You could click on the little dartboard what your have thrown on a real board. It just kept score and told you best finish options.
Screenshot below was a digitized picture, no way accurate. Versions later the board was realtime drawn with GDlib and pixelperfect. It even showed you previous throws.
At the end of the game it should give you the hotspots you have thrown.
It was a beautiful day in May, and a lot of people were outside enjoying themselves.
Monique was working in the garden, and i was sitting in the living room.
We heard some commotion and saw the smoke. Some people said that the Chinese restaurant in that neighbourhood (containing illegal fireworks) was burning.
We heard a big explosion and Monique was blown off her feet, and sat down in the garden.
I saw the large livingroom window bulging to the inside and moving outside again. (This had loosen the mortar around the window)
When seeing the now black smoke, we went inside, to the opposite site of our home, and turned on the news/checked websites.
We were lucky that there was a large factory between us and the blast (Polaroid factory)
Large pieces of cement where found 100m further than our house was.
Below some of my own media, for a better understanding of the destruction and aftermath of the disaster check the divers websites.
The script which tracked a certain webpage realtime was using something like a pixel tracker. But it was a complete logo.
I created a cgi-bin bash script which, when called, just printed a jpg with the correct headers, and because the server was in my room, it played a soundfile over the speakers also.
Just place the following part somewhere in your webpage
#!/bin/sh
echo Content-type: image/jpeg
echo
cat /var/lib/httpd/htdocs/banners/logo.jpg
bwavplay /data/test.wav > /dev/null
echo ACCESS | mail 0612345678@gin.nl -s "Archive Site Accessed"
Build a hardware webcounter (it was a thing back then) , i used below schematic. Wanted to use huge 7 segment displays but never got around it to buy the large ones.. It was easily converted to multiple segments. I think i used 4 and pulses where send via a parallel port.
Old webcounter schematic
The three (my case four) buttons are to get the counter in sync with my real counter which was a CGI script. It generated html code with took numeric images and displayed these on a page, the state was stored in a file. No numbers where send to the counter, only a pulse. So no synchronisation! Not the way to do this nowadays!
Joystick recorder
I designed a joystick movement recorder for a school project.
You could record movement, and press a button to start recording. (and starting the game) It was not really usable. Because, it needed a higher recording rate, a game which always reacted to the player in the same manner. Only made a half proof of concept.
Drawing images using lasers
For another school project i wanted to be able to draw figures using a laser. One of my teachers fixed a meetup for me with a guy attending university in Enschede. He was using lasers to scan miniscule objects using a laser in groves something resembling a longplayer record.
I wanted to use two DACs to control the movement of two mirrors. But i’d had to take into account the speed of the movement and the weight of the mirrors, else images where distorted.
He gave me a schematic which used: 2 controllabe video disc mirrors, light split glasses and amplifier part.
Previous project with Oscilloscope drawings helped, with understanding those problems. https://www.henriaanstoot.nl/1992/01/01/oscilloscope-graphics-using-a-amiga-bonus-vectrex/
I’ve still got the components, except for the high grade laser i lend from a friend. But a simple laser pen should suffice
"If something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing."