Tag Archives: electronics

Retro Space Invaders

I think this is wonderful. Today I got to play with Gareth Bailey’s Space Invaders game – a quick hack, he claims, which he put together yesterday.

This uses an oscilloscope as an X-Y plotter to draw the graphics, harking back to the earliest days of computer displays. But historically, displays like this would usually have been driven by a mainframe, where as Gareth’s is driven by a Raspberry Pi.

And where do you get a couple of nice analog outputs from a Raspberry Pi? Why, from the left and right channels of the audio, of course….

Apologies for the quality of the video, but I thought this was worth capturing despite the challenging environment!

Possibly-related posts:

Change the world with your DVD drive?

Researchers at UCLA produced graphene supercapacitors — an amazingly efficient electricity-storage medium — using a standard DVD burner.

“The process is straightforward, cost-effective and can be done at home,” El-Kady said. “One only needs a DVD burner and graphite oxide dispersion in water, which is commercially available at a moderate cost.”

More info here.

Possibly-related posts:

Circuitry for the brain

Are you socially handicapped by your lack of electronics knowledge? Wishing you could remember more from school physics/IT lessons? Ever wondered what these strange transistor things are and why they were so important?

I’ve just come across a very nice site called JeeLabs by Jean-Claude Wippler – thanks, Aideen – and in particular a set of posts called Easy Electrons, which introduce resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, and some of the things you can do with them.

It’s not a series for complete beginners – you need to have some grasp of voltage and current and the relationship between them – but if you’ve ever wondered “Do I need a resistor with this LED, and if so, why, and how big should it be?”, or “Why is my transistor getting hot?”, then this could be useful reading.

I liked the ones about diodes and the set of posts about transistors….

Possibly-related posts:

Feeds

RSS  RSS feed

Categories

May 2023
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser