To get a little more experience with ActionScript 3, I wrote up a very simple class which will take a rule number, and then generate a cellular automata based on that.

The movie below requires Flash 9 or above to be installed. Some rules to try out: 90, 30, 73, 110, 150. Valid numbers are 0-255, but not all produce interesting results.

Direct link to flash movie (got some people complaining the SWFObject script doesn't work under Vista)

See Wikipedia for more info, and Wolfram.com has a list of all 256 possible results
Here's the code:
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So apparently ICANN has decided to start allowing people to purchase new Top Level Domains. Existing ones are things like .com, .net, .info, .biz, and so forth. They are going to charge a hefty $100,000 for the privilege however. Personally I think it's a terrible idea, and it's just a plot to make some quick money on their part. Anyway, my buddy guesses there will be 950 vanity TLDs registered in the first auction (where a vanity TLD being one that refers to a company, person, organization) I say that's way too high, I'd be surprised if there were over a hundred.

ole has taken my KVM port to Nintendo DS and added some updates. I haven't played with it much, but he lists the changes as follows.

R3: New features added by Ole:

• fixed the CLDC implementation (timer, memory size, system properties)
• added support for reading of the PNG images (code taken from the PhoneMe project)
• implemented native functions for rendering the basic graphics primitives on the screen
  (lines, rectangles, triangles, images)
• added support for accepting the JAD files in the application browser
• added the core part of the Pstros MIDP library
• added VideoTest example to show how to draw on the screen
• added '_rebuild.bat' to show how to build and preverify the class files.
  Note WTK installation is required.

This is quite interesting if it is able to run some MIDP-compliant games, but we'll need to do some testing to see how the speed compares to your average mobile phone.

UPDATE: He's made a few more updates since I originally made this post. Be sure to check out ole's site for the latest info and download links.

Just a tiny update to my homebrew mandelbrot browser for Nintendo DS. This version merely adds DLDI-support, meaning you should be able to save screenshots as .PNG from pretty much any flashcart. Check the previous post for screenshots, more info, etc. To the right is an actual image saved from the program.

Download r06 .nds

I've finished assembling my little gadget...and it works! As a side note, Flux is super handy, it made soldering the tiny SMT stuff really easy, also I learned a few tips from this video.

I ran into one small problem: on the board, I added a JTAG port for in-circuit programming & debugging. However, my cheapo JTAGICE mkI (not mkII) doesn't support the newer AVR chip I put on the board. So I had to hack in an ICSP port, hence the four ugly green wires coming out of the middle of the board. But once I got that in, I updated the program I had running on the prototype. There were just some minor changes, IO pins were mapped differently, and the syntax for using Timers was slightly changed.

Now that the hardware is essentially done, I need to write some more software, get a few polished minigames on there.

UPDATE: Please enter your email address, I'm trying to find out if there's any interest in these devices. If enough people subscribe, it will encourage me to do something about it

You can download a short video, or watch it online here:

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Over the christmas holiday I received my PCBs back from Olimex. They look very professionally made, it's pretty neat knowing that I designed it completely myself. In the picture to the right you can see the board with a few of the components. I haven't started soldering yet, but I've placed them on there so you can get an idea of how it will look when finished.

I'm waiting on the parts from Allegro before I can finish, I've requested samples of their surface mount pieces (previously I only got the ones in the DIP packages).

So I built a pretty good prototype of my LED matrix, AVR-based toy (as you can see in my previous post, as well as this video). Now I've decided to get a PCB made, using mostly surface mount components, which will make it nice and compact. You can see to the right a 3D render of approximately what it will look like, right now a company in Bulgaria is fabricating my PCB, hopefully I'll get it within another week or two.

Whether or not it actually will work once I get it & assemble it, remains to be seen.

I used cadsoft's Eagle tool to design the PCB, and I used this plugin along with povray in order to create the 3d render. Also I sort of edited in the image of the LED matrix...since they didn't already have a 3d part built for it. But it looks reasonable enough I think.

Someone was having trouble compiling it, so I threw this together real quick.
See FreeType's official site for more info on it, but basically it's a library for rendering nice ttf fonts, and it's been compiled so that it can run on Nintendo DS. It wont do anything on its own, this is really only useful for homebrew developers who want to include some sort of nice font rendering.

freetype-2.3.5-nds-dka-r21.zip (1.2MB)

It's been compiled with devKitARM r21, no guarantees it will work with any later/earlier version. In fact, no guarantees it will work at all, I haven't actually tested it...but it compiles without any errors. I had to disable two checks in in the configure script, because it kept getting confused when I told it to compile for arm-eabi.

If anyone uses this, would be nice to know, drop me a line in the comment section.

I've uploaded a new batch of DS demos that are free to download. I've put them on a new page, separate from the old one, so it's easy to see the new ones. There are a bunch of fun looking ones, be sure to check them out!

New Demos Page
Previous Demo Collection

I've had a little time to come back to working on my AVR ATMega-based project. First of all, I replaced a bunch of free wires with a ribbon cable, which makes things a lot easier to handle. I've also wired up the buttons, so now I can write little programs which can be controlled by user input. Right now you can just move the dot around and change its color, next I think I will make a 1 or 2 player pong game.

Download a short video of it in action (~700KB), or view it here:
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