May 22, 2012 |
1,512 views |
Book Description
Learn how to quickly build cool electronic gadgets with .NET Gadgeteer. With the easy-to-follow instructions in this guide, you’ll tackle five fascinating projects, using Microsoft’s rapid prototyping Gadgeteer platform. There’s no soldering involved—you simply plug in modules that make gadget-building quick and easy.
Ideal for beginners, this book shows you how to work with modules and other hardware in the popular Fez Spider Starter Kit, and teaches you how to program your gadgets with Visual Studio C# Express and the .NET Micro Framework 4.1 SDK. You’ll soon learn a wide range of programming techniques along with the skills to design your own projects.
- Get to know the software and hardware with a simple LED project
- Download code from the companion site to build and test each project
- Build a spy camera that automatically captures and saves images at regular intervals
- Construct a simple animated game with the joystick module
- Create a web server that sends messages you draw or write on the touchscreen module
- Build a gadget that backs up digital images from an SD card to a USB flash drive
- Learn about other .NET Gadgeteer modules for creating environmental sensors, an MP3 player, and a WiFi network
Download Now »
May 22, 2012 |
1,324 views |
Book Description
The first magazine devoted entirely to do-it-yourself technology projects presents its 30th quarterly edition for people who like to tweak, disassemble, recreate, and invent cool new uses for technology.
Until recently, home automation was an unfulfilled promise — systems were gimmicky, finicky, user-hostile, or potentially unsecure. But today, thanks to a new crop of devices and technologies, home automation is useful, fun, and maker-friendly. Using smartphones, wireless networks, the internet, simple microcontrollers, and even gesture recognition, DIY-style Smart Homes can now do everything promised and more, for much less — and MAKE shows you how in Volume 30.
Table of Contents
May 18, 2012 |
2,345 views |
Book Description
Device drivers make it possible for your software to communicate with your hardware, and because every operating system has specific requirements, driver writing is nontrivial. When developing for FreeBSD, you’ve probably had to scour the Internet and dig through the kernel sources to figure out how to write the drivers you need. Thankfully, that stops now. In FreeBSD Device Drivers, Joseph Kong will teach you how to master everything from the basics of building and running loadable kernel modules to more complicated topics like thread synchronization. After a crash course in the different FreeBSD driver frameworks, extensive tutorial sections dissect real-world drivers like the parallel port printer driver.
You’ll learn:
- All about Newbus, the infrastructure used by FreeBSD to manage the hardware devices on your system
- How to work with ISA, PCI, USB, and other buses
- The best ways to control and communicate with the hardware devices from user space
- How to use Direct Memory Access (DMA) for maximum system performance
- The inner workings of the virtual null modem terminal driver, the USB printer driver, the Intel PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver, and other important drivers
- How to use Common Access Method (CAM) to manage host bus adapters (HBAs) Download Now »
May 15, 2012 |
3,487 views |
Book Description
If you’ve done some Arduino tinkering and wondered how you could incorporate the Kinect—or the other way around—then this book is for you. The authors of Arduino and Kinect Projects will show you how to create 10 amazing, creative projects, from simple to complex. You’ll also find out how to incorporate Processing in your project design—a language very similar to the Arduino language.
The ten projects are carefully designed to build on your skills at every step. Starting with the Arduino and Kinect equivalent of “Hello, World,” the authors will take you through a diverse range of projects that showcase the huge range of possibilities that open up when Kinect and Arduino are combined.
- Gesture-based Remote Control. Control devices and home appliances with hand gestures.
- Kinect-networked Puppet. Play with a physical puppet remotely using your whole body.
- Mood Lamps. Build your own set of responsive, gesture controllable LED lamps.
- Drawing Robot. Control a drawing robot using a Kinect-based tangible table.
- Remote-controlled Vehicle. Use your body gestures to control a smart vehicle.
- Biometric Station. Use the Kinect for biometric recognition and checking Body Mass Indexes.
- 3D Modeling Interface. Learn how to use the Arduino LilyPad to build a wearable 3D modelling interface.
- 360º Scanner. Build a turntable scanner and scan any object 360º using only one Kinect.
- Delta Robot. Build and control your own fast and accurate parallel robot. Download Now »
May 02, 2012 |
6,943 views |
Book Description
The emergence of the cloud and modern, fast corporate networks demands that you perform judicious balancing of computational loads. Practical Load Balancing presents an entire analytical framework to increase performance not just of one machine, but of your entire infrastructure.
Practical Load Balancing starts by introducing key concepts and the tools you’ll need to tackle your load-balancing issues. You’ll travel through the IP layers and learn how they can create increased network traffic for you. You’ll see how to account for persistence and state, and how you can judge the performance of scheduling algorithms.
You’ll then learn how to avoid performance degradation and any risk of the sudden disappearance of a service on a server. If you’re concerned with running your load balancer for an entire network, you’ll find out how to set up your network topography, and condense each topographical variety into recipes that will serve you in different situations. You’ll also learn about individual servers, and load balancers that can perform cookie insertion or improve your SSL throughput.
You’ll also explore load balancing in the modern context of the cloud. While load balancers need to be configured for high availability once the conditions on the network have been created, modern load balancing has found its way into the cloud, where good balancing is vital for the very functioning of the cloud, and where IPv6 is becoming ever more important.
Download Now »
May 02, 2012 |
2,964 views |
Book Description
Hacking the Kinect is the technogeek’s guide to developing software and creating projects involving the groundbreaking volumetric sensor known as the Microsoft Kinect. Microsoft’s release of the Kinect in the fall of 2010 startled the technology world by providing a low-cost sensor that can detect and track body movement in three-dimensional space. The Kinect set new records for the fastest-selling gadget of all time. It has been adopted worldwide by hobbyists, robotics enthusiasts, artists, and even some entrepreneurs hoping to build business around the technology.
Hacking the Kinect introduces you to programming for the Kinect. You’ll learn to set up a software environment, stream data from the Kinect, and write code to interpret that data. The progression of hands-on projects in the book leads you even deeper into an understanding of how the device functions and how you can apply it to create fun and educational projects. Who knows? You might even come up with a business idea.
- Provides an excellent source of fun and educational projects for a tech-savvy parent to pursue with a son or daughter
- Leads you progressively from making your very first connection to the Kinect through mastery of its full feature set
- Shows how to interpret the Kinect data stream in order to drive your own software and hardware applications, including robotics applications Download Now »
