The following item I found recently while browsing thru the vintage video game section of eBay. While the item is far from being vintage (Made in 2007), I was fascinated and decided to invest $20 bucks in this console, claiming to be a Nintendo Entertainment System clone and capable of playing NES cartridges.

The item arrived in a colorful box with instructions on the back. A/V cord and 2 controllers were included. The console itself is quite small (about 4 stacked CD cases) and very light, but the plastic case is well made and also the controllers are fairly decent. All cords are a comfortable 5 ft long, including the controllers.

After hooking the console up and inserting a Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge ($0.59 @ local GameCrazy) I push the power button and the console really seems to do what it claims: pretend to be a NES system. The picture quality is 'authentic' good and the sound, while a bit muted, is mostly accurate.

After playing Super Mario Bros for a bit I decided to try out Duck Hunt and got the original Nintendo Zapper from 1985 ($2.99 @ local GameCrazy). Since the unit has the original NES connectors, connecting was no problem and the Zapper worked like a charm. After trying a few different NES games, the only minor problems I could find was in Kirby, the sound seems a bit off and some minor graphics errors appear on the edge of the screen, but did not affect the game play.

Overall the unit is quite nice, on the inside a single custom chip seems to do all the work. For $20 bucks quite a travel back in time.

Want your own? Check out these eBay search results:

I recently pickup up this little IP camera from the Computer Geeks for around $55. This camera is completely unbranded and came in a white box, with the Computer Geeks website listing the part number GCJ51W.

After some investigation I found out that this camera is sold under a number of different brands and in at least two case variations, but all seem to have the same hardware:

Edimax IC-1500Wg
Edimax IC-1510Wg
Logilink WC0002
Logilink WC0002N
Minitar MWIPC-1510WG
Hawking HNC230G (crippled version, only 512kb flash!)

The board on the inside shows IC-1500 and the firmware is interchangable between the Edimax, Logilink and Minitar - I personally use the Edimax IC-1500Wg firmware 1.34, which appears stable and one of the latest versions.

I also found a Wiki about this camera that has more in depth information:

http://ic1500.wikispaces.com/

The camera appears to be running uLinux on a RealTek RTL8651B processor, 2MB flash and 8MB SDRAM. Since the source code is available on the Edimax site, there is a real possibility of custom firmware to be developed for this camera.

I am quite happy with the camera, it has a bunch of features, like scheduled or motion detection snapshots, can send images via email or ftp, has direct links to the jpg and mjpeg steam and even has a way to get a login-free jpg URL. One of the few downsides of the camera is that the default web viewer only runs in Internet Explorer, but it is possible to view the mjpeg stream directly in Firefox/Netscape by opening http://CAMERAIP/snapshot.cgi (still requires login).

I have read several reports of random freezing and crashing of the camera, but I cannot confirm that - my camera has been running stable for over 10 days.

Picture quality is decent, here's a sample shot of my mail man:



You can find the camera here:

Wireless 802.11b/g Compact MJPEG Internet Camera (White)

So after some setbacks (all I'll say is MCLR) I finally finished a 4x4 RGB matrix I build controlled by a PIC 16F88. This is modeled after a friend's light object. Unfortunately the color mixing is not really great but I am able to control each of the 48 LEDs with 32 levels of brightness, resulting theoretically in roughly 32k colors per pixel. I've applied a cardbox matrix and a piece of paper as the cover to show the different colors.