This post isn’t about the usual kind of dragon (if there even is a “usual” kind). The AVR Dragon is a gizmo made by Atmel, useful for programming their AVR line of microcontrollers. It’s relatively cheap (around US$50 at the time of this writing) and does many useful things. The specific application I’m going to talk about here is using it to “fix” parts when you’ve set the fuses in such a way that said parts won’t talk to simpler programmers. Details after the jump.
Tag: gadgets
Bay Area Maker Faire: Saphira
High-school students Sam DeRose and Alex Jacobson have constructed Saphira, a fire-breathing, Arduino-controlled animatronic dragon (named in homage to the protagonist of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance trilogy).
You can see her in person at the Maker Faire at San Mateo County Event Center, May 22 and 23. (Via Make: Online.)
Linux on Zipit
Update: Please see my newer Debian on Zipit article for a better installation process.
This is an article about running Linux on the Zipit Z2 instant messaging device. Or rather, it is about running a general-purpose Linux distro, since the device out-of-the-box runs a Linux kernel with proprietary userland software.
Why is this interesting? With a list price of US$50 (and sale prices approaching half that), this device can be an SSH client, DOSbox, NES emulator, video streamer, music player and/or IRC client.
Since the state of documentation seems to be lagging behind the state of development on this device, I’m using this post as an information dump about all the things I found a hassle to figure out (and hope to save others that same hassle).