ASCII Art FTW

A digital project that's been bouncing around in my brain for a few months has finally started to take shape during this holiday break. Machinations of design have already begun! Pencils are sharpened, Eagle skillz are flexed, and the Logic is rdy for the big time.

Also, for reasons unknown, this project incorporates a super simple piece of ASCII art.

Inner dialog:

- "Needed?" No.

- "Waste of precious Mega8 flash (8KB!)?" Most certainly.

- "Freaking cool?" Most certainly not.

- "Necessary?" Absolutely.

Astounding Ways to Graphically Depict The Solar System

XKCD never ceases to impress me with innovative uses of stick figures and fascinating data representation. Seriously, click here.

Daddy, I'm not sure about this...

Sweet L00t!

Santa Sara dropped the perfect gift for me under the tree this year. She got me a Saleae USB Digital Logic Probe (Logic for short). What is a Saleae (still unsure of proper pronunciation; 'say-lee' in my head) USB Digital Logic Probe and how will it help you take over the world?

In my last blog post (August!? lazy...), you can see a screenshot of hyperterminal displaying the serial output of my hacked Defcon 17 badge. This morning, I broke out the DC 17 badge and attached a couple of probes to test out the Logic (see picture above). The device itself communicates with a Windows XP / Vista / 7 computer via USB and requires you to download the software and drivers from Saleae's website.

With everything hooked up and the software installed, I went about testing the Logic. To my great surprise I found it dead easy to use. Attach the gray probe cable to ground and the black cable to some TTL goodness and start analyzing. That's how easy it is to use. As you can see from the screen shot below of Saleae's software, the Logic was able to interpret the first few characters outputted from the badge.

Get one from Sparkfun today!