June 2, 2007

DiggX, Hacked Firmware for the Digg Button (youTube and Instructables)

adafruit industries makes a very cool and simple electronics kit called the Digg Button. It's an offshoot of the Digg.com social filtering news site. The Digg Button just counts the number of times it's pressed, or dug. A measure of esteem. It's based on an Atmel AVR2313 microprocessor and the original firmware was published on the ladyada support site for adafruit. DiggX is my hacked version, available here. The .zip file has the "hex" file which can be downloaded to the Digg Button. It also contains the source files (in C) so you can mod my mod if you want. Opensource, of course.

It changes some behaviors and adds some features:

  • Longer scrolling and selfish message ("digg me" rather than "digg")
  • A short button press increments the counter and plays the "dug" animation
  • A long button press resets the counter to zero and returns to scrolling
  • A timeout after 2 minutes of no presses returns the Digg Button to scrolling (but doesn't reset the count) ... kind of a screensaver mode that helps attract diggers
  • A long timeout after 5 minutes of no presses puts the Digg Button into sleep mode to conserve power. Pressing the button wakes it up again

I've posted a short youTube demo at:

And, finally, I also created an Instructable (at instructables.com) the shows how to create a removable interface cable for the Digg Button.

Check 'em out.

Posted by bob | 2:58 PM | permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube and Proxies

Another of many insights I've gained only after long hours of confusion was that I needed to enable proxy access on my firewall before I could upload videos to youTube. Without this, it would appear to work, but hang after some random percentage has been sent. I finally changed this setting for no other reason than it was something I hadn't tried (i.e. act of desparation).

There was no word of this ANYWHERE I searched.

Posted by bob | 2:54 PM | permalink | Comments (0)

iMovie and Fat32 Don't Mix!

So, I spent many hours trying to figure out why the fast/slow/reverse effect wouldn't work for me in iMovie. It would preview OK and seem to work when I applied the effect to a clip, but the resulting clip would be all black and the movie would begin behaving very strangely. I upgraded iLife from 5 to 6 thinking that might fix the problem. No luck! Finally, after exhausting many theories I Googled and found an obscure comment in a forum about Fat32 and iMovie. Bingo!

I have a couple of hard drives I use for media projects. Since I have both Mac/PC computers around, I thought I'd just format them as Fat32 so I could get to them from my PC if I needed. That turned out to be the problem. Once I moved things around and reformatted the drives as OS X Extended (Journaled) everything worked like a charm. Sigh.

Posted by bob | 2:48 PM | permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack