DIY Hardware

The ACM has a somewhat strange collection of hardware for DIY projects! While the admin notes are not, necessarily, precisely the right place to document things, it is probably worth having an enumeration and links off to relevant places here as the contents of the lab do fall under the lab admin’s bailiwick.

I/O Devices

• LED Sign: a Alpha Sign Inc. BetaBrite. The admin note chapter on this has been moved to one of the projects to write a driver: https://git.acm.jhu.edu/unbeliever536/delta-lib/blob/master/doc/betabrite-sign.rst The protocol document is available from Alpha Sign Inc and is cached locally (for members’ use only) at file:///afs/acm.jhu.edu/group/admins/manuals/Alpha%20Sign%20Communication%20Protocol%20(PN%2097088061).pdf
• Film processing controller keyboard. A generic-ish keypad with numbers and colors (RGB & CMY) and a few miscellaneous buttons. The pinout was worked out and is documented in the ACM bug-tracker: https://ebola.acm.jhu.edu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=675

Embedded Computers

• BeagleBone Blacks: several were donated by the lovely and charming Greg Kroah-Hartman and BeagleBoard.org. We run two (at the time of this writing) as low-power always-on control nodes for the ACM infrastructure (bits of AFS, Kerberos, LDAP, and some ancillary components), but the others are available for arbitrary use!
• Janus, our door controller, is a Raspberry Pi stuffed uncomfortably into a small box. Most of its I/O is still available, should someone want to do something else with the door. See Janus: The God Of Doorways, or The ACM Door Lock Controller for details on the device.

Robots!

• Lego Mindstorms NXT kit! Programmable in many things, but we’ve found http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/ to be a good starting point (and the nbc compiler is packaged in Debian). Offers cabled (USB) and wireless (Bluetooth) connectivity; see http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/doc/nxtlinux.txt for some helpful points.
• Parallax Stingray robot development board. Pretty minimal but complete substrate, with power, motors, a breadboard, and a Parallax Propeller chip development board for its brain. Details of the hardware are available at http://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Parallax%20PDFs/28980.pdf (cached locally at file:///afs/acm.jhu.edu/group/admins/manuals/DigiKey-Parallax-Stingray.pdf).

Miscellany

• A small and cheap but viable multimeter floats around the lab.
• A few small breadboards and hookup wire kits are on the DIY shelf in the lab (if they’re not in use, of course).