hardware

The Arduino platform is doing something amazing: bringing hardware development to the masses. It's a sweet little system, with a built-in hardware programmer, simplified programming language, and lively user base that offers plenty of sample code and assistance in the online forums. While this fully assembled solution is a good way to get your feet wet, there are a lot of good reasons to just buy an off-the-shelf processor, make your own circuit board and write in a low level language like C. It can be cheaper, quicker and easier to debug. Here, check out some of the projects I've made and how I pay for my hobby, as well as my hardware setup.

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Have you ever found yourself wishing that your Eee PC had a better trackpad, or maybe even a joystick? Well, the Atmel AVR USB key might be your answer.

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This little gimmick has been in graphics design studios for years: a clever way to bring a wayward menu bar back from a dual monitor setup without plugging in a second monitor. Essentially, by shorting pins 1 (red video signal out) and 6 (red ground), and 3 (blue video signal out) and 8 (blue ground) on a 15-pin VGA adapter, you can mislead the PC into -- erroneously -- detecting the presence of a second monitor. Then it's just a matter of dragging the menu bar back onto the correct display.

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When Seagate originally developed the ST1 hard drive family of devices in 2004, they were remarkable little critters. Measuring just a bit larger than a conventional Compact Flash media card, the ST1 was a full-fledged 3600 rpm platter spinnin’ hard drive. Armed with a large 2MB cache buffer and an average seek time of 16 ms, the ST1 was stoked with Seagate’s RunOn (the heads are forced to stay on track) and G-Force Protection (the heads are removed from the platter during power down) technologies. Yet, the ST1 sported a Type II Compact Flash interface.

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Including a built-in SD card reader in the ASUS Eee PC was just one of many smart decisions that went into the lovable little portable (are you listening Apple?). Without a large hard disk, memory cards are crucial for any Eee user wanting to store large media collections, keep tons of applications, or boot multiple operating systems, allowing for a virtually unlimited data storage system without any external add-ons.

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As we showed you in our May 2008 issue, Asus's Eee PC has quickly become a favorite of hardware hackers around the web. Here, we offer the first installment of our Eee PC School series. Check back in the coming weeks for more tiny ultraportable tweaking.—Eds.

What good is that portable PC if you can’t type anywhere and anytime? With its ultra-compact keyboard, even touch typing pros will be hard-pressed to avoid frequent mistakes on when the lights go out. To say it’s a frustrating exercise in futility to locate the miniature F3 key in the dark is an understatement. Oops, you just lost WiFi contact by accidentally hitting F2.

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