Tag: Open Source
2015
11.21

A week ago I attended BSides Winnipeg 2015, a local security conference. There were a ton of great talks and lots of interesting people there. The food was pretty good too.

The recordings of the talks recently went up. Among them was a talk that I gave on the relatively new programming language Rust. It was a lot of fun and I hope I can do it again soon.

If you would like a copy of the slides, you can get them here. My talk was heavily inspired by Memory Safety in Rust by Nicholas Matsakis. If you want to learn more about Rust’s memory safety features, I highly recommend checking out his talk.

2013
06.21

It has been a while since my last post. Lots of stuff going on. Here’s a quick summary.

Earlier in the year I was elected to the board of directors at SkullSpace. It is really great to see all the things people are doing there and to be a part of making that happen.

For a while now I’ve been working on a bit of a side business. The idea is that we will develop, manufacture, and sell open source electronics. Ultimately, we intend to sell them with a pay-what-you-want model (with minimums) as well as pay-who-you-want (ie. allow the customer to direct where they want some of the profits to go; designer, influential projects, charities, etc). If you are interested, you can sign up for our mailing list on our website.

One of the first products I’ll be posting is an RGB LED ring display for a rotary encoder. Additionally, it adds capacitive sensing to the encoder so it can tell when the user is touching the knob. The firmware is still a work in progress, but I made a simple demo video to showcase the basic features.

RGB Rotary Encoder Display Demo from Benjamin Bergman on Vimeo.

2012
11.01

Introducing the μJoypad, the worlds smallest NES controller! Measuring in at 25.4×12.8×3.2mm (1.0×0.5×0.1in) this is, by my best research, the worlds smallest, fully functional NES compatible controller. A couple months ago I saw an article or video of the world’s largest game controller and thought to myself “I bet I could make the smallest” and so I did. The project is open hardware and available on GitHub. More pictures and a description of the design process after the jump.

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2012
10.20