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https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/trying-to-build-a-communications-device-with-a-1-pound-laser-and-a-7805/ | Trying To Build A Communications Device With A 1-Pound Laser And A 7805 | Lewin Day | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser diode"
] | You can get a red laser diode pretty cheap these days—as cheap as £1 in fact. [Beamer] had purchased one himself, but quickly grew bored with just pointing it at the walls. He decided to figure out if he could use it for some kind of communication,
and whipped up a circuit to test it out
.
To do the job, he designed a modulator circuit that could drive the laser without damaging it. The build is based around the common 7805 regulator and the venerable 555 timer IC. The 555 is set to pulse at a given rate with the usual array of capacitors and resistors. Its output directly drives the input of a 7805 regulator. It’s set up as a constant current source in order to deliver the correct amount of current to run the laser. The receiver is based around a photodiode, which should prove fairly straightforward.
[Beamer]’s still working on the full setup, but plans to use the laser’s pulses to drive a varying analog meter or something similar.
Not every communications method has to send digital data
, and it’s good to remember that! Video after the break. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760499",
"author": "Boris the Spider",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T20:51:10",
"content": "When I read the title, I was thinking it was a weighty HeNe or argon laser – not a £1 laser diode – a HeNe laser would be much harder to blink without additional hardware",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,911.093036 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/etch-a-sketch-camera-is-open-source/ | Etch-A-Sketch Camera Is Open Source | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"brushless motors",
"etch a sketch",
"motors"
] | The Etch-a-Sketch was a great toy if you were somehow born with the talent to use it. For the rest of us, it was a frustrating red brick filled with weird grey sand. [Every Flavor of Robot] has taken the irritating knob-encrusted oblong and turned it into something we can all enjoy, however,
by building an Etch-a
-Sketch camera!
The build is simple. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller to run the show, equipped with a camera. The camera is used to take a photo of the subject, and the image is then sent to a desktop computer. The desktop runs the image through an AI pipeline that generates a simplified version of the image, and the necessary G-Code to draw it on the Etch-A-Sketch. The toy’s knobs are operated by a pair of brushless motors which have been geared down to provide more torque.
It’s a neat project, and more details are available
on GitHub
.
We’ve seen some other great mechanized Etch-a-Sketch builds before, too
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760482",
"author": "biuro",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T19:30:45",
"content": "I guess etch a sketch could be used as a soap dispenser at the airport, eh?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760703",
"author": "The Commenter Form... | 1,760,371,910.935411 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/supercon-2023-exploring-the-elegance-of-the-voja4/ | Supercon 2023: Exploring The Elegance Of The Voja4 | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"assembly language",
"instruction set",
"Voja Antonic"
] | When you design an electronic badge, the goal is to make a device that’s interesting and has enough depth to keep your attendees engaged for the duration of the con but not so complicated that they can’t become proficient with it before they have to head home. It’s a difficult balance to nail down, and truth be told, not every Supercon badge has stuck the landing in this regard.
But if you’ve really done things right, you’ll create a piece of hardware that manages to outlive the event it was designed for. A badge that attendees continue to explore for months, and potentially even years, afterward. If the talk
“Inside the Voja4” by Nathan Jones
is any indication, we think it’s safe to say that goal was achieved with the Supercon 2022 badge.
During this forty-minute presentation, Nathan discusses what makes the 4-bit badge so fascinating from a technical standpoint and how it could theoretically be expanded to accomplish far more complex tasks than one might assume at first glance.
Following The Instructions
The bulk of Nathan’s presentation is on the architecture of the Voja4, or more specifically, the architecture used by the emulated 4-bit CPU that lives inside the badge’s PIC24 microcontroller. The emulated CPU isn’t based on anything that ever existed in the real world — it came straight from the imagination of badge designer Voja Antonić. But that doesn’t mean it’s some fanciful creation, either. Nathan breaks down how it compares to more traditional CPU architectures and the rationale behind its deviation from the norms.
If the goal of the Voja4 was simply to get people writing code for vintage hardware, we could have just put a 6502 on the thing and called it a day. But in that case, the user would simply have found some 6502 code on the Internet, ran it on the badge, and then promptly forgot about the whole thing. Instead, the goal was to get attendees acquainted with the idea of bare metal programming and the joys of actually being able to understand what the computer is doing at each step.
Keeping in mind the ideal level of badge complexity, it was necessary to create a processor that used a significantly reduced instruction set. In the short term, this makes programming the badge in assembly easier than if it had used a “real” CPU. On the flip side, this austerity does mean your final code could end up longer and more complicated than is strictly necessary. As Nathan says, it would be nice to have a multiplication instruction built in, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work around it.
Unlike pretty much anything else attendees would have likely had experience with, the Voja4 uses a 12-bit instruction length. Within these 12 bits, which corresponded to 12 physical buttons and LEDs on the front of the badge, you could express both the opcode and up to two operands. At first glance, this would seem to limit you to just 16 possible opcodes, but by designing some of the opcodes so they only require a single operand, Voja was able to double that number.
Compared to other architectures, which can throw you for a loop with things like variable instruction lengths, this makes it much easier to understand what’s going on during each cycle on the Voja4.
Limited By Imagination…and RAM
Looking at the Voja4 and its specifications, you might naturally assume that it’s little more than a computational novelty. But Nathan argues that the instruction set, while limited, is complete enough that there’s no task it cannot perform — assuming you’ve got some time to burn. He points to examples of folks
running Linux on 8-bit chips like the ATmega1284P
, which can take hours just to boot up to the login prompt.
That said, there’s technically still one missing element: more memory. The Voja4, as designed, can’t address enough memory to make something like this possible, but at the end of his talk, Nathan proposes some hypothetical modifications that could be made to allow the badge to address external memory over the serial port.
Again, patience would be the name of the game with such an arrangement. But if given all the memory it could handle and enough time to chew through it, the only remaining limitation on the Voja4 would be within the user’s imagination. While we don’t expect anyone to boot Linux with it
as they did on the 2019 FPGA badge
, we’d love to see somebody actually try and expand the Voja4’s memory and really push the envelope on what it can do. Maybe for
Supercon 2024
? | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760457",
"author": "Karman",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T18:11:13",
"content": "I could not attend neither EEUU nor EU conferences. I would like to buy one of these badges. Is there any chance it can go live on tindie (for example)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,910.577902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/how-to-lace-cables-like-its-1962/ | How To Lace Cables Like It’s 1962 | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"cable harness",
"cable lacing",
"cable wrapping",
"retrotechtacular",
"vintage"
] | Cable harnesses made wire management a much more reliable and consistent affair in electronic equipment, and while things like printed circuit boards have done away with many wires, cable harnessing still has its place today.
Here is a short how-to on how to lace cables
from a 1962 document, thoughtfully made available on the web by [Gary Allsebrook] and [Jeff Dairiki].
It’s a short resource that is to the point in all the ways we love to see. The diagrams are very clear and the descriptions are concise, and everything is done for a reason. The knots are self-locking, ensuring that things stay put without being overly tight or constrictive.
According to the document, the ideal material for lacing cables is a ribbon-like nylon cord (which reduces the possibility of biting into wire insulation compared to a cord with a round profile) but the knots and techniques apply to whatever material one may wish to use.
Cable lacing can be done ad-hoc, but back in the day cable assemblies were made separately and electrically tested on jigs prior to installation. In a way, such assemblies served a similar purpose to traces on a circuit board today.
Neatly wrapping cables really has its place, and while doing so by hand can be satisfying, we’ve also seen
custom-made tools for neatly wrapping cables with PTFE tape
. | 34 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760424",
"author": "Gareth",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T16:24:58",
"content": "That’s how I was taught in 1992!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6760485",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T19:41:49",
... | 1,760,371,911.020782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/single-stage-to-orbit-the-launch-technology-we-wish-was-real/ | Single-Stage-to-Orbit: The Launch Technology We Wish Was Real | Lewin Day | [
"Space"
] | [
"orbit",
"rocket",
"rocketry",
"single stage to orbit",
"space",
"spacecraft"
] | Reaching orbit around Earth is an incredibly difficult feat. It’s a common misconception that getting into orbit just involves getting very high above the ground — the real trick is going sideways
very, very fast.
Thus far, the most viable way we’ve found to do this is with big, complicated multi-stage rockets that shed bits of themselves as they roar out of the atmosphere.
Single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) launch vehicles represent a revolutionary step in space travel. They promise a simpler, more cost-effective way to reach orbit compared to traditional multi-stage rockets. Today, we’ll explore the incredible potential offered by SSTO vehicles, and why building a practical example is all but impossible with our current technology.
A Balancing Act
The SSTO concept doesn’t describe any one single spacecraft design. Instead, it refers to any spacecraft that’s capable of achieving orbit using a single, unified propulsion system and without jettisoning any part of the vehicle.
The Saturn V shed multiple stages on its way up to orbit. That way, less fuel was needed to propel the final stage up to orbital velocity. Credit: NASA
Today’s orbital rockets shed stages as they expend fuel. There’s one major reason for this, and it’s referred to as the
tyranny of the rocket equation.
Fundamentally, a spacecraft needs to reach a certain velocity to attain orbit. Reaching that velocity from zero — i.e. when the rocket is sitting on the launchpad — requires a change in velocity, or delta-V. The rocket equation can be used to figure out how much fuel is required for a certain delta-V, and thus a desired orbit.
The problem is that the mass of fuel required scales exponentially with delta-V. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel. But then you need even more fuel again to carry the weight of
that
fuel, and so on. Plus, all that fuel needs a tank and structure to hold it, which makes things more difficult again.
Work out the maths of a potential SSTO design, and the required fuel to reach orbit ends up taking up almost all of the launch vehicle’s weight. There’s precious mass left over for the vehicle’s own structure, let alone any useful payload. This all comes down to the “mass fraction” of the rocket. A SSTO powered by even our most efficient chemical rocket engines would require that the vast majority of its mass be dedicated to propellants, with its structure and payload being tiny in comparison. Much of that is due to Earth’s nature. Our planet has a strong gravitational pull, and the minimum orbital velocity is quite high at about 7.4 kilometers per second or so.
Stage Fright
Historically, we’ve cheated the rocket equation through smart engineering. The trick with staged rockets is simple. They shed structure as the fuel burns away. There’s no need to keep hauling empty fuel tanks into orbit. By dropping empty tanks during flight, the remaining fuel on the rocket has to accelerate a smaller mass, and thus less fuel is required to get the final rocket and payload into its intended orbit.
The Space Shuttle sheds its boosters and external fuel tank on its way up to orbit, too. Credit: NASA
So far, staged rockets have been the only way for humanity to reach orbit. Saturn V had five stages, more modern rockets tend to have two or three. Even the Space Shuttle was a staged design: it shed its two booster rockets when they were empty, and did the same with its external liquid fuel tank.
But while staged launch vehicles can get the job done, it’s a wasteful way to fly. Imagine if every commercial flight required you to throw away three quarters of the airplane. While we’re learning to reuse discarded parts of orbital rockets, it’s still a difficult and costly exercise.
The core benefit of a SSTO launch vehicle would be its efficiency. By eliminating the need to discard stages during ascent, SSTO vehicles would reduce launch costs, streamline operations, and potentially increase the frequency of space missions.
Pushing the Envelope
It’s currently believed that building a SSTO vehicle using conventional chemical rocket technology is marginally possible. You’d need efficient rocket engines burning the right fuel, and a light rocket with almost no payload, but theoretically it could be done.
Ideally, though, you’d want a single-stage launch vehicle that could actually reach orbit with some useful payload. Be that a satellite, human astronauts, or some kind of science package. To date there have been several projects and proposals for SSTO launch vehicles, none of which have succeeded so far.
Lockheed explored a spaceplane concept called VentureStar, but it never came to fruition. Credit: NASA
One notable design was the proposed
Skylon spacecraft
from British company Reaction Engines Limited. Skylon was intended to operate as a reusable spaceplane fueled by hydrogen. It would take off from a runway, using wings to generate lift to help it to ascend to 85,000 feet. This improves fuel efficiency versus just pointing the launch vehicle straight up and fighting gravity with pure thrust alone. Plus, it would burn oxygen from the atmosphere on its way to that altitude, negating the need to carry heavy supplies of oxygen onboard.
Once at the appropriate altitude, it would switch to internal liquid oxygen tanks for the final acceleration phase up to orbital velocity. The design stretches back decades, to the earlier British HOTOL spaceplane project. Work continues on the proposed
SABRE engine
(Syngergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) that would theoretically propel Skylon, though no concrete plans to build the spaceplane itself exist.
The hope was that efficient aerospike rocket engines would let the VentureStar reach orbit in a single stage.
Lockheed Martin also had the VentureStar spaceplane concept, which used an innovative “aerospike” rocket engine that maintained excellent efficiency across a wide altitude range. The company even built a scaled-down test craft called the X-33 to explore the ideas behind it. However, the program saw its funding slashed in the early 2000s, and development was halted.
McDonnell Douglas also had a crack at the idea in the early 1990s. The DC-X, also known as the Delta Clipper, was a prototype vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. At just 12 meters high and 4.1 meters in diameter, it was a one-third scale prototype for exploring SSTO-related technologies
It would take off vertically like a traditional rocket, and return to Earth nose-first before landing on its tail. The hope was that the combination of single-stage operation and this mission profile would provide extremely quick turnaround times for repeat launches, which was seen as a boon for potential military applications. While its technologies showed some promise, the project was eventually discontinued when a test vehicle caught fire after NASA took over the project.
McDonnell Douglas explored SSTO technologies with the Delta Clipper. Credit: Public domain
Ultimately, a viable SSTO launch vehicle that can carry a payload will likely be very different from the rockets we use today. Relying on wings to generate lift could help save fuel, and relying on air in the atmosphere would slash the weight of oxidizer that would have to be carried onboard.
However, it’s not as simple as just penning a spaceplane with an air-breathing engine and calling it done. No air breathing engine that exists can reach orbital velocity, so such a craft would need an additional rocket engine too, adding weight. Plus, it’s worth noting a reusable launch vehicle would also still require plenty of heat shielding to survive reentry. One could potentially build a non-reusable single-stage to orbit vehicle that simply stays in space, of course, but that would negate many of the tantalizing benefits of the whole concept.
Single-stage-to-orbit vehicles hold the promise of transforming how we access space by simplifying the architecture of launch vehicles and potentially reducing costs. While there are formidable technical hurdles to overcome, the ongoing advances in aerospace technology provide hope that SSTO could become a practical reality in the future. As technology marches forward in materials, rocketry, and aerospace engineering in general, the dream of a single-stage path to orbit remains a tantalizing future goal.
Featured Image: Skylon Concept Art,
ESA/Reaction Engines Ltd | 72 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760403",
"author": "Alan Sailer",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T15:39:32",
"content": "Great write-up. One correction, the Saturn V was a three stage engine. Unless you count the LM and the command modules. But these two engines reached orbit on the first three stages…Cheers.",
"par... | 1,760,371,910.895369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/try-image-classification-running-in-your-browser-thanks-to-webgpu/ | Try Image Classification Running In Your Browser, Thanks To WebGPU | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development"
] | [
"computer vision",
"image classification",
"webgpu"
] | When something does zero-shot image classification, that means it’s able to make judgments about the contents of an image without the user needing to train the system beforehand on what to look for.
Watch it in action with this online demo
, which uses WebGPU to implement CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) running in one’s browser, using the input from an attached camera.
By giving the program some natural language visual concept labels (such as ‘person’ or ‘cat’) that fit a hypothetical template for the image content, the system will output — in real-time — its judgement on the appropriateness of such labels to what the camera sees. Again, all of this runs locally.
It’s maybe a little bit unintuitive, but what’s happening in the demo is that the system is deciding which of the user-provided labels (“a photo of a cat” vs “a photo of a bald man”, for example) is most appropriate to what the camera sees. The more a particular label is judged a good fit for the image, the higher the number beside it.
This kind of process benefits greatly from shoveling the hard parts of the computation onto compatible graphics cards, which is exactly what
WebGPU
provides by allowing the browser access to a local GPU. WebGPU is relatively recent, but we’ve already seen it used to
run LLMs (Large Language Models) directly in the browser
.
Wondering what makes GPUs so very useful for AI-type applications? It’s all about
their ability to work with enormous amounts of data very quickly
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760374",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T12:53:53",
"content": "Might come in handy cruising Pinterest.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6760386",
"author": "mirror1",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T13... | 1,760,371,911.185973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/20/finding-and-resurrecting-archie-the-internets-first-search-engine/ | Finding And Resurrecting Archie: The Internet’s First Search Engine | Maya Posch | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"archie",
"search engine"
] | Back in the innocent days of the late 1980s the Internet as we know it today did not exist yet, but there were still plenty of FTP servers. Since manually keeping track of all of the files on those FTP server would be a royal pain, [Alan Emtage] set to work in 1986 to create an indexing and search service called Archie to streamline this process. As a local tool, it’d regularly fetch the file listing from FTP servers in a list, making this available for easy local search.
After its initial release in 1990, its feature set was expanded to include a World Wide Web crawler by version 3.5 in 1995. Years later, it was assumed that the source for Archie had been lost. That was until the folk over at [The Serial Port] channel
managed to track down
a still running Archie server in Poland.
The name
Archie
comes from the word ‘archive’ with the ‘v’ stripped, with no relation to the Archie comics. Even so, this assumption inspired the Gopher search engines Jughead and Veronica. Of these the former is still around, and Veronica’s original database was lost, but a re-implementation of it is still around. Archie itself enjoyed a period of relative commercial success, with [Alan] starting
Bunyip Information Systems
in 1992 which lasted until 2003. To experience Archie today, [The Serial Port] has the Archie
documentation
online, along with a
live server
if you’re feeling like reclaiming the early Internet. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760333",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T08:59:48",
"content": "Good old scavenger hunt!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760372",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T12:37:17",
"content": "Prett... | 1,760,371,910.631441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/diy-eye-and-face-tracking-for-the-valve-index-vr-headset/ | DIY Eye And Face Tracking For The Valve Index VR Headset | Donald Papp | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"eye tracking",
"face tracking",
"mouth tracking",
"valve",
"vr"
] | The Valve Index VR headset has been around for a few years now. It doesn’t come with eye or face tracking, but that didn’t stop inspired folks like [Physics-Dude] from
adding DIY solutions in elegant and effective ways
using a combination of hardware, open software, and 3D printable parts.
The whole assembly integrates tightly, thanks in part to the “frunk” designed into the Index for exactly this kind of thing.
This project leverages the
EyeTrackVR
project (and optionally,
Project Babble
for mouth tracking) which both have great applications particularly in social VR spaces.
These are open-source, self-contained and modular solutions intended for a variety of hardware platforms. Of course, every millimeter and gram tends to count when it’s something that gets worn on one’s head, so [Physics-Dude] tailored a solution specifically for the Valve Index. His project makes great use of the platform’s
hacker-friendly hardware design
.
[Physics-Dude] also makes excellent use of a certain widely-available “gumstick” style USB hub as an important part of his build. Combined with with the front-mounted USB port on the Index, it results in an extremely compact and tightly integrated solution that looks great. While it can be risky to rely on a particular off-the-shelf item in a build, doing so absolutely has its place here.
The documentation is fantastic, including welcome guidance on cable routing and step-by-step instructions. If you’ve been interested in adding eye tracking to a project, be sure to give it a look. Already have eye tracking in a project of your own?
Tell us all about it! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760346",
"author": "Adam Prest",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T10:27:51",
"content": "Still surprises me that the valve index is still one of the top tier PC VR headsets in 2024.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760365",
"author... | 1,760,371,910.528459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/radio-caroline-at-60/ | Radio Caroline At 60 | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"pirate radio",
"radio caroline"
] | In the 1960s, if you were a teenager in the United States, a big part of your life was probably music. There was a seemingly endless supply of both radio stations and 45s to keep you entertained. In the UK and other countries, though, the government held a monopoly on broadcasting, and they were not always enthralled with the music kids liked. Where there is demand, there is an opportunity, and several enterprising broadcasters set up radio stations at sea, the so-called pirate radio stations. In 1964, Irish businessman [Ronan O’Rahilly] did just this and founded Radio Caroline. Can you imagine that 60 years later,
Radio Caroline is still around
?
Not that it has been in operation for 60 years in a row. There were a few years the station’s ship had been impounded by creditors. Then, the ship ran aground on the Goodwin Sands and was damaged. You can see a news short from 1965 in the video below (Radio Caroline shows up at about the 1:50 mark).
True, Radio Caroline isn’t quite the same as it was. They operate mostly from a legal onshore studio now. But one weekend a month, a crew operates from the ship now in British waters.
Back in 1964, you might have had problems picking up Radio Caroline from far away. Now, the pirate station is as close as your
web browser
. The other big pirate station was
RNI
, and they are still around, too. | 11 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760260",
"author": "Feinfinger (super villain in nostalgy mode)",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T02:14:06",
"content": "\\o/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760318",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T08:27:59",
... | 1,760,371,911.144296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/hackaday-links-may-19-2024/ | Hackaday Links: May 19, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"api",
"aurora",
"Carrington",
"Clippy",
"geomagnetic",
"grid",
"hackaday links",
"HOPE XV",
"IoT",
"northern lights",
"Rinnai",
"rubber",
"security",
"solar storm",
"Starlink",
"sunspot",
"tire",
"wheelwright"
] | If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to
the stunning display of aurora borealis
— and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:
Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with
the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline
, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.
Despite this being the strongest solar storm in almost 20 years, the damage was nearly non-existent, with reports limited to minor power grid disturbances and some GPS and satellite outages.
Starlink service was reportedly impacted
, but luckily
no satellites deorbited
, a distinct possibility for recently launched satellites still in lower orbits due to increased atmospheric drag. Still, it feels like we dodged a cosmic bullet here, and if you have any doubt about that,
check this out
— it’s a comparison of the sunspot group that just got us with
the Carrington Event
sunspots from 1859. What a difference a few degrees of latitude makes.
From the “Not Everything Needs to be IoT” files comes a story about
the perils of security as an afterthought
. The condensed version: tech journalist Kevin Purdy’s new home came with a Rinnai tankless water heater. He hooked up the Rinnai Control-R WiFi module to control the appliance remotely from a smartphone app, and as any good home automation geek would, eventually tried integrating it into Home Assistant. But then he discovered that for an early version of Control-R, there was absolutely no security on the company’s cloud service, making it possible to control any connected Rinnai water heater knowing nothing more than the user’s email address. No auth tokens, no passwords, nothing. Rinnai seems to have added authentication to their newer Rinnai Central system, but the whole story is worth a read, not least for the weaselly responses from Rinnai through a PR firm.
If you thought Clippy, the annoying animated desktop assistant from the bad old days of Microsoft Office 97, had died a well-deserved death in obscurity, think again.
Clippy is back,
this time as a wise-cracking assistant in an open-source tool called Winpilot, which is designed to eliminate bloatware and turn off annoying defaults in Windows 11. The irony of including an icon of annoyance in an application designed to make your user experience less annoying is rich indeed. It’s not really clear how Winpilot’s author, Belmin Hasanovic, is getting away with using Clippy; we’d have thought Microsoft would protect their IP a little more vigorously, especially when it says things like, “You know something, champ? This is bullsh*t. I started this gig in ’97. My ultimate goal was to take over Bill Gates job.”
The list of announced talks
for HOPE XV keeps growing. It’s hard to say how many talks were added since last week, but it looks like a lot. Better get your proposals in soon if you want to have a chance at a talk.
And finally, we’ve featured
the work of Montana wheelwright Dave Engels before
, specifically the process of shrink-fitting iron tires onto the massive wooden wheels he builds for things like timber carts and borax wagons. The whole thing is a ballet of fire, steel, wood, smoke, steam, and people, and never fails to entertain. But giant wheels aren’t the only thing Engels works on, and some of the smaller wheels have pretty interesting processes behind them too.
Fitting rubber tires to cart wheels
is a perfect example, and one with a lot of surprises. We had no idea that these tires have steel wires running through them, to keep them firmly seated on the wooden wheel, which also has a shrink-fit steel rim. The machine that tensions the wires while compressing the rubber is fascinatingly complex, too. We were also taken by the parallels between this machine and a modern tire machine, as well as the clear lineage between solid rubber buggy wheels and modern pneumatic tires. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760226",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-20T00:07:44",
"content": "Death (again) to Clippy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760232",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,371,910.678025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/lost-foam-casting-in-action/ | Lost Foam Casting In Action | Jenny List | [
"how-to"
] | [
"casting",
"lost foam",
"metal casting"
] | Even though not all of us will do it, many of us are interested in the art of casting metal. It remains a process that’s not out of reach, though, especially for metals such as aluminium whose melting points are reachable with a gas flame. The video below the break takes us through the aluminium casting process by showing us
the lost-foam casting of a cylinder head for a BSA Bantam motorcycle
.
The foam pattern is CNC milled to shape, and the leftover foam swarf is removed with a hot wire. The pattern is coated with a refractory coating of gypsum slurry, and the whole is set up in a tub packed with sand. We get the impression that the escaping gasses make this a tricky pour without an extra sprue, and indeed, they rate it as not perfect. The cooling fins on the final head are a little ragged, so it won’t be the part that goes on a bike, but we can see with a bit of refining, this process could deliver very good results.
For this pour, they use a gas furnace, but we’ve seen it done
with a microwave oven
. Usually, you are
losing wax
, not foam, but the idea is the same. | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760184",
"author": "Totally real person #238239 (Not a bot)",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T22:07:16",
"content": "The kind of guy every vintage bike owner wishes was his in-law. The casting quality on those fins is really impressive for shop-made, incredible that you can get that witho... | 1,760,371,911.251192 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/scott-manley-explains-gps-jamming/ | [Scott Manley] Explains GPS Jamming | Al Williams | [
"gps hacks"
] | [
"gps"
] | We always think of [Scott Manley] as someone who knows a lot about rockets. So, if you think about it, it isn’t surprising he’s talking about GPS — after all, the system uses satellites. GPS is used in everything these days, and other forms of navigation are starting to fall by the wayside. However, the problem is that the system is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. This is especially important if you fear GPS allowing missiles or drones to strike precise targets. But there are also plenty of opportunities for malicious acts. For example, drone light shows may be subject to GPS attacks from rival companies, and you can easily imagine worse. [Scott] talks about
the issues around GPS spoofing in the video
, which you can see below.
Since GPS satellites are distant, blocking the signal is almost too easy, sometimes happening inadvertently. GPS has technology to operate in the face of noise and interference, but there’s no way to prevent it entirely. Spoofing — where you produce false GPS coordinates — is much more difficult.
Of course, jamming or spoofing GPS is highly illegal, and it is easy to locate jammers, so most people doing this will be state actors and military units. Don’t try this at home. But it does happen, and [Scott] mentions how warnings appear to alert pilots of areas where GPS may be unreliable due to jamming and spoofing.
There are anti-jamming countermeasures you can employ. But things like this tend to be leapfrog situations, where jammers will overcome the countermeasures only to face better countermeasures they’ll have to overcome again later.
As you might expect, this isn’t a how-to video, but just talks about the ideas behind jamming and spoofing along with the potential countermeasures. While you usually buy a
module
to do GPS, you can
roll your own
. If you want a
detailed explainer
, we got you. | 46 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760125",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T18:25:09",
"content": "Spoofing to change the course of a ship was demonstrated several years ago, as a R&D proof of concept. But today GPS is used by many and very valuable, however I think we have became too reliant on it.... | 1,760,371,911.335754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/this-wifi-filament-sensor-is-unnecessary-but-awesome/ | This WiFi Filament Sensor Is Unnecessary, But Awesome | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"filament sensor",
"hall effect sensor"
] | As desktop 3D printers have inched towards something resembling the mainstream, manufacturers have upped their game across the board. Even the quality of filament that you can get today is far better than what was on the market in the olden days, back when a printer made out of laser-cut birch wasn’t an uncommon sight at the local makerspace. Now, even the cheap rolls are wound fairly well and are of a consistent diameter. For most folks, you just need to pick a well-reviewed brand, buy a roll, and get printing.
But as with everything else, there are exceptions. Some people are producing their own filaments, or want to make sure their extrusion rate is perfectly calibrated. For those that need the capability, the
WInFiDEL from [Sasa Karanovic]
can detect filament diameter in real-time while keeping the cost and complexity as low as possible. Even better, with both the hardware and software released as open source, it makes an excellent starting point for further development and customization.
In fact, the WInFiDEL itself was developed from the earlier
InFiDEL sensor designed by [Thomas Sanladerer]
. This new version uses the same basic mechanism: a pair of bearings, with one fixed in position and the other attached to an arm with a magnet on the end. As the filament passes between the bearings, the arm raises and lowers the magnet, which is detected by a linear Hall-effect sensor. The resulting raw deflection data, once properly calibrated, provides a highly accurate readout of the filament diameter as it passes through the sensor and into the extruder.
What’s changed is how the sensor is utilized. [Thomas] imagined the original sensor as being connected directly to the 3D printer’s motherboard, with its data being used to modify the extrusion rate during printing. In other words, it wasn’t really designed for humans to use. For the WInFiDEL, [Sasa] dropped the anemic ATTiny85 and replaced it with an ESP32 that can connect to your WiFi network and offer up a slick web interface, complete with a easy to use calibration tool and a rolling graph that plots out the data as it comes in. There’s also an API that allows you to hit the sensor with a web request to get current diameter and calibration data should you want to virtually connect it up to something like OctoPrint.
Most of us don’t need the WInFiDEL. But looking at the exceptional hardware and software of this project, we sure as hell want one anyway. Of course, we’d expect no less from [Sasa]. Whether its his
OS-agnostic fan controller
or
ESP32 powered camera slider
, his creations always exhibit a sort of simplistic elegance that we’re big fans of. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760088",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T16:14:15",
"content": "I’m just checking in to say that “WInFIDEL” is a pretty catchy name!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760133",
"autho... | 1,760,371,912.215995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/rediscovering-the-nile-the-ancient-river-that-was-once-overlooked-by-the-egyptian-pyramids/ | Rediscovering The Nile: The Ancient River That Was Once Overlooked By The Egyptian Pyramids | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"egypt",
"ground penetrating radar",
"pyramid",
"Synthetic aperture radar"
] | Although we usually imagine the conditions in Ancient Egypt to be much like the Egypt of today, back during the Holocene there was significantly more rain as a result of the African Humid Period (AHP). This translated in the river Nile stretching far beyond its current range, with many more branches. This knowledge led a team of researchers to test the hypothesis that the largest cluster of pyramids in the Nile Valley was sited along one of these now long since vanished branches. Their findings are
described in an article published
in
Communications Earth & Environment
, by [Eman Ghoneim] and colleagues.
The Ahramat Branch and pyramids along its trajectory. (Credit: Eman Ghoneim et al., 2024)
The CliffsNotes version can be found in the accompanying
press release
by the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Effectively, the researchers postulated that a branch of the Nile existed along these grouping of pyramids, with their accompanying temples originally positioned alongside this branch. The trick was to prove that a river branch once existed in that area many thousands of years ago.
What complicates this is that the main course of the Nile has shifted over the centuries, and anthropogenic activity has obscured much what remained, making life for researchers exceedingly difficult. Ultimately a combination of soil core samples, geophysical evidence, and remote sensing (e.g. satellite imagery) helped to cement the evidence for the existence what they termed the Ahramat Nile Branch, with ‘ahramat’ meaning ‘pyramids’ in Arabic.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and high-resolution radar elevation data provided evidence for the Nile once having traveled right past this string of pyramids, also identifying the modern Bahr el-Libeini canal as one of the last remnants of the Ahramat Branch before the river’s course across the floodplain shifted towards the East, probably due to tectonic activity. Further research using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electromagnetic Tomography (EMT) along a 1.2 km section of the suspected former riverbed gave clear indications of a well-preserved river channel, with the expected silt and sediments.
Soil cores to a depth of 20 and 13 meters further confirmed this, showing not only the sediment, but also freshwater mussel shells at 6 meter depth. Shallow groundwater was indicated at these core sites, meaning that even today subsurface water still flows through this part of the floodplain.
These findings not only align with the string of pyramids and their causeways that would have provided direct access to the water’s edge, but also provided hints for a further discovery regarding the Bent Pyramid — as it’s commonly known — which is located deep inside the desert today. Although located far from the floodplain by about a kilometer, its approximately 700 meters long causeway terminates at what would have been a now extinct channel: the Dahshur Inlet, which might also have served the Red Pyramid and others, although evidence for this is shakier.
Altogether, these findings further illustrate an Ancient Egypt where the Old Kingdom was followed by a period of severe changes, with increasing drought caused by the end of the AHP, an eastwardly migrating floodplain and decreased flow in the Nile from its tributaries. By the time that European explorers laid eyes on the ancient wonders of the Ancient Egyptian pyramids, the civilization that had birthed them was no more, nor was the green and relatively lush environment that had once surrounded it. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760039",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T11:36:48",
"content": "Climate change even then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6760057",
"author": "John Spencer",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T13:26:10",
... | 1,760,371,912.045877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/19/mobius-string-robot-goes-round-and-round/ | Möbius String Robot Goes Round And Round | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"hydrogel",
"mobius strip",
"soft robot"
] | While it doesn’t look like a traditional robot, the
hydrogel robot
from [Zi Liang Wu] forms a möbius strip and can be activated by light. They also experimented with shaping the hydrogels as a Seifert ribbon.
The key is that the hydrogels contain gold nanoparticles. Light heats the gold particles and this causes the hydrogels to move. The connections between the strips of hydrogels causes them to move in predictable ways. You can see a video about the experiments below.
These robots aren’t going to be for warehouse or factory work. But they can do tasks like collecting plastic beads, something difficult for conventional robots to do. They also hope to demonstrate that these soft robots could work in the body for taking samples or delivering a drug, although it isn’t apparent how light would get to them inside your body.
The dark side of the material tends to turn towards the light. The continuous loop structure means it never runs to the end of its travel. Watching it move on a string is pretty impressive.
Crawling
and slithering robots may be the answer for certain specialized applications. After all, it
works well in nature
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760051",
"author": "Pretty cool",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T13:16:19",
"content": "wowmobius strip robotthat’s creative!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6760063",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T14:01:28",... | 1,760,371,911.97916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/a-tiny-tuner-for-the-low-power-ham/ | A Tiny Tuner For The Low Power Ham | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna tuner",
"matching network",
"QRP"
] | Something that all radio amateurs encounter sooner or later is the subject of impedance matching. If you’d like to make sure all that power is transferred from your transmitter into the antenna and not reflected back into your power amplifier, there’s a need for the impedance of the one to match that of the other. Most antennas aren’t quite the desired 50 ohms impedance, so part of the standard equipment becomes an antenna tuner — an impedance matching network. For high-power hams these are big boxes full of chunky variable capacitors and big air cored inductors, but that doesn’t exclude the low-power ham from the impedance matching party. [Barbaros Aşuroğlu WB2CBA] has designed the perfect device for them:
the credit card ATU
.
The circuit of an antenna tuner is simple enough, two capacitors and an inductor in a so-called Pi-network because of its superficial resemblance to the Greek letter Pi. The idea is to vary the capacitances and inductance to find the best match, and on this tiny model it’s done through a set of miniature rotary switches. There are a set of slide switches to vary the configuration or switch in a load, and there’s even a simple matching indicator circuit.
We like this project, in that it elegantly provides an extremely useful piece of equipment, all integrated into a tiny footprint.
It’s certainly not the first ATU we’ve brought you
.
Thanks [ftg] for the tip! | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759974",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T05:08:01",
"content": "that headline makes me want to say ‘Tina Turner’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759991",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2024-05-1... | 1,760,371,911.830141 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/m1-development-board-from-scraps/ | M1 Development Board From Scraps | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"arm",
"developer transition kit",
"development",
"dtk",
"M1",
"mac",
"mac mini",
"pcb",
"repair"
] | Apple is fairly notorious for building devices that are difficult to repair, but with the right tools it’s often not completely impossible to circumvent some of their barriers. As they say, every lock has a key. [dosdude1] has wanted a specific M1 development board for a while now and has been slowly piecing together everything he needs to cobble one together, and finally got this unit running despite many roadblocks put in his way by Apple.
The development kit is a
Developer Transition Kit or “DTK” meant for developers during Apple’s transition from Intel chips to their own in-house ARM-based M1 platform. This particular version is in a Mac Mini form factor but it has a few hurdles to clear before it powers on. First, the board was cut in a critical location that shorted out many of the PCB layers, so this had to be carefully filed down to remove the shorts. It was also missing a few tiny surface mount components and a NAND chip, but these were scavenged from other scrapped parts and assembled into a fully working machine.
There are a number of other non-physical problems to solve here as well, too. Apple coded their NAND chips to work with specific WiFi modules so if these aren’t programmed to work together the computer will get stuck in a boot loop. But with that and a few other details out of the way [dosdude1] finally has his DTK up and running in a 2018 Mac Mini chassis, right down to the working power LEDs. We’ve seen all kinds of PCB damage before (although not often quite this intricate)
and even PCBs repaired that were snapped in half
.
Thanks to [CodeAsm] for the tip! | 29 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759946",
"author": "Oscar Goldman",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T02:35:34",
"content": "I had a (most likely) 50-cent part go bad in my iMac when it was relatively new, a thermal sensor. I found out where it was on the motherboard, but the manufacturer had created an Apple-specific par... | 1,760,371,912.418545 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/hack-your-own-adventure-story-with-yarn-spinner/ | Hack Your Own Adventure Story With Yarn Spinner | Al Williams | [
"Games"
] | [
"adventure game",
"programmed instruction"
] | We are big fans of programmed texts for education. You know, the kind where you answer a question and go to a new page based on your answer. But they can also be entertaining “choose your own adventure” stories. You might say, “You are standing in front of an oak door, two meters high, with an iron handle. Do you a) open it? b) knock on it? c) ignore it?” Then, based on your answer, you go to a different part of the story. These are tough to write, but you can get some help using
Yarn Spinner and the Yarn scripting language
.
The original purpose of Yarn is to produce conversations for games. There’s a
tutorial
for that. The difference is to produce a book, you get a choose your own adventure PDF at the end. For the tutorial, you can try to read the text on the left-hand side of the editor or just press Test (at the top) and let it “read” the tutorial to you, which is a little more fluid.
The scripting language is mostly text, but you can have branching logic, which is critical for the book generation. You can also set variables as in:
<<set $gold to 5>>
Then you can test variables with
<<if>>
as you might expect. You can also jump to other parts of the script using
<<jump>>
. This works with nodes that look like this:
title: HackadayNode
---// Yarn script goes here===
That’s about it. We took the liberty of writing a
cheeky Hackaday adventure
. The
source code
is available, too. You’ll notice the script is simplistic. It doesn’t merge the lines, so if you have, say, three jumps to node X, you will get three copies of node X in the book. Then again, that helps your page count, and it doesn’t distract from the enjoyment of the finished product. And, yes, we added the title graphic after the fact.
It should be possible to write
programmed instruction material
with this, too. Why just pretend to submit a project to Hackaday when you could
do it for real
so easily? | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759912",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T23:10:02",
"content": "Just have an LLM write it.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759970",
"author": "david",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,371,911.876952 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/improved-3d-scanning-rig-adds-full-sized-camera-support/ | Improved 3D Scanning Rig Adds Full-Sized Camera Support | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"3d scanner",
"camera",
"dslr",
"gcode",
"grammetry",
"photo",
"scanner"
] | There are plenty of reasons to pick up or build a 3D scanner. Modeling for animation or special effects, reverse engineering or designing various devices or products, and working with fabrics and clothing are all well within the wide range of uses for these tools. [Vojislav] built one a few years ago which used an array of cameras to capture 3D information but the Pi camera modules used in this build limited the capabilities of the scanner in some ways. [Vojislav]’s latest 3D scanner
takes a completely different approach by using a single high-quality camera instead
.
The new 3D scanner is built to carry a full-size DSLR camera, its lens, and a light. Much more similarly to how a 3D printer works, the platform moves the camera around the object in programmable steps for the desired 3D scan. The object being scanned sits on a rotating plate as well, allowing for the entire object to be scanned without needing to move the camera through a full 180° in two axes. The scanner can also be used for scanning more 2D objects while capturing information about texture, such as various textiles.
For anyone looking to reproduce something like this, [Vojislav] has made all of the plans for this build available on
the project’s GitHub page
including some sample gcode to demonstrate the intended use for the scanner. On the other hand, if you’re short the often large amount of funding required to get a DSLR camera,
his older 3D scanner is still worth taking a look at as well
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759665",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T02:12:32",
"content": "Make their modeling job easier.https://youtu.be/dX9CGRZwD-w",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759725",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-... | 1,760,371,912.254958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/emulating-biology-for-robots-with-rolling-contact-joints/ | Emulating Biology For Robots With Rolling Contact Joints | Maya Posch | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"joint",
"rolling contact joint"
] | Joints are an essential part in robotics, especially those that try to emulate the motion of (human) animals. Unlike the average automaton, animals are not outfitted with bearings and similar types of joints, but rather rely sometimes on ball joints and a lot on rolling contact joints (RCJs). These RCJs have the advantage of being part of the skeletal structure, making them ideal for compact and small joints. This is the conclusion that [Breaking Taps]
came to as well
while designing the legs for a bird-like automaton.
These RCJs do not just have the surfaces which contact each other while rotating, but also provide the constraints for how far a particular joint is allowed to move, both in the forward and backward directions as well as sideways. In the case of the biological version these contact surfaces are also coated with a constantly renewing surface to prevent direct bone-on-bone contact. The use of RCJs is rather common in robotics, with the humanoid DRACO 3 platform as
detailed in a 2023 research article
by [Seung Hyeon Bang] and colleagues in
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
.
The other aspect of RCJs is that they have to be restrained with a compliant mechanism. In the video [Breaking Taps] uses fishing line for this, but many more options are available. The ‘best option’ also depends on the usage and forces which the specific joint will be subjected to. For further reading on the kinematics in robotics and kin,
we covered
the book
Exact Constraint: Machine Design Using Kinematic Principles
by [Douglass L. Blanding] a while ago. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759626",
"author": "Graham",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T21:13:51",
"content": "Great video. Thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759672",
"author": "Joits",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T02:35:04",
"content": "Searc... | 1,760,371,911.93076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/raspberry-pi-files-paperwork-with-the-london-stock-exchange/ | Raspberry Pi Files Paperwork With The London Stock Exchange | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"IPO",
"raspberry pi",
"stock market"
] | If you’re a regular visitor to the Raspberry Pi website and you have a sharp eye, you may have noticed during the last few days a new link has appeared in their footer. Labelled “
Investor relations
“, it holds links to the
documents filed with the London Stock Exchange
of their intention to float. In other words, it’s confirmation of their upcoming share offering.
It has been interesting to watch the growth of Raspberry Pi over the last twelve years, from cottage industry producing a thousand boards in China, to dominating the SBC market and launching their own successful silicon. Without either a crystal ball or a window into Eben Upton’s mind, we’re as unreliable as anyone else when it comes to divining their future path. But since we’re guessing that it will involve ever more complex silicon with a raspberry logo, it’s obvious that the float will give them the investment springboard they need.
For those of us who have been around for a long time this isn’t the first company in our corner of the technology world we’ve seen burn brightly. It’s not even the first from Cambridge. Appointing ourselves as pundits though, we’d say that Raspberry Pi’s path to this point has been surprisingly understated, based upon the strength of its products rather than hype, and while Eben is undoubtedly a well-known figure, not based upon a cult of personality. There is already a significant ecosystem around Raspberry Pi, we’d like to think that this move will only strengthen it. We may not be looking at the British Microsoft, but we don’t think we’re looking at another Sinclair either. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759577",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T18:34:53",
"content": "I suppose it was too good to last. It will be embrace-extend-extinguished by a rival tech company fairly quickly. It would be foolish if somebody did not embrace this strategy, although it will be unfortunate ... | 1,760,371,912.169648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/hackaday-podcast-episode-271-audio-delay-in-a-hose-ribbon-cable-repair-and-diy-hacker-metrology/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 271: Audio Delay In A Hose, Ribbon Cable Repair, And DIY Hacker Metrology | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What did Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams find interesting on Hackaday this week? Well, honestly, all the posts, but they had to pick some to share with you in the podcast below. There’s news about SuperCon 2024, and failing insulin pumps. After a mystery sound, the guys jump into reverbing garden hoses, Z80s, and even ribbon cable repair.
Adaptive tech was big this week, with a braille reader for smartphones and an assistive knife handle. The quick hacks ranged from a typewriter that writes on toast to a professional-looking but homemade ham radio transceiver.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download a file chock full of podcast here
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 271 Show Notes:
News:
Software Bug Results In Insulin Pump Injuries, Spurs Recall
Hackaday Supercon 2024 Call For Participation: We Want You!
What’s that Sound?
Do you know what this week’s sound is?
Fill out this form
with your best guess, and you might win!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
An Audio Delay, The Garden Hose Way
The Most Famous Room In Rock-n-Roll You’ve Never Seen
A History of Reverb in Music Production
A Tape Loop Echo You Can Build
It’s A Microphone And A Spring Reverb All In One
Protoboard Z80 Computer Teaches The Basics
Retrocomputing For $4 With A Z80
The $4 Z80 Single-Board Computer, Evolved
Supercon 2023: Building The Ultimate Apple IIe, Decades Later
BreadboardOS, A Command Line Interface For The Pico
The Impossible Repair: Ribbon Cables
Adaptive Chef’s Knife Provides Better Leverage
Nurses Create In A Medical Makerspace
Vibrating Braille Display Is Portable
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Introduction To MOSFET Switching Losses
Non-Split-Flap Clock Does It With Fewer Flaps
JTAG Hacking An SSD With A Pi: A Primer
This Typewriter Types Toast
Al’s Picks:
How AI Large Language Models Work, Explained Without Math
Tweeze Your Way To Soldering Success!
GitHub Hosts Ham Radio
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Measure Three Times, Design Once
A Slice Of Simulation, Google Sheets Style | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,912.094315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/nature-vs-nurture-in-beethovens-genome/ | Nature Vs Nurture In Beethoven’s Genome | Navarre Bartz | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"Beethoven",
"genetics",
"music"
] | When it comes to famous musicians, Beethoven is likely to hit most top ten charts. Researchers recently peered into his genome to see if they could
predict his talent by DNA alone
.
Using a previously-identified polygenetic index (PGI) for musical talent, which finds the propensity of certain genes to influence a given trait after a genome-wide association study (GWAS), the researchers were able to compare samples of Beethoven’s DNA to that of two separate population studies with known musical achievement data.
Much to the relief of those who saw
Gattaca
as a cautionary tale, the scientists found that Beethoven scored only around the tenth percentile for the ability to keep a beat according to his genetic markers. According to the researchers, using genetic markers to predict abilities of an individual can lead to incorrect conclusions, despite their usefulness for group level analyses.
Curious about more musical science? How about reconstructing
“Another Brick in The Wall (Part I)” from brainwaves
or building a
Square Laser Harp
? | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759536",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T15:56:22",
"content": "How do you know how well Beethoven could keep a beat? Did anyone ever measure him?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759571",
"author": "TG",
... | 1,760,371,912.479123 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/this-week-in-security-the-time-kernel-org-was-backdoored-and-other-stories/ | This Week In Security: The Time Kernel.org Was Backdoored And Other Stories | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Ebury",
"ssh",
"This Week in Security"
] | Researchers at Eset have published
a huge report on the Ebury malware/botnet
(
pdf
), and one of the high profile targets of this campaign was part of the kernel.org infrastructure. So on one hand, this isn’t new news, as the initial infection happened back in 2011, and
was reported then
. On the other hand, according to the new Eset report, four kernel.org servers were infected, with two of them possibly compromised for as long as two years. That compromise apparently included credential stealing or password cracking.
The Ebury attackers seem to gain initial access through credential stuffing — a huge list of previously captured credentials are tried one at a time. However, once the malware has a foothold in the network, a combination of automated and manual steps are taken to move laterally. The most obvious is to grab any private SSH keys from that system, and try using them to access other machines on the local network. Ebury also replaces a system library that gets called as a part of
sshd
,
libkeyutils.so
. This puts it in a position to quietly capture credentials.
For a targeted attack against a more important target, the people behind Ebury seem to go hands-on-keyboard, using techniques like Man-in-the-Middle attacks against SSH logins on the local network using ARP spoofing. In this case, someone
was
doing something nasty.
And that doesn’t even start to cover the actual payload. That’s nasty too, hooking into Apache to sniff for usernames and passwords in HTTP/S traffic, redirecting links to malicious sites, and more. And of course, the boring things you might expect, like sending spam, mining for Bitcoin, etc. Ebury isn’t exactly easy to notice, either, since it includes a rootkit module that hooks into system functions to hide itself. Thankfully there are a couple of ways to get a clean shell to look for the malware, like using
systemd-run
or launching a local shell on the system console.
And the multi-million dollar question: Who was behind this? Sadly we don’t know. A single arrest was made in 2014, and recovered files implicated another Russian citizen, but the latest work indicates this was yet another stolen identity. The rest of the actors behind Ebury have gone to great lengths to remain behind the curtain.
The Great 12 Second Ethereum Heist
Ethereum moved from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake model back in 2022. That had some interesting ramifications, like making the previously random block times
a predictable 12 second cadence
. With a change that big, there were bound to be some bugs around the edges. In this case, the edge is the MEV-Boost algorithm, which a pair of brothers managed to
manipulate into giving them $25 million
worth of Ethereum. The DOJ went after the two for wire fraud, and made a point that the hack happened in just 12 seconds.
That seems to be the point. The trick here is was to make a bunch of worthless transactions look really appealing to the MEV-Boost algorithm, while also running the validator that actually processed the block. Being in this privileged position on both sides of the block creation allowed for tampering with the transaction. It’s definitely not what the Ethereum network needed. And pro tip: If you’re going to commit wire fraud, try not to leave a search engine history detailing your money laundering and extradition avoidance plans.
WiFi and SSID Confusion
There’s
a new WiFi issue
, that seems to be an actual vulnerability in the 802.11 spec itself. The key is a man-in-the-middle attack on the raw wireless traffic, which is fairly easy. Some of the negotiation process happens in the clear, so the attacker can manipulate that data, to rewrite the SSID in the initial connection attempt. This results in the legitimate access point sending back a message suggesting that the victim connect to a different AP. There is one important point to make here: The “good” and “bad” network can use different security types, but do need to use the same password. So this is of limited use, though there are certainly cases where it could be misused.
16 Year Long Tale
Turn back your clocks to 2008, and remember CVE-2008-0166, a vulnerability in the Debian OpenSSL packages. That was a Debian patch to fix a usage of uninitialized memory in the OpenSSL random number generator. Yes it was accessing uninitialized memory — to use it as seed for the random number generator. The result is that on Debian systems from 2006 to 2008 could only generate a few thousand discrete keys. What
[Hanno Böck] realized was that the DKIM email specification was released in 2007
. How many DKIM certificates still around today were generated on Debian before the bug was fixed? At least 855, or about a quarter of a percent of the domains checked. Oops. That’s a very long tail indeed.
Bits and Bytes
Care to shut down a website? If that site is protected by a vulnerable Web Application Firewall, it’s fairly easy to include a comment that
looks suspicious enough to trick the WAF into blocking
its own site. The rule that’s triggered is actually intended to keep internal error messages from spilling out into the open web. It’s a bit tamer version of the database deletion trick we covered a few weeks ago.
Sprocket Security did the hard work for us,
patch diffing the fix for CVE-2024-3400
in Palo Alto GlobalProtect. This write-up is more about the actual approach to getting a vulnerable copy of the software to make the comparison against. And if you wondered, it’s command injection, due to
shell=True
where it shouldn’t be.
And finally, there was a VirtualBox vulnerability used in the latest Pwn2Own competition, and
the details are available
. A bit clearing routine for the virtual VGA device has a memory handling error in it, allowing manipulation of memory outside the intended bounds. In the competition, it was used for privilege escalation inside the VM, but it has potential for full VM escape in some cases. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6760127",
"author": "Rebellion",
"timestamp": "2024-05-19T18:30:58",
"content": "I like the behind the curtain reference on that one. Iron curtain I would imagine….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,912.517428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/betta-aims-to-bring-wire-edm-to-the-desktop/ | Betta Aims To Bring Wire EDM To The Desktop | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"CoreXY",
"desktop manufacturing",
"EDM",
"Electrical Discharge Machining",
"machining",
"wire EDM"
] | Just as practical nuclear fusion has been “only 20 years away” for the last 80 years or so, the promise of electrical discharge machining (EDM) in the home shop seems to always be just around the corner. It’s hard to understand why this is so — EDM is electrically and mechanically more complicated than traditional subtractive manufacturing techniques, so a plug-and-play EDM setup seems always just out of reach.
Or perhaps not, if
this 3D printed 4-axis wire EDM machine
catches on. It comes to us from [John] at Rack Robotics and is built around
the Powercore EDM power supply
that we’ve previously featured. Since wire EDM is a process that requires the workpiece to be completely immersed in a dielectric solution, the machine, dubbed “Betta,” is designed to fit inside a 10-gallon aquarium — get it?
A lot of thought went into keeping costs down. for example, rather than use expensive sealed motors, [John] engineered the double CoreXY platform to keep the motors out of the water bath using long drive shafts and sealed bearings. The wire handling mechanism is also quite simple, at least compared to commercial WEDM machines, and uses standard brass EDM wire. The video below shows the machine going to town of everything from aluminum to steel, with fantastic results on thin or thick stock.
While Rack Robotics is going to be offering complete kits, they’re also planning on open-sourcing all the build files. We’re eager to see where this leads, and if people will latch onto EDM with the same gusto they did with 3D printing. | 35 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759484",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T11:16:35",
"content": "Don’t really know much about manufacturing so its the first I’ve heard of wire EDM. Seems pretty cool.As I grow older and my projects start getting more complex, I am realising that a “good” design is o... | 1,760,371,912.588725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/how-italians-got-their-power/ | How Italians Got Their Power | Jenny List | [
"History"
] | [
"italy",
"mains voltage",
"power connector"
] | We take for granted that electrical power standards are generally unified across countries and territories. Europe for instance has a standard at 230 volts AC, with a wide enough voltage acceptance band to accommodate places still running at 220 or 240 volts. Even the sockets maintain a level of compatibility across territories, with a few notable exceptions.
It was not always this way though, and to illustrate this we have [Sam], who’s provided us with
a potted history of mains power in Italy
. The complex twists and turns of power delivery in that country reflect the diversity of the power industry in the late 19th and early 20th century as the technology spread across the continent.
Starting with a table showing the impressive range of voltages found across the country from differing power countries, it delves into the taxation of power in Italy which led to two entirely different plug standards, and their 110/220 volt system. Nationalization may have ironed out some of the kinks and unified 220 volts across the country, but the two plugs remain.
Altogether it’s a fascinating read, and one which brings to mind that where this is being written you could still find a few years ago some houses with three sizes of the archaic British round-pin socket. Interested in the diversity of plugs?
We have a link for that
. | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759861",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T20:38:00",
"content": "Well, that clears up the mystery of the 155VAC setting on the Blaupunkt Granada tube radio my wife owns. Her parents bought it in the 1960s. I’ve always wondered why it had a setting for 155VAC.The ... | 1,760,371,912.798354 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/students-leaf-blower-suppressor-to-hit-retail/ | Students’ Leaf Blower Suppressor To Hit Retail | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"lawn care",
"leaf blower",
"suppressor"
] | Electric leaf blowers are already far quieter than their gas-powered peers, but they still aren’t the kind of thing you’d like to hear first-thing on a Saturday morning. Looking to improve on the situation, a group of students from Johns Hopkins University have successfully designed a 3D printed add-on that manages to
significantly reduce the noise generated by a modern electric leaf blower
without compromising the amount of air it’s able to move. The device has proven to be so successful in tests that Stanley Black & Decker is looking to put a commercial version of the device on store shelves within the next two years.
The team says the first part of the problem was identifying where the noise was actually coming from. After taking an example leaf blower apart and studying all of its moving components, they determined that most of the noise produced wasn’t mechanical at all — what you’re actually hearing is the complex cacophony of high-speed air rushing out of the nozzle. With this knowledge in hand, they isolated the frequencies which were the harshest to the human ear and focused on canceling them out.
Let’s try spinning the air, that’s a good trick.
We’re assuming the pending commercial venture with Stanley has prevented them from releasing too much technical information about the gadget. But from what was published on the university’s news site
Hub
and the video below, it’s explained that a portion of the air is redirected into channels printed into the device, which slows it down before dumping it back into the stream.
To be clear, this doesn’t eliminate the noise completely. In a side-by-side comparison, the suppressed blower is still fairly loud. But with the shriller tones removed from the mix, it’s at least a less annoying noise.
As designed, the printed suppressor is meant to attach to an otherwise unmodified blower. But we’re willing to bet that Stanley instead plans on implementing the technology directly into the nozzles of their future blowers. That way, rather than selling you a simple plastic add-on, they can get you on the hook for a whole new blower.
That is, unless somebody out there decides to come up with their own DIY version. We’ll
keep an eye on the tip line
should anyone want to share with the class. | 81 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759814",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T17:11:33",
"content": "They’re using an electric leafblower in the video, which already gets rid of most of the noise by ditching the gas engine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,913.020028 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/about-right/ | About Right | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"measurement",
"metrology",
"newsletter"
] | I really enjoyed reading Anne Ogborn’s piece on
making simple DIY measurement devices for physical quantities
like force, power, and torque. It is full of food for thought, if you’re building something small with motors and need to figure out how to spec them out.
A Push Stick
Aside from a few good examples, what I really took home from this piece is how easy it can be to take approximate measurements. Take the push stick, which is a spring-loaded plunger in a transparent barrel. You use it to measure force by, well, squeezing the spring and reading off how far it deflects. That’s obvious, but the real trick is in calibration by pushing it into a weighing scale and marking divisions on the barrel. That quickly and easily turns “it’s pressing this hard” into an actual numerical force measurement.
The accuracy and precision of the push stick are limited by the quality of your scale and the fineness of the pen tip that you use to mark the barrel. But when you’re just looking to choose among two servo motors, this kind of seat-of-the-pants measure is more than enough to buy the right part. Almost any actual measurement is better than a wild-ass guess, so don’t hold yourself to outrageous standards or think that improvised quantitative measurement devices aren’t going to get the job done.
Al Williams quoted a teacher of his as saying that the soul of metrology is “taking something you know and using it to find something you don’t know”, and that sums up this piece nicely. But it’s also almost a hacker manifesto: “take something you can do and use it to do something that you can’t (yet)”.
Got any good measurement hacks you’d like to share?
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759893",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T22:15:46",
"content": "Push stick my ass, that is a pocket penetrometer, or a nyman probe.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6760432",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
... | 1,760,371,912.635288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/flexures-keep-this-printed-displacement-sensor-in-line/ | Flexures Keep This Printed Displacement Sensor In Line | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"compliant mechanism",
"dial indicator",
"flexure",
"metrology",
"opto-interrupter",
"phototransistor"
] | When the job at hand is measuring something with micron-range precision, thoughts generally turn to a tool with a Mitutoyo or Starrett nameplate. But with a clever design and a little electronics know-how, it turns out you can 3D print
a displacement sensor for measuring in the micron range
for only about $10.
While the tool that [BubsBuilds] came up with isn’t as compact as a dial indicator and probably won’t win any industrial design awards, that doesn’t detract from its usefulness. And unlike a dial indicator — at least the analog type — this sensor outputs an easily digitized signal. That comes courtesy of a simple opto-interrupter sensor, which measures the position of a fine blade within its field of view. The blade is attached to a flexure that constrains its movement to a single plane; the other end of the flexure has a steel ball acting as a stylus. In use, any displacement of the stylus results in more or less light being received by the phototransistor in the opto-interrupter; the greater the deflection, the less light and the lower the current through the transistor. In addition to the sensor itself, [Bub] printed a calibration jig that allows precision gauge blocks or simple feeler gauges to be inserted in front of the stylus. The voltage across the emitter resistor for these known displacements is then used to create a calibration curve.
[Bub] says he’s getting 5-micron repeatability with careful calibration and multiple measurements of each gauge block, which seems pretty impressive to us. If you don’t need the digital output, this
compliant mechanism dial indicator
might be helpful too.
Thanks to [Bub]’s friend [Ethan] for the tip. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759745",
"author": "C. Scott Ananian",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T11:24:43",
"content": "The optointerrupter should probably be shielded from room ambient light if you’re trying to get that sort of precision out of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,913.066139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/netbsd-bans-ai-generated-code-from-commits/ | NetBSD Bans AI-Generated Code From Commits | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development"
] | [
"LLM",
"netbsd"
] | A recent change was
announced
to the NetBSD
commit guidelines
which amends these to state that code which was generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) or similar technologies, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot or Meta’s Code Llama is presumed to be tainted code. This amendment was to the existing section about tainted code, which originally referred to any code that was not written directly by the person committing the code, and was due to licensing concerns. The obvious reason behind this is that otherwise code may be copied into the NetBSD codebase which may have been licensed under an incompatible (or proprietary) license.
In the case of LLM-based code generators like the above-mentioned, the problem stems from the fact that they are trained on millions of lines of code from all over the internet, which are naturally released under a wide variety of licenses. Invariably, some of that code will be covered by a license that’s not acceptable for the NetBSD codebase. Although the guideline mentions that these auto-generated code commits may still be admissible, they require written permission from core developers, and presumably an in-depth audit of the code’s heritage. This should leave non-trivial commits that got churned out by ChatGPT and kin out in the cold.
The debate about the
validity of works produced by current-gen “artificial intelligence” software
is only just beginning, but there’s little question that NetBSD has made the right call here. From a legal and software engineering perspective this policy makes perfect sense, as LLM-generated code simply doesn’t meet the project’s standards. That said, code produced by humans brings with it a whole
different set of potential problems
. | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759706",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T08:09:20",
"content": "The history of BSD is well know, why would they risk that nightmare again.The only thing people using the tool would be to validate what was a blatant theft of code. It Microsoft was serious they would have... | 1,760,371,913.146529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/put-a-little-pigeon-in-you-next-clock-project/ | Put A Little Pigeon In Your Next Clock Project | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"gear",
"involute",
"pendulum",
"pigeons",
"profile",
"tooth",
"wheel"
] | If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably wondered why gear teeth are shaped the way they’re shaped. But we’ll go out on a limb and say
you’ve never wondered why gear teeth aren’t shaped like pigeons
, and what a clock that’s not quite a clock based around them would look like.
If this sounds like it has [Uri Tuchman] written all over it, give yourself a cookie. [Uri] has a thing for pigeons, and they make an appearance in nearly all his whimsical builds, from
his ink-dipping machine
to
his intricately engraved metal mouse
. For this build, pigeons are transformed into the teeth of a large, ornate wheel, cut from brass using an impressive Friedrich Deckel pantograph engraver. To put the pigeon wheel to work, [Uri] built an escapement and a somewhat crooked pendulum, plus a drive weight and dial. It’s almost a clock, but not quite, since it doesn’t measure time in any familiar units, and the dial has a leg rather than hands — classic [Uri].
It may not be
[Clickspring]-level stuff
, but it’s still a lovely piece of work, and instructive to boot. The way [Uri] figured out the profile for the meshing teeth by looking at the negative space swept out by the pigeon profiles was pretty sweet. Plus, pigeons. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759708",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T08:18:01",
"content": "“…you’ve probably wondered why gear teeth are shaped the way they’re shaped.”So the touching surfaces roll rather than slide. You do npt oil gears in clocks.I can’t quite tell if he’s been really clever and cu... | 1,760,371,913.19427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/winamp-source-code-will-be-opened-up-company-says/ | Winamp Source Code Will Be Opened Up, Company Says | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"winamp"
] | Recently the company currently in charge of the Winamp media player – formerly Radionomy, now Llama Group –
announced
that it will be making the source code of the player ‘available to developers’. Although the peanut gallery immediately seemed to have jumped to the conclusion that this meant that the source would be made available to all on the announced 24 September 2024 date, reading between the lines of the press release gives a different impression.
First there is the sign-up form for ‘FreeLlama’ where interested developers can sign up, with a strong suggestion that only vetted developers will be able to look at the code, which may or may not be accompanied by any non-disclosure agreements. It would seem appropriate to be skeptical considering Winamp’s
rocky history
since AOL divested of it in 2013 with version 5.666 and its new owner Radionomy not doing much development on the software except for adding NFT and crypto/blockchain features in 2022. The subsequent Winamp online service doubled down on this.
Naturally it would be great to see Winamp become a flourishing OSS project for the two dozen of us who still use Winamp on a daily base, but the proof will be in the non-NFT pudding, as the saying goes. | 58 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759663",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-05-18T02:08:36",
"content": "No other player allowed me to whip a Llama’s ass.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759870",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,913.285711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/designing-a-quality-camera-slider-can-be-remarkably-satisfying/ | Designing A Quality Camera Slider Can Be Remarkably Satisfying | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"camera slider",
"digital camera",
"stepper motor",
"toothed belt"
] | Camera sliders are great creative tools, letting you get smooth controlled shots that can class up any production.
[Anthony Kouttron] decided to build one for an engineering class,
and he ended up mighty satisfied with what he and his team accomplished.
As an engineering class project, this wasn’t a build done on a whim. Instead, [Anthony] and his fellow students spent plenty of time hashing out what they needed this thing to do, and how it should be built. An Arduino was selected as the brains of the operation, as a capable and accessible microcontroller platform. Stepper motors and a toothed belt drive were used to move the slider in a controllable fashion. The slider’s control interface was an HD44780-based character LCD, along with a thumbstick and two pushbuttons. The slider relied on steel tubes for a frame, which was heavy, but cost-effective and easy to fabricate. Much of the parts were salvaged from legendary e-waste bins on the university grounds.
The final product was stout and practical. It may not have been light, but the steel frame and strong stepper motor meant the slider could easily handle even heavy DSLR cameras. That’s something that
lighter builds can struggle with
.
Ultimately, it was an excellent learning experience for [Anthony] and his team. As a bonus, he got some great timelapses out of it, too. Video after the break. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759086",
"author": "transistor-man",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T20:22:20",
"content": "That camera slider has an enormous battery pack, how long is the run time? Ive seen some commercial camera sliders that generally run out after 2 hours. This looks like it will run all day. Nice bu... | 1,760,371,913.328744 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/how-ai-large-language-models-work-explained-without-math/ | How AI Large Language Models Work, Explained Without Math | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"LLM",
"natural language"
] | Large Language Models (LLMs ) are everywhere, but how exactly do they work under the hood? [Miguel Grinberg] provides
a great explanation of the inner workings of LLMs
in simple (but not simplistic) terms that eschews the low-level mathematics of
how
they work in favor of laying bare
what
it is they do.
At their heart, LLMs are prediction machines that work on tokens (small groups of letters and punctuation) and are as a result capable of great feats of human-seeming communication. Most technical-minded people understand that LLMs have no idea what they are saying, and this peek at their inner workings will make that abundantly clear.
Be sure to also review an illustrated guide to
how image-generating AIs work
. And if a peek under the hood of LLMs left you hungry for more low-level details, check out our coverage of
training a GPT-2 LLM using pure C code
. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759066",
"author": "LH",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T18:42:31",
"content": "I’d rather have it explained with math, just with English annotations for some of us that are rusty on our symbolic notation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,913.44539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/hackaday-supercon-2024-call-for-participation-we-want-you/ | Hackaday Supercon 2024 Call For Participation: We Want You! | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"call for participation",
"talks",
"workshops"
] | We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2024, and will be taking place November 1st through the 3rd in sunny Pasadena, California. As always, Supercon is all about you, the Hackaday community. So put on your thinking caps because we’d like to hear your proposals for talks and workshops! The
Call for Speakers
and
Call for Workshops
forms are online now, and you’ve got until July 9th to get yourself signed up.
Supercon is a fantastic event to geek out with your fellow hackers, and to share the inevitable ups and downs that accompany any serious project. Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries.
Honestly, just the crowd that Supercon brings together is reason enough to attend, but then you throw in the talks, the badge-hacking, the food, and the miscellaneous shenanigans … it’s an event you really don’t want to miss. And as always, presenters get in for free, get their moment in the sun, and get warm vibes from the Hackaday audience.
Get yourself signed up now
! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759041",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T17:22:21",
"content": "Elliot,I think that you should put more emphasis on the Hackaday “Pros”,than on the Hackaday “Cons”.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,913.386322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/heres-the-norwegian-tape-deck-teardown-youve-been-waiting-for/ | Here’s The Norwegian Tape Deck Teardown You’ve Been Waiting For | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"cassette",
"cassette deck",
"compact cassette",
"teardown"
] | “They just don’t build ’em like they used to”
is a truer statement every year. Whether your vice is CRTs, film cameras, or tape decks, you’ll know that the very best gear simply isn’t manufactured anymore. Even the day-to-day stuff from 60 years ago is often a cut above a lot of today’s equipment. [Anthony Kouttron] shows us this with
his teardown of a Tandberg TCD301 from many decades ago.
The Tandberg unit is beautifully finished in wood and metal, a style of construction that’s fairly rare these days. It’s got big, chunky controls, and a certain level of
heft
that is out of vogue in modern electronics. Heavy used to mean
good —
these days, it means
old.
That’s not to say it’s indestructible, though. It’s full of lots of old plastic pulleys and fasteners that have aged over the decades, so it’s a little fragile inside.
Still, [Anthony] gives us a great look at the aluminium chassis and buttons and the electromechanical parts inside. It’s a rats-nest design with lots of discrete components and wires flying between boards. You couldn’t economically produce this and sell it to anyone today, but this is how it was done so many years ago.
This non-functional unit ended up being little more than a salvage job, but we’re still glad that [Anthony] gave us a look inside. Still, if you long for more cassette-themed teardowns,
we’ve got the goodness you’re looking for! | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759025",
"author": "Kryptylomese",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T15:46:08",
"content": "Equipment with moving parts had to be built well to work well. Modern digital technology with no moving parts, far exceeds the sound quality of those older machines and with greater reliability and ... | 1,760,371,913.630552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/a-slice-of-simulation-google-sheets-style/ | A Slice Of Simulation, Google Sheets Style | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"am2900",
"am2901",
"amd",
"bitslice"
] | Have you ever tried to eat one jelly bean or one potato chip? It is nearly impossible. Some of us have the same problem with hardware projects. It all started when I wrote about the old bitslice chips people used to build computers before you could easily get a whole CPU on a chip. Bitslice is basically Lego blocks that build CPUs. I have always wanted to play with technology, so when I wrote that piece, I looked on eBay to see if I could find any leftovers from this 1970-era tech. It turns out that the chips are easy to find, but I found something even better. A mint condition AM2900 evaluation board. These aren’t easy to find, so the chances that you can try one out yourself are pretty low. But I’m going to fix that, virtually speaking.
This was just the second potato chip. Programming the board, as you can see in the video below, is tedious, with lots of binary switch-flipping. To simplify things, I took another potato chip — a Google Sheet that generates the binary from a quasi-assembly language. That should have been enough, but I had to take another chip from the bag. I extended the spreadsheet to actually emulate the system. It is a terrible hack, and Google Sheets’ performance for this sort of thing could be better. But it works.
If you missed it, I left many notes on
Hackaday.io
about the project. In particular,
I created a microcode program that takes two four-bit binary-coded decimal digits and computes the proper 8-bit number
. It isn’t much, but the board only has 16 microcode instructions, so you must temper your expectations. If you want an
overview of the entire technology
, we’ve done that, too.
Starting Point
Block diagram of the board being simulated
The idea for the simulator struck me when I was building the assembler. I considered writing a stand-alone program, but I wanted to limit my potato chip consumption, so keeping it in the
spreadsheet
seemed like a good idea.
Was it? Hard to say. Google Sheets has macros that are just Javascript. However, the macros are somewhat slow and attaching them to user interface elements is difficult. There were plenty of ways to do it, but I went for the path of least resistance.
Strategy
For better or worse, I tried to minimize the amount of scripting. All of the real work occurs on the Sim tab of the spreadsheet, and only a few key parts are included in the attached macros. Instead, the cells take advantage of the way the AM2900 works. For example, some bits in the microcode instructions represent how to find the next address. Instead of calculating this with code, there is a table that computes the address for each possible branch.
For example, branch type zero goes to the next address when the current result is zero or the address coded in the instruction if the result is not zero. If the branch type is one, there is always a jump to the hardcoded address, while a branch type of two always takes the next instruction. So, the associated table always computes all the possible results (see cells O1 through P18). Then, cell P18 uses
VLOOKUP
to pick the right row from the table (which has 16 rows).
Every part of the instruction decode works this way. The only complication is that the instructions operate on the current result, something mentioned in the last post. In other words, consider an instruction that says (in English): If the result is zero, go to location 9; add 1 to the B register. You might assume the jump will occur if B+1 results in zero. But that’s not how it works. Instead, the processor adds B and 1. Then, it jumps to location 9 if the state was zero before the addition operation.
What this means is that the spreadsheet computes all things at all times. The macros are almost like clock pulses. Instead of gating flip flops, they copy things from where they are calculated to where they are supposed to go.
Macros
The main simulation logic is in the
stepengine
macro. It computes the next address and sets the status latch, if necessary. Then it grabs the result of the current operation and places it in the correct destination. The final part of the macro updates the next location, which may require manipulating the processor stack. All of those things would have been difficult to do in spreadsheet logic.
The other macros are essentially wrappers around
stepengine
. The
Exec
macro executes an instruction without advancing (like stepping the real board in load mode). The
Step
macro can optionally single step, or it can execute in place like
Exec
. The
Run
macro does the real execution and also checks for breakpoints. There’s also a
Reset
macro to put everything in a known state.
Usage
The user interface for the simulator.
You can call the macros directly, but that’s not very user-friendly. Instead, the Sim tab has three graphical buttons for run, step, and reset. Each command has options. For example, under Run, you can set a hex address to break execution. Under Step, you can decide if the step should advance the program counter or not. The reset button allows you to clear registers.
Don’t enter your program on the Sim tab. Use the Main tab as before. You can also go to the Extensions | Macros menu to load one of the canned demos. Demo 1 is the BCD program from the last post. The other examples are the ones that shipped with the real board’s manual. If you really want to learn how the thing works, you could do worse than walk through the
manual
and try each example. Just don’t forget that the scanned manual has at least two typos: Figure 7 is wrong, and example 7 has an error (that error was fixed in later manuals and in the simulator’s copy, too). Instead of figure 7, use figure 3 or pick up
a corrected figure
on Hackaday.io.
Why learn how to operate the AM2900 evaluation board? Beats me, but I did it anyway, and now you can do it without spending the money I did on a piece of exotic hardware. I’d like to say that this might help you understand modern CPU design, but that wouldn’t be very fair. I suppose it does help a little, but modern CPUs have as much in common with this design as a steam locomotive has in common with a jet airplane.
If the idea of building a CPU from modules appeals to you, check out
DDL-4
. If that’s too easy for you, grab your bag of 2,000 transistors and check out
this build
. I’m sealing up my bag of potato chips now. Really. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759016",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T15:07:43",
"content": "“I’m sealing up my bag of potato chips now. Really.”We’ll see!Great article, thanks, I enjoyed that.Now off to reopen my own bag of chips…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,913.855685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/introduction-to-mosfet-switching-losses/ | Introduction To MOSFET Switching Losses | Maya Posch | [
"Parts",
"Science"
] | [
"mosfet"
] | Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) see common use in applications ranging from the very small (like CPU transistors) to very large (power) switching applications. Although its main advantage is its high power efficiency, MOSFETs are not ideal switches with a perfect on or off state. Understanding the three main sources of switching losses is crucial when designing with MOSFETs, with a recent
All About Circuits
article by [Robert Keim]
providing a primer
on the subject.
As it’s a primer, the subthreshold mode of MOSFET
modes of operation
is omitted, leaving the focus on the linear (ohmic) mode where the MOSFET’s drain-source is conducting, but with a resistance that’s determined by the gate voltage. In the saturated mode the drain-source resistance is relatively minor (though still relevant), but the turn-on time (R
DS(on)
) before this mode is reached is where major switching losses occur. Simply switching faster is not a solution, as driving the gate incurs its own losses, leaving the circuit designer to carefully balance the properties of the MOSFET.
For those interested in a more in-depth study of MOSFETs in e.g. power supplies, there are many articles on the subject, such as
this article (PDF)
from Texas Instruments. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758982",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T11:56:42",
"content": "“but the turn-on time (RDS(on)) before this mode is reached is where major switching losses occur”Turn-on time is not RDS(on). RDS(on) is the on-resistance (between Drain and Source, hence the name) when fully ... | 1,760,371,913.691337 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/custom-polyurethane-belts-made-easy/ | Custom Polyurethane Belts Made Easy | Lewin Day | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"belt drive",
"belts",
"jig",
"polyurethane"
] | If you need to make polyurethane belts in custom lengths, it’s not
too hard.
You just need to take lengths of flexible polyurethane filament, heat the ends, and join them together. In practice, it’s difficult to get it right by hand.
That’s why [JBVCreative] built a 3D printed jig to make it easy.
The jig consists of two printed sliders that mount on a pair of steel rods. Each slider has a screw-down clamp on top. The clamps are used to hold down each end of the polyurethane filament to be joined. Once installed in the jig, the ends of the filament can be heated with a soldering iron or other element. and then gently pushed together. The steel rods simply enable the filament to be constrained linearly so the ends don’t shift during the joining process.
The jig doesn’t produce
perfect
belts. There’s still a small seam at the join that is larger than the filament’s base diameter. A second jig for trimming the belt to size could be helpful in this regard. Still, it’s a super useful technique for making custom belts. This could be super useful to anyone needing to
restore old cassette decks
or similar mechanical hardware.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758976",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T10:26:16",
"content": "Thats a good ideea for 3d printer filament welding.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6758987",
"author": "Mika",
"timestamp": "2024... | 1,760,371,913.743256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/non-split-flap-clock-does-it-with-fewer-flaps/ | Non-Split-Flap Clock Does It With Fewer Flaps | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"clock",
"not a split-flap display",
"split-flap display",
"stepper motor"
] | As cool as split-flap clocks and displays are, they do have a few disadvantages. The mechanism sticks out on the side, and the whole thing relies on gravity. Some people don’t care for the visual split in the middle of each digit that comes as a result. And their cousins, the Numechron clocks? Those wheels, especially the hours wheel, are really big compared to the size of what they display, so the clock housings are huge by comparison.
[shiura] decided to re-invent the digital display and
came up with this extremely cool spinning flap mechanism
that uses a lip to flip each flap after it is shown. Thanks to this design, only half the number of flaps are needed. Not only is the face of the clock able to be much larger compared to the overall size of the thing, the whole unit is quite shallow. Plus, [shiura] tilted the display 15° for better visibility.
If you want to build one of these for yourself, [shiura] has all the STLs available and some pretty great instructions. Besides the printed parts, you don’t need much more than the microcontroller of your choice and a stepper motor. Check out the demo/build video after the break, and stick around for the assembly video.
Don’t mind the visual split in the numbers?
Check out this split-flap clock that uses a bunch of magnets
. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759299",
"author": "Daniel V.",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T17:52:04",
"content": "That is a brilliant idea! Great execution too, I love the clock.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759314",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,913.801913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/measure-three-times-design-once/ | Measure Three Times, Design Once | Anne Ogborn | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Skills"
] | [
"Mechanisms",
"robot"
] | Most of the Hackaday community would never wire a power supply to a circuit without knowing the expected voltage and the required current. But our mechanical design is often more bodged. We meet folks who carefully budget power to their microcontroller, sensors, and so on, but never measure the forces involved in their mechanical designs. Then they’re surprised when the motor they chose isn’t big enough for the weight of their robot.
An obstacle to being more numbers oriented is lack of basic data about the system. So, here are some simple tools for measuring dynamic properties of small mechanisms; distances, forces, velocities, accelerations, torques, and other things you haven’t thought about since college physics. If you don’t have these in your toolkit, how do you measure?
Distance
For longer distances the usual homeowner’s tools work fine. The mechatronics tinkerer benefits from two tools on the small end. A dial or electronic caliper for measuring small things, and a thickness gauge (or leaf gauge) for measuring small slots.
Dial Caliper- We prefer these to the electronic version
GFDL Querren, jp.wikipedia.org
A thickness gauge is just metal leaves in different thicknesses, bolted together at one end. Find a combination of leaves that just fits in the space.
Force
Here’s four force measuring tools we use to cover different magnitudes of force: a postage scale, a push stick, a spring scale, and a letter scale. The postage scale is best purchased. For big things, the bathroom scale works.
A push stick is a force measurement device that you can make yourself. We first saw one of these used to tune slot cars, but they’re universally useful. It’s a simple pen shaped device made with a barrel from any small transparent parts tube, a spring, and a plunger with a protruding pin. Grasp the barrel and push the gizmo with the pin, and you can read the force off the tube.
If you need it to be calibrated, remember that you just bought a postage scale. Push it into the scale and mark off reasonable increments. Make several, in different sizes. A Z or L shaped plunger is useful for hard to reach places.
A letter scale
A Push Stick
The conventional spring tension scale is useful, but most commercial ones are terribly made and inaccurate. You can make yourself a better one. They are useful for measuring the spring constant of springs, for learning the tractive effort needed to move a robot, finding the center of gravity of a robot arm, and a hundred other ‘how much oomph’ things. Again, it’s just a matter of connecting a hook to a spring, and measuring its deflection.
For yet lighter weights, you could buy a letter scale, at least in the old days. Today you might have to make your own. It can be as simple as a piece of spring steel fixed to a sheet of calibrated cardboard.
Torque
Torque measurements are good not only for sizing actuators, but for measuring efficiency.
How you do torque measurements depend on the speed you want to make them at. For static loads, just put a lever of known length on the shaft and measure the force. Torque = distance * force. For fast rotating systems, you can run the system at a known speed and measure the electrical energy used.
If you just want to apply a varying known torque to measure efficiency, your life is much easier. Mount a broad wheel of some sort on the shaft — RC airplane tires work well. Drape a piece of ribbon over the tire. Anchor it at the “out” end and hang a small weight at the “in” end. This is a
Prony Brake
, and it’s a useful device to know about. The force on the outside of the wheel is just enough to lift the weight – after that the ribbon slips. The measured torque is then the weight times the wheel radius.
You may also want to measure speeds and accelerations. Here, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras is your friend. Suppose you’re animating a crane on your model railroad. Record yourself on video moving the crane with your hands against a protractor to get a feel for speed and acceleration. In video editing software check the positions for various frames, and you now have position changes. The number of frames and distance can help you calculate the speed, and the change in speed vs time is acceleration.
If your mechanism is moving too fast for video, use a fast phototransistor or hall effect device and an oscilloscope, or gear down by holding a toy wheel against the shaft and measure the more slowly rotating wheel.
In the crane example, the torque you need to supply is the frictional torque plus the acceleration torque, and to calculate the acceleration torque you need the moment of inertia. For refresher: angular acceleration = torque / moment of inertia (ω = τ / I) and moment of inertia = mass * radius
2
(I = m * r
2
) for point mass.
You can drive the crane with a repeatable torque, say using a pulley and weight or a motor, and get the acceleration ω
1
from the still frames on your video. If you repeat this with a known mass m a known distance r from the shaft axis, like a lump of putty on the end of the crane arm, you can get a second value: ω
2.
Write the ω = τ / I equations, ω
1
= τ / I
crane
and ω
2
= τ / (I
crane
+ r
2
* m). Combining and isolating I
crane
and holding our tongues just right, I
crane
= r
2
* m / (ω
1
/ ω
2
– 1).
Be careful to subtract the moment of inertia of your measuring apparatus, and add in the moment of inertia of the final drive if needed. Now you can size your servo with some confidence. Believe me, once you’ve done this a couple times, you’ll never go back to winging it.
Power
The easiest way to get a ballpark feel for power is to simply measure the system’s consumed power by measuring the electrical power at the motor, but this ignores losses in the drive train. And losses are one of the really interesting things to measure. Bad performance is usually friction, and efficiency is a goal for other reasons than just motor sizing or battery life. It’s a measure of how janky your setup is.
Does your model train or robot run poorly? Set it to climb a steep grade on a test track. Calculate the work it does: mass * height change. Measure the input electrical power and the time, Energy = V*I*T. You now have an idea of how much the actual power consumption differs from the maximally efficient system. Any power that went in but didn’t appear as potential energy in the choo-choo’s new position is frictional loss. Now you can experiment with loosening and tightening screws, changing gear mesh, and such, and have some idea if you’re making things better or worse.
Conclusion
None of the above was rocket science, and you don’t need to do some complex FEM analysis to make the average hacker project. But a bit of real engineering can go a long way towards more reliable mechanisms, and that starts with knowing the numbers you’re dealing with. Taking the required measurements can be simple if you know how to build the tools you need, and your life will be easier with some numbers to guide you. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759275",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T14:32:46",
"content": "So guilty of this ☺️I tend to go with ehat “looks sufficiently beefy”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759276",
"author": "Julianne",
... | 1,760,371,913.98995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/you-can-now-jailbreak-a-ps4-with-an-lg-tv/ | You Can Now Jailbreak A PS4 With An LG TV | Lewin Day | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"jailbreak",
"playstation 4",
"ps4"
] | You might think that jailbreaking a PS4 to run unsigned code is a complicated process that takes fancy tools and lots of work. While
developing
said jailbreaks was naturally no mean feat, thankfully they’re far easier for the end user to perform. These days,
all you need is an LG TV.
Of course, you can’t just use any LG TV. You’ll need a modern LG webOS smart TV, and
you’ll need to jailbreak it
before it can in turn be used to modify your PS4. Once that’s done, though, you can install the PPLGPwn tool for jailbreaking PS4s. It’s based on the PPPwn exploit released by [TheFlow], which was then optimized by [xfangxfang] and implemented for LG Smart TVs by [zauceee]. Once installed, you just need to hook up your PS4 to the TV via the Ethernet port. Then, with the exploit running on the TV, telling the PS4 to set up the LAN via PPPoE will be enough to complete the jailbreak.
There are other ways to jailbreak a PS4 that don’t involve
the use of a specific television
. Nonetheless, it’s neat to see the hack done in such an amusing way.
Thanks to [eyeoncomputers] for the tip! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759242",
"author": "SewKnee",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T11:35:45",
"content": "but… but… you MUST sign up for a PSN account for YOUR OWN SAFETY AND SECURITY! Otherwise we will shut down your games, EVEN if you aren’t even playing the game on a playstation!God I love when crackers p... | 1,760,371,913.908816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/adaptive-chefs-knife-provides-better-leverage/ | Adaptive Chef’s Knife Provides Better Leverage | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"assistive",
"knife",
"molded",
"resin"
] | [Colleen] struggled with using a chef’s knife to cut a variety of foods while suffering from arthritis in her wrist and hand. There are knives aimed at people with special needs, but nothing suitable for serious work like [Colleen]’s professional duties in a commercial kitchen.
As a result, the IATP (Illinois Assistive Technology Program) created the
Adaptive Chef’s Knife
. Unlike existing offerings, it has a high-quality blade and is ergonomically designed so that the user can leverage their forearm while maintaining control.
The handle is durable, stands up to commercial kitchen use, and is molded to the same standards as off-the-shelf knife handles. That means it’s cast from FDA-approved materials and has a clean, non-porous surface. The pattern visible in the handle is a 3D printed “skeleton” over which resin is molded.
Interested? The IATP Maker Program makes assistive devices available to Illinois residents free of charge (though donations in suggested amounts are encouraged for those who can pay) but the plans and directions are freely available to anyone who wishes to roll their own.
Assistive technology doesn’t need to be over-engineered or frankly even maximally efficient in how it addresses a problem. Small changes can be all that’s needed to give people meaningful control over the things in their lives in a healthy way. Some great examples are are
this magnetic spoon holder
, or
simple printed additions to IKEA furnishings
. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759209",
"author": "Vincent",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T09:03:35",
"content": "better to take a sharper knive or an ultra sonic. the one which is pictured looks like an add-on",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759214",
... | 1,760,371,914.058554 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/generative-ai-hits-the-commodore-64/ | Generative AI Hits The Commodore 64 | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ai",
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"machine learning",
"sprite"
] | Image-generating AIs are typically trained on huge arrays of GPUs and require great wads of processing power to run. Meanwhile,
[Nick Bild] has managed to get something similar running on a Commodore 64.
(via
Tom’s Hardware
).
A figure generated by [Nick]’s C64. We shall name him… “Sword Guy”!
As you might imagine, [Nick’s] AI image generator isn’t churning out 4K cyberpunk stills dripping in neon. Instead, he aimed at a smaller target, more befitting the Commodore 64 itself. His image generator creates 8×8 game sprites instead.
[Nick’s] model was trained on 100 retro-inspired sprites that he created himself. He did the training phase on a modern computer, so that the Commodore 64 didn’t have to sweat this difficult task on its feeble 6502 CPU. However, it’s more than capable of generating sprites
using
the model, thanks to some BASIC code that runs off of the training data. Right now, it takes the C64 about 20 minutes to run through 94 iterations to generate a decent sprite.
8×8 sprites are generally simple enough that you don’t need to be an artist to create them. Nonetheless, [Nick] has shown that
modern machine learning techniques
can be run on slow archaic hardware, even if there is limited utility in doing so. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!] | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759259",
"author": "Bruce Gettel",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T12:58:14",
"content": "Is that a sword, or are you happy to see me?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759261",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T13:1... | 1,760,371,914.1585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/think-again-tips-on-finding-and-flexing-your-creativity/ | Think Again: Tips On Finding And Flexing Your Creativity | Donald Papp | [
"how-to",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"creative thinking",
"problem solving"
] | Technical work — including problem-solving — is creative work. In addition, creativity is more than a vague and nebulous attribute that either is or isn’t present when it’s needed. A short article by [Anthony D. Fredericks] gives some practical and useful tips on
energizing and exercising one’s creativity
.
Why would creative thinking be meaningful to a technical person? The author shares an anonymous observation that as children we’re taught to stay inside the lines, while as adults we are often expected to think outside the box. Certainly when it comes to technical tasks, our focus is more on logical thinking. But problem solving benefits as much from creative thinking as it does from more logical approaches.
How can one cultivate creative thinking? The main idea is that creativity is best flexed and exercised by actively looking for connections and similarities between highly dissimilar elements, rather than focusing on their differences. Some thought exercises are provided to help with this process. Like with any exercise, the more one does it, the better one becomes.
Practicing more creative thinking can help jolt new ideas and approaches to a tough problem, so give it a shot. It’s also worth keeping in mind that we all need a feeling of progress, especially during extended times of applying effort to something, so
do yourself a favor and give yourself an occasional win
. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759165",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T02:59:28",
"content": "Okay, so… I’ve been studying psychology for a couple of years now, with a focus on creativity.The article states a claim: that creativity lies in looking for similarities rather than differences.I’ve never... | 1,760,371,914.112857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/15/floss-weekly-episode-783-teaching-embedded-with-the-unphone/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 783: Teaching Embedded With The Unphone | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"embedded",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Unphone"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and
Rob Campbell
talk with Gareth Coleman and Hamish Cunningham! It’s all about the Unphone, an open source handset sporting an ESP32, color touchscreen, and LoRa radio. It’s open hardware, and used in a 3rd year university course to teach comp sci majors about hardware and embedded development.
https://unphone.net/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,914.199248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/17/running-four-brushless-motors-with-a-single-pi-pico/ | Running Four Brushless Motors With A Single Pi Pico | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"motor controller",
"pi pico"
] | Sometimes, you have to drive four motors, and you need to do so with a certain level of control. You could throw a lot of parts at the problem, but you don’t necessarily have to. As [Shaun Crampton] demonstrates,
you can run four brushless DC motors with a single Pi Pico
.
[Shaun] set about developing a brushless motor controller from scratch with the Pico, relying on its PIO hardware and the TI DRV8313 — a handy three phase motor driver. Before he knew it, he was implementing field oriented control (FOC) in MicroPython, only to find that it was a little too slow for proper motor control work. He soon switched to C for the lower overheads, and was readily driving a brushless motor with his own code. Before long, he’d implemented torque limiting and PID speed control. He was even able to optimize things to the point where he had four motors hanging off a single Pi Pico, complete with Hall sensors for feedback.
The full story is well worth reading, as it goes from “Hello, World” all the way to the end of the project. If you’ve never experienced the joy of your own code getting a motor to spin, you might enjoy following in [Shaun’s] footsteps. Files are
on GitHub for the curious
.
We’ve seen
a lot of motor controllers around here
, many of which draw heavily from other projects online. It’s a great way to learn the basics of what is a very well established field. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own project in this space, do
drop us a line! | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759468",
"author": "Micos",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T09:31:44",
"content": "With all respect, I thought you utilised Pico as 4-1 esc, but you just use “motor drivers” so title is pretty clickbait. Got disappointed",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,914.347869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/customizable-bird-clock-sings-the-hours-by/ | Customizable Bird Clock Sings The Hours By | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"atmega128a",
"bird",
"bird song",
"clock",
"DS3231",
"mp3",
"rtc",
"stepper motor"
] | For those looking to build their own clocks, one of the easiest ways to get started is with a pre-built module that uses a simple quartz oscillator and drives a set of hands. This generally doesn’t allow for much design of the clock besides the face, and since [core weaver] was building a clock that plays bird songs,
a much more hackable clock driver was needed to interface with the rest of the electronics needed to build this project
.
The clock hands for this build are driven by a double stepper motor which controls an hour and minute hand coaxially but independently. Originally an H-bridge circuit was designed for driving each of the hands but they draw so little current in this configuration that they could be driven by the microcontroller directly. A DS3231 clock is used for timekeeping connected to an ATMega128a which controls everything else. At the start of each hour the clock plays a corresponding bird song by communicating with an mp3 module, and a remote control can also be used to play the songs on demand.
Bird clocks are not an uncommon thing to find off the shelf, but this one adds a number of customizations that let it fly above those offerings, including customizing the sounds that play on the hour and adding remote control capabilities, a lithium battery charging circuit, and a number of other creature comforts. If you’re looking for even more unique bird clock designs
this binary bird clock might fit the bill
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759429",
"author": "Balls",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T05:27:19",
"content": "This looks like a great way to scare my family in the middle of the night",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759430",
"author": "Ewald",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,914.297782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/is-the-frequency-domain-a-real-place/ | Is The Frequency Domain A Real Place? | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"fourier transform",
"frequency domain"
] | When analyzing data, one can use a variety of transformations on the data to massage it into a form that works better to tease out the information one is interested in. One such example is the application of the Fourier transform, which transforms a data set from the time domain into the frequency domain. Yet what is this frequency domain really? After enticing us to follow the white rabbit down a sudden plummet into the intangible question of what is and what is not, [lcamtuf]
shows us around
aspects of the frequency domain and kin.
One thing about the (discrete) Fourier transform is that it is excellent at analyzing data that consists out of sinewaves, such as audio signals. Yet when using the Fourier transform for square waves, the resulting output is less than useful, almost as if square waves are not real. Similarly, other transforms exist which work great for square waves, but turn everything else into meaningless harmonics. Starting with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), this gets us into Walsh and Hadamard matrices and the
Walsh-Hadamard Transform
(WHT), and their usage with transforming data from the time into the frequency domain.
Ultimately it would seem that the frequency domain is as real as it needs to be, albeit that its appearance is wholly dependent on the algorithm used to create it, whether this the DFT, DCT, WHT or something else entirely. | 60 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759395",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T02:20:31",
"content": "Absolutely not. It is a mapping from the time domain to a Complex space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759474",
"author": ".",
... | 1,760,371,914.532422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/midi-spoon-piano-is-exactly-what-you-think-it-is/ | MIDI Spoon Piano Is Exactly What You Think It Is | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"capacitive touch",
"keyboard",
"midi",
"midi synth",
"music",
"spoons"
] | Pianos traditionally had keys made out of ivory, but there’s a great way to avoid that if you want to save the elephants. You can build a keyboard using spoons,
as demonstrated by [JCo Audio].
The build relies on twelve metal spoons to act as the keys of the instrument. They’re assembled into a wooden base in a manner roughly approximating the white and black keys of a conventional piano keyboard, using 3D-printed inserts to hold them in place. They’re hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Pico via
a Pico Touch 2 board
, which allows the spoons to be used as capacitive touch pads.
Code from [todbot]
was then used to take input from the 12 spoons and turn it into MIDI data. From there, hooking the Pi Pico up to a PC running some kind of MIDI synth is enough to make sounds.
It’s a simple build, but a functional one. Plus, it lets you ask your friends if they’d like to hear you play the spoons. The key here is to make a big show of hooking your instrument up to a laptop while explaining you’re not going to play the spoons
a la the folk instrument,
but you’re going to play
a synth instead
. Then you should use the spoon keyboard to play emulated spoon samples anyway. It’s called
doubling down.
Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759369",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T23:03:37",
"content": "I hope he plays Spoonman!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759399",
"author": "Sheff",
"timestamp": "2024-05-17T03:00:18",
"con... | 1,760,371,914.418737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/big-server-fan-becomes-fume-extractor/ | Big Server Fan Becomes Fume Extractor | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fan",
"fume extractor",
"fumes"
] | [Anthony Kouttron] wanted a fume extractor for his personal electronics lab, but he didn’t like the look of the cheap off-the-shelf units that he found. Ultimately, he figured it couldn’t be that hard to build own
portable fume extractor
instead.
The build is based around
a mighty 110-watt centrifugal fan
from an IBM server that’s rated at approximately 500 CFM. It’s a hefty unit, and it should be, given that it retails at over $200 on DigiKey. [Anthony] paired this fan with off-the-shelf HEPA and activated carbon filters. These are readily available from a variety of retailers. He didn’t want to DIY that part of the build, as the filter selection is critical to ensuring the unit actually captures the bad stuff in the air. He ended up building a custom power supply for the 12-volt fan, allowing it to run from common drill batteries for practicality’s sake.
Few of us have need for such a beefy fume extractor on the regular. Indeed, many hobbyists choose to ignore the risk from soldering or 3D printing fumes. Still, for those that want a beefy fume extractor they can build themselves, it might be worth looking over [Anthony]’s initial work.
We’ve seen some other great DIY fume extractors before, too.
Even those that use drill batteries!
If you’ve been cooking up your own solution, don’t hesitate to drop us a line! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759338",
"author": "Anthony Kouttron",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T20:26:15",
"content": "Neat to see this project here! It’s currently changed a bunch since I last updated this article (1yr ago) and the PCB has been completely redesigned. The one I posted was a proof of concept. The ... | 1,760,371,916.670106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/pump-it-up-gets-homebew-gba-port-that-rocks/ | Pump It UpGets Homebrew GBA Port That Rocks | Lewin Day | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"game boy advance",
"gba",
"pump it up"
] | Pump It Up
is a popular music video game that hails from South Korea. It’s similar in vibe to
Dance Dance Revolution
and
In The Groove
, but it has an extra arrow panel to make life harder.
[Rodrigo Alfonso] loved it so much, he ported it to the Game Boy Advance.
The port looks fantastic, with all the fast-moving arrows and lovely sprite-based graphics you could dream of. But more than that, [Rodrigo’s] port is very fully featured. It doesn’t rely on tracked or sampled music, instead using actual GSM audio files for the songs.
It can also accept input from a PS/2 keyboard, and you can even do multiplayer over the GBA’s Wireless Adapter. What’s even cooler is that some of the game’s neat features have been broken out into separate libraries so other developers can use them. If you need a
Serial Port library
for the GBA, or a way to
read the SD card
on flash carts, [Rodrigo] has put the code on GitHub.
As you might have guessed, this
isn’t the first time [Rodrigo] has pushed the limits
on what Nintendo’s 32-bit handheld can do. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759325",
"author": "Erik",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T19:32:48",
"content": "Ahem, homebrew, not homebew",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6759376",
"author": "Akane",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T23:24:23",
"content": "Jus... | 1,760,371,916.254095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/16/displayport-hacking-and-examples/ | DisplayPort: Hacking And Examples | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to"
] | [
"display port",
"displayport",
"engineering"
] | So far, I’ve talked about
why DisplayPort is the future,
introduced the basics of
how to work with it on the hacker level,
took apart
and
tamed the DisplayPort altmode,
and recently, went through the eDP (embedded DisplayPort) display technology. This time, I want to give you a project library to reference, so that your hacking goes as smoothly as possible – real-world examples of open-source DisplayPort boards, a few boards I’ve worked on, part numbers, and whatever other information you might need.
Even this wonderful build is not immune from wasting power on unnecessary video conversion
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that a non-zero amount of cyberdeck builders buy eDP screens with HDMI converter boards on Aliexpress, then connect them to SBCs using USB-C to HDMI adapters, or ignore the onboard eDP port; even
this super cool Framework-based cyberdeck
has done that! I get that it’s the simplest option, but I do believe that you ought to know how to improve it. The issue is that this double-conversion decreases the battery life significantly by burning two extra ASICs doing video conversion back and forth. Every hour of battery life matters in a cyberdeck, doubly so if it’s based on a low-power device already – you could easily cut your battery life in half if you’re not careful!
With these projects and references in your arsenal, my aim is that DisplayPort becomes way more comfortable for you to work with. Thankfully, there are quite a few projects to reference by now – let’s delve in.
Right out of the gate – are you looking for an SBC with DisplayPort support? The BoardDB website, a database of single-board computers,
has a DisplayPort filter – click this link
with the filter already enabled and browse through.
Gateway Tablets
Perhaps the most omnipresent open-source DisplayPort project is the Adafruit adapter for iPad Retina displays. When iPad Retina displays became available to hackers, as far as I can tell,
it was [Andrzej] who discovered
that they were using the eDP interface, and figured out that you could easily convert it to DisplayPort. Eventually, that led to
Adafruit making an adapter board
they could mass-produce – which is one of the best outcomes for such an idea! We’ve seen proprietary boards for these displays being sold since then, even with USB-C DP altmode support – but
the Adafruit board is open-source,
which makes for a way better start, more so given they have cool tutorials to go with it.
I hereby pronounce this “ramen routing”.
There’s many things you can learn from this board, and some things you shouldn’t. Well, one thing you shouldn’t – the trace routing on the Adafruit board is seriously puzzling, even though it undeniably works. However, it gives you an example on how to drive a bare backlight – something you still might have to do when it comes to tablet displays. Oh, and there’s an ATTiny for managing the PWM input of the backlight driver, and a few buttons – if you’re making your own eDP adapter and you need a backlight driver controller, you could do worse than
yanking their ATTiny firmware and schematic.
Now, this has kickstarted a fair bit more eDP hacking – like
this Retina adapter
we’ve covered a few years ago, there’s been
other boards for other eDP displays,
too; and,
iPad screens
are
still
here
and available for purchase. The bottom line is that wiring up an eDP display is easy, and it might make your cyberdeck all that more practical. Now, a Raspberry Pi with a DisplayPort connection would be awesome to have, but I suppose RPF’s allegiance to Broadcom’s allegiance to HDMI makes it unlikely – until someone figures out an accessible and Pi-compatible DSI-DP converter, or at least, I can dream.
Laptop Panel Handling And Connectors
Here’s something I no longer have to dream about –
an adapter from DisplayPort to different eDP connectors,
that [WifiCable] and I have recently designed. Remember – eDP displays only use two different connectors, and, there’s an abundance of FPC-to-eDP cables on Aliexpress and other Eastern marketplaces, so you might only need to add an FFC connector onto your board. As for pinouts, this adapter supports four different eDP pinouts with three connectors, including the pinout of the Asus ROG Ally display, and it handles touch-enabled displays too.
Since the DP signal goes to three connectors at once, there’s some suboptimal stubs involved, but it’s an experimental enough board that I’m not particularly worried. The capacitors are added inline, but can be bypassed with 0 Ω jumpers if you so desire – as I’ve been saying, footprints are free. And, this board is currently untested – we’ve only just ordered it and will be assembling it within like a month. That said, I’m open-sourcing it now – it has enough work put in that it’ll already be useful. Also, in the near future, I plan to convert the DisplayPort socket to a USB-C port with DP altmode support, and use the existing USB-C socket for charging input – that will be a fun adventure!
From this board’s files, you can get things like the eDP panel pinouts you can copy-paste into your KiCad project, as well as footprint and symbol for a DisplayPort connector. Now, to be clear, we got the footprint and symbol from LCSC. You can find DisplayPort sockets on Mouser and Digikey, but LCSC is that much cheaper.
Actually locating DisplayPort parts on LCSC is tricky, but gets way easier after you follow some simple rules. First rule is – don’t only check
the DisplayPort category,
since manufacturers seem to often ignore it; check
the D-Sub/VGA connector category,
too. Second rule is – do not touch absolutely any filters, make sure all of them are disabled – you have to do this because filters on LCSC are deeply broken; the only thing you can touch is “In Stock”, so only check that. Third rule is – set “items per page” to 100, for your own sanity’s sake. Maybe complain to them so that they bring back the 500 option, because I’m personally tired of doing that, only for them to again limit it back to 100 a month later.
Absolutely do not touch any of these filters
, as much as they are tempting – unless you want half of all products to disappear from the search results.
Also, here’s
a DisplayPort socket
on LCSC,
and another
,
and another
, and here’s
a miniDisplayPort socket;
please don’t buy them all out, thanks. There’s no shortage of chips either, just that they can be a bit tricky to find. For instance, do you want high-speed muxes? Here’s two independent KiCad projects who do DisplayPort “one port to many ports” KVM-style muxing;
this one just does DP
and
this one also supports USB.
It’s no MST, but if you want to switch between screens or DisplayPort sources, it’s a pretty viable solution! In general, if you
look up
"AUX+" kicad
in the GitHub search bar,
you can find out about some fun boards, and even
find ICs
you might’ve otherwise missed
.
As an aside, if your DP transmitter does DP++,
the MXM immobilizer project
from [WifiCable] gives you a reference implementation that supports both DisplayPort and HDMI/DVI backwards compatibility mode on your connector. This one has been taken from working laptop schematics; that said, this design hasn’t been tested.
This PCIe-MXM design
was tested, though, and even though the license is super restrictive, you should still be able to check schematics, especially if you go to the commit before the author deleted the KiCad port of this adapter.
USB-C DP Altmode And Motherboard Hacking
Here’s another design you can make use of:
a USB-C to eDP converter.
I’ve recently been finishing bringup of this board, and while I got a little stuck on making the firmware perfect before making it actually work, the AUX connection has indeed after bodging two resistors onto it, which are now integrated into the design. The only area yet unexplored are the main DP lanes, which, I’m sure, have no problems at all and will work wonderfully first try as soon as I figure out the right VDM (edit: I have since done more adapter bringup work and realized I’ve mixed up the main lanes, a fix has already been pushed to the repo). I’ve partially covered this design in
the Altmode Taming article
and talked some about DisplayPort USB-C muxes, but I haven’t published it yet at that point, and that was long overdue, so here you go.
Really, the main things you can borrow from here is the mux implementation, and USB-C to DisplayPort routing if you’re fancy. However, there’s also the connector being used – it’s a nice one. If the connector doesn’t look familiar, that’s because it’s the connector used on the Framework laptop, for the KVM conversion mode that I’ve been working on. The Framework’s eDP connector is overall pretty capable – four lanes *and* touchscreen connection, all within just 40 pins! It’s capable enough that even
system76’s Virgo,
a WIP
open-source laptop design
, appears to use it; that said,
they’ve confused the polarity
because of Framework’s initially confusing data, so I hope they take note of this whenever they resume work.
This connector may look tricky to solder onto your board, what’s with the pads being fully hidden, and it is tricky to both solder and repair, but it’s a pretty suitable choice if you are decent at stenciling. Also, thanks to Framework as of recently,
you can buy their cables separately
– they’re locked into the 40-pin high-res pinout and you can’t easily change that, but you could definitely add an adapter if needed. If you’re looking for a fancy connector that still supports more hobbyist-oriented soldering methods, however, a good middle ground is using the I-PEX connector that eDP laptop displays themselves use, and then finding a male-male cable with microcoax wires on either Aliexpress or Digikey.
This is the way to layout the Framework-style eDP connector, even if the pinout might have you believe otherwise. Alternatively, the FFC connectors remain very much an option.
Framework’s connector is the connector you will want to use if you want to connect an arbitrary display to a Framework mainboard, too, and it’s not easy to make custom cables for it. That’s not an uncommon situation – some of the SBCs with DisplayPort in the SBC database list I’ve linked, will too have it on a connector that ain’t easy to work with; watch out! Fortunately, even here, you could use the Framework’s cable, plug it into the Framework motherboard, and
put an I-PEX 40-pin high-res pinout socket
on your adapter board – that’s what I’m currently doing for a small and yet-unfinished project of mine.
Otherwise
, if you need the touchscreen signals that Framework cable doesn’t pass through, you could
do a breakout
with a male-male cable;
as long as you’re okay spending $50 on a cable,
that is.
DisplayPort is not always faultless – for instance, you might find out that your SBC’s DisplayPort driver has not been tested with lane widths less than four,
as [Timon] found out
during
the [Damn Linux Tablet] project.
Nevertheless, if you connect a random eDP display to a random eDP device, due to the auto-discovery mechanism over AUX being a link requirement, it’s highly likely to just work – as opposed to the old LVDS days; and, making hardware for DisplayPort is seriously easy.
Capacitors, Resistors, And PDFs
When you see some of the open-source boards, you might see series capacitors, perhaps, even pullup or pulldown resistors on the AUX line, too. They’re something I ought to have expanded upon in
the Under The Hood installment
, but the second best time is to do it now, before the boards might leave you confused. An official DisplayPort spec will help with both of these – you can find it easily enough by looking up
DP-1.2.pdf
; I couldn’t find higher version specs PDF names for you since they’re not public. There’s no spec for embedded DisplayPort that I could find, and it’d be wonderful to take a look, so if someone has it handy, please do let me know!
You need series capacitors for both the AUX link (1.2 spec page 329) and the main link pairs (page 362); range is 75 to 200 nF, so regular 100 nF will do. The 0402 package is preferred, but 0603 is possible. Main link capacitors are only required on transmitter (source = upstream) end, but you can put them on the receiver (sink = downstream) end too if you’d like. Remember that stacking capacitors in series causes the overall capacitance to decrease in the same exact way that resistance decreases when you stack resistors in parallel, so you might not want to overdo it.
The AUX channel is a differential pair –
as you might remember,
it’s used for monitor parameter querying, link training, configuration, and things like audio. Just like USB2, it’s pseudodifferential – there’s resistors that sometimes have to be used for your device to be detected, or for the bus to be properly biased to work. The transmitter pulls AUX+ down and AUX- up to 3.3V, the receiver pulls AUX- up and AUX+ down. Oh, and remember HPD? It needs a 100k-ish pulldown on the device side (page 327).
Do you need either capacitors or resistors for a regular DP adapter? Likely not – a DisplayPort source will integrate them, and your display might, too. However, they might be useful if you’re working on a USB-C adapter or adding muxes to the equation, and it helps to know that they’re sometimes required.
All in all, DisplayPort is a great option for your displays, and it’s one you deserve to be able to work with – there’s no shortage of DisplayPort hardware around us. May these designs and references help you in your own DisplayPort forays, no matter what you might be building.
I thank [WifiCable] for help in compiling the materials and links for this article! | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6759298",
"author": "Steve M.",
"timestamp": "2024-05-16T17:41:11",
"content": "Comprehensive Article. Unfortunately there are no cheap DP capture solutions, or are there? Probably adapting to HDMI is the cheapest way.On a slightly related note, I recently (ab)used cheap ($8) USB 3.... | 1,760,371,916.616168 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/breadboardos-a-command-line-interface-for-the-pico/ | BreadboardOS, A Command Line Interface For The Pico | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"breadboardos",
"os",
"pi pico",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | Operating systems! They’re everywhere these days, from your smart TV to your smartphone. And even in your microcontrollers!
Enter BreadboardOS for the Raspberry Pi Pico.
BreadboardOS is built on top of FreeRTOS. It’s aim is to enable quick prototyping with the Pi Pico. Don’t confuse operating system with a graphical environment — BreadboardOS is command-line based. You’d typically interface with it via a serial terminal emulator, but joy of joys, it does support color!
Using BreadboardOS is a little different than typical microcontroller development. Creating an application involves adding a “service” which is basically a task in FreeRTOS parlance. The OS handles running your service for you. Via the text interface, you can query running services, and start or kill them at will.
Meanwhile, running
df
will happily give you stats on the flash usage of the Pi Pico, and free will tell you how full the memory is doing. If you really want to get raw, you can make calls to control GPIO pins, the SPI hardware, or other peripherals, and do it right on the command line.
BreadboardOS isn’t for everyone, but it could prove a useful tool if you like that way of doing things.
It’s not the only OS out there for the Pi Pico, either! | 25 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758941",
"author": "Le Gru",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T06:18:48",
"content": "That looks awesome.Everything is better with a CLI.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6759297",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2024-... | 1,760,371,916.398312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/the-perfect-desktop-kit-for-experimenting-with-self-driving-cars/ | The Perfect Desktop Kit For Experimenting With Self Driving Cars | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"machine learning",
"R/C car"
] | When we think about self-driving cars, we normally think about big projects measured in billions of dollars, all funded by major automakers. But you can still dive into this world on a smaller scale,
as [jmoreno555] demonstrates.
The build consists of a small RC car—an HSP 94123, in fact. It’s got a simple brushed motor inside, driven by a conventional speed controller, and servo-driven steering. A Raspberry Pi 4 is charged with driving the car, but it’s not alone. It’s outfitted with a Google Coral USB stick, which is a machine learning accelerator card capable of 4 trillion operations per second. The car also has a Wemos D1 onboard, charged with interfacing distance sensors to give the car a sense of its environment. Vision is courtesy of a 1.2-megapixel camera with a 160-degree lens, and a stereoscopic camera with twin 75-degree lenses. Software-wise, it’s early days yet. [jmoreno555] is exploring the use of Python and OpenCV to implement basic lane detection and other self driving routines, while using Blender as a simulator.
The real magic idea, though, is the treadmill. [jmoreno555] realized that one of the frustrations of working in this space is in having to chase a car around a test track. Instead, the use of a desktop treadmill allows the car to be programmed and debugged with less fuss in the early stages of development.
If you’re looking for a platform to experiment with AI and self-driving, this could be an project to dive in to.
We’ve covered some other great builds in this space, too.
Meanwhile, if you’ve cracked driving autonomy and want to let us know,
our tipsline
is always standing by! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758954",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T07:24:36",
"content": "Would be nice to try this with an Orange Pi 5 which has a built-in NPU capable of 6 Tops.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,916.476341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/vibrating-braille-display-is-portable/ | Vibrating Braille Display Is Portable | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"braille",
"vibration motor"
] | Smartphones are an integral part of life, but what if you can’t see the screen? There is text-to-speech available, but that’s not always handy and can be slow. It also doesn’t help users who can’t hear or see. Refreshable braille devices are also available, but they are expensive and not very convenient to use. [Bmajorspin] proposed a different method and built
a prototype braille device
that worked directly with a cell phone. The post admits that as the device stands today, it isn’t a practical alternative, but it does work and is ripe for future development to make it more practical.
The device saves costs and increases reliability by using six vibration motors to represent the six dots of a braille cell. However, this leads to an important issue. The motor can’t directly mount to the case because you have to feel each one vibrating individually. A spring mounting system ensures that each motor only vibrates the tactile actuator it is supposed to. However, the system isn’t perfect, and fast output is difficult to read due to the spread of vibrations.
The whole thing sits in a magnetic case and connects to the phone for power. The data is sent via Bluetooth (BLE, actually, in this version). The electronics are simple: just some basic motor drivers and an Arduino. Slowing them down might make the vibrations easier to manage, and that might be an idea for the next version.
Overall, this seems like a good idea that maybe needs a bit of refinement. The post ends with several ideas for future development.
This made us think of a system we saw that
requires no contact at all
. Even machines can learn to
read braille
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758879",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T23:30:10",
"content": "Bravo!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6758899",
"author": "Andrew Singleton",
"timestamp": "2024-05-15T01:13:40"... | 1,760,371,916.160593 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/3d-print-a-drill-powered-helicopter-toy-because-its-simply-fun/ | 3D Print A Drill-Powered Helicopter Toy Because It’s Simply Fun | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"heli",
"heli toy",
"helicopter",
"toy"
] | These days, you can get a fully remote-control helicopter that you can fly around your house for about $30. Maybe less. Back in the day, kids had to make do with far simpler toys, like spinning discs that just flew up in the air. [JBV Creative] has built a toy just like that with his 3D printer.
It may be simple, but it also looks pretty darn fun.
The design is straightforward. It uses a power drill to spin up a geartrain, which in turn drives a small disc propeller. Spin the propeller fast enough and it’ll launch high into the air. The geartrain mounts to the drill via the chuck, and it interfaces with the propeller with a simple toothed coupler. Alternatively, there’s also a hand-cranked version if you don’t have a power drill to hand.
Launching is easy. First, the drill spins the propeller up to speed. Then, when the drill’s trigger is released, it slows down, and the propeller spins free of the toothed coupler, with the lift it generates carrying it into the sky.
Files are available online
for those interested. We could imagine this toy could make the basis for a great design competition. Students could compete to optimise the design with more effective gear ratios or better airfoils.
We’ve seen similar designs before, too
. Video after the break. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758881",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T23:32:00",
"content": "When I saw the Title Photo, I wondered what Napoleon Dynamite had been up to since the movie was released.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,916.203683 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/pcb-design-review-hdmi-to-lvds-sony-vaio-lcd-devboard/ | PCB Design Review: HDMI To LVDS Sony Vaio LCD Devboard | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"PCB Hacks",
"Skills"
] | [
"design review",
"hdmi",
"lvds"
] | Today, we revisit another board from [Exentio] – a HDMI/DVI to LVDS transmitter for the Sony Vaio P display. This board is cool to review – it has a high-speed serial interface, a parallel interface, a healthy amount of power distribution that can be tricky to route, and many connectors to look over.
I’ve decided to show this review to you all because it demonstrates a PCB improvement concept we haven’t yet touched upon, that you should absolutely know about when doing board layout. Plus, I get a chance to talk about connector choice considerations!
The board is lovely. It integrates the DPI-LVDS circuit
we’ve previously reviewed,
but also a HDMI to parallel RGB chip from Texas Instruments, TFP401, a chip appreciated enough that
even Adafruit has adapters with it.
The fun thing about this chip is that it doesn’t even handle EDID like the usual HDMI to RGB/LVDS chips you get on cheap Aliexpress boards. So, there’s no firmware to take care of – it just receives a HDMI/DVI signal, converts it into parallel RGB, then converts that to LVDS, and off to the display it goes. The downside is that you have to provide your own EDID with an EEPROM, but that isn’t that tricky.
Again, this is a two-layer board, and, again, I like this – fitting tracks to the smallest possible space is a respectable and enjoyable challenge. This board has absolutely done well by this challenge. I do see how this board could be routed in an even better way, however, and it could be way way cleaner as a result. For a start, rotating the chip would improve the odds a whole lot.
The Chip Gets Rotated
When doing silicon layout, engineers generally try and make the resulting chip pinout as sensible as possible. There can be exceptions, of course. This rule means that there’s usually a single easy way to lay out a chip, and a few hard ways. You have to look at the pinout, try to notice the pin groups, and see how they align with your peripherals. Ignore this at your own peril.
The TFP401 chip has HDMI on one side and parallel RGB pins on the other. This board, however, currently has the chip rotated in a way that disadvantages the layout. This is an easy mistake to do initially – thankfully, even when the design is already finished, rotating the chip and rerouting it can pay off!
If you reroute this kind of board, not only you are more likely to get a functioning board, considering the high-speed signals, you’re also training yourself to distinguish good and subpar chip rotations as you’d be rerouting. In other words, it’s the kind of refactoring that makes you say “wow, that was way easier than the first time around”.
Lift, Clean Up, Rotate, Behold
To do the reroute, just, take the chip, “lift it up” with
M
and move it off the board. See the grey thin wires? They’re called ratsnest wires, and using them is the best way you can notice rotation issues. Seriously, the ratsnest wires are underrated in noticing such issues before they bite you. Let’s clean the chip’s surroundings up. First, see those capacitor groups? Move them away too, all the power pins are changing their locations anyway, we’ll reposition them later.
Box select the signal traces that previously went to the chip, and press `Shift+Del` to completely delete them from beginning to end – on this board, this is the quickest way to get to a quickly routable space. Every trace that went to the chip is now gone, and every unrelated trace stays. Make sure there’s a healthy amount of space between the chip and the HDMI port, but also between it and the DPI-LVDS converter – more or less the same center position is fine here.
Look at the picture above. Using the ratsnest wires, you can instantly notice which trace groups you will need to flip and which you won’t. In this case, as you might notice, you will need to flip like, three out of four? No matter, because all of them will be easy, even the HDMI pairs.
Speaking about HDMI, before routing, I will replace the THT signal pin HDMI connector with an SMT signal pin one. They’re way, way nicer to layout – the through-hole staggered pins mean that you have to run two of the diffpairs around the connector shell. Plus, they’re cheaper and easier to source too. [Exentio] picked this connector for expected sturdiness and solderability, and that is a valid choice, I’m just prioritizing ease of layout and easier sourcing.
Reroute Time
With HDMI, not only is the order flipped, but the pair polarity is also flipped. Still, there are multiple things you could do here. You could flip the connector onto the opposite side of the board, or use a HDMI connector that’s flipped (harder to source but not impossible), or try to re-route the diffpairs as they are now. I’ll do the last one, since it’s the most fun one.
Here’s my take. This is draft routing, without any calculated trace impedance, because this is a 2-layer board and we’re winging it. Still, I’m trying to give this routing some love – not that HDMI would ever love me back, I just think that this board working on the first try is a good goal to strive for, and HDMI can be sensitive. Pair length is also kind of matched between the pairs – they’re all 23 mm +- 2 mm, good enough. By the way, KiCad 8 has added a new feature where you can check track length by simply pressing 7 (8 for diffpairs) and then hovering over tracks – inter-pair length matching is now the easiest it’s ever felt!
Now, what’s left is three bundles of parallel wires (R/G/B) and four individual tracks (EN/CLKIN/HSYNC/VSYNC) going to the DPI-LVDS chip. Since all four individual tracks are on the DPI-LVDS chip corners, I’ve decided that the parallel RGB pairs will go in the middle and the tracks will go around them. The biggest problem is flipping the bundles – you can do that under the HDMI chip or under the LVDS chip, I did it under the HDMI chip because it felt like there was just enough space there.
Here you can see how the three bundles progressed. They’re nice and tight, with some ground fills between the separate bundles and accompanying the wires. I’ve had to move the first bundle once to make room for flipping the last one, but other than that, things fit surprisingly nicely. The bundles don’t intersect each other’s paths, and that helps. If they did, I would probably consider rotating the DPI-LVDS chip together with the LVDS connector.
There are some other small tweaks too. I’ve moved the EDID EEPROM towards the HDMI I2C header at the bottom, only leaving the HPD pullup near the HDMI connector. The near-connector position is also a valid choice, I just wanted to do via-less routing of I2C as much as possible, and moving the EEPROM helped. Oh, and I’ve moved the LVDS connector to the right a bit – that let me route LVDS better, which, in turn, let me actually connect the DPI-LVDS chip’s 3.3 V pins.
Power Pin Routing
This is the thing you might get stuck on, at some point. The chip has whole four different groups of power pins – one direct 3.3 V input, and three separate 3.3 V inputs that you’re supposed to feed through Pi filters, for a cleaner power supply for all your analog needs. Use the “ (~)` key to highlight all four power nets of the chip – here’s how it will look.
OVDD
AVDD
DVDD
I’d describe these as annoying, but they’re still routable. First, break apart the nice cap groups for the four rails – they’re nice visually, but they’re not great for power delivery. Remember – one capacitor per IC power pin is the platonic ideal, and each of these capacitors has to actually be placed close to a power pin, with a short path to ground too.
OVDD
AVDD
DVDD
I started with the 3.3V feed, and then placed a couple of ferrites to nearby power rails. Then, I went through each of the power rails, starting with the simplest, pulling power tracks where it seemed viable. In the end, I could place all the ferrites near the actual 3.3V supply point. A 3.3V power plane could be fun on this board, and would probably be very much called for if we wanted to do FCC testing for this board, but for now, it’s not required.
Long story short, here’s the “rest of the owl” pictures. Remember – for power tracks, wherever you can make them thicker, make them thicker. They will drop all that less voltage, and they will look like dedicated power tracks, too. Also, don’t forget about GND! Highlight the GND net, then make sure that each GND point has a via directly near it, going to the bottom layer ground plane, with ground now even more abundant than before.
After this layout was done, there were only cosmetic fixes left. Things like trace keepout that I’m still maintaining, feeding 3.3 V everywhere it was called for. I suppose I would add a 5 V to 3.3 V linear regulator footprint onto this board, just because it would make bringup much easier, but it’s such a small change that it could even be bodged onto this PCB later with little hassle. This board is, all things considered, wonderfully hackable already.
“Before” picture for comparison
Closing Statement
Here’s the end result of the board re-layout. It’s even cleaner than before, with improvements to both high-speed tracks and power distribution, and I hope it’s been a fun example about rotating your chips properly, something you could reasonably overlook on a board of yours.
As an outro to this review, here’s some good news. That DPI-LVDS board
we’ve reviewed last time?
It works! Which means that the DPI and LVDS parts of this HDMI-LVDS board should also work. Nothing is fundamentally broken to the best of our perception, [Exentio] has designed
a working RPi config,
and, as such, one of the more challenging parts of the Sony Vaio rebuild design is now complete – we only need to tinker with the backlight now.
As usual, if you would like a design review for your board,
submit a tip
to us with [design review] in the title, linking to your board files. KiCad design files strongly preferred, both repository-stored files (GitHub/GitLab/etc) and shady Google Drive/Dropbox/etc .zip links are accepted. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758775",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T17:27:38",
"content": "i still miss the shortcut to change track thickness on the fly after routing. now you have to open a separate modal dialog to change them. or is there a shortcut for that?",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,371,916.332485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/the-alien-energy-crisis-solved/ | The Alien Energy Crisis Solved | Al Williams | [
"News"
] | [
"aliens",
"dyson sphere",
"space"
] | Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, humans have been searching for more energy. Especially lately, there has been a huge interest in wind, solar, geothermal, and other ways to capture and harness power. However, we have a huge power plant just eight light minutes away: our sun. Oh sure, we toy with solar power, but the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth or even Earth orbit is a tiny fraction of Sol’s total output. But what if you could capture nearly all of the sun’s output? Scientists think that maybe — just maybe —
they’ve detected 60 new extraterrestrial civilizations doing just that
. At least, that’s what it could be.
[Freeman Dyson] popularized the idea of a Dyson sphere, an artificial sphere surrounding a sun to capture the maximum amount of energy, back in 1960. However, the idea is older and usually credited to [Olaf Stapledon]’s 1937 novel
Star Maker
. While most people think the sphere would be solid, [Dyson] himself thought it would be a swarm of disjointed collectors owing to the difficulty in creating a solid shell of the required size.
Both SETI and Fermilab have searched for what is thought to be telltale infrared radiation that scientists think would emanate from a star surrounded by spheres or swarms. Several have been located, but there is no conclusive evidence.
The new 60 were identified by analyzing data from the Gaia satellite. Again, the evidence is not conclusive, but small and dim stars that are very bright in infrared can’t be explained by conventional explanations. One way to explain at least some of the stars would be if about 16% of the star was obscured by something like a swarm of Dyson sphere collectors.
There are, of course, more jejune explanations possible. For example, the star might happen to be in front of some more distant IR source. Still, it is tantalizing to think there may be more than 60 high-tech civilizations out there either waiting to meet us or, perhaps, waiting to eat us, depending on how paranoid you are. | 48 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758752",
"author": "Chris Waldrip",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T16:28:12",
"content": "Any civilizations capable of building and utilizing one or more Dyson spheres would look at us like we look at the first mammals after the dinosaurs were wiped out. Cute, full of potential, but of n... | 1,760,371,916.555532 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/supercon-2023-building-the-ultimate-apple-iie-decades-later/ | Supercon 2023: Building The Ultimate Apple IIe, Decades Later | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"apple",
"apple iie",
"Mega II"
] | The Apple II was launched in 1977, a full 47 years ago. The Apple IIe came out six years later, with a higher level of integration and a raft of new useful features. Apple eventually ended production of the whole Apple II line in 1993, but that wasn’t the end. People like [James Lewis] are still riffing on the platform to this day. Even better,
he came to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about his efforts!
[James]’s talk covers the construction of the Mega IIe, a portable machine of his own design. As the name suggests, the project was based on the Mega II chip, an ASIC for which he had little documentation. He wasn’t about to let a little detail like that stop him, though.
The journey of building the Mega IIe wasn’t supposed to be long or arduous; the initial plan was to “just wire this chip up” as [James] puts it. Things are rarely so simple, but he persevered nonetheless—and learned all about the Apple II architecture along the way.
Simply Mega
For the unfamiliar, the Mega II contained most of Apple IIe, but condensed down to fit on to one single 84-pin ASIC. It first appeared in 1986, and was used in the Apple IIGS. The Mega II chip doesn’t contain a CPU, but does contain a lot of the supporting hardware that makes the Apple IIe what it is. The IOU, MMU, video and keyboard ROMs, and keyboard and mouse controller are all there.
[James] began his work with breadboards and plenty of flywires.
In theory, you could wire it up with a CPU, some RAM, and a ROM, and you’d have an Apple II. That sounded about right to [James], but as he would soon find out, the reality is more complicated. Had real documentation been available, he might have learned this sooner, but he was flying blind and stuck at it anyway.
[James]’s talk starts by dispelling some myths. The first is that the Mega II is a single-chip Apple II. His own build makes it obvious that’s not the case. Beyond that, he also notes that the Apple IIGS didn’t use the Mega II for backwards compatibility. It was instead used as a memory controller and for working with classic Apple II video modes and the expansion slots. He also states that the “Gemini” chip from the Macintosh LC Apple II card is not a Mega II, based on significant differences in registers and general design. He wanted to check on a rumor, too, that the chip was never finished, hence why it was just used as a basic controller in the Apple IIGS. To figure that out, he wanted to prove that you could build a functional Apple II using the Mega II chip salvaged from the IIGS.
Getting the boot sequence working at all was a challenge.
Early work went well. After spinning up a basic board with the Mega II and the necessary hardware, [James] was able to get a text video mode working. It spat out a lot of gibberish, but it was evidence that something was going on. The string “Apple ][” even appeared in the output!
It wasn’t smooth sailing from there, though. Months of debugging ensued, with a logic analyzer showing the “computer” he’d built was making seemingly random jumps all over the place rather than going through a normal boot process. He suspected it was because the chip wasn’t finished, but that wasn’t the case. Eventually, a friend suggested he check if one of the data bus lines was stuck. It turned out a stuck wire fragment on a solder pad was causing all of his problems. With that fixed, he made a huge leap forward. He saw the message appear—”KERNEL OK”. Success!
However, he still wasn’t at a prompt. He was stuck in a test routine, and didn’t have a fully fledged computer. Nonetheless, he knew this meant he was on the right path. If the test routine was behaving appropriately, it suggested the Mega II really did have most of an Apple II living inside it.
From there, the talk goes through the arduous work required to get this thing fully operational. He faced crash after crash as he tried to get a full boot to happen. Once he got that far, he had to try and go from a rat’s nest of wires and breadboards to something that wouldn’t fall apart every time he breathed on it. His final design has some neat features—like the way he built his own motherboard with a connector that let him plug his logic analyzer right in with a single connector.
Revision 2 used a multi-board design with headers used as backplane connectors.
By revision 2, he had the thing built up on a bunch of PCBs with header connectors, and it was even booting from floppy disks. The amount of work it took to get even this far was phenomenal. [James] didn’t just have to whip up a motherboard, he had to do all kinds of work to give the thing a working keyboard interface and the ability to read floppy disks. By this point, he’d realized that the supposed single chip solution that was the Mega II anything but. Beyond RAM, ROM, and a CPU, it also needed another custom ASIC called SlotMaker, and a keyboard controller. This chip is for handling expansion slots, but it also handles one important signal for the keyboard that makes it essential to the computer’s proper functioning. Frustrating stuff indeed. Other work involved producing video output over VGA and creating a working sound board.
The revision 3 board was neat and compact.
His third revision involved consolidating his multi-PCB solution into a working computer on a single PCB. A few mistakes cropped up in the board design, but it wasn’t enough to stop [James]. With a little creative bodging, he got the thing operational. He’d managed to build a working computer based around the Mega II ASIC.
He may not have been the first to build a Mega II into a working computer; [James] admits that the
prototype of the Tiger Learning Computer
from Tiger Electronics does serve as an existing example that the Mega II was usable as a fully-fledged machine. But he did manage to do it without any support or documentation from Apple at all. That’s no mean feat.
It’ll even run Prince of Persia!
Watching the talk, it’s easy to understand why the project took [James] several years to complete. It’s always neat to see someone set themself a difficult goal and follow through to completion. It’s also rad that [James] was able to teach us so much more about the Mega II that we never knew before. That’s worthy of celebration! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758819",
"author": "George White",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T19:09:34",
"content": "One of the best programs written for the //e was a program called Diversi-Dial.It was a 7 line chat system. 7 300 SSM Modemcards , or Micromodem ][e or AppleCat modems, and you had a system where use... | 1,760,371,916.440907 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/printable-keycaps-keep-the-alphasmart-neo-kicking/ | Printable Keycaps Keep The AlphaSmart NEO Kicking | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed keycaps",
"AlphaSmart",
"AlphaSmart NEO",
"keycaps"
] | Today schools hand out Chromebooks like they’re candy, but in the early 1990s, the idea of giving each student a laptop was laughable unless your zip code happened to be 90210. That said, there was an obvious advantage to giving students electronic devices to write with, especially if the resulting text could be easily uploaded to the teacher’s computer for grading. Seeing an opportunity, a couple ex-Apple engineers created the AlphaSmart line of portable word processors.
The devices were popular enough in schools that they remained in production until 2013, and since then, they’ve gained a sort of cult following by writers who value their incredible battery life, quality keyboard, and distraction-free nature. But keeping these old machines running with limited spare parts can be difficult, so earlier this year a challenge had been put out by the community to develop 3D printable replacement keys for the AlphaSmart — a challenge which
[Adam Kemp] and his son [Sam] have now answered
.
In an article
published on
KBD.news
, [Sam] documents the duo’s efforts to design the Creative Commons licensed keycaps for the popular Neo variant of the AlphaSmart. Those who’ve created printable replacement parts probably already know the gist of the write-up, but for the uninitiated, it boils down to measuring, measuring, and measuring some more.
Things were made more complicated by the fact that the keyboard on the AlphaSmart Neo uses seven distinct types of keys, each of which took their own fine tuning and tweaking to get right. The task ended up being a good candidate for parametric design, where a model can be modified by changing the variables that determine its shape and size. This was better than having to start from scratch for each key type, but the trade-off is that getting a parametric model working properly takes additional upfront effort.
A further complication was that, instead of using something relatively easy to print like the interface on an MX-style keycap, the AlphaSmart Neo keys snap onto scissor switches. This meant producing them with fused deposition modeling (FDM) was out of the question. The only way to produce such an intricate design at home was to use a resin MSLA printer. While the cost of these machines has come down considerably over the last couple of years,
they’re still less than ideal for creating functional parts
. [Sam] says getting their keycaps to work reliably on your own printer is likely going to involve some experimentation with different resins and curing times.
[Adam] tells us he originally saw the
call for printable AlphaSmart keycaps here on Hackaday
, and as we’re
personally big fans of the Neo around these parts
, we’re glad they took the project on. Their efforts may well help keep a few of these unique gadgets out of the landfill, and that’s always a win in our book. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758661",
"author": "alanrcam",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T12:12:49",
"content": "While the shape is good, there are no labels on the printed keycaps.You still need to sort that out yourself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6758... | 1,760,371,916.890663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/power-resistance-isnt-futile/ | Power Resistance Isn’t Futile | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"nichrome wire",
"power resistor"
] | As [Electronoobs] points out, everything has resistance. So, how hard can it be to make
a high-power resistor
? In the video below, he examines a commercial power resistor and how to make your own using nichrome wire.
Sure, in theory, you can use a long piece of wire, but normally, you want to minimize the amount of space occupied. This leads to winding the wire around some substrate. If you just wind the wire, though, you get an inductor. This can cause nasty voltage spikes when there is a change in current through the resistor. You can get “noninductive” wire wound resistors that use either two opposing windings or alternate the turn direction on each turn. This causes the magnetic fields to tend to cancel out, reducing the overall inductance.
Nichrome wire has more resistance per millimeter and can dissipate more power. Modern digital meters can measure the resistance of a wire if you account for the test leads. To make a substrate, [Electronoobs] got creative since he anticipated generating a lot of heat. The final product even uses water cooling.
Why do you want a big resistor? Maybe you need a dummy load, or you want to
drain some batteries
. If you want to
recycle nichrome wire
, it is much more common than you might expect. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758637",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T10:20:22",
"content": "They’re surprisingly complicated devices when you aim for the higher power levels and making them non inductive is kinda tricky if all you have is wire to work with.There are wirewounds that are specced up t... | 1,760,371,916.816012 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/github-hosts-ham-radio/ | GitHub Hosts Ham Radio | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"SI5351"
] | [Alex R2AUK] has been busy creating version two of a
homebrew all-band ham radio transceiver
. The unit has a number of features you don’t always see in homebrew radios. It covers the 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, and 10 meter bands. The receiver is a single-IF design with AGC. The transmitter provides up to 10W for CW and 5W for single sideband operations. There’s a built-in keyer, too. A lot of the
documentation
is in Russian (including the video below, which is part of a
playlist
). But translation tools are everywhere, so if you don’t speak Russian, you can still probably figure it out.
The VFO for both transmit and receive is an Si5351. The transmit chain is straightforward. The receiver reuses many of the same filters.
Like many projects these days, an attractive 3D-printed case gives the radio a polished look. If you prefer using a straight key to a keyer, the transmitter will use either. The microphone amplifier has built-in compression for good audio levels.
If you don’t want to roll your own, you can get
similar ham gear that is ready-built
. If you want to go minimal. we’ve seen a less-capable transceiver built
with only seven transistors
. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758635",
"author": "tyjtyjtyj",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T09:53:20",
"content": "Is possible send/receive digital data too?for example mesh network?speed more than DMR or wifi 7",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6758689",
... | 1,760,371,917.452559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/the-new-extremely-large-telescopes-and-the-us-waning-influence-in-astronomy/ | The New Extremely Large Telescopes And The US’ Waning Influence In Astronomy | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"astronomy",
"telescope"
] | For many decades, the USA has been at the forefront of astronomy, whether with ground-based telescopes or space-based observatories like Hubble and the JWST. Yet this is now at risk as US astronomers are forced to choose between funding either the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) or the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) as part of the US Extremely Large Telescope (USELT) program. This rightfully has the presidents of Carnegie Science and Caltech – [Eric D. Isaacs] and [Thomas F. Rosenbaum] respectively – upset, with
their opinion piece
in the
Los Angeles Times
going over all the reasons why
this funding cut
is a terrible idea.
The slow death of US astronomy is perhaps best exemplified by the slow death and eventual collapse of
the Arecibo radio telescope
. Originally constructed as a Cold War era ICBM detector, it found grateful use by radio astronomers, but saw constant budget cuts and decommissioning threats. After Arecibo’s collapse, it’s now China with its FAST telescope that has mostly taken the limelight. In the case of optical telescopes, the EU’s own
ELT
is expected to be online in 2028, sited close to the
GMT
in the Atacama desert. The
TMT
would be sited in Hawai’i.
Of note is also that the TMT and GMT are both not solely US-funded at this point in time, but rather a partnership with a range of other nations, including Australia, Chile, South Korea, China, Canada, Japan, India and others. Even if the US only contributes funds to either telescope, the other partners may decide to pick up the slack, however the TMT project is currently in dire straits as the selected site on Mauna Kea has run into severe local resistance. This may force the TMT project to be sited elsewhere.
GMT and ESO’s ELT would seem to overlap significantly in terms of functionality and observed parts of the sky, making the TMT perhaps the most useful choice for US astronomers if they cannot have both. No matter what choice is made, however, it’ll mean more US budget cuts for astronomy and more US astronomers having to schedule observation time at EU and Asian observatories. Ultimately the USA as the guiding star in astronomy may significantly diminish, along with the positive effects of this status in the scientific community. | 54 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758588",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T03:37:35",
"content": "Now this is a bit weird. The Magellan is somewhere halfway construction, while the 30m is in some planning state. It seems unlikely that construction of the Magellan is being started before financing has ... | 1,760,371,917.29217 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/broken-lens-provides-deep-dive-into-camera-repair/ | Broken Lens Provides Deep Dive Into Camera Repair | Dan Maloney | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"diagnostic",
"fuse",
"lens",
"sigma",
"smd"
] | While most of us are probably willing to pick up the tools and void the warranty on just about anything, often just to see what’s inside, many of us draw the line at camera gear. The tiny screws, the complex mechanisms, and the easily destroyed optical elements are all enough to scare off the average hacker. Not so for [Anthony Kouttron], who
tore into a broken eBay Sigma lens and got it working again
.
Now, to be fair, modern lenses tend to have a lot more in them that’s amenable to repair than back in the old days. And it seemed from the get-go that [Anthony]’s repair was going to be more electronic than optical or mechanical. The 45-mm lens was in fantastic shape physically, but wouldn’t respond to any controls when mounted to a camera body. Removing the lens bayonet mount exposed the main controller PCB, which is tightly packed with SMD components and connectors for the flex cables that burrow further into the lens to its many sensors and actuators. By probing traces with his multimeter, [Anthony] found a DC-DC converter on the main PCB with an unknown component nearby. This turned out to be an SMD fuse, and as luck would have it, it was open. Replacing the fuse got the lens working again, and while there’s always the nagging suspicion that whatever blew the fuse the first time could happen again, the repair seems to have worked.
Despite the simplicity of the fix, [Anthony] continued the teardown and shared a lot of tips and tricks for lens repairs, including where he would have looked next if the fuse had been good. One tip we loved was the use of double-sided tape to organize parts as they’re removed; this is particularly important with camera gear where screws or different lengths can make for a really bad day on reassembly.
Feeling the need to dive deeper into lens repair?
This step-by-step repair
should keep you satisfied. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758559",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-14T00:41:35",
"content": "The only notable camera repair that I have done was to replace the solenoid in my Pentax K-something. Fortunately, I had instructions from those who had done it before me.",
... | 1,760,371,917.585283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/gps-at-any-speed/ | GPS At Any Speed | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"gps hacks"
] | [
"gps",
"speedometer"
] | [Mellow_Labs] was asked to create a
GPS speedometer
. It seems simple, but of course, the devil is in the details. You can see the process and the result in the video below.
We have to admit that he does things step-by-step. The first step was to test the GPS module’s interface. Then, he tried computing the speed from it and putting the result on a display. However, testing in the field showed that the display was not suitable for outdoor use.
That prompted another version with an OLED screen. Picking the right components is critical. It struck us that you probably need a fast update rate from the GPS, too, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
The other issue is, of course, that you have to have a GPS lock for this to work. Inside the urban canyon, you might be better served with a different method. You might think about an accelerometer, but while that’s easy in theory (velocity is the integration of acceleration), in practice, errors and other issues make that a tough way to do it.
The project wraps up with a nice case and some special display modes. We were sorry that the code and STLs were available “on request,” but you’d probably do it differently anyway. This isn’t the first
GPS speedometer we’ve seen
. Ever wonder
how fast your dog is going
? | 39 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758462",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T20:10:11",
"content": "Just put a magnet on the wheel, and time it with a hall effect sensor. If you know the wheel diameter, you know the speed.Had a simple setup like this as a kid, probably was like 20$ or so. Used an lcd scr... | 1,760,371,917.52897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/sandwizz-promises-to-reinvent-the-breadboard/ | Sandwizz Promises To Reinvent The Breadboard | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"breadboard",
"jumperless",
"prototyping"
] | The solderless breadboard is perhaps the electronic hobbyist’s most commonly used tool, but let’s be honest, it isn’t exactly anyone’s favorite piece of gear. Even if you’ve got an infinite supply of jumpers in
just
the right size, any mildly complex circuit quickly becomes a nightmare to plan out and assemble. To say nothing of the annoyance of trying to track down an intermittent glitch, only to find you’ve got a loose wire someplace…
The
Sandwizz Breadboard
hopes to address those problems, and more, by turning the classic breadboard into a high-tech electronics prototyping platform. The Sandwizz not only includes an integrated power supply capable of providing between 1.8 and 5 volts DC, but also features an array of integrated digital and analog components. What’s more, the programmable connection system lets you virtually “wire” the internal and external components instead of wresting with jumper wires.
To configure the Sandwizz, you just need to connect to the device’s serial interface with your favorite terminal emulator and work your way through its text-based menus. You can also export a netlist file from your KiCad schematic and upload it into the board to make all the necessary connections automatically. This lets you make the leap from concept to physical prototype in literally seconds.
Jumperless in all its RGB LED glory.
If all this sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because the Sandwizz clearly
has a lot in common with the Jumperless
. Created by [Kevin Santo Cappuccio], Jumperless uses an array of analog crosspoint switches to connect devices on the breadboard without the need for any jumpers (hence the name), and also uses a serial interface to configure the netlist. Jumperless uses RGB LEDs to indicate connections directly on the breadboard, and features some integrated analog and digital diagnostic tools, as well as the ability to take voltage and current measurements.
On paper it does sound like the Sandwizz offers some advantages over the Jumperless. The collection of onboard circuit components sounds very interesting, but the documentation seems pretty vague on what’s included. The expandability that lets you connect multiple Sandwizz boards together to create a larger workspace also looks nice, but depending on how much these things cost, having more than one might be a tall order for the average hobbyist.
But the biggest difference between the two is that the
Jumperless is open source hardware
and is
available for purchase right now
, while the Sandwizz is still working its way towards a Kickstarter currently scheduled for early June. The limited documentation and AI-voiced video below the break don’t exactly instill us with confidence, but to be fair, we can’t pass judgement on it until we can see how it works in the real-world. In the meantime, we’re interested to see where this new competition in the world of smart breadboards will take us.
Thanks to [paulvdh] for the tip. | 42 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758420",
"author": "f__",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T18:41:31",
"content": "At a first glance, the concept is attractive. However, I think it’s ultimately the wrong direction to go.The point of breadboards is physicality and understandability. I can see where connections go, I can mo... | 1,760,371,917.200189 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/the-art-of-hackaday-hack-chat/ | The Art Of Hackaday Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, May 15 at noon Pacific for the
The Art of Hackaday Hack Chat
with
Joe Kim
!
Here at Hackaday, we writers strive to bring you the freshest hacks and the best news from the world of engineering and science. When we miss the mark and make technical errors or stake out a controversial position on something, our readers will certainly let us know in the comments section. It’s a love-hate thing.
While we don’t always see eye to eye, there’s one thing that everyone seems to agree on: Hackaday’s art is amazing! Our unique look comes down to one man: art director Joe Kim. Joe’s creations have graced Hackaday’s pages for years, and his ability to come up with just the right art to illustrate subject matter that’s often complicated and abstract never ceases to amaze.
A lot of you have asked about Hackaday’s art over the years, so we asked Joe to come on the Hack Chat to talk about the process of creating these mini masterpieces. If you’ve ever wondered about the art of Hackaday, or just wanted to say thanks for the visual feast, here’s your chance.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758363",
"author": "Regent",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T16:10:29",
"content": "I love the illustrations, and often find myself wishing for a desktop version. Is there a public archive of them over the years?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,371,917.110313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/new-quadcopter-speed-world-record-set-at-nearly-500-km-h/ | New Quadcopter Speed World Record Set At Nearly 500 Km/h | Maya Posch | [
"drone hacks",
"News"
] | [
"quadcopter",
"world record",
"world record flight"
] | Making a quadcopter go fast would seem to be quite simple: just strap on powerful motors, aim the quadcopter roughly at where you want it to go fast, and let ‘er rip. Because of aerodynamics and other pesky physical laws there are a few complications to this, of course, but this
didn’t deter
[Luke Bell] and his father [Mike Bell] from nailing the Guinness World Record for remote-controlled quadcopters on April 21, 2024. During the official run, a top speed of 480.23 km/h was recorded, making it considerably faster than the
first version
they made, which hit a measly 400 km/h.
For this second iteration of the ‘got to go fast’ quadcopter, the design was scaled up, with more powerful motors and associated electronics added. Naturally, when you’re pushing brushless motors and their ESCs to their limits, stuff can get a bit hot due to the immense currents flowing through the system. This resulted in a number of battery, wire and other fires. Fortunately, the worrying aspect of in-flight stability got addressed pretty well courtesy of a professional drone trainer, and ultimately the world record attempt went off without a hitch.
An endurance test was also attempted, which reached 7.5 km at 180 km/h, and with the clear canopy in from of the camera removed, visual performance was pretty stunning, while still easily reaching 400 km/h. This might make it the perfect high-speed chase camera system.
Thanks to [Craig] for the tip. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758366",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T16:16:31",
"content": "A true beast of a vehicle. Still remember the popularization of quads in the 2010s, such slow and limited ones. We have come a long way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,917.641194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/youve-probably-never-considered-taking-an-airship-to-orbit/ | You’ve Probably Never Considered Taking An Airship To Orbit | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"airship",
"airship to orbit",
"orbit",
"space"
] | There have been all kinds of wild ideas to get spacecraft into orbit. Everything from firing huge cannons to spinning craft at rapid speed has been posited, explored, or in some cases, even tested to some degree. And yet, good ol’ flaming rockets continue to dominate all, because they actually get the job done.
Rockets, fuel, and all their supporting infrastructure remain expensive, so the search for an alternative goes on. One daring idea involves using airships to loft payloads into orbit.
What if you could simply float up into space?
Lighter Than Air
NASA regularly launches lighter-than-air balloons to great altitudes, but they’re not orbital craft. Credit: NASA, public domain
The concept sounds compelling from the outset. Through the use of hydrogen or helium as a lifting gas, airships and balloons manage to reach great altitudes while burning zero propellant. What if you could just keep floating higher and higher until you reached orbital space?
This is a huge deal when it comes to reaching orbit. One of the biggest problems of our current space efforts is referred to as
the t
yranny of the rocket equation. T
he more cargo you want to launch into space, the more fuel you need. But then that fuel adds more weight, which needs yet more fuel to carry its weight into orbit. To say nothing of the greater structure and supporting material to contain it all.
Carrying even a few extra kilograms of weight to space can require huge amounts of additional fuel. This is why we use staged rockets to reach orbit at present. By shedding large amounts of structural weight at the end of each rocket stage, it’s possible to move the remaining rocket farther with less fuel.
If you could get to orbit while using zero fuel, it would be a total gamechanger. It wouldn’t just be cheaper to launch satellites or other cargoes. It would also make missions to the Moon or Mars far easier. Those rockets would no longer have to carry the huge amount of fuel required to escape Earth’s surface and get to orbit. Instead, they could just carry the lower amount of fuel required to go from Earth orbit to their final destination.
The rumored “Chinese spy balloon” incident of 2023 saw a balloon carrying a payload that looked very much like a satellite. It was even solar powered. However, such a craft would never reach orbit, as it had no viable propulsion system to generate the huge delta-V required. Credit: USAF, public domain
Of course, it’s not that simple. Reaching orbit isn’t just about going high above the Earth. If you just go straight up above the Earth’s surface, and then stop, you’ll just fall back down. If you want to orbit, you have to go sideways really,
really
fast.
Thus, an airship-to-orbit launch system would have to do two things. It would have to haul a payload up high, and then get it up to the speed required for its desired orbit. That’s where it gets hard. The minimum speed to reach a stable orbit around Earth is 7.8 kilometers per second (28,000 km/h or 17,500 mph). Thus, even if you’ve floated up very,
very
high, you still need a huge rocket or some kind of very efficient ion thruster to push your payload up to that speed. And you still need fuel to generate that massive delta-V (change in velocity).
For this reason, airships aren’t the perfect hack to reaching orbit that you might think. They’re good for floating about, and you can even go very, very high. But if you want to circle the Earth again and again and again, you better bring a bucketload of fuel with you.
Someone’s Working On It
JP Aerospace founder John Powell regularly posts updates to YouTube regarding the airship-to-orbit concept. Credit:
John Powell, YouTube
Nevertheless, this concept is being actively worked on, but not by the usual suspects. Don’t look at NASA, JAXA, SpaceX, ESA, or even Roscosmos. Instead, it’s the work of the DIY volunteer space program known as JP Aerospace.
The organization has grand dreams of launching airships into space. Its concept isn’t as simple as just getting into a big balloon and floating up into orbit, though. Instead, it envisions a three-stage system.
The first stage would involve an airship designed to travel from ground level up to 140,000 feet. The company proposes a V-shaped design with an airfoil profile to generate additional lift as it moves through the atmosphere. Propulsion would be via propellers that are specifically designed to operate in the near-vacuum at those altitudes.
Once at that height, the first stage craft would dock with a permanently floating structure called Dark Sky Station. It would serve as a docking station where cargo could be transferred from the first stage craft to the Orbital Ascender, which is the craft designed to carry the payload into orbit.
The Ascender H1 Variant is the company’s latest concept for an airship to carry payloads from an altitude of 140,000ft and into orbit. Credit:
John Powell, YouTube screenshot
The Orbital Ascender itself sounds like a fantastical thing on paper. The team’s current concept is for a V-shaped craft with a fabric outer shell which contains many individual plastic cells full of lifting gas. That in itself isn’t so wild, but the proposed size is. It’s slated to measure 1,828 meters on each side of the V — well over a mile long — with an internal volume of over 11 million cubic meters. Thin film solar panels on the craft’s surface are intended to generate 90 MW of power, while a plasma generator on the leading edge is intended to help cut drag. The latter is critical, as the craft will need to reach hypersonic speeds in the ultra-thin atmosphere to get its payload up to orbital speeds. To propel the craft up to orbital velocity, the team has been running test firings on its own designs
for plasma thrusters.
Payload would be carried in two cargo bays, each measuring 30 meters square, and 20 meters deep. Credit:
John Powell, YouTube Screenshot
The team at JP Aerospace is passionate, but currently lacks the means to execute their plans at full scale. Right now, the team has some experimental low-altitude research craft that are a few hundred feet long. Presently, Dark Sky Station and the Orbital Ascender remain far off dreams.
Realistically, the team hasn’t found a shortcut to orbit just yet. Building a working version of the Orbital Ascender would require lofting huge amounts of material to high altitude where it would have to be constructed. Such a craft would be torn to shreds by a simple breeze in the lower atmosphere. A lighter-than-air craft that could operate at such high altitudes and speeds might not even be practical with modern materials, even if the atmosphere is vanishingly thin above 140,000 feet. There are huge questions around what materials the team would use, and whether the theoretical concepts for plasma drag reduction could be made to work on the monumentally huge craft.
The team has built a number of test craft for lower-altitude operation. Credit:
John Powell, Youtube Screenshot
Even if the craft’s basic design
could
work, there are questions around the practicalities of crewing and maintaining a permanent floating airship station at high altitude. Let alone how payloads would be transferred from one giant balloon craft to another. These issues might be solvable with billions of dollars. Maybe. JP Aerospace is having a go on a budget several orders of magnitude more shoestring than that.
One might imagine a simpler idea could be worth trying first. Lofting conventional rockets to 100,000 feet with balloons would be easier and still cut fuel requirements to some degree. But ultimately, the key challenge of orbit remains. You still need to find a way to get your payload up to a speed of at least 8 kilometers per second, regardless of how high you can get it in the air. That would still require a huge rocket, and a suitably huge balloon to lift it!
For now, orbit remains devastatingly hard to reach, whether you want to go by rocket, airship, or nuclear-powered paddle steamer. Don’t expect to float to the Moon by airship anytime soon, even if it sounds like a good idea. | 75 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758352",
"author": "gene",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T14:56:26",
"content": "JP aerospace’s airship to orbit is a completely ridiculous concept. Unless they can get near magical hypersonic drag reduction tech to work it’s pointless, there’s just no way they can overcome drag for the ... | 1,760,371,917.769426 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/this-tiny-game-boy-lets-the-real-thing-play-online/ | This Tiny Game Boy Lets The Real Thing Play Online | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"game boy",
"Game Boy Link Cable",
"Link Cable",
"pi pico"
] | Back in 2021, [stacksmashing] found that it took little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico and some level-shifters to create a USB connection with the Game Boy’s link port. Add in the proper software, and suddenly you’ve got online multiplayer for the classic handheld. The hardware was cheap, the software open source, and a good time was had by all.
Inspired by both the original project and some of the hardware variations that have popped up over the years, [weiman] recently set out to create a new version of the
USB link adapter that fits inside a miniature 3D printed Game Boy
.
The big change from the original design is that this is using the far smaller, but equally capable, RP2040-Zero development board. This is mated with a SparkFun logic level converter board (or a clone of one from AliExpress) by way of a custom PCB that also includes the necessary edge connectors to connect directly to a Game Boy Link Cable.
Once the PCB is assembled, it’s dropped into the 3D printed Game Boy shell. [weiman] really worked some nice details into the case, such as aligning the d-pad and buttons in such a way that pressing them engages either the RESET or BOOTSEL buttons on RP2040-Zero. The screen of the printed handheld also lines up with the RGB LED on the top of the dev board, which can produce some cool lighting effects.
The original project from [stacksmashing]
was an excellent example of the capabilities of the Pi Pico, and we’re glad to see it’s still being worked on and remixed by others. Even though the
state of Game Boy emulation is nearly perfect
these days, there’s still something to be said for working with the original hardware like this. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758309",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T12:02:08",
"content": "Oh that’s neat. I gotta build a couple of those, pretty sure I have all the parts except the PCB and prints. Is the server script still Tetris-only?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,917.812733 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/cp-m-on-an-eight-line-display/ | CP/M On An Eight Line Display | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"CP/M",
"z80"
] | How many lines do you need on a CP/M terminal? More is usually better, of course, but the MicroOffice RoadRunner managed with an 8-row, 80-column LCD screen. That may sound anemic, but in 1983, it was high-tech, as was the RoadRunner, and
[Tech Time Traveller] tells us about them in a recent video
you can see below.
The intro to the video shows some really strange old laptops before it gets to the RoadRunner. The machine used a Z80 work-alike CPU and a form of CP/M with some organizer functions. The machine didn’t have floppies or other disk storage, but did have four cartridge slots that could hold more memory, a spreadsheet, BASIC, or a text editor. The memory cartridges were static RAM with battery backup, so they retained data when you pulled them from the slot. Assuming the battery didn’t die.
Inside a RoadRunner cartridge.
Unfortunately, this particular machine suffered some shipping damage. In addition to the cartridges, it also had a removable battery and modem. At around the eight-minute mark, the case comes off, and inside are — surprise — more internal cartridges.
While MicroOffice isn’t a household name today, it was founded by a former Exxon executive and tapped a CEO and investor from Timex. It was funded by the likes of Olivetti. The computer rolled out in late 1983 and lived until Telxon bought MicroOffice in 1985.
Attempts to run
Zork
were not fruitful. There really wasn’t enough memory, and file transfer was a bit wonky. If you want a modern Z80 laptop, we know of one
with 16 cores
. As clunky as the RoadRunner looks, it still beats the
old suitcase computers
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758318",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T12:31:36",
"content": "Back then I had just upgraded my ZX81 for a C64, of which I’d eventually use GEOS to write papers for school. Or use their built-in spreadsheet.Though it was an exciting time for computers, the major iss... | 1,760,371,917.86181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/emulate-a-kim-1-with-a-commodore-64/ | Emulate A KIM-1 With A Commodore 64 | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"commodore 64",
"emulator",
"kim-1"
] | When you think about virtualization, you usually think about making some CPU pretend to be another CPU. However, there are sometimes advantages to making a computer pretend to be the
same
computer.
That’s the case with [oldvcr]’s
KIMplement
, which emulates a KIM-1 with a 6502 using a Commodore 64, which also uses a 6502.The reason this makes sense is that you have total control over an emulated CPU. If a program, for example, writes to a critical memory location or tries to take over the screen or keyboard, you can easily make the emulator do something more appropriate. Things like breakpoints and single stepping also become trivial.
The virtual machine at the heart of it is 6o6 (6502 on 6502), and it seems to perform well. By virtualizing, you can easily protect the system from programs that try to, for example, take over an interrupt vector. This is similar to how x86 protected mode can run old real-mode code in a virtual environment and intervene for certain instructions. The emulation is good enough that the emulator can run the emulator, which then runs the emulator to actually run the real target. That’s wasteful, of course, but it does speak to the completeness of the pretend CPU.
If you want a KIM-1 (and an 1802 Elf) but only have an Arduino, you can emulate
a different way
. At least an emulated KIM-1 doesn’t
develop bad memory chips
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758426",
"author": "Serentty",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T18:55:39",
"content": "> When you think about virtualization, you usually think about making some CPU pretend to be another CPU. However, there are sometimes advantages to making a computer pretend to be the same computer.What... | 1,760,371,917.896705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/answering-all-your-iscsi-scanner-questions/ | Answering All Your ISCSI Scanner Questions | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"hardware",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"document scanner",
"film scanner",
"flatbed scanner",
"iscsi",
"scanner",
"scsi"
] | iSCSI is a widely used protocol for exposing SCSI devices over a network connection, and some scanners have in the past been equipped with SCSI ports. So, could you have an iSCSI network scanner? [xssfox]
details her journey
making a Canoscan FS4000US film scanner work over iSCSI, sparked by someone’s
overly-confident StackOverflow comment
that it couldn’t be done. Nothing in the spec said it couldn’t actually work, however, and after figuring out a tentative architecture, a hardware setup was put together.
No flatbed scanners with SCSI ports could be found on the cheap, so a film scanner had to be procured. After figuring out a few hitches with the loading mechanism and getting a test image locally, it was time to try and build up the software setup, tearing through SCSI compatibility and cabling, driver and PCI pass-through woes, bluescreens, and intermediate software having dropped some of the necessary features by now. Still, [xssfox] eventually exported the scanner as an iSCSI target – and, on the other end of the network, successfully connected to it and completed a scan. The StackOverflow answer was wrong, after all.
It’s fun to see how far old technology can go, and get answers to questions you never knew you had. Whether you’re reminiscing about SCSI days or wondering what the technology about, we’ve talked about it aplenty, from
a retrospective
to
modern-day experiments
,
repurposing old SCSI hardware
for modern SATA ports,
a Raspberry Pi implementation
,
an emulator
, and
a fair bit more.
We thank [Valentijn Sessink] and [adistuder] for sharing this with us! | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758218",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T02:09:27",
"content": "“No flatbed scanners with SCSI ports could be found on the cheap,” ??? At the local Goodwill, you’d be hard pressed to find one that wasn’t SCSI.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,917.951243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/hackaday-links-may-12-2024/ | Hackaday Links: May 12, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"biosignature",
"bluetooth",
"dimethyl sulfide",
"exoplante",
"FORTRAN",
"fuzzy bunny slippers",
"hackaday links",
"ICBM",
"K2-18b",
"launch control center",
"Minuteman",
"satellite",
"semiconductor fab",
"survey"
] | Don’t pack your bags for the trip to exoplanet K2-18b quite yet — it turns out that the James Webb Space Telescope
may not have detected signs of life there
after all. Last year, astronomers reported the possible presence of dimethyl sulfide there, a gas that (at least on Earth) is generally associated with phytoplankton in the ocean. Webb used its infrared spectrometer instruments to look at the light from the planet’s star, a red dwarf about 111 light-years away, as it passed through the hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The finding was sort of incidental to the discovery of much stronger signals for methane and carbon dioxide, but it turns out that the DMS signal might have just been overlap from the methane signal. It’s too bad, because K2-18b seems to be somewhat Earth-like, if you can get over the lack of oxygen and the average temperature just below freezing. So, maybe not a great place to visit, but it would be nice to see if life, uh, found a way anywhere else in the universe.
Attention Fortran fans: your favorite language isn’t quite dead yet. In fact,
it cracked the top ten on one recent survey
, perhaps on the strength of its numerical and scientific applications. The “Programming Community Index” is perhaps a bit subjective, since it’s based on things like Google searches for references to particular languages. It’s no surprise then that Python tops such a list, but it’s still interesting that there’s enough interest in a 67-year-old programming language to make it onto the list. We’d probably not advise building a career around Fortran, but you never know.
If your experience with Bluetooth is anything like ours, you’ll probably be skeptical of reports of
a successful Bluetooth connection with a satellite 600 km in space
. But according to Hubble Network, a startup seeking to build a global Bluetooth network, they managed to do it using off-the-shelf hardware. The feat apparently required a firmware update to account for the Doppler shift and a phased-array antenna on the satellite for beam steering, but other than that, direct Bluetooth connections from your phone to a satellite could be coming soon. For some reason.
If you’ve ever wondered why it costs $20 billion to build a semiconductor fab,
wonder no more
. This is a long article, but it has to be since it covers everything from the structure of semiconductor chips to the processes used to make them, and just about everything you ever wanted to know about fab construction. Our revelation was just how little of a fab’s vertical space is devoted to the cleanroom space, which is sandwiched between sub-fab and utility layers below and a huge interstitial space above for air handling. It’s eye-opening stuff.
And finally, it turns out that “
WarGames
” was actually pretty accurate, at least in terms of the missile launch bunker set during the film’s cold open. Judging by
this virtual tour of a US Minuteman ICBM launch control center (LCC)
, that is. The 360 tour features detailed — but not
too
detailed — photos of what appears to be an actual LCC and good explanations of all the equipment. Our biggest surprise was the pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers in the commander’s kit bag. Hey, if you’re going to be responsible for potentially initiating the apocalypse, you might as well be comfortable. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758211",
"author": "spaceman spiff",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T00:47:21",
"content": "Darn – I was on my way to K2-18b.How does K2-18c look?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6758217",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known A... | 1,760,371,918.000992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/autochrome-for-the-2020s/ | Autochrome For The 2020s | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks",
"News"
] | [
"autochrome",
"photographic chemistry",
"photography"
] | For all intents and purposes, photography here in 2024 is digital. Of course chemical photography still exists, and there are a bunch of us who love it for what it is, but even as we hang up our latest strip of negatives to dry we have to admit that it’s no longer mainstream. Among those enthusiasts who work with conventional black-and-white or dye-coupler colour film are a special breed whose chemistry takes them into more obscure pathways.
Wet-collodion plates for example, or in the case of [Jon Hilty], the
Lumière autochrome process
. This is a colour photography process from the early years of the twentieth century, employing a layer of red, green, and blue grains above a photosensitive emulsion. Its preparation is notoriously difficult, and he’s lightened the load somewhat with the clever use of CNC machinery to automate some of it.
Pressing the plates via CNC
His web site has the full details of how he prepares and exposes the plates, so perhaps it’s best here to recap how it works. Red, green, and blue dyed potato starch grains are laid uniformly on a glass plate, then dried and pressed to form a random array of tiny RGB filters. The photographic emulsion is laid on top of that, and once it is ready the exposure is made from the glass side do the light passes through the filters.
If the emulsion is then developed using a reversal process as for example a slide would be, the result is a black and white image bearing colour information in that random array, which when viewed has red, green, and blue light from those starch filters passing through it. To the viewer’s eye, this then appears as a colour image.
We can’t help being fascinated by the autochrome process, and while we know we’ll never do it ourselves it’s great to see someone else working with it and producing 21st century plates that look a hundred years old.
While this may be the first time we’ve featured such a deep dive into autochrome,
it’s certainly not the first time we’ve looked at alternative photographic chemistries
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758229",
"author": "Isaac Wingfield",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T03:47:08",
"content": "Sort of related was Polaroid’s Polacolor (IIRC), which used very narrow RGB stripes (like A Sony color TV) over a very fine grain Polaroid quick-developing B&W emulsion. Color was great, but dim b... | 1,760,371,918.297607 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/ircb-s73-7-satellite-found-after-going-untracked-for-25-years/ | IRCB S73-7 Satellite Found After Going Untracked For 25 Years | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"satellite",
"space debris"
] | When the United States launched the KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite into orbit atop a Titan IIID rocket in 1974, it brought a calibration target along for the ride: the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (IRCB) S73-7. This 66 cm (26 inch) diameter inflatable satellite was ejected by the KH-9, but failed to inflate into its intended configuration and became yet another piece of space junk. Initially it was being tracked in the 1970s, but vanished until briefly reappearing in the 1990s.
Now it’s popped up again
, twenty-five years later.
As
noted by [Jonathan McDowell]
who tripped over S73-7 in recent debris tracking data, it’s quite possible that it had been tracked before, but hidden in the noise as it is not an easy target to track. Since it’s not a big metallic object with a large radar cross-section, it’s among the more difficult signals to reliably pick out of the noise. As can be seen in [Jonathan]’s
debris tracking table
, this is hardly a unique situation, with many lost (XO) entries. This always raises the exciting question of whether a piece of debris has had its orbit decayed to where it burned up, ended up colliding with other debris/working satellite or simply has gone dark.
For now we know where S73-7 is, and as long as its orbit remains stable we can predict where it’ll be, but it highlights the difficulty of keeping track of the around 20,000 objects in Earth orbit, with disastrous consequences if we get it wrong. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758174",
"author": "WurstCase",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T19:09:42",
"content": "Did it pass the Event Horizon?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6758178",
"author": "RitJ",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T19:39:43",
... | 1,760,371,918.650406 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/jtag-hacking-an-ssd-with-a-pi-a-primer/ | JTAG Hacking An SSD With A Pi: A Primer | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"jtag",
"jtag finder",
"jtag tools",
"nvme ssd",
"ssd"
] | [Matthew “wrongbaud” Alt] is well known around these parts for his hardware hacking and reverse-engineering lessons, and
today he’s bringing us a JTAG hacking primer
that demoes some cool new hardware — the PiFEX (Pi Interface Explorer). Ever wondered about those testpoint arrays on mSATA and M.2 SSDs? This write-up lays bare the secrets of such an SSD, using a Pi 4, PiFEX, OpenOCD and a good few open-source tools for JTAG probing that you can easily use yourself.
The PiFEX hat gives you level-shifted bidirectional GPIO connectors for UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG, SWD and potentially way more, an OLED screen to show any debugging information you might need, and even a logic analyzer header so that you can check up on your reverse-engineering progress.
The suggested software workflow pulls no punches either, proposing ease-of-use features like USB-Ethernet gadget mode and Jupyter notebooks. [wrongbaud] shows us how to find JTAG among the dozen testpads left on the SSD, get the SSD single-stepping through code, and dump some of its memory space as a test. Full of tricks of the trade like reverse-engineering devices on a sheet of paper you can leave markings on, this write-up gives you a solid background in JTAG hacking, even if you only have a Pi and an old SSD.
So how can you get your hands on one? [wrongbaud] says the plan is to open source both the PiFEX hardware and software in the near future. Until until then, it looks like at least the hardware it wouldn’t be too hard to re-implement it yourself if you wanted to get the hang of reverse engineering with the Raspberry Pi.
[Matthew “wrongbaud” Alt] is a good friend of Hackaday community. He’s stopped by to
host a reverse engineering Hack Chat
, and ran a
HackadayU class on Ghidra
. His reverse-engineering journeys are always an informative read, from using
arcade machines
as a Linux hacking primer, to
hacking a cryptocurrency wallet
through glitching attacks. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758220",
"author": "wrzwicky",
"timestamp": "2024-05-13T02:54:49",
"content": "Enterprise SAS SSD drives have a tiny connector on the front, I’m curious if those are related.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6758271",
... | 1,760,371,918.44788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/tweeze-your-way-to-soldering-success/ | Tweeze Your Way To Soldering Success! | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"soldering",
"soldering tools",
"tweezers"
] | Soldering, for those of us who spend a lot of time at an electronics bench, is just one of those skills we
have
, in the way that a blacksmith can weld or a tailor can cut clothing. We have an uncommon skill with hot metal and can manipulate the tiniest of parts, and incidentally our chopstick skills aren’t that bad as a consequence, either.
But even the best with a soldering iron can find useful tips from an expert, and that’s where [Mr SolderFix] comes in. His channel is chock-full of soldering advice, and
in his latest video he takes a look at tweezers
. They’re a part of the solderer’s standard kit and we all have several pairs, but it’s fair to say that we don’t always have the right pair to hand.
It was refreshing to hear him confirm that a good pair of tweezers, once a certain quality threshold has been met, need not necessarily be the most expensive set. We’ve certainly seen expensive tweezers with suspiciously bendy ends, and have found random AliExpress purchases which have stood the test of time. He also makes the point about which situations a set of tweezers with serrated heads might be more useful, and he demonstrates with a crystal oscillator.
As with photography though, we’d observe that sometimes the best set of tweezers to rectify a mishap are the ones in your hand. If you’re interested in more from [Mr SolderFix], we’ve featured his work more than once in the past.
When he showed us how to lift SMD pins, for example
. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758109",
"author": "Erik VdB",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T11:27:49",
"content": "“a good pair of tweezers” ???a single tweezer is not a tweazer, it is just useless, just like a single scisser is not a scissor …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,918.361027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/12/a-master-class-on-reverse-engineering-six-ar-glasses/ | A Master-Class On Reverse-Engineering Six AR Glasses | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"ar glasses",
"augmented reality",
"augmentedreality"
] | Augmented reality (AR) tech is getting more and more powerful, the glasses themselves are getting sleeker and prettier, and at some point, hackers have to conquer this frontier and extract as much as possible. [Void Computing] is writing an open source SDK for making use of AR glasses, and, along the way, they’ve brought us two wonderful blog posts filled with technical information laid out in a fun to read way. The first article is titled “AR glasses USB protocols:
the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”
, and the second one follows as “
the Worse, the Better and the Prettier”.
Have you ever wanted to learn how AR glasses and similar devices work, what’s their internal structure, which ones are designed well and which ones maybe not so much? These two posts have concise explanations, more than plenty of diagrams, six case studies of different pairs of AR glasses on the market, each pair demonstrated by our hacker’s canine assistant.
[Void Computing] goes in-depth on this tech — you will witness MCU firmware reverse-engineering, HID packet captures, a quick refresher on the USB-C DisplayPort altmode, hexdumps aplenty, and
a reminder
on often forgotten tools of the trade like
Cunningham’s law.
If reverse-engineering lights your fire, these high-level retrospectives will teach you viable ways to reverse-engineer devices in your own life, and they certainly set a high bar for posts as far as write-ups go. Having read through these posts, one can’t help but think that some sort of AR glasses protocol standard is called for here, but fortunately, it appears like
[Void Computing]’s SDK
is the next best thing, and
their mission
to seize the good aspects of a tentative cyberpunk future is looking to be a success. We’ve started talking about AR glasses over
a decade ago,
and it’s reassuring to see hackers catching up on this technology’s advancements.
We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us on the
Hackaday Discord server
! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758155",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T15:53:26",
"content": "Side by side stereoscopic 3D gaming possible on Windows and Linux (this should really just be supported out of the box on any video card drivers and game in this day and age, but at least people are hacking... | 1,760,371,918.401114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/no-solder-squeeze-your-parts-to-the-pcb/ | No Solder! Squeeze Your Parts To The PCB | Elliot Williams | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"pcb",
"prototyping",
"rapid prototyping",
"reuse",
"solderless"
] | What’s solder for, anyway? It’s just the stuff that sticks the parts to the PCB. If you’re rapid prototyping, possibly with expensive components, and want to be able to remove chips from the board easily when you spin up the next iteration, it would be great if you didn’t have to de-solder them to move on. If only you could hold the parts without the solder…
That’s exactly the goal behind [Zeyu Yan] et al’s
SolderlessPCB
, which uses custom 3D printed plastic covers to do the holding. And it has the knock-on benefit of serving as a simple case.
In their paper, they document some clever topologies to make sure that the parts are held down firmly to the board, with the majority of the force coming from screws. We especially like the little hold-down wings for use with SMD capacitors or resistors, although we could absolutely see saving the technique exclusively for the more high value components to simplify design work on the 3DP frame. Still, with the ability to automatically generate 3D models of the board, parts included, this should be something that can be automated away.
The group is doing this with SLA 3D printing, and we imagine that the resolution is important. You could try it with an FDM printer, though. Let us know if you do!
This is the same research group that is responsible for
the laser-cut sheet-PCB origami
. There’s clearly some creative thinking going on over there. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758031",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T05:24:05",
"content": "Pretty nice – and the holes for component alignment could simplify SMD use for people who find it too fiddly to solder them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,918.51044 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/the-minimalistic-dillo-web-browser-is-back/ | The Minimalistic Dillo Web Browser Is Back | Maya Posch | [
"internet hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"dillo",
"web browser"
] | Over the decades web browsers have changed from the fairly lightweight and nimble HTML document viewers of the 1990s to today’s top-heavy browsers that struggle to run on a system with less than a quad-core, multi-GHz CPU and gigabytes of RAM. All but a few, that is.
Dillo is one of a small number of browsers that requires only a minimum of system resources and will happily run on an Intel 486 or thereabouts. Sadly, the project more or less ended back in 2016 when the rendering engine’s developer passed away, but with the
recent 3.10 release
the project seems to be back on track,
courtesy of efforts
by [Rodrigo Arias Mallo].
Although a number of forks were started after the Dillo project ground to a halt, of these only
Dillo+
appears to be active at this point in time, making this project revival a welcome boost, as is its porting
to Atari systems
. As for Dillo’s
feature set
, it boasts support for a range of protocols, including Gopher, HTTP(S), Gemini, and FTP via extensions. It supports HTML 4.01 and some HTML 5, along with CSS 2.1 and some CSS 3 features, and of course no JavaScript.
On today’s JS-crazed web this means access can be somewhat limited, but maybe it will promote websites to have a no-JS fallback for the Dillo users. The source code and releases can be obtained from the
GitHub project page
, with contributions to the project gracefully accepted.
Thanks to [Prof. Dr. Feinfinger] for the tip. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6758020",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T04:13:44",
"content": "oh come on you mean it is not normal for chrome to use 90%+ cpu usage and 8GB+ of ram when i open up a web page……….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,918.716234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/blueberry-is-a-smartphone-agnostic-keyboard-firmware/ | BlueBerry Is A Smartphone-Agnostic Keyboard Firmware | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth keyboard",
"keyboard",
"phone keyboard",
"ZMK"
] | If you’re anything like us, you really, really miss having a physical keyboard on your phone. Well, cry no more, because [Joe LiTrenta] has made it possible for any modern smartphone whatsoever to have a detachable, physical keyboard and mouse at the ready.
[Joe] calls this creation the BlueBerry
.
The keyboard/mouse combo in question is a little BlackBerry Bluetooth number from ZitaoTech
which is available on Tindie
, ready to go in a 3D printed case. What [Joe] has done is to create a custom ZMK-based firmware that allows the keyboard be device-agnostic.
In order to easily mount the keyboard to the phone and make it detachable, [Joe] used adhesive-backed metal mounting plates on both the phone and the keyboard, and a mag-safe pop socket to connect the two. The firmware makes use of layers so everything is easily accessible.
Check out the demo video after the break, which shows the board connected to a Google Pixel 7. It makes the phone comically long, but having a physical keyboard again is serious business, so who’s laughing now? We’d love to see a keyboard that attaches to the broad side of the phone, so someone get on that. Please?
Do you have a PinePhone?
There’s an extremely cute keyboard for that
. | 34 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757990",
"author": "StevoBambino",
"timestamp": "2024-05-12T00:09:13",
"content": "This is the best idea I have seen in a while. I hate touch interfaces so much. My fingers just do not work with them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,918.941428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/software-bug-results-in-insulin-pump-injuries-spurs-recall/ | Software Bug Results In Insulin Pump Injuries, Spurs Recall | Dan Maloney | [
"Medical Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"diabetes",
"fda",
"insulin",
"ios",
"recall",
"T1D",
"tandem"
] | Managing Type 1 diabetes is a high-stakes balancing act — too much or too little insulin is a bad thing, resulting in blood glucose levels that deviate from a narrow range with potentially dire consequences on either side. Many diabetics choose to use an insulin pump to make managing all this easier, but as
a recent recall of insulin pump software by the US Food and Drug Administration
shows, technology isn’t foolproof.
Thankfully, the recall is very narrow in scope. It’s targeted at users of the Tandem t:slim X2 insulin pump, and specifically the companion application running on iOS devices. The mobile app is intended to run on the user’s phone to monitor and control the pump. The pump itself is a small, rechargeable device that users often keep on their belt or tucked into a pocket that delivers a slow, steady infusion of insulin during the day, plus larger bolus doses to compensate for meals.
The t:slim X2 insulin pump.
But version 2.7 of the t:connect mobile app can crash unexpectedly, and on iOS devices, that can lead to the OS continually relaunching it. Each time it does this, the app tries to reconnect with the pump via Bluetooth, which eventually runs down the battery in the pump. Once the battery is dead, no more insulin can be delivered, potentially leading to a condition called hyperglycemia (“hyper” meaning an excess, “gly” referring to sugar, and “emia” meaning presence in blood — excess sugar in the blood.)
Untreated hyperglycemia can progress to a much more serious state called diabetic ketoacidosis, which can lead to coma and death. Thankfully, nobody has suffered that fate from this bug, but the FDA has received over 200 reports of injuries, hence the recall. Tandem sent out a notice to all affected customers back in March to update their apps, but it’s still possible that some users didn’t get the message.
Apart from the human cost of this bug, there’s a lesson here about software design and unintended consequences. While it intuitively seems like a great idea to automatically relaunch a crashed app, especially one with a critical life-safety function, in hindsight, the better course might have been to just go into a safe mode and alert the user with an alarm. That’s a lesson we’ve learned by
exploring space
, and it seems to apply here as well.
Images: AdobeStock, Tandem Diabetes | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757959",
"author": "nik282000",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T20:30:05",
"content": "Who could have ever predicted that connecting a life saving device to a machine most people use for watching 6 hrs of TikTok could be a bad idea?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,918.786264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/the-impossible-repair-ribbon-cables/ | The Impossible Repair: Ribbon Cables | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"aluminium tape",
"membrane keypad",
"ribbon cable"
] | It’s a problem that faces many a piece of older equipment that ribbon cables of the type used on membrane keyboards start to fail as they become older. These cables are extremely difficult to repair as they can’t be soldered to, and since they are usually custom to the device in question. All is not lost, though, as
[Spare Time Repair] shows us with the cable on a Honeywell heating controller
broken by a user attempting to remove the battery with a screwdriver.
The whole process can be seen in the video below the break, and it involves the use of a vinyl cutter to cut the pattern of tracks in aluminium tape stuck on a sheet of acetate. This makes a new piece of ribbon cable, however it’s still a step short of being part of the circuit. His challenge is to make a clip tight enough to attach it to the intact part of the broken cable and maintain contact, then to hope that the new piece of cable bent back on itself can make enough contact for the device to work.
At the end of it all, he has a working Honeywell controller, though as he points out, it’s a device he has little interest in. Instead, this opens a window on an extremely useful technique that should be of relevance far beyond the world of heating.
There’s one machine close to home for us that could use this technique
, for example. | 32 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757916",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T17:17:32",
"content": "tl;dr: not really.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6757919",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T17:36:14",
"content": "Nice fix. I... | 1,760,371,918.856563 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/institutional-memory-on-paper/ | Institutional Memory, On Paper | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Space"
] | [
"history",
"memory",
"newsletter",
"Rant",
"scanning",
"voyager"
] | Our own Dan Maloney has been on a Voyager kick for the past couple of years. Voyager, the space probe. As a long-term project, he has been trying to figure out the computer systems on board. He got far enough to
write up a great overview piece
, and it’s a pretty good summary of what we know these days. But along the way, he stumbled on a couple old documents that would answer a lot of questions.
Dan asked JPL if they had them, and the answer was “no”. Oddly enough, the very people who are involved in
the epic save
a couple weeks ago would also like a copy. So when Dan tracked the document down to a paper-only collection at Wichita State University, he thought he had won, but the whole box is stashed away as the library undergoes construction.
That box, and a couple of its neighbors, appear to have a treasure trove of documentation about the Voyagers, and it may even be one-of-a-kind. So in the comments, a number of people have volunteered to help the effort, but I think we’re all just going to have to wait until the library is open for business again. In this age of everything-online, everything-scanned-in, it’s amazing to believe that documents about the world’s furthest-flown space probe wouldn’t be available, but so it is!
It makes you wonder how many other similar documents – products of serious work by the people responsible for designing the systems and machines that shaped our world – are out there in the dark somewhere. History can’t capture everything, and it’s down to our collective good judgement in the end. So if you find yourself in a position to shed light on, or scan, such old papers, please do! And then contact some nerd institution like the
Internet Archive
or the
Computer History Museum
.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757883",
"author": "Frank",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T15:02:04",
"content": "It happens a lot. I worked for a company that had not got the source to two embedded systems that represent a major part of there business. One of my secondary task was to reverse engineer and rewrite them.... | 1,760,371,919.112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/gather-round-this-unique-4-player-arcade-cabinet/ | Gather ‘Round This Unique 4-Player Arcade Cabinet | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"arcade cabinet",
"cocktail cabinet",
"multiplayer"
] | Usually when we see arcade cabinet builds, they’re your standard single-player stand up variety. Even one of them takes up quite a bit of room, so as appealing as it might be to link up two or more cabinets together for the occasional multiplayer session, the space required makes it a non-starter for most of us.
But
this cleverly designed 4-player cocktail cabinet from [OgrishGadgeteer]
goes a long way towards solving that problem. The circular design of the cabinet gives each player a clear view of their respective display in a much smaller footprint than would otherwise be possible, and the glass top allows the whole thing to double as an actual cocktail table when it’s not game time.
The cabinet was modelled in 3D before construction.
According to a post on r/cade
, it took [OgrishGadgeteer] three months to go from paper sketches of the cabinet’s basic shape to the final product. Most of the components were picked up on the second hand market, which brought the total cost of the build to around $350. That wouldn’t have been a surprising price for a traditional full-size cabinet build, so for this, it seems like an absolute steal.
A Dell OptiPlex 7060 small form factor PC provides the power for this build, with the video output passing through a 4-way VGA distribution amplifier into 20 inch monitors. At $75, the four player control kit ended up being the single most expensive component of the build, though you could make do with some parts bin buttons and a Pi Pico if you wanted to really bring this one in on a budget.
Perhaps the most surprising element of the whole build is that, despite the cabinet’s complex design, [OgrishGadgeteer] pulled it off without a CNC to cut the plywood panels. Instead, a vinyl cutter was used to make full-size templates of the cuts and holes that needed to be made, which were attached directly to the wood. After that, it was just a matter of following the lines with a jigsaw. Not the fastest or most convenient solution, but it’s hard to argue with the final results.
We’ve seen other
cocktail cabinet builds
in the past, but this is the first that managed to cram four players in. Well,
unless you count
Dungeons & Dragons
, anyway. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757863",
"author": "Donta",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T12:13:06",
"content": "Looks like ply rather than mad",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6757907",
"author": "Lover of very cool things",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T16:33:... | 1,760,371,919.16387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/protoboard-z80-computer-teaches-the-basics/ | Protoboard Z80 Computer Teaches The Basics | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"handwired",
"perfboard",
"z80"
] | As curious people, we’re all incredibly fortunate to live in an age where information can so easily be obtained. If you want to learn how something works, from a cotton gin to an RBMK reactor, you’re just a few keystrokes away from articles, diagrams, and videos on the subject. But as helpful as all of that information can be, we also know that there’s no substitute for hands-on experience.
While we can’t recommend you try building a miniature graphite-moderated nuclear reactor, there’s plenty of other devices that you can study by constructing your own functioning model. For example, when [Jorisclayton] wanted to
really
know what was going on inside a computer, they decided to
go back to basics and build their own Z80 machine
. To maximize the experience, they skipped any of the existing kit designs and instead wired the whole thing up by hand across a few perfboards.
The main board contains a 4 MHz Z80 processor, paired with 32K ROM and 64K RAM. Here you’ll also find the clock generator, I/O decoder, serial port, voltage regulator, and a trio of expansion slots that use a long strip of 2.54 mm pin headers as the interface. In the first expansion slot you’ve got a primordial “graphics card” based around the TMS9918 video display controller (VDC) and 16K of additional RAM. The second expansion card has a CompactFlash reader and an LED array mapped to I/O address 0x00h so it can be used for various notifications.
[Jorisclayton] says the final expansion board is still being worked on, but the idea is for it to handle user input through a PS/2 keyboard connector, as well as provide ports for a pair of Super Nintendo (or compatible) controllers. Everything is held together with a minimalist 3D printed frame to show off all that careful soldering.
Obviously there’s no PCB design files to share for this one, but [Jorisclayton] has posted a schematic for wiring everything up if you’re looking for resources to build your own Z80 computer. Sure the
chips themselves might no longer be in production
, but that doesn’t mean this venerable CPU is going anywhere just yet. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757833",
"author": "smartroad",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T08:19:58",
"content": "Makes me wonder if there is a big enough market these days to create an ASIC graphics chip based on either an old design or something more modern? Given the extremely high costs of going ASIC would ther... | 1,760,371,919.047478 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/an-umbrella-can-teach-a-thing-or-two-about-product-longevity/ | An Umbrella Can Teach A Thing Or Two About Product Longevity | Jenny List | [
"Art"
] | [
"design",
"durability",
"recycling",
"right to repair"
] | This time of year always brings a few gems from outside Hackaday’s usual circle, as students attending industrial design colleges release their final year projects, The worlds of art and engineering sit very close together at times, and theirs is a discipline which sits firmly astride that line. This is amply demonstrated by the work of [Charlie Humble-Thomas], who has taken an everyday object, the umbrella, and used it to pose the question:
How long should objects last
?
He explores the topic by making three different umbrellas, none of which we are guessing resemble those you could buy. The first is not particularly durable but is completely recyclable, the second is designed entirely with repairability in mind, while the third is hugely over-engineered and designed for durability. In each case the reader is intended to think about the impact of the umbrella before them.
What strikes us is how much better designed each one is than the typical cheap umbrella on sale today, with the polypropylene recyclable one being flimsy by design, but with a simplicity missing from its commercial counterpart. The durable one meanwhile is full of CNC parts, and carbon fiber.
If you’re hungry for more student work in this vein, we recently brought you
this toasty typewriter
. | 30 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757813",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T05:16:41",
"content": "The most durable umbrella is only comical because it actually fails to be a practical umbrella. Improved further with weight reduction, repairability, and time-tested materials (not mystery-meat carbon ... | 1,760,371,919.380759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/ai-created-coffee-blend-isnt-terrible/ | AI-Created Coffee Blend Isn’t Terrible | Kristina Panos | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"coffee",
"coffee beans",
"coffee blend"
] | Weren’t we just talking about coffee-based sacrilege the other day? Here’s something to make the single-origin bean snobs chew their espresso cups:
an artisan roastery in Helsinki is offering a coffee blend created by artificial intelligence called AI-conic
. The idea, of course, is that technology will lighten the workload needed to produce coffee.
This is an interesting development because
Finland consumes the most coffee in the world
, according to the International Coffee Organization. Coffee roasting is a highly-valued traditional artisan profession there, so it stands to reason that they might turn to technology for help.
Just like with scotch whisky, there’s nothing wrong with coffee blends outright. Bean blends are good for consistency, when you want every cup to taste pretty much exactly the same. Single-origin beans, though, are traceable to one location, and as a result, they usually have a distinct flavor based on the climate they’re grown in.
If you’re new to coffee, blends are a nice, safe way to start out. And, interestingly, the AI chose to make the blend out of four different types of beans instead of the usual two or three, despite being tasked with creating a blend that would suit the palates of coffee enthusiasts. But the coffee experts agreed that the AI blend was “perfect” and needed no human intervention. We probably won’t be getting to Finland anytime soon, so if you try it, let us know how it tastes!
Do you like cold brew?
How would you like to be able to brew some in just three minutes? | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757828",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T07:11:36",
"content": "It seems weird to see LLMs (large language models) being used as mini “brains” when all they do in the simplest terms is predict the next word that must come.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,919.265944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/split-flap-clock-uses-magnets-everywhere/ | Split-Flap Clock Uses Magnets Everywhere | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino nano",
"clock",
"hall effect sensor",
"magnets",
"split-flap display",
"stepper motor"
] | While split-flap alarm clocks once adorned heavy wood nightstands in strong numbers, today the displays are most commonly found in train stations and airports. Hey, at least they’re still around, right? Like many of us, [The Wrench] has always wanted to make one for themselves,
but they actually got around to doing it
.
This doesn’t seem like a beginner-friendly project, but [The Wrench] says they were a novice in 3D design and so used Tinkercad to design all the parts. After so many failures, they settled on a design for each unit that uses a spool to attach the flaps, which is turned by a stepper motor.
A small neodymium magnet embedded in the primary gear and a Hall effect sensor determine where the stepper motor is, and in turn, which number is displayed. Everything is handled by an Arduino Nano on a custom PCB.
Aside from the sleek, minimalist look, our favorite part is that [The Wrench] used even more magnets to connect each display segment to the base. You may have noticed that there are only three segments, because the hours are handled by a single display that has flaps for 10, 11, and 12. This makes things simpler and gives the clock an interesting look. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
Want to build a more complicated clock?
Try suspending sand digits in the air with persistence of vision
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757836",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2024-05-11T08:46:13",
"content": "Cool, ,but just one step away from being perfect. Making use of a ESP8266, he would make time setting completely automatic.I have a split flap mechanism from an old alarm clock, that I intend to bring b... | 1,760,371,919.207939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/diy-bimetallic-strip-dings-for-teatime/ | DIY Bimetallic Strip Dings For Teatime | Elliot Williams | [
"chemistry hacks",
"cooking hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"bimetallic strip",
"machining"
] | Do you like your cup of tea to be cooled down to exactly 54 C, have a love for machining, and possess more than a little bit of a mad inventor bent? If so, then you have a lot in common with [Chronova Engineering]. In this video, we see him
making a fully mechanical chime-ringing tea-temperature indicator
– something we’d be tempted to do in silicon, but that’s admittedly pedestrian in comparison.
The (long) video starts off with
making a DIY bimetallic strip out of titanium and brass
, which it pretty fun. After some math, it is tested in a cup of hot water to ballpark the deflection. Fast-forward through twenty minutes of machining, and you get to the reveal:
a tippy cup that drops a bearing onto a bell when the deflection backs off enough to indicate that the set temperature has been reached
. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.
OK, so this is bonkers enough. But would you believe
a bimetallic strip can be used as a voltage regulator
? How many other wacky uses for this niche tech do you know?
Thanks [Itay] for the tip! | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757763",
"author": "Paul LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T22:17:04",
"content": "You could use it to automatically snuff out a candle after a given period of time",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6757814",
"author": "Thoma... | 1,760,371,919.543016 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/the-3d-printed-computer-space-takes-shape/ | The 3D PrintedComputer SpaceTakes Shape | Jenny List | [
"Games"
] | [
"3d printing",
"arcade games",
"Computer Space"
] | A few weeks ago we brought you news of a project to recreate the flowing lines of the first computerised arcade game,
Computer Space
, as a full-size 3D printed replica. We left the project with all the parts put together to make a complete but unfinished shell that was very recognizable as a
Computer Space
cabinet but had neither finishing nor internals. Now
we’re very pleased to bring you the conclusion of the project
, as it moves from unfinished 3D print to playable cabinet.
The video below the break is a journey of print finishing to a very high standard with that lustrous blue glitter resin, but oddly it’s most interesting to find out about the manufacturing quirks of the original. How the rear door was imprecisely cut from plywood and fixed on with gate hinges, how the ventilation holes differ from cabinet to cabinet, and how the collection vessel for those quarters was an old tin. The monitor is a newer broadcast CRT in this version and the electronics are naturally modern, but if you didn’t know, you’d be hard pressed to spot that you weren’t playing the real thing.
Finally we see the gameplay which is admittedly frustrating, and a little bit of punditry as to why this wasn’t the commercial success of the following
Pong
. It’s a fascinating look at the early computer game industry.
Have a look at
our coverage of the first episode of this project. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,919.432114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/hackaday-podcast-episode-270-a-cluster-of-microcontrollers-a-rocket-engine-from-scratch-and-a-look-inside-voyager/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 270: A Cluster Of Microcontrollers, A Rocket Engine From Scratch, And A Look Inside Voyager | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they get excited over the pocket-sized possibilities of the recently announced 2024 Business Card Challenge, and once again discuss their picks for the most interesting stories and hacks from the last week. There’s cheap microcontrollers in highly parallel applications, a library that can easily unlock the world of Bluetooth input devices in your next project, some gorgeous custom flight simulator buttons that would class up any front panel, and an incredible behind the scenes look at how a New Space company designs a rocket engine from the ground up.
Stick around to hear about the latest 3D printed gadget that all the cool kids are fidgeting around with, a brain-computer interface development board for the Arduino, and a WWII-era lesson on how NOT to use hand tools. Finally, learn how veteran Hackaday writer Dan Maloney might have inadvertently kicked off a community effort to digitize rare documentation for NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download your very own copy of the podcast right about here
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 270 Show Notes:
News:
The 2024 Business Card Challenge Starts Now
The Credit Card Sized GameBoy
A Linux Business Card You Can Build
Tiny Sideways Tetris On A Business Card
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [Karo] for guessing Flappy Bird!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
256-Core RISC-V Megacluster
A RISC-V Supercluster For Very Low Cost
How Does The Raspberry Pi Rack Up Against A Mini PC?
Bluepad32 Brings All The Controllers To Your MCU
Put More Korry In Your Flight Sim Switches
Robotic Platform Turns Shop Vac Into Roomba
A Wiper Motor 101
Building A Rocket Engine From Scratch
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
3D Printed Fidget Knife Snaps Back And Forth All Day Long
Much Faster Cold Brew Through Cavitation
Your Pi, From Anywhere
Z80s From The ’80s Had Futuristic Design
Tom’s Picks:
Giving Your KiCad PCB Repository Pretty Pictures
ArdEEG Lowers The Cost Of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Fully 3D Printed Case Is Stacked High With Mini PCs
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Retrotechtacular: How Not To Use Hand Tools
The Computers Of Voyager | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,919.475328 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/reflecting-on-the-state-of-game-boy-emulation-in-2024/ | Reflecting On The State Of Game Boy Emulation In 2024 | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"emulation",
"game boy",
"GB Enhanced+"
] | Considering the decades that have passed since Nintendo’s Game Boy was considered the state-of-the-art in mobile gaming, you’d imagine that the community would have pretty much perfected the emulation of the legendary family of handhelds — and on the whole, you’d be right. Today, you can get open source emulators for your computer or even smartphone that can play the vast majority of games that were released between the introduction of the original DMG-1 “brick” Game Boy in 1989 through to the final games published for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s.
But not
all
of them. While all the big name games are handled at this point, there’s still a number of obscure titles (not all of which are games) that require specialized hardware accessories to properly function. To bring the community up to speed on where work is still required, [Shonumi] recently provided a rundown on the
emulation status of every commercial Game Boy accessory
.
If there’s anyone who would know what still needs some polishing, its [Shonumi]. Not only is he the creator and maintainer of the GB Enhanced+ emulator, but he’s
literally written a book on the subject
.
So what’s the verdict? Not too bad, actually. [Shonumi] figures that about 80% of the Game Boy peripherals have been emulated well enough to make their respective games work, at least to some degree. For example, the
basic functionality of the sonar transducer
that was packed in with 1998’s
Pocket Sonar
fish finder has been emulated, but it always returns static data. But since you probably weren’t looking to take your emulated Game Boy out on the lake anyway, it’s not really a problem.
Most of the other devices are at least partially supported, but [Shonumi] says they need more work before they could really be considered fully functional. This includes several games which used infrared to communicate. Games which used IR for system-to-system communication are largely supported, but some titles used the IR hardware to communicate with external devices which still need to be tracked down for reverse engineering and testing.
One the most interesting entries in the list of partially supported accessories is the modem and camera for
Campho Advance.
This cartridge allowed the Game Boy Advance to connect to a telephone line and make two-way video calls back in 2004. [Shonumi] says that GB Enhanced+ can already connect two emulated copies of
Campho Advance
over the network, and you can even place calls between them. But like
Pocket Sonar
, the video feed has been replaced with a static image. Once the code has been written to connect the emulator with a video source on the local device (such as a webcam), this particular gadget can be checked off the list as fully functional.
According to [Shonumi], there’s only a single Game Boy accessory which has completely eluded the emulation community so far, the GBKISS LINK. This was a device that connected to your computer and could transmit downloadable games to a special cartridge over IR. Unfortunately, the system is very rare. Only a few examples are known to still exist, and none of them have ever been reverse engineered or documented.
[Shonumi] ends this State of the Union address with the belief that emulation of every official Game Boy accessory is within the community’s grasp. Progress is being made on the last stragglers, and if somebody with the right skills can get their hands on a GBKISS LINK, the final piece of the puzzle should fall into place.
Now, the state of emulation for other systems…that’s a whole different story. But hey, one legendary system at a time, right?
Thumbnail image: Sammlung der Medien und Wissenschaft,
CC BY 4.0
. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757683",
"author": "SETHxor",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T17:52:38",
"content": "I mainly use the mGBA amd Gambatte emulator cores in Retropie. They work great, but some games won’t or can’t work due to lack of hardware emulation, gameboy camera, tilt sensors.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,919.9445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/this-week-in-security-tunnelvision-scarecrows-and-poutine/ | This Week In Security: TunnelVision, Scarecrows, And Poutine | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"github",
"gitlab",
"This Week in Security",
"TunnelVision"
] | There’s a clever “new” attack against VPNs, called
TunnelVision
, done by researchers at Leviathan Security. To explain why we put “new” in quotation marks, I’ll just share my note-to-self on this one written before reading the write-up: “Doesn’t using a more specific DHCP route do this already?” And indeed, that’s the secret here: in routing, the more specific route wins. I could not have told you that DHCP option 121 is used to set extra static routes, so that part was new to me. So let’s break this down a bit, for those that haven’t spent the last 20 years thinking about DHCP, networking, and VPNs.
So up first, a route is a collection of values that instruct your computer how to reach a given IP address, and the set of routes on a computer is the routing table. On one of my machines, the (slightly simplified) routing table looks like:
# ip route
default via 10.0.1.1 dev eth0
10.0.1.0/24 dev eth0
The first line there is the default route, where “default” is a short-hand for
0.0.0.0/0
. That indicate a network using the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation. When the Internet was first developed, it was segmented into networks using network classes A, B, and C. The problem there was that the world was limited to just over 2.1 million networks on the Internet, which has since proven to be not nearly enough. CIDR came along, eliminated the classes, and gave us subnets instead.
In CIDR notation, the value after the slash is commonly called the netmask, and indicates the number of bits that are dedicated to the network identifier, and how many bits are dedicated to the address on the network. Put more simply, the bigger the number after the slash, the fewer usable IP addresses on the network. In the context of a route, the IP address here is going to refer to a network identifier, and the whole CIDR string identifies that network and its size.
Back to my routing table, the two routes are a bit different. The first one uses the “via” term to indicate we use a gateway to reach the indicated network. That doesn’t make any sense on its own, as the 10.0.1.1 address is on the 0.0.0.0/0 network. The second route saves the day, indicating that the 10.0.1.0/24 network is directly reachable out the eth0 device. This works because the more specific route — the one with the bigger netmask value, takes precedence.
The next piece to understand is DHCP, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. That’s the way most machines get an IP address from the local network. DHCP not only assigns IP addresses, but it also sets additional information via numeric options. Option 1 is the subnet mask, option 6 advertises DNS servers, and option 3 sets the local router IP. That router is then generally used to construct the default route on the connecting machine — 0.0.0.0/0 via router_IP.
Remember the problem with the gateway IP address belonging to the default network? There’s a similar issue with VPNs. If you want all traffic to flow over the VPN device, tun0, how does the VPN traffic get routed across the Internet to the VPN server? And how does the VPN deal with the existence of the default route set by DHCP? By leaving those routes in place, and adding more specific routes. That’s usually
0.0.0.0/1
and
128.0.0.0/1
, neatly slicing the entire Internet into two networks, and routing both through the VPN. These routes are more specific than the default route, but leave the router-provided routes in place to keep the VPN itself online.
And now enter TunnelVision. The key here is DHCP option 121, which sets additional CIDR notation routes. The very same trick a VPN uses to override the network’s default route can be used against it. Yep, DHCP can simply inform a client that networks
0.0.0.0/2
,
64.0.0.0/2
,
128.0.0.0/2
, and
192.0.0.0/2
are routed through malicious_IP. You’d see it if you actually checked your routing table, but how often does anybody do that, when not working a problem?
There is a CVE assigned, CVE-2024-3661, but there’s an interesting question raised: Is this a vulnerability, and in which component? And what’s the right solution? To the first question, everything is basically working the way it is supposed to. The flaw is that some VPNs make the assumption that a /1 route is a bulletproof way to override the default route. The solution is a bit trickier.
Wireguard on Linux already has a very robust solution that users can opt in to, the use of network namespaces to further isolate traffic inside and outside the VPN. Another approach is to simply ignore DHCP option 121 like Android does, making it one of the few unaffected platforms. It seems reasonable that platforms that do need option 121 could re-use the existing trusted vs untrusted designation for networks, only honoring option 121 for trusted networks.
And one final thought before moving on, this can really be a problem on semi-trusted networks, where an adversary could set up a malicious rogue DHCP server. Proper host isolation seems like it would make that a challenge, but not every network does so. The biggest threat I see is an informed attacker using TunnelVision to capture traffic meant for internal traffic. Internal IPs don’t have valid HTTPS certificates, so this seems like it could be used in a highly targeted campaign to capture data intended for such a device.
A Scarecrow Would Have Saved You
We’re going to take a quick look at a new way the zEus malware is getting distributed, and then chat about a new tool that may have helped prevent infection. So first, it was
embedded in a Minecraft Source Pack
. Now as far as we can tell, this isn’t a vulnerability in Minecraft, it’s just your normal self-extracting RAR that runs the malware while extracting a copy of the files you actually want. For our purposes, the interesting part is the anti-analysis component.
This malware has a list of computer names and running programs that it checks for before deploying. If your computer is named george, or you’re running Wireshark, the payload won’t trigger. That’s not unique to this particular malware, and it’s exactly the malware quirk that
Cyber Scarecrow
uses. This might be one of those “dumb ideas” that works, and therefore isn’t a dumb idea. Regardless, Cyber Scarecrow runs on Windows, and launches multiple fake analysis indicators, trying to trick malware into leaving your computer alone.
Poutine
Boost Security has released
poutine
, a new Open Source security scanner for both GitHub and Gitlab actions/pipelines. The scanner looks for misconfigurations that allow things like arbitrary code execution from external contributors.
Running the tool appears to be pretty simple, and it’s available via docker, brew, or a binary download. On the roadmap is support for CircleCI and Azure, with more misconfigurations to be added.
Gitlab’s Deep Dive
Last for this week is
Gitlab’s own coverage of a file write vulnerability
. And it all starts with the Ruby Gem
devfile
calling an external binary. That raised suspicions, as interfaces like those are prone to bugs. And here was a bug at the interface: the parent key worked by copying files to the local directory. That’s not what you want.
The good news is that this was guarded against in the Ruby code. But there was a bypass, by specifying a binary sequence, the safeguard in the Ruby code doesn’t trigger, but the binary code did see the unsafe entry. The only trick left to find was how to do path traversal to put the payload where it needed to go. And the answer was to use a devfile registry to pull a tarfile. A tarfile that can technically include both dots and slashes in its filename. Yep, you can put the
../
directory traversal right in the filename, for ultimate ease of use. The fixes landed back in January, and surely we’ve all updated out Gitlab instances since then, right? | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757646",
"author": "Horacio",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T15:23:30",
"content": "The cyber scarecrow reminds me of another trick that was setting some locale in regedit as russian, as most hackers from there wouldn’t want to infect nationals",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,919.648438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/this-typewriter-types-toast/ | This Typewriter Types Toast | Jenny List | [
"Art"
] | [
"design",
"toaster",
"typewriter"
] | As a writer it’s a pleasure to see one’s work appear from time to time on a physical medium. While newspapers may be shuffling slowly off this mortal coil, there are still a few opportunities to write for printed media. It’s safe to say that no Hackaday scribe has ever managed to have their work published on the medium in this hack though,
because it’s a typewriter designed to type on toast
.
The toaster-typewriter is the work of [Ritika Kedia], and it forms part of her thesis in product design at the Parsons School of Design, New York. It’s written up very much from an artistic rather than a tech perspective, but it’s no less ingenious for that in the way it uses letters formed from hot wire on a clay substrate, mounted on the end of the typewriter arms in front of a toaster.
We’re slightly sad to see that it only has three operable letters at the moment as it’s an artwork rather than a document machine, but we love the idea and wish she had time to develop it further with a full alphabet. You can see a short demo in the video below the break. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757567",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T11:23:58",
"content": "Ha ha you can eat your words!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6757588",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T12:36:36",
"c... | 1,760,371,919.722079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/10/diy-keyboard-can-handle-up-to-three-host-devices/ | DIY Keyboard Can Handle Up To Three Host Devices | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"atmega32u4",
"Planck",
"Planck keyboard",
"QMK"
] | Here’s a story that may be familiar: [der-b] is a Linux developer who is forced two carry two laptops — one for work with unavoidable work stuff on it, and one for software development. Unfortunately this leads to keyboard confusion between the two when one is connected to an external display.
In an attempt to overcome this,
[der-b] designed a keyboard that can be connected to more than one device at a time
, despite ultimately thinking that this will lead to another layer of confusion. The point was to try to make something as lightweight as possible, since carrying two laptops is already a struggle. As a bonus, this project was a learning experience for soldering SMD parts.
The keyboard itself is based on
the Planck
and uses an ATMega32u4 running QMK firmware, so that means it’s a 40% ortholinear with 48 keys total. [der-b] used low-profile Cherry MX switches to keep things sleek.
In order to switch between different host devices, [der-b] uses shortcuts as you’ll see in the short video after the break. This is accomplished with a FSUSB36 IC on the USB connections between the ATMega and the host.
[der-b] encountered a spate of issues while building this keyboard, which you can read all about in the blog post. We love to see transparency when it comes to your write-ups, especially when the projects become learning experiences. (Aren’t they all?) But if 48 keys aren’t nearly enough for you,
check out this learning-experience keyboard build
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757524",
"author": "itsemast",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T08:17:45",
"content": "I am not sure what would be easier: adding a new device into the equation (the switching keyboard) or just getting rid of one of the laptops. Pretty sure one of them can be left plugged to a wall adapter... | 1,760,371,919.780926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/09/the-zx-spectrum-takes-to-the-airwaves-again/ | The ZX Spectrum Takes To The Airwaves Again | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"broadcast radio",
"tape storage",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | A perk of writing for Hackaday comes in the vast breadth of experience represented by our fellow writers. Through our colleague [Voja Antonić] for example we’ve gained an unparalleled insight into the cutting edge of 8-bit computing in 1980s Yugoslavia, of his Galaksija home computer, and of software being broadcast over [Zoran Modli]’s Ventilator 202 radio show.
We’re strongly reminded of this by hearing of
the Slovenian Radio Študent broadcasting the classic Slovenian ZX Spectrum text adventure game
Kontrabant 2
, at the behest of the Slovenian Computer History Museum. It’s been four decades and a lot of turbulent history, but once again 8-bit code will be heard on FM in Europe.
Some of our younger readers may never have experienced the joy of loading software from cassette, but in those days it represented a slow alternative to the eye-wateringly expensive floppy drives of the day. The software was represented as a serial bitstream translated into tones and recorded on a standard cassette recorder which was standard consumer electronics back then, and when played back through a speaker it was an ear-splitting sound with something in common with that of a modem handshake from a decade or more later. This could easily be transmitted over a radio station, and a few broadcasters tried experimental technology shows doing just that.
We haven’t heard from any listeners who managed to catch the game and run it on their Spectrum, but we hope that Slovenia’s retrocomputing community were out in force even if Audacity and a n emulator replaced the original hardware. Given that more than one hacker camp in our community has sported radio stations whether legal or not, it would be nice to hear the dulcet tones of 8-bit software on the airwaves again.
Meanwhile if cassettes are too cheap for you, feast your eyes on
Sir Clive’s budget storage solution
.
Thanks [Stephen Walters]. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757543",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T09:23:29",
"content": "It’s fascinating how history is intertwined sometimes. Especially east vs west.For example, I’ve read that many ZX Spectrums came from West Germany (smuggled over?), while the eastern block Z80 was the U88... | 1,760,371,920.000039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/09/an-audio-delay-the-garden-hose-way/ | An Audio Delay, The Garden Hose Way | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"delay",
"hose",
"lo-fi"
] | Creating music in 2024 is made easier by ready access to a host of effects in software that were once the preserve only of professional studios. One such is the delay; digital delays are now a staple of any production software where once they required infrastructure. [Look Mum No Computer] is no stranger to the world of Lo-Fi analogue music making, and along with his musical collaborator [Hainback], he’s created an analogue delay from an unexpected material:
garden hose pipe
.
The unit takes inspiration from some commercial 1970s effects, and lends a fixed short delay intended to give a double-tracking effect to vocals or similar. It involves putting a speaker at one end of a reel of hose and a microphone at the other, while the original unexpectedly used Shure SM57 capsules as both speaker and microphone they use a very small loudspeaker and a cheap microphone capsule.
The sound is not what you’d call high quality. Indeed, it’s about what one might expect when listening down a long pipe. But when mixed in behind the vocals, it gives a very pleasing effect. The duo use it on their new EP which, as you might expect, is released on vinyl.
If such effects interest you,
also take a look at a 1950s reverb room
at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6757463",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-05-10T02:20:29",
"content": "The bottom link is requesting a WordPress login…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6757474",
"author": "Giake",
... | 1,760,371,920.05993 |
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