url stringlengths 37 208 | title stringlengths 4 148 | author stringclasses 173
values | publish_date stringclasses 1
value | categories listlengths 0 12 | tags listlengths 0 27 | featured_image stringlengths 0 272 | content stringlengths 0 56.1k | comments_count int64 0 900 | scraped_comments_count int64 0 50 | comments listlengths 0 50 | scraped_at float64 1.76B 1.76B |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/will-we-recycle-fpgas-in-the-future/ | Will We Recycle FPGAs In The Future? | Al Williams | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"recycle"
] | If you really want to look at how much something costs, you need to look at total cost of ownership, not just the sticker price. Same goes for things like pollution and carbon footprint. A vehicle, for example, might have a low carbon footprint in operation but require more carbon in the manufacturing or disposal processes. Researchers have noted that FPGA accelerators get replaced and may wind up as e-waste in as little as two years. They propose
REFRESH
, an architecture that recycles old FPGAs into new ones by joining multiple FPGA dice with a simple interposer to coordinate the work.
The idea is not as radical as it might first seem. Many modern chips use chiplets anyway, so this is a reasonable extension of that idea. You simply need a way to harvest the old devices.
Of course, design tools for these hybrid recycled FPGAs would require work, too. We imagine that if you are not worried about the carbon footprint, you probably won’t be keen to develop a process for recycling chips, making new ones from them, and standing up a different toolchain. But there are a few factors that could make it worthwhile — tax incentives, for example.
We are more likely to
recycle plastic bottles
. Or even
metal beverage cans
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6711011",
"author": "drenehtsral",
"timestamp": "2023-12-23T03:35:27",
"content": "Heck, I’m pretty sure Xilinx already sells some SKUs which are built this way: A carrier die containing mostly interconnect, the support hardware to configure the interconnect fabric, and the drivers ... | 1,760,372,066.181309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/spice-up-your-earrings-with-microelectronics/ | Spice Up Your Earrings With Microelectronics | Julian Scheffers | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"0402",
"attiny",
"earrings",
"industrial earring",
"jewelry"
] | We’ve covered [mitxela] in the past and if you know him, you’ll likely know him for putting the micro in microelectronics. This year, he’s at it again with his
LED Industrial Piercing
.
This tiny PCB is really pushing the limits of fabrication
Inspired by the absolutely tiny 0402 LEDs and
industrial piercings
, [mitxela] started thinking of a way to construct the 5cm long device. He found some normal LED earrings to steal the battery compartment from. Then, with a tick needle and some more steel, he created a new industrial earring with some holes.
Of course, no [mitxela] project is complete without comically tiny microsoldering and this project makes the VQFN ATTiny he used look large. He puts his PCB suppliers to the test with a merely 1mm wide flex PCB for the LEDs to be mounted on. Finally, he combines the flex PCB, the earring and some epoxy to create yet another piece of LED jewelry.
Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710989",
"author": "Needleroozer",
"timestamp": "2023-12-23T00:25:55",
"content": "Here’s the link to his writeup for those who don’t want to watch a video:https://mitxela.com/projects/scaffold",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,372,066.128807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/30-guitar-build-shows-what-you-can-do-with-amazon-parts/ | $30 Guitar Build Shows What You Can Do With Amazon Parts | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"build",
"guitar"
] | Most guitarists buy their axes fully assembled from big names like Fender, Gibson, and… maybe Yamaha? Sure. But there are a dedicated set that relish in mixing and matching parts and even building and assembling their own instruments. [Danny Lewis] decided to see what he could do with the cheapest guitar parts from Amazon and a body of his own design,
and he put together something pretty passable for just $30.
The wood for the body was cut on a bandsaw, and was essentially free scrap sourced from old furniture. [Danny] went for an unconventional design using a roughly Telecaster outline and large cutouts either side of the bridge. The neck was free, by virtue of being an old Harmony neck sourced off Craigslist. We’d have preferred to see what could be done with a cheap Amazon neck, but it nonetheless fits the vibe of the build.
The guitar then received a $9.99 pickup and controls, an $8.80 solidtail bridge, and $11 tuning machines for the headstock. Strung up, it actually sounds passable. We’d want to throw it on a proper amp and give the whole thing a setup before fully assessing it, but hey, for $30, it’s hard to go wrong.
We do love some hacky guitars around here; we’ve even featured some with
surprise effects gear built into the bodies.
Video after the break. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710957",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T21:23:36",
"content": "Fyi. it’s not a bandsaw that was used to cut the outer faces of the body, it’s a scroll saw, pretty much a fretsaw strapped to a motor, much more forgiving on the fingers and ears, the bulk of ... | 1,760,372,065.699455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/ultra-basic-thermal-camera-built-using-arduino-uno/ | Ultra-Basic Thermal Camera Built Using Arduino Uno | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Uno",
"thermal camera",
"thermal imaging"
] | Thermal cameras can cost well into the five-figure range if you’re buying high-resolution models with good feature sets. New models can be so advanced that their export and use is heavily controlled by certain countries, including the USA. If you just want to tinker at the low end, though, you don’t have to spend a lot of scratch. You can even
build yourself something simple based on an Arduino Uno!
The build uses Panasonic’s cheap “Grid-EYE” infrared array as the thermal sensor, in this case, a model with an 8×8 array of thermopiles. It’s not going to get you any fancy images, especially at long range, but you can use it to get a very blocky kind of Predator-vision of the thermal radiation environment. It’s a simple matter of hooking up the Grid-EYE sensor to the Arduino Uno over I2C, and then spitting out the sensor’s data in a nice visual form on a cheap TFT screen.
It’s a great introduction to the world of thermal imaging. There’s no better way to learn how something works by building a working example yourself. We’ve featured
a few similar projects before, too
; it’s all thanks to the fact that thermal sensors are getting
cheaper and more accessible than ever! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710931",
"author": "Phil Maitrot",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T19:48:30",
"content": "I always wondered if it’s possible to stack 4 of those 32×32 sensors in a way that they overlap, and by software retrieve a higher resolution picture of those sensors",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,065.857337 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/hackaday-podcast-episode-249-data-by-laser-and-parachute-bluetooth-hacks-googles-gotta-google/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 249: Data By Laser And Parachute, Bluetooth Hacks, Google’s Gotta Google | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | ‘Twas the podcast before Christmas, and all through the house, the best hacks of the week are dancing around Elliot and Tom’s heads like sugar-plums. Whatever that means.
I’d just like to
interject for a moment
. What you’re referring to as Christmas is, in fact, Happy/Holidays.
Before settling their brains in for a long winter’s nap, they’ll talk about the open source software podcast that now calls Hackaday home, the latest firmware developments for Google’s Stadia controller, high-definition cat videos from space, and upgrades for the surprisingly old-school battery tech that powers the Toyota Prius.
Out on the lawn, expect a clatter about the the state-of-the-art in DIY camera technology, the acoustic properties of hot chocolate, and a storage media from the 1990s that even Al Williams had never heard of.
Finally, after tearing open the shutters and throwing up the sash, the episode wraps up with a discussion about wiring techniques that let you leave the soldering iron at home, and the newest chapter in the long history of transferring data via parachute. Miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer sold separately.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the gift you really want this year:
this week’s podcast in DRM-free MP3
.
Episode 249 Show Notes:
News:
TWiT – Show Changes and Cancellations
FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea
What’s that Sound?
This week’s sound was a Rubiks Cube! Congratulations to [Daddy Long Legs from SF!].
Towards The Perfect Coin Flip: The NIST Randomness Beacon
https://beacon.nist.gov/beacon/2.0/chain/2/pulse/600657
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Reverse-Engineering The Stadia Controller Bluetooth Switching Procedure
Stadia Says Goodbye With Bluetooth And Crap Game
The Dark Side Of Hacking XMas Lights, Literally
NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space Via Laser
Psyche
Old Prius Gets Upgraded Batteries
Multi-View Wire Art Meets Generative AI
Raspberry Pi Zero Powers Custom Camera Platform
CinePi Project Promises Open Source Movie Making
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Up Close And Personal With A MEMS Microphone
Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin
The Hot Chocolate Effect Explained
Tom’s Picks:
Storage Media Forgotten
How A LEGO Set Is Born
The Small And Silly Synth Now Even Smaller (But Just As Silly)
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder?
Parachute Drops Are Still A Viable Solution For Data Recovery From High Altitude Missions
SpaceX Joins In The Long History Of Catching Stuff From Space
GitHub – Repository for the SuperBIT Data Recovery System | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710985",
"author": "Thomas Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2023-12-23T00:00:23",
"content": "Modulo math, Elliot remember 13 is 0 to 12.Add 1 unless you are indexing the list from 0.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6711090",
... | 1,760,372,066.230797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/saving-the-planet-with-carefully-cut-paper/ | Saving The Planet With Carefully Cut Paper | Kristina Panos | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"kirigami",
"packaging",
"recycling"
] | You may not think much of origami or its cousin-with-cutouts kirigami, but the latter could (and already is) helping to save the planet. But let’s back up a bit.
Most readers will be familiar with origami, the Japanese art of folding paper. But there is also kirigami, which uses a series of cuts to produce 3D shapes from 2D stock. Turns out that
if you cut paper just right, you can turn it into highly-recyclable packaging
that even interlocks with itself, negating the need for folding or even tape.
The video after the break takes a look at 3M’s Scotch Cushion Lock™ protective wrap through the eyes of its inventor, Tom Corrigan. It all started when 3M wanted to create a self-assembling box from a flat piece of cardboard.
So far, that particular invention hasn’t come to fruition, but after many long nights with paper and X-Acto knives, Tom came up with a honeycomb design with strong vertical walls that absorb energy much like bubble wrap or packing peanuts. The toothiness of each honeycomb wall adds height which adds strength, and allows the packaging to interlock with itself.
Not only is this packaging easier to recycle, it takes up way less space than other packaging alternatives. Once expanded, a 1,000 square foot roll of this stuff is equal to 2,500 square feet of bubble wrap, which constitutes about a dozen rolls.
Now, what to do about all that expanded polystyrene packaging still out there?
With the right tool, you can turn it into insulation.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710899",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T17:35:42",
"content": "As always, this will only be adopted if it’s the cheaper option. Amazon already abandoned all of it’s climate commitments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,066.019322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/this-week-in-security-terrapin-seized-unseized-and-autospill/ | This Week In Security: Terrapin, Seized Unseized, And Autospill | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Autospill",
"phishing",
"Terrapin"
] | There’s a new SSH vulnerability,
Terrapin
(
pdf paper
), and it’s got the potential to be nasty — but only in an extremely limited circumstance. To understand the problem, we have to understand what SSH is designed to do. It replaces telnet as a tool to get a command line shell on a remote computer. Telnet send all that text in the clear, but SSH wraps it all inside a public-key encrypted tunnel. It was designed to safely negotiate an unfriendly network, which is why SSH clients are so explicit about accepting new keys, and alerting when a key has changed.
SSH uses a sequence counter to detect Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) shenanigans like packet deletion, replay, or reordering. That sequence isn’t actually included in the packet, but is used as part of the Message Authentication Check (MAC) of several encryption modes. This means that if a packet is removed from the encrypted tunnel, the MAC fails on the rest of the packets, triggering a complete connection reset. This sequence actually starts at zero, with the first unencrypted packet sent after the version banners are exchanged. In theory, this means that an attacker fiddling with packets in the pre-encryption phase will invalidate the entire connection as well. There’s just one problem.
The innovation from the Terrapin researchers is that an attacker with MitM access to the connection can insert a number of benign messages in the pre-encryption phase, and then silently drop the first number of messages in the encrypted phase. Just a little TCP sequence rewriting for any messages between, and neither the server nor client can detect the deception. It’s a really interesting trick — but what can we do with it?
For most SSH implementations, not much. The
9.6 release of OpenSSH
addresses the bug, calling it cryptographically novel, but noting that the actual impact is limited to disabling some of the timing obfuscation features added to release 9.5.
There is no other discernable impact to session secrecy or session integrity.
However, for at least one other SSH server, AsyncSSH, there’s
quite a bit more at stake
. This Python library is both an SSH server and client, and there’s a Terrapin vulnerability in each. For an AsyncSSH client, the vulnerability allows injection of extension info messages prior to the transition to encrypted. The example given is that the client authentication algorithm can be downgraded, which doesn’t seem particularly useful.
The more notable vulnerability is when any SSH client is used to connect to an AsynchSSH server. If the attacker also has an account on that server, the victim’s connection can be routed into an attacker-controlled shell. While this does not break SSH encryption directly, it has essentially the same effect. This is not a sky-is-falling sort of vulnerability, as the prerequisite set of circumstances are very narrow for exploitation. It is definitely a unique and novel approach, and we anticipate more findings from other researchers building on the technique.
AlphV Has been Seized — and Unseized
In a hilarious saga,
the FBI has played tag with AlphV
over a .onion ransomware site. A TOR onion service uses a public-private key, where the public key is the .onion address, and the private key controls all the routing magic that connects a user to the service. The FBI apparently nabbed the physical server, and used that captured private key to redirect the .onion address to the takedown page.
Apparently the AlphV admins have retained control of that private key, too, as a rather cheeky message kept replacing the FBI’s notice. In the “unseized” version, a black cat presents a new .onion address. Oh, and in retribution for the slight, AlphV has rescinded their restriction against targeting hospitals and other critical infrastructure. The one cutout that remains is their reluctance to target the Commonwealth of Independent States, AKA the old Soviet Union.
Autospill
This one initially sounds pretty bad.
Android apps get access to password manager credentials
. But a bit deeper look might temper our distress. So first, remember that Android apps have a native view for normal operations, and also have a webview for showing web content. The problem here is that when a password manager autofills into a website in that webview, the contents are leaked back into the native app’s interface.
The threat model then, is that an untrusted app launches a website for an “Log in with” authentication flow. Your password manager detects the Facebook/Google/Microsoft site, and offers to autofill credentials. And upon autofilling, the app itself now has captured them. It’s taking a bit for Google and password manager companies to agree on exactly who’s problem this is, and if fixes are necessary. For more details,
there is a PDF available
.
Bits and Bytes
Hash collisions are generally a bad thing. If a hashing algorithm has any feasible chance of collision, it’s time to retire it for any serious work. But what if we only needed to collide the first 7 bytes? In use with git, for instance, SHA-256 often gets truncated to the first 7 bytes for usability sake. How hard is it to collide those? And what about adding the last 7 bytes?
[David Buchanan] ran the numbers for us
, and let’s just say that you really need to check all the bytes of a 256-bit hash for cryptographic robustness. With some tricks for efficiency, 128 bits of a SHA256 hash only costs $93,000 and would take about a month.
Here’s a new/old idea: Send an email, include a
.
, and second email with full headers. What will the receiving mail server do? In some cases, this odd email is seen as a single message, and in some cases, it’s two. In other words,
you get SMTP smuggling
. This is really a problem, as it tricks one email host into sending your arbitrary emails as trusted messages. Want to send a message as bill.gates(at)microsoft.com, and have the DKIM check out? Smuggle a message through the office365 servers! On the other hand, this one has already been disclosed to a bunch of vulnerable services, so you’ve probably lost your chance.
And for a bit of fun,
Microsoft’s Phishing Simulator catches real Phish
! That is, Microsoft now has an Attack Simulator tool that can help you send fake phishing emails, to help train users not to click on that link. [Vaisha Bernard] was giving the tool a test run, and realized that one of the bogus links was off to a non-existent confluence page, and being sent from an unregistered domain. Register both, and that phishing simulator has real teeth. Apparently [Vaisha] earned multiple bug bounties on finally get the whole problem fixed, which goes to show it pays to be curious. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710875",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T16:00:54",
"content": "SSH wraps it all inside a public-key encrypted tunnel.No, the tunnel is symmetric-key encrypted. Public-key encrypted is the symmetric-key exchange.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,065.740589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/giant-demonstrator-explains-how-dlp-projectors-work/ | Giant Demonstrator Explains How DLP Projectors Work | Lewin Day | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"display",
"dlp",
"dmd",
"projector"
] | Texas Instruments developed digital mirror devices, and the subsequent digital light processing (DLP) projector, starting in the late 1980s. The technology is a wondrous and fanciful application of micro-scale electronics and optics. Most of us that have tangled with these devices have had to learn their mode of operation from diagrams and our own imagination. But what if you just built one at a large enough scale that you could see how it worked? Well,
[jbumstead] did just that!
A real Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) consists of hundreds of thousands of mirrors, which would be impractical to recreate. This build settles for a simpler 5×5 array made using half-inch square mirrors. It uses solenoids to move each individual mirror between a flat and angled position to create the display. The solenoids are all under the command of an Arduino Mega which controls the overall state of the display and shows various patterns.
It’s not perfect, with the mirrors not
quite
matching in angles at all times, but it demonstrates the concept perfectly well. When you see it in action with light bouncing off it, you can easily understand how this could be used to make a display of many thousands of pixels in a projector arrangement. We’ve featured some other DLP hacks before, too,
so dive in if you’re interested
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710911",
"author": "cplamb",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T18:16:46",
"content": "Before TI used square mirrors pivoted on two opposite corners they used a different technology. The mirrors were little metal dimples which popped between concave and convex just like the silicon rubber fi... | 1,760,372,065.644262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/22/open-source-dc-ups-keeps-the-low-voltage-gear-going/ | Open Source DC UPS Keeps The Low-Voltage Gear Going | Dan Maloney | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"bms",
"dc",
"ESP32",
"network",
"rp2040",
"stm32",
"Uninterruptible Power Supply",
"ups"
] | We all like to keep our network gear running during a power outage — trouble is, your standard consumer-grade uninterruptible power supply (UPS) tends to be overkill for routers and such. Their outlet strips built quickly get crowded with wall-warts, and why bother converting from DC to AC only to convert back again?
This common conundrum is the inspiration for
[Walker]’s DC UPS design
, which has some interesting features. First off, the design is open source, which of course invites tinkering and repurposing. The UPS is built for a 12 volt supply and load, but that obviously can be changed to suit your needs. The battery bank is a 4S3P design using 18650 cells, and that could be customized as well. There’s an ideal diode controller that prevents DC from back-feeding into the supply when the lights go out, and a really interesting synchronous buck-boost converter in place of the power management chip you’d normally see in a UPS. The converter chip takes a PWM signal from an RP2040; there’s also an ESP32 onboard for web server and UI duties as well as an STM32 to run the BMS. The video below discusses the design and shows a little of the build.
We’ve seen a spate of DC UPS designs lately,
some more elaborate
than
others
. This one has quite a few interesting chips that most of us don’t normally deal with, and it’s nice to see how they’re used in a practical design. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710826",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T11:44:40",
"content": "If it needs 3 MCUs to achieve a simple task, it´s almost sure the software side is a clutter mess.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710890",
"a... | 1,760,372,066.080443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/zerowriter-promises-zero-distractions-while-writing/ | Zerowriter Promises Zero Distractions While Writing | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"e-ink display",
"e-ink typewriter",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W"
] | As great as full-blown desktop computers may be for web surfing, gaming, and what have you, they are theaters of distraction when it comes time to write. And while there are machines out there purpose-built for writing, the price tags run awfully high for what they are, which is essentially a microprocessor handling a keyboard and an E-ink display.
So, why not build one yourself, then?
That’s the idea behind the Zerowriter
, which, as you may have guessed, is based on the Raspberry Pi Zero. The Zero 2 W to be exact: [zerowriter] says that the extra power over the original Zero is quite useful.
In addition, there’s a 4.2″ Waveshare E-ink display and the Vortex Core 40% keyboard inside the 3D-printed enclosure. The design is based on the Penkesu computer, although in the Zerowriter, the Pi sits behind the screen instead of underneath the keyboard. [zerowriter] built an application on top of the Waveshare demo program that’s easy to use and modify.
The price tag for this build comes in around $200, which is a fraction of similar commercial products. Most of the cost is in this particular keyboard, although 40%s are, broadly speaking, not cheap. We would love to see someone make a keyboard for this.
Looking to make something a bit bigger?
Be sure to check out the MUSE. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710735",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T06:38:15",
"content": "Looks alright. I hope that the e-ink can update fast enough to not be totally unusable (sub-50 ms or so is my guess, probably very possible with localized updates)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,372,065.80337 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/desalinating-water-with-the-sun/ | Desalinating Water With The Sun | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"clean water",
"desalination",
"mit",
"passive solar",
"plumbing",
"pumps",
"seawater",
"Shanghai Jiao Tong University",
"solar",
"water"
] | Getting fresh water from salt water can be difficult to do at any kind of scale. Researchers have developed a
new method of desalinating water
that significantly reduces its cost. [via
Electrek
]
By mimicking the thermohaline circulation of the ocean, the researchers from MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University were able to solve one of the primary issues with desalination systems, salt fouling. Using a series of evaporator/condenser stages, the seawater is separated into freshwater and salt using heat from the sun.
Evaporating water to separate it from salt isn’t new, but the researchers took it a step further by tilting the whole contraption and introducing a series of tubes to help move the water along and create eddy currents. These currents help the denser, saltier water move off of the apparatus and down deeper into the fluid where the salt doesn’t cause an issue with the device’s operation. The device should have a relatively long lifetime since it has no moving parts and doesn’t require any electricity to operate.
The researchers believe a small, suitcase-sized device could produce water for a family for less than the cost of tap water in the US. The (paywalled) paper is available from
Joule
.
If you’re curious about other drinking water hacks, check out this post on
Re-Imagining the Water Supply
or this
previous work
by the same researchers. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710692",
"author": "GotNoTime",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T04:33:13",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/2023/10/02/passive-desalination-discovers-how-to-avoid-salt-clogging/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6718677",
"aut... | 1,760,372,066.376682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/vu-meter-built-with-neat-graphical-vfd-display/ | VU Meter Built With Neat Graphical VFD Display | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"VU meter"
] | VFD displays are beloved for their eerie glow that sits somewhere just off what you’d call blue. [mircemk] used one of these displays to create an old-school VU meter
that looks straight out of a 1970s laboratory.
The build uses an Arduino Nano as the brains of the operation, which uses its analog inputs to process incoming audio into decibel levels for display on a VU meter. It’s then charged with driving a GP1287 VFD display. Unlike some VFDs that have preset segments that can be illuminated or switched off, this is a fully graphical dot matrix display that can be driven as desired. Thus, when it’s not acting as a bar graph VU meter, it can also
emulate old-school moving-needle meters
. Though, it bears noting, the slow updates the Arduino makes to the display means it’s kind of like those dodgy skeumorphic music apps of the 16-bit era; i.e. it’s quite visually jerky.
Overall, it’s a neat project that demonstrates how to work with audio, microcontrollers, and displays all in one.
We’ve featured other projects from [mircemk] before, too
, almost all of which appear in the same blue and grey project boxes. Video after the break. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710624",
"author": "meyouthemus",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T00:07:09",
"content": "Everybody keeps sayingVU meterwhat does VU even stand for?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710677",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"t... | 1,760,372,066.28257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/making-a-guitar-go-to-eleven-the-hard-way/ | Making A Guitar Go To Eleven, The Hard Way | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"brass",
"guitar",
"knob",
"machining",
"potentiometer",
"spline"
] | At the end of the day, all it takes to
make a guitar go to eleven
is a new knob. Making the knob is another thing — that takes a shop full of machine tools, the expertise to use them, and a whole bunch of time. Then again, if you’re pressed for time, it looks like a 3D printer will do nicely too.
While the 3D printing route is clearly the easier option, it sure seems as if [Chronova Engineering] is more about the journey than the destination. In need of some knob bling for an electric guitar, he takes us through the lengthy process (nicely summarized in the video below) of crafting one from a bar of solid brass. Like all good machining projects, this one starts with making the tools necessary to start the actual build; in this case, it’s a tool to cut the splines needing to mate with the splines on the guitar’s potentiometer shaft. That side quest alone represents probably a third of the total effort on this project, and results in a tool that’s used for all of about 30 seconds.
Aside from spline cutting, there are a ton of interesting machining tidbits on display here. We particularly liked the use of a shaping technique to form the knurling on the knob, as opposed to a standard rotary method, which would have been difficult given the taper on the knob body. Also worth noting are the grinding step that puts a visually interesting pattern on the knob’s top surface, as well as the pantograph used to etch the knob’s markings.
Congrats to [Chronova Engineering] for a great-looking build, and the deep dive into the machinist’s ways. If you’re still interested in custom brass knobs but don’t have a machine shop,
we can help with that
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710583",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T21:10:41",
"content": "its sort of why my crunch box doesn’t have a stomp switch. why would i ever want to turn it off?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6710592",
"a... | 1,760,372,066.326262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/bed-sensors-do-more-than-youd-think/ | Bed Sensors Do More Than You’d Think | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"esphome",
"home automation",
"leak detector",
"pressure sensor",
"sensor"
] | Bed sensors do sort of sound like a gimmick — after all, who cares whether someone is occupying the bed? But if you think about it,
that information is quite useful from a home automation standpoint.
A person could do all sorts of things in this state, from ensuring the overhead lights in the room can’t come on, to turning off other smart devices that are likely not being used while both occupants are sleeping.
[The Home Automation Guy] presents a couple of ways of doing this, but both center around a fairly inexpensive pressure-sensing mat.
In the first method, he connects the pressure mat up to a Zigbee Aqara Leak Sensor, which conveniently has two terminals on the back to accept the wires from the pressure sensor. Then he simply connects it up to a Zigbee-compatible home assistant like the Aqara Hub.
In slightly harder mode, he forgoes the Aqara Leak Sensor and connects the pressure mat up to an ESP32 using a nifty screw terminal dev board. Then he sets up the sensor and all the desired actions in ESPHome. Of course, with an ESP32, it’s easy to add a second pressure mat for [Mrs. The Home Automation Guy]’s side of the bed.
Now, once they’ve both gone off to bed, the house goes into night mode — all the smart plugs, Sonos devices, and other things are powered down, and the alarm system is put into night mode. Be sure to check out the build video after the break. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710567",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T20:24:29",
"content": "If the bed’s a-rockin’, start data loggin’!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710829",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-12-22T1... | 1,760,372,066.92948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/displays-we-love-hacking-spi-and-i2c/ | Displays We Love Hacking: SPI And I2C | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"I2C oled",
"oled",
"oled display",
"oled screen",
"OLED SSD1306",
"SPI display",
"SPI screen",
"tft",
"TFT display",
"TFT LCD",
"tft screen"
] | I’ve talked about HD44780 displays before – they’ve been a mainstay of microcontroller projects for literal decades. In the modern hobbyist world, there’s an elephant in the room – the sheer variety of I2C and SPI displays you can buy. They’re all so different, some are LCD and some are OLED, some have a touchscreen layer and some don’t, some come on breakouts and some are a bare panel. No matter which one you pick, there are things you deserve to know.
These displays are exceptionally microcontroller-friendly, they require hardly any GPIOs, or none extra if you already use I2C. They’re also unbelievably cheap, and so tiny that you can comfortably add one even if you’re hurting for space. Sure, they require more RAM and a more sophisticated software library than HD44780, but with modern microcontrollers, this is no problem at all. As a result, you will see them in almost every project under the sun.
What do you need for those? What are the requirements to operate one? What kind of tricks can you use with them? Let’s go through the main aspects.
The Basics
These displays are all fundamentally the same in how you create the data to be displayed. There’s no interface to show text strings anymore like there is with HD44780 displays – you take control of pixels, monochrome or color, and you have to send them to the display from your microcontroller. This means you have to have enough RAM to represent all those pixels, or generate them on the fly naturally, which puts a cap on the kinds of MCUs you can use.
It’s possible to send partial updates to such a display, so that you can create UI by sending different chunks of data to different regions of the display. For instance, I’ve once built an UI that solely did partial updates for a 320 x 480 color display driven by an ESP32, in a project where RAM was already at a premium. To help with such tasks, many displays allow you to read pixel data out of them. However, it will require more intricate code, so a typical library allocates a full screen’s worth of space for the display and calls it a day.
There are two interfaces typically used for these displays – I2C and SPI. I2C is easier and is likely already available in your project, but it puts a cap on your data transfer speed. This means that you will hardly ever see a color display with an I2C interface – because, as a rule, you need to send 16 times more data to update a color display as opposed to a monochrome one, for the same amount of pixels. You can push SPI faster – whereas I2C typically goes either 100 kHz or 400 kHz, rarely 1 MHz, you can typically push data into an SPI display at a few MHz clock rate, often even 10 MHz.
This SPI display gives you a 240×320 color pixel area to draw anything on.
By [AaltoFablab], CC 2.0
On the other hand, I2C is easier to wire up. If your SPI wiring or configuration is incorrect, an SPI display will not display a picture and just leave you hanging. If you can detect an I2C display on the bus, it can accept your data – SPI displays have no such detection mechanism, at least, not as far as I know, and definitely not for the vast majority of small displays that don’t even expose the MISO pin.
If you’ve miswired an SPI display, you will get no output and no idea on what’s going on, until you re-inspect your wiring and code, thoroughly look the problem up online, or plug a logic analyzer in. It’s not like miswiring SPI displays is all that easy, but it’s not uncommon when doing bringup on unfamiliar displays, and it can happen to anyone. Also, the extra SPI pins require extra GPIOs, and it’s not uncommon that you can’t share the SPI bus with other displays unless you add a 74×125 gate to make sure that your SPI display is not interfering with other devices on the bus.
These factors are not a problem as such, they’re merely things I describe so that you know which display to pick in which situation. If you’re starting out in electronics and you’re fine with monochrome output, pick up an I2C OLED, they’re numerous and software support is omnipresent. If you want high speed updates or color output, you’ll have to work with an SPI display. By the way, displays like SSD1306 and SH1106 OLEDs support both I2C and SPI – it depends on how the breakout is wired up; TFT displays only support SPI as a rule. Picked one of the two, and found the GPIOs needed? Let’s talk software.
A Little Code
Even an ATMega328P can work with such a display – though, sometimes, barely.
By [Turbospok] CC BY-SA 4.0
For most of the popular programming languages and platforms, there’s already a library to work with an average screen you can buy. If you have a favourite language or platform you’d like to use, see if there’s a pre-written library for it that works with your specific screen, and purchase accordingly. To look the library up, all you need to know is the display controller name and the display resolution. If there isn’t a library yet, you can one by modifying one of the existing screen libraries for your screen’s parameters. Of course, that might not be how you’ve planned to spend your evening. But what if you have to? What if you got yourself a display and it doesn’t work with existing libraries?
If you want to know how a system works, it’s helpful to see how it breaks – so let’s describe possible (but rare) software incompatibilities and see where they come from. I’ll discuss wiring problems in a later section, for now, let’s assume you have a working link with the display and all GPIOs are in order. First thing to look into, then, is the controller IC type. Every LCD or OLED screen has an IC bonded to the panel – it’s the square pretty piece of silicon, that is often covered with a black sticker to protect the silicon from stray photons and general damage. There’s different families and models of these ICs, and they’re a defining feature for a typical screen – when picking a library, it’s important to know which screen controller it’s for.
Different controllers might require different SPI modes, control pins or clock speeds. However, most often, what’s different is the ‘language’ that the controller uses – its registers and their addresses, the values you need to write into these addresses, and the way it accepts screen data. If you port a library from one controller to another, you might need to change the way that the library speaks to the controller in general, learning it from a working library for your controller in a different language. If controllers are similar, say, ST7789 vs ST7789V, they’ll often speak the same fundamental language, and you might only need to change a few register values in the initialization sequence.
Initialization sequence is a sequence of register writes that you have to send to your display before you can show any data on it, and it is often the key for fixing display problems. For instance, if you have a certain controller display and a library only supports that controller with a different resolution panel connected to it, what you’d need to change is the bytes in initialization sequence responsible for controller-to-panel wiring mapping. Sometimes the resolution is the same, but the pixels are wired slightly differently, and that also fixable in the initialization sequence.
The initialization sequence is also where you can rotate or flip a display ‘in hardware’, in case your project needs the display to be in a certain non-default orientation – find a value to change, and the display will map the pixels in a different way. A single controller IC could work with a myriad, which is why, even if you find a datasheet for the display controller IC, it might not help you when you need to make your actual display work, because the controller datasheet might not have the exact initialization parameters you need to know.
If you can’t find the proper initialization sequence or it’s hard to introspect the code, you can always sniff it with a logic analyzer! It can also help you figure out things like different commands to write pixels to the display – sending data to the display also has to be preceded by a certain command sequence, which has you give the display the address of the place you want to push the pixels into. Those commands are somewhat standardized by MIPI Alliance, so there’s only a few common ones and they don’t tend to change for the same display manufacturer, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind depending on how much you need to adapt your library.
This is about what you need to know when it comes to display software. Chances are, you’ll never have any problems on this front, but now you know where to look if you do. Let’s descend to more earthly matters – wiring.
A Little Wiring
The overwhelming majority of SPI and I2C displays expect 3.3 V VCC. Make sure to not reverse GND and VCC – if you do, your display’s controller IC will die. Also, many display breakouts include a 3.3 V linear regulator on them, so that people can power them from 5 V too – it’s not exactly needed, but it can be nice to have. Other than that, for LCD panels, you will need to manage the backlight. You can typically hardwire it to VCC and GND – a resistor shouldn’t be needed, as it’s usually included on the breakout PCB. If you want manual backlight control, an N-FET or an NPN transistor will make quick work of that if it’s low-side (GND-side) control, P-FET or PNP for high-side (VCC-side) control, and, of course, you can PWM it!
SPI and I2C displays differ in their wiring. I2C displays rarely ever need anything other than SDA and SCL. Here’s one exception though, and that is the RST signal, something that both I2C and SPI displays tend to need. Everywhere I’ve seen it, it’s a non-negotiable signal – after the display gets powered up, you need to ground RST for a bit before you even dare to send data. If your display breakout has RST exposed and you ignore it, you’re setting yourself up for a bad time.
However, that doesn’t mean you need to waste a GPIO on a signal that only changes once! As a rule, a simple resistor-capacitor circuit is sufficient to toggle the display’s RST pin right after power-up, and many breakouts include this circuit by default, with an extra diode to make sure that even the quickest power dips still result in a display reset. The capacitor has to be in single-digit uF range, but that’s not much of a problem to source, it doesn’t have to have a super good temperature coefficient or high maximum voltage or anything. Here we go, that’s one more spare GPIO for your project use!
SPI displays also need CS, naturally. Some displays perma-ground CS and never expose it to the user, which takes the SPI bus hostage and is all-around annoying to work with. If you want to ground CS and not waste a GPIO on it, you always do it out of your own volition! Some displays won’t like a perma-grounded CS, as they use the CS signal for internal purposes and expect you to switch it as you send data, but, for instance, typical SH1106 OLEDs sure don’t seem to mind.
Another signal that exclusively SPI displays need is D/C, also known as A0. This signal tells the display whether you’re currently sending data or commands to it – since displays operate in 8-bit mode and you have to use the whole 8 bits for your commands or data bytes, you need some sort of sideband to tell the display which one it’s receiving at any given moment. If you want to omit this pin, you can either send data to the display in 9-bit SPI mode instead of the default 8-bit mode, something that your MCU often won’t support, or do
a witty workaround!
Oh, and for panels capable of both SPI and I2C mode, this signal might be used for the LSB of the I2C address when the panel is wired up for I2C mode, so that you can theoretically have two of the same displays on the same bus. If you need more than two of these displays, add more I2C buses, or use I2C address translators.
A Little Hacking
If you’re developing your own board, make sure you’re using the right FFC pad pitch for the panel connector
Display breakout boards are amazing and they’re what you will use in the majority of case – you can use them easily on your custom boards too, just put a 4-pin header on the board and plug a display breakout into it. However, breakouts shall not constrain you. If you want to build a smaller device, you can always put the bare panel on your board – you need the FPC footprint and mechanical considerations for the bare panel, but that’s it. Make sure you really really have the correct pitch for the display FPC connector – lifting it from open-source KiCad projects is your best bet, and a datasheet for the panel (not the controller IC!) will help too. It’s really annoying to produce a board that – print the board out on paper if you must.
Many OLED displays want charge caps – find breakout schematics online and repeat them, and if you can’t find schematics, re-draw the breakout you have and measure the caps with a capacitance meter. Some LCD panels require an external boost circuit, especially color OLEDs and some small TFTs – there’s some open-source projects to learn from if you want to work with a panel that has such a requirement.
When you need to unglue a display panel from its breakout for whatever purposes, reverse-engineering or repair alike, mind you that it’s typically glued to the PCB with double-sided tape. Use a hairdryer to heat up the tape from the PCB side (not the screen glass side!) and then use a plastic spudger to lift it equally from all sides, a credit card could work wonders too. Be very, very careful and measured while applying force, don’t shatter the LCD/OLED glass, and don’t tear the FPC! If you’re working on one of the OLED screens that fold over a board, desoldering the FPC first might help – then you can rotate the panel, which should help free up the display from the tape a fair bit faster, just be careful gripping it. Isopropyl alcohol might be tempting to use, but beware – it might damage the polarizer layer on the panel, heat from a hairdryer is what I’ve found works best. A hot air gun at soldering temps is likely to cause the SMD parts on the other side of the breakout to shift by accident, but if you don’t have any to worry about, that could work in a pinch too!
A lot of the common OLED and LCD displays have Linux kernel drivers! With the right modprobe command or a DeviceTree snippet, you’ll be surprised to see the Linux boot logs and then a `tty` prompt appear on your tiny screen. You can’t quite send arbitrary commands or tweak the initialization sequence easily while using a Linux driver, but it’s all open-source, so there’s some ways around it.
That about sums up what you should know about the most common type of display you can encounter. With the basic things out of the way, you should be able to get to whatever goal you need this display for, instead of spending time debugging common problems. The displays themselves are fascinating, too – just a few months ago, on Hackaday Discord, we’ve been watching someone abuse the SSD1306 controller OLED screens to create dithering and ‘hardware-accelerated’ graphics! Whatever thing you might discover, now you’re a few steps closer.
Next time, let’s peek into the kingdom of parallel RGB screens. Whenever you want a screen with high resolution and decent refresh rate, or simply a screen wider than 3″, maybe you even want a touchscreen-enabled panel, parallel RGB is where it’s at. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710542",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T18:38:58",
"content": "” and if you can’t find schematics, re-draw the breakout ”Nah…I like to be able for someone or myself to be able to recreate the things I make, and part of that is using things that are common and documente... | 1,760,372,066.779672 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/teardown-of-fgm-148-javelin-missiles-guidance-computer/ | Teardown Of FGM-148 Javelin Missile’s Guidance Computer | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"avionics",
"missile guidance"
] | You know it’s a good teardown when [Michel] starts off by saying to not ask him where exactly he got
the guidance section
of an FGM-148 Javelin from. This shoulder-launched anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) is a true marvel of engineering that has shown its chops during recent world events. As a fire-and-forget type guided missile it is designed to use the internal IR tracker to maintain a constant lock on the target, using its guidance system to stay exactly on track.
FGM-148 Javelin schematic overview. (Source: U.S. Army, FM 3-22.37)
Initially designed in 1989 and introduced into service in 1996, it has all the ceramic-and-gold styling which one would expect from a military avionics package from the era. Tasked with processing the information from the IR sensor, and continuously adjusting the fins to keep it on course, the two sandwiched, 3 mm thick PCBs that form the main section of the guidance computer are complemented by what looks like a milled aluminium section which holds a sensor and a number of opamps, all retained within the carbon-fiber shell of the missile.
In the video [Michel] looks at the main components, finding datasheets for many commercially available parts, with the date codes on the parts confirming that it’s a late 80s to early 90s version, using presumably a TMS34010 as the main CPU on the DSP board for its additional graphics-related instructions. Even though current production FGM-148s are likely to use far more modern parts, this is a fun look at what was high-end military gear in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Thanks to [Claus] for the tip. | 45 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710508",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T16:46:44",
"content": "I wonder how small you could fit all this today? Maybe an Infiray module and any fast CPU like ESP32 or STM32.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710511"... | 1,760,372,066.867288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/how-do-you-test-if-an-eeprom-can-hold-data-for-100-years/ | How Do You Test If An EEPROM Can Hold Data For 100 Years? | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"accelerated aging",
"eeprom",
"flash",
"flash storage",
"hardware"
] | Data retention is a funny thing. Atmel will gladly tell you that the flash memory in an ATmega32A will retain its data for 100 years at room temperature. Microchip says its EEPROMs will retain data for over 200 years. And yet, humanity has barely had a good grasp on electricity for that long. Heck, the silicon chip itself was only invented in 1958. EEPROMs and flash storage are altogether younger themselves.
How can these manufacturers make such wild claims when there’s no way they could have tested their parts for such long periods of time? Are they just betting on the fact you won’t be around to chastise them in 2216 when your project suddenly fails due to bit rot.
Well, actually, there’s a very scientific answer. Enter the practice of accelerated wear testing.
Faster, Faster Now
EEPROM and NAND flash storage are both immensely important technologies. EEPROMs are used to store firmware for all kinds of devices, as well as things like cryptographic keys and other such largely-static data. Most EEPROMs have data retention ratings for many decades, if not centuries. Flash can be used in much the same way, but it’s also used as mass storage. It’s not quite as good at retention as EEPROM is. Some parts are rated for only a few years if left to sit, particularly at elevated temperatures. Other flash parts can hang on to data for much longer if designed to do so.
The question is, though, how we determine these numbers. Given the impracticality of real-time testing over a century, the industry instead relies on accelerated life testing methods. These techniques involve subjecting memory devices to heightened stress factors, such as elevated temperatures, to expedite the aging process. The underlying principle is based on the Arrhenius equation, which posits that the rate of chemical reactions increases exponentially with temperature.
The degradation of memory cells is, fundamentally, because of chemical reactions that take place over long periods of time. Over time spans of decades or centuries, plastics degrade, materials oxidise, and all kinds of other chemical reactions go on. These chemical reactions can damage the tiny structures of a silicon chip responsible for storing data as little electrical charges. It’s almost like when you leave an apple out and it rots away; the phenomenon is often referred to as
bit rot.
As per the Arrhenius equation, you can thus model a long period of memory degradation in a much shorter time by elevating the temperature, because the reactions occur at a faster rate. If you’ve studied physics, this should all be pretty familiar. Temperature is really just the rate at which atoms are wiggling around. Thus, if they’re hotter, they’re wiggling around more and it makes sense that reactions would occur faster, what with all these atoms and molecules bobbling about. This explanation is simplified, of course, and won’t get me invited to any real science conferences, but it serves our purposes here.
Some flash memory parts are rated to hold data for decades at room temperature, while others only for a few years at best. Often, higher density flash storage is more susceptible to things like charge leakage, which leads to a loss of data over time. Credit:
Nrbelex
, CC BY-SA 3.0
Thus, to test a device for long-term data retention, you merely need to place it in a hotter-than-typical environment and run checks on how it holds data over time. Naturally, this is done with many samples with scientific rigor, enabling statistical insights to be made. Obviously, there are limits, too. There’s no point testing EEPROMs at 500 C, where they’ll melt and burn in mere seconds, retaining precisely zero data. However, within the realistic limits of the part, significant insights can be made.
By observing the effects of accelerated aging, predictions can be made about the long-term retention capabilities of these devices. After accelerated aging, the EEPROM and Flash memories undergo rigorous data retention tests. The outcomes of these tests are extrapolated to estimate how the devices would perform over extended periods at normal temperatures. This extrapolation, while scientifically grounded, is not without its uncertainties and relies heavily on sophisticated statistical models.
While temperature plays a pivotal role in accelerated aging, other factors like voltage variations and humidity are also considered to simulate various stress conditions. This holistic approach ensures a more comprehensive assessment of long-term data retention capabilities.
Climate-controlled chambers are used for accelerated aging tests. Often, controlling relative humidity is just as important as controlling for temperature. Credit:
Cjp24
, CC BY-SA 3.0
Due to inherent variations in memory cells, a statistical approach is employed in these tests. By testing a large batch of devices and analyzing the average behavior, more accurate predictions of long-term performance are made. This statistical analysis is crucial in understanding the overall reliability of memory technology.
Key to these longevity tests is the monitoring of specific failure mechanisms, such as charge leakage in memory cells. Understanding these failure modes is essential in predicting data loss and devising strategies to mitigate such risks. These specific failures will occur on their own timeframes and will be more subject to certain conditions than others.
It bears noting that accelerated aging methods aren’t just used for assessing flash memory and EEPROMs; the techniques are applied to everything from archival papers to inks and other such products. These methods aren’t without their negative points, though. Criticisms of these methods revolve around the fact that different chemical reactions can occur at different temperatures, which spoils the correlation between an accelerated aging procedure and what would naturally occur over time at a lower temperature. Correlation can at times be poor, and for many items, particularly those invented recently, we simply haven’t had the chance to compare accerated aging results with what occurs in real time. At the same time, with the rate that technology moves, it raises the question—will anyone in 2100 care if an ATmega can really store data on an EEPROM for 100 years?
Despite the rigor and sophistication of these testing methodologies, predicting the performance of memory devices over a century carries inherent uncertainties. Seemingly minor manufacturing changes or unforeseen environmental factors can impact the accuracy of these predictions. Understanding the physics and chemistry at play is key to accurately modelling long-term aging in more human compatible time frames. Even still, our best models are just that. Until somebody actually checks a given EEPROM or flash part in a century, we can’t know for certain how accurate these models really are.
At the end of the day, most of us don’t have to worry too much about storing data on centuries-long time frames. For those that do, accelerated aging techniques are a highly useful tool in understanding how best to preserve data on those time scales. If you take one thing away from all this, just remember that leaving your flash drives or microcontrollers on a hot surface is going to trash your data far quicker than if you left them somewhere cooler. If your PhD thesis is currently sitting on an old flash drive in a hot car, you’d be best advised to make multiple backups and store it somewhere wiser. | 40 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710481",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T15:32:30",
"content": "“There’s no point testing EEPROMs at 500 C, where they’ll melt and burn in mere seconds”Only the plastic package would be damaged. Die, lead frame and bond wires will probably survive, their melting points ... | 1,760,372,067.08473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/teslas-plug-moves-another-step-closer-to-dominance/ | Tesla’s Plug Moves Another Step Closer To Dominance | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks",
"car hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"CCS",
"chademo",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"EV charger",
"Federal Highway Administration",
"SAE International",
"SAE J3400",
"standards",
"tesla"
] | Charging an EV currently means making sure you find a station with the right plug. SAE International has now published what could be the end to the mishmash of standards in North America with the
J3400 North American Charging Standard
.
The SAE J3400TM North American Charging Standard (NACS) Electric Vehicle Coupler Technical Information Report (TIR), which just rolls off the tongue, details the standard formerly only available on Tesla vehicles. We previously talked about the
avalanche of support from other automakers
this year for the connector, and now that the independent SAE standard has come through, the only major holdout is Stellantis.
Among the advantages of the NACS standard over the
Combined Charging System
(CCS) or CHAdeMO is a smaller number of conductors given the plug’s ability to carry DC or AC over the same wires. Another benefit is the standard using 277 V which means that three separate Level 2 chargers can be placed on a single 3-phase commercial line with no additional step down required. Street parkers can also rejoice, as the standard includes provisions for lampost-based charger installations with a charge receptacle plug instead of the attached cable required by J1772 which leads to maintenance, clutter, and ADA concerns.
Now that J3400/NACS is no longer under the purview of a single company, the Federal Highway Administration has announced that it will be looking into amending the requirements for federal charger installation subsidies. Current rules require CCS plugs be part of the installation to qualify for funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.
If you want to see how to spice up charging an EV at home, how about this
charging robot
or maybe try
fast charging an e-bike
from an electric car plug? | 46 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710454",
"author": "JKW",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T13:26:09",
"content": "277 V – You Americans and your funny electrical systems :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710457",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,067.006012 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/arduino-measures-remaining-battery-power-with-zero-components-no-i-o-pin/ | Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"adc",
"arduino",
"atmega",
"attiny",
"battery",
"low battery",
"power monitor",
"voltage"
] | [Trent M. Wyatt]’s
CPUVolt library
provides a fast way to measure voltage using no external components, and no I/O pin. It only applies to certain microcontrollers, but he provides example Arduino code showing how handy this can be for battery-powered projects.
The usual way to measure VCC is simple, but has shortcomings.
The classical way to measure a system’s voltage is to connect one of your MCU’s ADC pins to a voltage divider made from a couple resistors. A simple calculation yields a reading of the system’s voltage, but this approach has two disadvantages: one is that it constantly consumes power, and the other is that it ties up a pin that you might want to use for something else.
There are ways to mitigate these issues, but it would be best to avoid them entirely.
Microchip application note 2447
describes a method of doing exactly that, and that’s precisely what [Trent]’s Arduino library implements.
What happens in this method is one selects Vbg (a fixed internal voltage reference that is temperature-independent) as Vin, and selects Vcc as the ADC’s voltage reference. This is essentially backwards from how the ADC is normally used, but it requires no external hookup and is only a bit of calculation away from determining Vcc in millivolts. There is some non-linearity in the results, but for the purposes of measuring battery power in a system or deciding when to send a “low battery” signal, it’s an attractive solution.
Being an Arduino library, CPUVolt makes this idea very easy to use, but the concept and method is actually something we have seen before. If you’re interested in the low-level details, then
check out our earlier coverage
which goes into some detail on exactly what is going on, using an ATtiny84. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710408",
"author": "wilhe_jo",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T09:07:15",
"content": "Ähmm, guess how precise measurements have been done for the last decades on any micro that does not feature a Vref pin… Yes, exactly that way!Nothing new for a “pro”, but maybe good information for the y... | 1,760,372,067.146005 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/homebrew-gel-fuel-keeps-the-steam-coming-legally/ | Homebrew Gel Fuel Keeps The Steam Coming, Legally | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"ethanol",
"external combustion",
"fuel",
"gel",
"hexamine",
"steam",
"Sterno"
] | All it takes is one knucklehead to go and do something stupid to screw things up for everyone. We’re not exactly sure who the knucklehead is behind the recent ban on hexamine fuel tablets, but given that it’s now proscribed in the UK under the “Control of Poisons and Explosives Precursors Regulations 2023,” we expect that that story is a doozy.
So what’s hexamine, and why should we care if it’s banned? As [Markus Bindhammer] explains, hexamine is a solid fuel commonly used to power model steam engines, among myriad other uses. Its ban leaves a bit of a hole in the model steam community, which [Markus] seeks to fill with
this quick and easy gel fuel chemistry project
.
The “California Snowball” is a homebrew version of what’s in those solid fuel cans you see heating chafing pans at catered events, with one common brand being Sterno. [Markus] used a saturated solution of calcium acetate (6 g in 50 ml of water) and added that to 150 ml of ethanol; commercial formulations usually use methanol to prevent anyone from drinking the stuff, with
varying degrees of success
. The calcium acetate forms a gel that looks like whipped cream and traps the ethanol inside. The gel can be easily scooped up and spread around, and burns with a clean, smokeless flame.
It may not exactly be a “plug and play” replacement for hexamine tablets, but one does what one can. And if there’s one thing we can celebrate about model steam engineers, it’s their persistence. We got a bunch of them together last year for
a Hack Chat with [Quinn Dunki]
, and their passion for making things move with steam was pretty impressive. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710382",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T06:30:36",
"content": "Hexamine is a precursor for the simplest synthesis of the chemical explosive RDX; in many areas its availability is tightly regulated due to this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,067.489029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/multi-view-wire-art-meets-generative-ai/ | Multi-View Wire Art Meets Generative AI | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"art",
"generative AI",
"multi-view",
"wire art"
] | DreamWire
is a system for generating multi-view wire art using machine learning techniques to help generate the patterns required.
The 3-dimensional wire pattern in the center creates images of Einstein, Turing, and Newton depending on viewing angle.
What’s wire art? It’s a three-dimensional twisted mass of lines which, when viewed from a certain perspective, yields an image. Multi-view wire art produces different images from the same mass depending on the viewing angle, and as one can imagine, such things get very complex, very quickly.
A
recently-released paper
explains how the system works, explaining the role generative AI plays in being uniquely suited to create meaningful intersections between multiple inputs. There’s also
a video
(embedded just under the page break) that showcases many of the results researchers obtained.
The
GitHub repository
for the project doesn’t have much in it yet, but it’s a good place to keep an eye on if you’re interested in what comes next.
We’ve seen generative AI applied in a similarly novel way to
help create visual anagrams
, or 2D patterns that can be interpreted differently based on a variety of orientations and permutations. These sorts of systems still need to be guided by a human, but having machine learning do the heavy lifting allows just about anybody to explore their creativity. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710357",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T04:16:27",
"content": "Oh yes, my favorite character, “Caption America”. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710359",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Re... | 1,760,372,067.317592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/floss-weekly-episode-762-spilling-the-tea/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"fedora",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"open source",
"red hat"
] | Editor’s Note:
We’re excited to announce that Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly, a long-running podcast about free, libre, and open-source software! The TWiT network hosted the podcast for an incredible seventeen years, but due to some changes on their end, they recently had to wind things down. They were gracious enough to let us pick up the torch, with Jonathan Bennett now taking over hosting duties.
Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode, featuring interviews with developers and project leaders, coverage of the free/libre software you use everyday (maybe without even knowing it), and the latest Open Source news.
This week Jonathan Bennett and
Simon Phipps
talk with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. The conversation starts off with asking Neal how he went from working on a minor project 11 years ago, to being the lead of KDE on Fedora. How does a company properly sponsor Open Source development? Neal speaks from his experience at Red Hat and other places, to give some really interesting answers.
The crew move on to what happened at Red Hat with CentOS, and why just maybe it was a good thing. Is the age of a company a good indicator of how they will treat Open Source? Is CentOS Stream the best thing to happen to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? What was it like to be at Red Hat during that time? How does a company manage the tension between sales and engineering? We cover this and more!
See
Neal’s website
for more information, as well as
his GitHub sponsors page
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Direct Download
for your off-line listening pleasure. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710390",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2023-12-21T07:36:59",
"content": "From [1]: “On December 13, 2023, TWiT dropped the podcast, citing cost concerns.[2] In response, the show was picked up by Hackaday, with Jonathan Bennett taking over as lead host.”So it seems that amongst ... | 1,760,372,067.421598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/slab-casting-a-new-way-to-combine-3d-printing-and-ceramics/ | Slab Casting – A New Way To Combine 3D Printing And Ceramics | Navarre Bartz | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"3d printing clay",
"ceramic",
"clay",
"curing",
"research"
] | Slip casting can be messy both in processing and in making the original plaster mold. What if there was a better way,
thanks to 3D printing
?
[Allie Katz] has developed a new technique using 3D printed slab molds to make ceramics. By combining the ability of 3D printing to make intricate designs and the formability of clay, they have found a way to make reproducible clay objects without all that tedious mucking about with liquid clay.
[Katz] takes us through a quick “Mould Making 101” before showing how the slab casting press molds were made. Starting with a positive CAD design, the molds were designed to eliminate undercuts and allow for air infiltration since a plastic mold can’t suck the water out of the clay like a plaster one would. Some
cookie
clay cutters were also designed to help with the trickier bits of geometry. Once everything was printed, the molds were coated with cornstarch and clay was pressed in. After removal, any final details like handles can be added and the pieces are then fired as normal.
If you’d like to see some more 3D printing mixed up with ceramics, check out
3D printing glass with a laser
,
reliable ceramic slurry printing
, or this
TPU-based approach
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710306",
"author": "GoguyT3d",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T23:19:49",
"content": "Interesting, as I have only attempted a one piece mold for custom silicone casting. It worked out quite well. I have considered 2 piece molds for epoxy but not much else. I am trying to limit the additio... | 1,760,372,067.379394 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/retrotechtacular-1960s-doc-calls-computers-the-universal-machine/ | Retrotechtacular: 1960s Doc Calls Computers The Universal Machine | Drew Littrell | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"1960s",
"documentary",
"history",
"retro computing",
"retrotechtactular"
] | It’s weird to think that an abacus would have still been used sixty years ago, or so posits the documentary series
The Computer and the Mind of Man
. This six part series originally aired on San Francisco local television station KQED in 1962, a time where few people outside of academia had even stood next to such a device.
Episode 3 titled “The Universal Machine” was dedicated to teaching the public how a computer can enhance every type of business provided humans can sufficiently describe it in coded logic. Though mainly filtered through IBM’s perspective as the company was responsible for
funding the set of films
; learning how experts of the time contextualized the computer’s potential was illuminating.
The real meat of the episode was the interview with Dr. Charles Decarlo, who was the director of education at IBM at the time. He explained how a major obstacle to the progression of the medium was the development of programming languages like Fortran and Algol. How these programming languages are structured was a key point of emphasis as to distinguish them from spoken languages, because the order in which the words appear matters more to a machine than the context of those words. As much as we might like for our computers (and other humans) to understand sarcasm…it only complicates communication on the other end.
Everything in the documentary sounds appropriately science-fictiony. Lots of boops and bleeps paired with discordant strings are punctuated by that prototypical narrator voice over where everything is pointedly enunciated. Thanks goes to [William] for uploading the series to YouTube and for reminding us how great the acronym GIGO is. In other words, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
“The computer, the universal machine; in that it is capable of doing whatever we are capable of instructing it to do.”
– Narrator, The Computer and The Mind of Man (1962)
Also just in case you missed it, there’s another great Retrotechtacular
post on crash testing trucks
with a soundtrack that is everything you would hope it would be. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710295",
"author": "Kasimir K",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T22:23:11",
"content": "I’d like to point out that the “boops and bleeps” are by the electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, and looks like that this series was among his very first works, if not the first.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,372,067.537928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-all-the-lego/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The LEGO | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Caligraph 2",
"carpenter tau keyboard",
"lego",
"LEGO keyboard",
"LEGO typewriter",
"nyan cat",
"wooden keyboard"
] | It seems like mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are more spoiled for choice with each passing day. But as broad as the open source pool has become, there’s still no perfect keyboard for everyone. So, as people innovate toward their own personal endgame peripherals and make them open source, the pool just grows and grows.
Image by [Bo Yao] via
Hackaday.IO
This beautiful addition to the glittering pool — [Bo Yao]’s
Carpenter Tau keyboard
— is meant to provide an elegant option at a particular intersection where no keyboards currently exist — the holy trinity of open source, programmable, and tri-mode connectivity: wired, Bluetooth, and 2.4 GHz.
Come for the lovely wooden everything, and stay for
the in-depth logs
as [Bo Yao] introduces the project and its roots, reviews various options for the controller, discusses the manufacture of the wooden parts, and creates the schematic for the 61-key version. Don’t want to build one yourself?
It’ll be on Crowd Supply soon enough.
LEGO Typewriter Build Brings Peace, One Piece at a Time
Actual peer pressure is one thing, but the fear of future peer pressure — now that’s a motivator. When Renée Graham, typewriter aficionado,
received a LEGO typewriter kit as a birthday gift
at brunch a few weeks ago, she knew she had to overcome her general fear of putting things together and at least try to build it, lest she have nothing to report back to those brunch buddies.
Image by Renée Graham via
The Boston Globe
After a few hours of building, Renée was sure she’d found a new calling in engineering and would finish it in no time, but she hit a major roadblock, got discouraged, and threw the thing into a closet. Let’s just say I can relate right down to the closet on another build, and hope to start (and finish) this typewriter myself one day.
But alas, Renée “refused to be defeated by a birthday gift”, and got back on the proverbial horse by completely starting over. During the build process, which was often performed in silence, Renée uncovered a patience she didn’t know she possessed by being forced to slow down and do things one at a time.
And it ultimately brought her peace. Except for that one piece that went missing, which we hope is safely underneath the entertainment center or something and not buried in the rug, waiting to strike as Renée suggests.
The Centerfold: LEGO My Keyboard
Image by [theglimy] via
reddit
Want to build something from LEGO that actually does stuff?
This here is the
KBDCraft Kit Lilith
, which isn’t even the only LEGO option they have. As you can see, [theglimy] went full LEGO, using Melgeek’s Pixel keycaps plus a 2u from Deadline Studio’s DOYS PC caps for the left Shift. Hiding underneath those are Switch S² Engine linear switches.
Some of [theglimy]’s kit bricks came warped, so they ended up building 90% of the keyboard out of random LEGO. But rather than throw out the warped bricks, they made a wrist rest out of them. ABS lemonade!
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: Caligraph 2
Image by
Antique Typewriters
Many keyboard layer enthusiasts will tell you the fewer keys, the better, so they never have to move my fingers too far from the home row. Heck, build a pointing device into the thing for good measure.
In the early days of typewriters, the idea of the home row as a keyboarding guidepost had yet to be standardized, along with the idea of using a Shift key to double the duty of each one. As such, there were designs like
the 1882 Caligraph 2
which was the first typewriter to use a double keyboard — separate keys for lower and upper case letters, and another set for numbers.
The perceived advantage was that a single keystroke was faster than using a combination of keys and a home row as with touch typing. When touch typing took off in the 1890s, support for this type of double keyboard dwindled rapidly, and the widely-imitated Underwood of 1896 with its four rows of keys really sealed the big double keyboard’s fate. Be sure to check out the brief video below from [Martin Howard] of Antique Typewriters showing the Caligraph 2 in operation.
ICYMI: Nyan Keys Is About As Fast As It Gets
Image by [Portland.HODL] via
Hackaday.IO
Did you see this vastly over-engineered beauty the first time around? Well,
Nyan Keys
is
awfully fast, what with the FPGA and all
, so you would be forgiven for missing it.
Of course, you couldn’t tell just by looking that this keyboard boasts a screaming 30 μs latency compared with a rough average of 1 ms for your faster commercial keyboards on the market. But it does, thanks to the
STM32F723VET6
MCU, which does USB 2.0 HS natively.
Since this keyboard uses an FPGA, each key switch can connect to its own I/O pin, eliminating the need for diodes. On top of that, each switch gets its own “core” in the form of an 8-bit timer that is always counting up to 255. The key can’t change its state unless the timer reads 255, so this acts as a debounce mechanism. Of course, to really unlock this keyboard’s potential, you have to enable the Bitcoin miner in the accompanying NyanOS.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710219",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T18:16:37",
"content": "I was really hoping that lego typewriter was a functional typewriter. I guess I’ll have to settle forthis printer made of lego blocksinstead.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,067.586089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/a-transistor-but-for-heat-instead-of-electrons/ | A Transistor, But For Heat Instead Of Electrons | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"conductivity",
"heat management",
"research",
"Thermal",
"transistor"
] | Researchers at UCLA recently developed what they are calling a thermal transistor:
a solid-state device able to control the flow of heat with an electric field
. This opens the door to controlling the transfer of heat in some of the same ways we are used to controlling electronics.
Heat management can be a crucial task, especially where electronics are involved. The usual way to manage heat is to draw it out with things like heat sinks. If heat isn’t radiating away fast enough, a fan can be turned on (or sped up) to meet targets. Compared to the precision and control with which modern semiconductors shuttle electrons about, the ability to actively manage heat seems lacking.
This new device can rapidly adjust thermal conductivity of a channel based on an electrical field input, which is very similar to what a transistor does for electrical conductivity. Applying an electrical field modifies the strength of molecular bonds in a cage-like array of molecules, which in turn adjusts their thermal conductivity.
It’s still early, but this research may open the door to better control of heat within semiconductor systems. This is especially interesting considering that
3D chips have been picking up speed for years
(stacking components is already a thing, it’s called Package-on-Package assembly) and the denser and deeper semiconductors get, the harder it is to passively pull heat out.
Thanks to [Jacob] for the tip! | 31 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710200",
"author": "Benjamin Goldberg",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T17:18:29",
"content": "I wonder if their new transistor works for phonons.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710289",
"author": "Jace",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,067.652104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/beyond-the-basics-exploring-exotic-scope-trigger-modes/ | Beyond The Basics: Exploring Exotic Scope Trigger Modes | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Skills"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"triggering"
] | Will Rogers once said that veterinarians are the best doctors because their patients can’t tell them where it hurts. I’ve often thought that electronic people have a similar problem. In many cases, what’s wrong with our circuits isn’t visible. Sure, you can visually identify a backward diode, a bad solder joint, or a blown fuse. But you can’t look at a battery and see that it is dead or that a clock signal isn’t reaching some voltage. There are lots of ways to look at what’s really going on, but there is no substitute for a scope. It used to be hard for the average person to own a scope, but these days, it doesn’t require much. If you aren’t shopping for the best tech or you are willing to use it with a PC, oscilloscopes are quite affordable. If you spend even a little, you can now get scopes that are surprisingly capable with features undreamed of in years past. For example, many modern scopes have a dizzying array of triggering options. Do you need them? What do they do? Let’s find out.
I’ll be using a relatively new Rigol DHO924S, but none of the triggering modes are unique to that instrument. Sometimes, they have different names, and, of course, their setup might look different than my pictures, but you should be able to figure it out.
What is Triggering?
In simple terms, an oscilloscope plots time across the X-axis and voltage vertically on the Y-axis. So you can look at two peaks, for example, and measure the distance between them to understand how far apart they are in time. If the signal you are measuring happens repeatedly — like a square or sine wave, for example — it hardly matters which set of peaks you look at. After all, they are all the same for practical purposes.
Pretty square waves all in a row. Channel 2 is 180 degrees out of phase (inverted). But is that all there is?
The problem occurs when you want to see something relative to a particular event. Basic scopes often have level triggering. They “start” when the input voltage goes above or below a certain value. Suppose you are looking at a square wave that goes from 0 V to 5 V. You could trigger at about 2.5 V, and the scope will never start in the middle of a cycle.
Digital scopes tend to capture data before and after the trigger, so the center of the screen will be right on an edge, and you’ll be able to see the square waves on either side. The picture shows two square waves on the screen with the trigger point marked with a T in the top center of the display. You can see the level in the top bar and also marked with a T on the right side of the screen.
What happens if there are no pulses on the trigger source channel? That depends. If you are in auto mode, the scope will eventually get impatient and trigger at random. This lets you see what’s going on, but there’s no reference. If you are in normal mode, though, the scope will either show nothing or show the last thing it displayed. Either way, the green text near the top left corner will read WAIT until the trigger event occurs. Then it will say T’D.
What’s Wrong with Edge Triggering?
Edge triggering — triggering when voltage goes above or below some trigger point — is tried and true. Why go beyond that? Well, the picture above is a little misleading. Watch the video below and see if you notice anything odd.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/trig-blink.mp4
The square waves are as they appear in the still picture, but there is a little flickering. That’s a clue that something else is going on, but what? Well, using different triggers, we can investigate further.
Let’s speculate that one of the signals may be getting stuck briefly. Maybe that’s a sign that something is wrong. Or maybe it is supposed to be like that, and we want to verify it. You can set up a timeout trigger.
This is what causes the flickering!
This timeout trigger tells the scope that if the signal stays low after a falling edge for too long, it should trigger. You can pick the level — the voltage that indicates a falling edge and the timeout. Note the scope is in normal mode, so nothing will show until the scope triggers (or, at least, nothing will update). The result?
Turns out the signal source pauses just a little bit every so often. Hard to see in the video, but crystal clear now that the trigger is set to detect it.
More Triggers
There are other ways to detect this pattern, too, especially once you know what to look for. For example, you can use the delay trigger to note when there is a long gap or look for a pattern where both signals are low. You can even move where the trigger occurs by modifying the timeout. Finally, since the event occurs every 100 pulses, you can simply count pulses. That’s sort of cheating, but if you had some other thing you wanted to sample on a specific number of pulses, it would be worthwhile.
You can see the different configurations below. The output screen will look more or less the same, with just slight variations on exactly where the trigger point occurs.
Looking for a long delay
Detecting a specific pattern
Or this pattern
Modifying the timeout can catch the opposite edge
Cheating by counting pulses!
Triggers on Data
A digital waveform decoded as RS232 and triggering on a capital H character
Most modern scopes have — at least as an option — a way to decode data using different protocols. For example, the scope can interpret RS232, CAN bus, I2C, SPI, and so on. It isn’t uncommon to have a way to trigger when specific data appears on a decoded bus.
Sometimes, you really do want to see the bus, but you might also want to look at some other signals when the bus triggers. The example in the images shows a serial port sending out “Hackaday” and a count. The scope is triggering on a capital “H.” While the scope input, in this case, is digital, this works on an analog signal, too.
Serial trigger setup
Each mode will be a little different, but, in general, you’ll need to set the threshold if you are using an analog input and if the data is inverted or not. You’ll also provide any specific parameters for the protocol, like baud rate and number of bits, of course. In this particular case, the scope can trigger on data or certain conditions like framing errors or a start bit.
Of course, each scope is different, and each protocol will be slightly different, too. Sometimes, the biggest value of this is not so much looking at the data stream but, instead, using the data trigger to look at other, possibly analog signals simultaneously.
Not Just for Digital
So far, the trigger data has been more or less digital pulses. However, sophisticated triggers exist for things like slope. To work with that, I used a little extra circuitry. Next time, we’ll look at runt triggers, slope triggers, and another digital trigger for setup and hold violations.
All of these various waveforms were created using a few different C++/Arduino programs on a Raspberry Pi Pico. You can pick up the code
in a Gist
if you want to try it out for yourself. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710176",
"author": "Don Reid",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T16:25:32",
"content": "My favorite trigger was the 2nd one on old Tek scopes. You could set up the main trigger and a delay, then arm the second trigger. That lets you see an event which is after a first one but with a varia... | 1,760,372,067.73424 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/up-close-and-personal-with-a-mems-microphone/ | Up Close And Personal With A MEMS Microphone | Dan Maloney | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"etching",
"MEMS",
"microelectromechanical systems",
"microfabrication",
"microphone",
"scanning electron microphone",
"sem",
"silicon"
] | If you’ve ever wondered what lies beneath the barely visible hole in the can of a MEMS microphone, you’re in luck, because
[Zach Tong] has a $10 pair of earbuds to sacrifice
for the cause and an electron microscope.
For the uninitiated, MEMS stands for microelectromechanical systems, the tiny silicon machines that power some of the more miraculous functions of smartphones and other modern electronics. The most familiar MEMS device might be the accelerometer that gives your phone a sense of where it is in space; [Zach] has
a deep dive into MEMS accelerometers
that we covered a while back.
MEMS microphones seem a little bit easier to understand mechanically, since all they have to do is change vibrations in air into an electrical signal. The microphone that [Zach] tore down for this video is ridiculously small; the SMD device is only about 3 mm long, with the MEMS chip under the can a fraction of a millimeter on a side. After some overall views with the optical microscope, [Zach] opened the can and put the guts under his scanning electron microscope. The SEM shots are pretty amazing, revealing a dimpled silicon diaphragm over a second layer with holes etched right through it. The dimples on the diaphragm nest into the holes, forming an air-dielectric capacitor whose capacitance varies as sound waves vibrate the diaphragm.
The most visually interesting feature, though, might be the deep cavity lying behind the two upper surfaces. The cavity, which [Zach] says bears evidence of having been etched by the deep reactive ion etching method, has cool-looking corrugations in its walls. The enormity of the cavity relative to the thin layers covering it suggests it’s a resonating cavity for the sound waves.
Thanks to [Zach] for this in-depth look at a device that’s amazingly complex yet remarkably simple. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710139",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T14:31:41",
"content": "What boggles my mind about this the most isn’t the intricate fabrication which is needed and which can be done at scale, but the price it can be done at too. Incredible sensor tech at a handful of pennies p... | 1,760,372,068.205333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/20/explore-neural-radiance-fields-in-real-time-even-on-a-phone/ | Explore Neural Radiance Fields In Real-time, Even On A Phone | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"3d",
"6dof",
"deep learning",
"nerf",
"neural radiance fields"
] | Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a method of reconstructing complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D inputs, and the field has been growing by leaps and bounds. Viewing a reconstructed scene is still nontrivial, but there’s a new innovation on the block:
SMERF
is a browser-based method of enabling full 3D navigation of even large scenes, efficient enough to render in real time on phones and laptops.
Don’t miss the gallery of demos
which will run on anything from powerful desktops to smartphones. Notable is the distinct lack of blurry, cloudy, or distorted areas which tend to appear in under-observed areas of a NeRF scene (such as indoor corners and ceilings).
The technical paper
explains SMERF’s approach in more detail.
NeRFs as a concept
first hit the scene in 2020
and the rate of advancement has been simply astounding, especially compared to
demos from just last year
. Watch the short video summarizing SMERF below, and marvel at how it compares to other methods, some of which are themselves only months old. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710142",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T14:51:32",
"content": "“Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a method of reconstructing complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D inputs…”New and improved compression.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,068.103401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/how-a-lego-set-is-born/ | How A LEGO Set Is Born | Navarre Bartz | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"design",
"lego",
"product development"
] | LEGOs are the first window into making something in your head become real for many makers. The Verge dug into how a LEGO set itself goes from
idea to the shelves
.
While most sets come from the minds of LEGO designers, since 2008, fans can submit their own sets to
LEGO Ideas
for the chance to become a real product. In this case, we follow the journey of [Marc Corfmat]’s Polaroid OneStep Camera from his initial attempts at LEGO stardom with his brother [Nick] to the current set that took off.
While the initial idea and build are the seed for a new set, once the project is in the hands of LEGO, designers meticulously make revision after revision to ensure the set is enjoyable to build and any moving parts continue to function for thousands of cycles. This is all weighed against the total cost of the BOM as well as any licensing required for intellectual property. One particularly interesting part of the article is how designers at LEGO are afforded a certain number of “frames” for custom bricks which leads to some interesting hacks and collaboration as all good constraints do.
For more LEGO hacks, checkout
LEGO’s long lost cousin
, testing
LEGO-compatible axle materials
, or these
giant LEGO-like pieces
. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710062",
"author": "Kalten",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T08:46:50",
"content": "“*LEGO* is the first window into”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710075",
"author": "Biotronic",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T10:03:33... | 1,760,372,068.061051 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/nasas-tech-demo-streams-first-video-from-deep-space-via-laser/ | NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space Via Laser | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"deep space",
"laser communication"
] | Everyone knows that the most important part of a tech demo is to make the right impression, and the team over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) definitely had this part nailed down when they showed off
streaming a cat video from deep space
using laser technology as part of NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication (
DSOC
) program. This system consists out of a ground-based laser transmitter and receiver along with a space-based laser transceiver, which for this experiment was positioned at a distance of 31 million kilometers – 80 times the distance between the Moon and Earth – as a part of the
Psyche spacecraft
.
After a range of tests with the system to shake out potential issues, the team found that they could establish a 267 Mbps link, with a one-way latency of a mere 101 seconds, allowing Psyche’s transceiver to transmit the preinstalled 15-second high-definition video in effectively real-time and making the cat Taters instantly world-famous. Although the potential for space-based cat videos cannot be underestimated, the main purpose of DSOC is to allow spacecraft to send back much larger data sets than they could before.
For robotic and potential future manned missions DSOC would mean high bandwidth video and data links, enabling more science, better communication and possibly the occasional cat video during interplanetary travel. | 46 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710004",
"author": "Bad Ideas Abounding",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T03:09:35",
"content": "If the aliens intercept it, they’ll think we’re a planet of cats.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710112",
"author": "Oskar",
... | 1,760,372,068.352216 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/reverse-engineering-the-stadia-controller-bluetooth-switching-procedure/ | Reverse-Engineering The Stadia Controller Bluetooth Switching Procedure | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Stadia"
] | Ever since the demise of Google’s Stadia game streaming service, the associated Stadia controllers have found themselves in limbo, with the only way to switch them from the proprietary WiFi mode to Bluetooth by connecting to a special Google website. Yet as [Gary] found out, all this website does is flash a firmware file via WebUSB and WebHID over the original Stadia firmware with a generic Bluetooth controller firmware image. This is the reason why it’s a one-way process, but this wasn’t to [Gary]’s liking, so he figured out how to
flash the controller himself
, with the option to flash the original Stadia firmware or something else on it later, too.
[Gary]’s
stadiatool
follows the same procedure as the Google Stadia website, just implemented in Python and outside the control of Google. Although Google has
recently announced
that it will keep the Bluetooth switching website online one year longer – until December 31st 2024 – at some point this service will go away and only
projects like [Gary]’s
together with squirreled away firmware images can still save any stray Stadia controllers that will inevitably discovered in the back of a warehouse in the future.
Although we
reported
on the demise of Stadia when it happened in January of 2023,
as Ars Technica notes
it was common in 2022 to buy into Stadia and get a controller manufactured in the 2019 launch year, suggesting massive overproduction. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709976",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T01:11:46",
"content": "Suggesting a white elephant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6709999",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T02:36:41",
"content":... | 1,760,372,068.155314 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/robotic-rose-of-enchantment-drops-petals-on-command/ | Robotic Rose Of Enchantment Drops Petals On Command | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"beauty and the beast",
"Circuit Playground",
"rose",
"rose of enchantment",
"servo",
"trimmer line"
] | In Disney’s 1991 film
Beauty and the Beast
, an enchantress curses the young (10 or 11-year-old) prince to beast-hood for spurning her based solely on her appearance. She gives him a special rose that she says will bloom until his 21st birthday, at which time he’ll be turned back into a prince, provided that he learned to love by then. If not, he’ll be a beast for eternity. As the years go by, the rose drops the occasional petal and begins to wilt under the bell jar where he keeps it.
[Gord Payne] was tasked with building such a rose of enchantment for a high school production
and knocked it out of the park. With no budget provided, [Gord] used what he had lying about the house, like nylon trimmer line. In fact, that’s probably the most important part of this build. A piece of trimmer line runs up through the stem made of tubing and out the silk rose head, which connects with a custom 3-D printed part.
Each loose petal hangs from the tubing using a short length of wire. Down at the base, the trimmer line is attached to a servo horn, which is connected to an Adafruit Circuit Playground. When the button is pressed on the remote, the servo retracts the trimmer line a little bit, dropping a petal. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.
Dropping petals is an interesting problem to solve.
Most of the flower hacks we see around here involve blooming
, which presents its own set of troubles. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6710030",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2023-12-20T05:11:29",
"content": "A+ hack and even better Youtube video. Short and to the point. Bless you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6713771",
"author": "Tom",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,068.00659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/raspberry-pi-zero-powers-custom-camera-platform/ | Raspberry Pi Zero Powers Custom Camera Platform | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"diy camera",
"Pi HQ camera",
"Raspberry Pi Zero"
] | These days, most of us are carrying a fairly impressive digital camera with us at all times. But as capable as the hardware and software of a modern smartphone may be, there’s still plenty of reasons you may want a “real” camera to go along with it. The larger sensor, advanced controls, and selection of lenses that you’ll get with even a relatively cheap camera opens up a world of artistic possibilities.
If you’re
really
into chasing that perfect shot, you can even build your own digital camera these days.
This design from [Jacob Cunningham]
may not be able to go shot-for-shot against a Canon or Nikon in its current state, but we think you’ll agree there’s a lot of potential here — especially for something pieced together with modular components and perfboard.
Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Pi HQ Camera module, an 1.5″ OLED display, a lithium-ion battery pouch cell, and the charging and voltage regulation boards necessary to keep everything powered up. There’s also a handful of tactile buttons to work through the settings and menus, and a 10-axis IMU to help you keep your horizon level.
[Jacob] figures the whole thing comes in at around at $185.00, though naturally that number could go up or down considerably depending on what you’ve already got in the parts bin and what kind of lenses you add to the mix.
The hardware side of things looks more or less complete, at least for a first version, and [Jacob] has provided everything you’ll need to build one of your own. But the software is still a work in progress, with the latest push to the Python code in the project’s GitHub repository just eight hours old at the time of this writing. If you’ve been looking for a DIY camera project to really sink your teeth into, this could provide a great starting point.
If you’re more interested in moving pictures,
we recently covered the CinePi project
, which aims to develop an open source cinema-quality camera that you won’t need studio backing to afford. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709895",
"author": "spaceminions",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T21:39:06",
"content": "It’s a shame that DIY cameras can’t get the sensors that established camera brands use, because their firmware is always so locked down and missing features that could easily be made to run on the ha... | 1,760,372,068.270977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/australia-bans-engineered-stone-workers-elsewhere-demand-the-same/ | Australia Bans Engineered Stone, Workers Elsewhere Demand The Same | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"asbestos",
"engineered stone",
"Quartz",
"silicosis"
] | Engineered stone, also known as artificial stone or composite stone, has become a popular material in the construction and design industries due to its aesthetic appeal and durability. It’s become the go-to solution for benchtops in particular, with modern kitchens and bathrooms heavily featuring engineered stone in this way.
However, this seemingly innocuous material harbors a dark side, posing significant health risks to workers involved in its manufacturing and installation. The hazards associated with engineered stone have gone unnoticed for some time, but the toll is adding up, and calls for action grow louder. Let’s examine why engineered stone is so harmful, and explore the measures being taken across the world to curtail or even ban its use.
Hidden Dangers
Kitchen countertops are the prime use for quartz-based engineered stone products. Credit:
Wtshymanski,
CC BY-SA 3.0
Engineered stone for benchtops is primarily made from quartz, one of the hardest minerals on Earth. The manufacturing process involves grinding quartz into dust and then combining it with resins and pigments. This creates a product that replicates the beauty of natural stone. Finding natural stone in large, uniform, aesthetically-perfect pieces suitable for benchtops is difficult. Thus, if you want a big natural stone benchtop, it comes at a very high price. Engineered stone benchtops can be had far more cheaply, as the material can be fabricated to any size or shape desired. It can also offer enhanced durability and stain resistance thanks to being non-porous, making it an ideal choice for countertops. Many engineered stone countertop products include a very high amount of silica, often up to 95%. It was first developed in the 1960s, and began to gain in popularity in following decades. It’s now highly popular for use in kitchens and bathrooms.
The material doesn’t pose a risk once installed and used as a benchtop. The danger of engineered stone lies in the dust generated during the cutting, grinding, and polishing processes, which are typically undertaken during manufacturing or installation. By virtue of being made from quartz, dust from engineered stone contains high levels of crystalline silica.
When inhaled, silica dust can penetrate deep into the lungs. The most severe health consequence is silicosis, a debilitating and often fatal lung disease. The dust particles itself in the aveolar sacs in the lungs causing irreversible damage. Over time, the dust particles are ingested by macrophages—immune system cells charged with destroying pathogens. They in turn stimulate the production of collagen around the tiny particles, which in time creates fibrotic nodules in the lungs that coalesce together in patients with higher exposure levels, which inhibits lung function. Those with the disease suffer most particularly from shortness of breath, rapid breathing, persistent coughs, and fatigue. Chest pain, weight loss, and loss of appetite are also common. Patients with silicosis are also much more susceptible to tuberculosis infection, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
The rise in the use of engineered stone has been mirrored by an alarming increase in cases of silicosis. This has been particularly evident among young workers in the stonecutting industry, many of whom have developed the advanced stages of the disease after only a few years of exposure. The aggressive form of silicosis seen in these workers is often referred to as “accelerated silicosis,” which can develop much more rapidly than traditional forms of the disease. Due to the similar causative factor of inhaling dust and the symptoms of lung disease, engineered stone has at times been colloquially referred to as “the new asbestos.”
In Australia, a case of silicosis linked to engineered stone was first identified in 2015, in a worker from the engineered stone industry. 570 cases have since been identified. The matter was quite unlike some traditional industrial hazards, which can take decades to reveal their harms. In many cases, silicosis from engineered stone was
striking down workers in their prime
, with many under 35 years of age.
Australia's young tradies who've been given a death sentence.
Sunday on
#60Mins
, a renovation catastrophe that's led to a global epidemic.
pic.twitter.com/CMGLS66YcT
— 60 Minutes Australia (@60Mins)
February 15, 2023
The rapid count of cases, especially among young workers, quickly prompted
a nationwide outcry for action.
In October this year, the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) voted in favor of a ban on the material. The broader union movement in Australia voted to support the ban, meaning no union workers would allow the importation, manufacturing, or use of the material in the country from the middle of 2024. In turn, major hardware retailers agreed to drop the material
by the end of the year,
and
furniture giant Ikea
similarly agreed to phase out the material from its kitchen range.
Australian authorities acted in turn,
announcing a world-first prohibition on engineered stone
to commence on July 1, 2024. The measures include a customs prohibition on the importation of the material. The ban also prohibits the manufacturing, supply, processing, or installation of engineered stone. Reports from government authorities noted that there was ” no scientific evidence for a safe threshold of crystalline silica content in engineered stone, or that lower silica content engineered stone is safer to work with.” Personal protective equipment has also proven to be inadequate to reduce the risk of harm.
In the interim period before the ban takes place, Australian authorities have mandated safer working procedures to limit the possible harm from the material. Water suppression “wet cutting” systems are required, or alternatively, the use of dust extraction and/or ventilation systems. Workers are also required to use appropriate respiratory protective equipment.
These regulations include mandatory health monitoring for workers, improved ventilation and dust extraction systems, and the requirement for wet cutting methods to reduce dust generation. Additionally, there has been an increase in awareness campaigns aimed at educating workers and employers about the risks of silica dust and the importance of protective measures.
A lung X-ray from a patient with complicated silicosis. Credit: gumersindorego, CC BY-SA 3.0
The actions taken by Australia serve as a model for other countries grappling with similar issues. The ban on engineered stone, while a bold move, underscores the seriousness of the health risks associated with silica dust exposure. It also highlights the need for a global reevaluation of the use of materials that pose significant health risks to workers. The material has already
made headlines in California
, where even workers in their 20s as are struggling with silicosis from cutting engineered stone benchtops. Australia’s ban has proven of great interest to those
fighting for emergency rules
to be placed on the use of the material.
Of course, a ban in one nation is no guarantee that workers elsewhere will be protected. Indeed, asbestos once again proves a useful example. Countries like Norway, Kuwait, and Australia banned the material for its deleterious health effects. The EU followed, as did most nations of the OECD. And yet, the United States continues to allow its use, as do countries like India, Russia, China. The latter two still mine it, as do Kazahkstan and Brazil. All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic to humans, and yet the mining and production goes on. International industry groups still exist to lobby for the use of the material because where there’s potential to make money, someone will have a go.
While engineered stone offers many desirable qualities, the health risks it poses to workers cannot be ignored. The steps taken by Australia to combat the dangers of silica dust exposure set an important precedent, emphasizing the need for vigilant regulation and a commitment to worker safety in industries worldwide. As we move forward, it is crucial to continue prioritizing the health and well-being of those who labor to bring these products to market.
Featured photo: “
Kitchen interior with light furniture
” by Max Rahubovskiy | 199 | 40 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709800",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T18:05:38",
"content": "The ban is entirely unnecessary overreaction. Techniques to deal safely with the material have been known for decades.This problem isn’t new, it just shifted markets, and the market chose to ignore th... | 1,760,372,068.797694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/making-a-kit-kat-clock-even-creepier/ | Making A Kit-Kat Clock Even Creepier | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"clock",
"Kit-Kat clock",
"secret santa",
"Seeed Grove AI Vision",
"servo",
"Xiao rp2040"
] | If there’s anything as American as baseball and apple pie, it’s gotta be the Kit-Kat clock in the kitchen. For the unfamiliar, the Kit-Kat clock is special in that its pendulum tail and eyes move back and forth with each passing second. They’re equal parts cute and creepy.
But
not this particular Kit-Kat
, not once [Becky Stern] got a hold of it. The cute/creepy scales have been tipped, because the eyes of this Kat follow you around the room. “You” in this case is fellow maker [Xyla Foxlin], whom [Becky] drew in the Maker Secret Santa pool. See, [Xyla] loves cats, but is deathly allergic to them. So really, what better gift is there?
In order to make this happen, [Becky] started by disconnecting the long lever that link the eyes and the tail, which move together, and connected a servo horn to the eyes. [Becky] drilled out the nose in order to fit the camera, which is connected to a Seeed Grove AI Vision board with a Xiao RP2040 piggybacked on top.
While soldering on the servo wires, [Becky] accidentally detached a tiny capacitor from the AI Vision board, but it turns out that it wasn’t critical. Although she only had to write one line of code to get it to work, it ended up working too well, with the eyes darting around really quickly. By making the servo move in timed increments to the new positions, it’s now much more creepy. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
You know we can’t resist a clock build around here,
especially when those clocks are binary. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709768",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T16:38:59",
"content": "Oh funny. I watched a video about this yesterday from the makers secret santa group on YT. They make cool gifts for each other.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,068.399228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/parachute-drops-are-still-a-viable-solution-for-data-recovery-from-high-altitude-missions/ | Parachute Drops Are Still A Viable Solution For Data Recovery From High Altitude Missions | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Original Art",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Space"
] | [
"aerial drop",
"balloon",
"balloon mission",
"data recovery system",
"parachute",
"parachute drop",
"raspberry pi",
"space",
"space mission"
] | Once upon a time, when the earliest spy satellites were developed, there wasn’t an easy way to send high-quality image data over the air. The satellites would capture images on film and dump out cartridges back to earth with parachutes that would be recovered by military planes.
It all sounds so archaic, so Rube Goldberg, so 1957. And yet, it’s still a viable method for recovering big globs of data from high altitude missions today. Really, you ask? Oh, yes indeed—why,
NASA’s gotten back into the habit just recently!
Drop It Like It’s 5TB
NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon mission is a very fancy high-altitude balloon that was charged with carrying the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope, or
SuperBIT
. Launched from New Zealand, the 18.8-million cubic foot balloon spent almost 40 days aloft in the upper atmosphere to provide a near-space-like environment for the optical equipment. The aim is for the experiment to take measurements regarding weak gravitational lensing of galaxy clusters, as a part of the agency’s hunt for dark matter.
Launched earlier in 2023, the experiment had two main data links—a Starlink connection, and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). Unfortunately, the balloon suffered a failure in its Starlink connection, and an unstable TDRSS link in May this year. Thus, the balloon was instructed to land during a pass over Argentina, while some connection to the balloon was still possible. As the balloon fell back to Earth, the telescope was destroyed as it was dragged along the ground for 3 kilometers when a parachute failed to release upon landing.
The DRS PCB, featuring a Raspberry Pi 3B and servo releases for deployment. Credit:
Ellen L. Sirks, et al., 2023
Thankfully, all was not lost during the balloon’s unplanned landing, however. That’s all thanks to a payload system designed to return the experiment’s precious data back to Earth separately from the main balloon. The Data Recovery System (DRS) for the craft was designed by Dr Ellen Sirks from the University of Sydney. This nifty recovery package was the topic of a paper published in
Aerospace
in November.
“This drop package is something we’ve been developing for about five years, but only now have we been able to test it in its final configuration. It’s got to the point where NASA wants to start producing these packages for other science missions as well, so this was really our final test to show that this system works.” said Dr. Sirks.
In (a), the DRS can be seen peeking out from under the mylar skirt. (b) shows the SuperBIT hardware suspended from a crane prior to launch, with DRS capsules hanging beneath. Credit:
Ellen L. Sirks, et al., 2023
While high-bandwidth satellite communications are normally the go for offloading data for such a mission, sometimes hurdles occur, or transmissions take too long. “At the moment, the most efficient way for us to download data is to copy it onto an SD drive and just drop it to Earth which is kind of crazy, but it works well,” explains Dr. Sirks. It recalls a famous quote from the earlier days of computing. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway,” from Andrew Tanenbaum in 1981.
Each DRS system contained a parachute and 5 terabytes of solid-state data storage. A global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver was also included for positioning data; we more colloquially refer to these as GPS receivers. To enable the DRS systems to report their location during descent and after landing, they carried a short-burst data transceiver that communicated with the Iridium satellite network for reliable uplink almost anywhere on Earth.
Thermal photos taken during development of the DRS. In (b), the hot spot at the bottom of the Raspberry Pi is from the four SD card readers warming up during heavy writes. Credit:
Ellen L. Sirks, et al., 2023
Drilling down into the hardware, each DRS module had a Raspberry Pi 3B as the brains of the operation. A 24V DC supply from the balloon’s main payload ran the DRS modules during flight, with two off-the-shelf Energizer lithium 9-volts running the devices during descent. This might sound like an interesting choice of battery for a near-space mission. After all, at a discharge rate of 500 mAh, typical for a Raspberry Pi at moderate load, an Energizer lithium 9V will last maybe 90 minutes at best as per
the company’s datasheet.
Obviously, double that for a pair of them.
However, the design is smarter than that, because during descent, the DRS uses a low-power microcontroller to run the show, instead of the Raspberry Pi. This provides much longer battery life. These batteries are also a cheap solution that is commercially available almost anywhere on the planet, and under most circumstances, one can assume the DRS will stay put after falling. Plus, space and near-space missions have to consider the risk of polluting the environment and such; a known quantity like an Energizer battery is preferable in that case.
Four SD card readers are plugged into the Pi, two on extension cords, which are charged with storing experiment data. The extension cords were a mitigation for failures on earlier tests where excessive heating took place at the USB ports during heavy writes to the SD cards. A pincer mechanism run by a simple servo is used to release the DRS. The pincer holds a nylon loop on the balloon’s main payload, and when the servo is activated, it releases, dropping away. Another servo pincer mechanism releases the parachute. An Ethernet link is used to attach the DRS to the balloon’s main payload. It’s hooked up with zero extraction force connectors on the main payload, such that the cable pulls free when the DRS is dropped. The whole kit is enclosed in a 3D-printed casing with a foam shell for impact protection and weatherproofing.
The DRS descend in an uncontrolled manner, but by choosing the position and timing of release, it’s possible to roughly predict where the device might land. Sirks’ paper notes that unpopulated areas near roads are ideal for safety and easy recovery.
Both DRS modules were recovered successfully in Argentina. Credit:
Ellen L. Sirks, et al., 2023
The balloon actually carried four DRS systems, but only two were dropped during the SuperBIT mission. The other two were left with the payload. This meant that either recovering the payload or the two DRS modules would allow for independent redundant sets of data to be recovered.
There were some minor issues with the devices not initially reporting their locations, thought to be due to the DRS batteries being excessively cold from being up in the stratosphere, and thus delivering lower voltage. However, both devices eventually reported locations after landing and were recovered successfully.
The full paper
is well worth the read if you’re eager to engineer your own rugged devices for similar tasks. It’s always impressive to learn about the detailed engineering that goes into any NASA or NASA-adjacent project, and you can often pick up a few tips or tricks for your own projects. So whether you’re ballooning or even building your own spy satellites (really?), take heed of the great lessons from this successful data recovery project! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709741",
"author": "dougm",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T15:12:10",
"content": "A long range drone intercept capture would be really cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6709806",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,068.542822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/bringing-apl-to-the-masses-the-history-of-the-ibm-5100/ | Bringing APL To The Masses: The History Of The IBM 5100 | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"APL",
"ibm 5100"
] | The 1970s was a somewhat awkward phase for the computer industry — as hulking, room-sized mainframes became ever smaller and the concept of home and portable computers more capable than a basic calculator began to gain traction. Amidst all of this, two interpreted programming languages saw themselves being used the most: BASIC and APL, with the latter being IBM’s programming language of choice for its mainframes. The advantages of being able to run APL on a single-user, portable system, eventually led to the IBM 5100. Its story is
succinctly summarized
by [Bradford Morgan White] in a recent article.
The IBM PALM processor.
Although probably not well-known to the average computer use,
APL
(A Programming Language) is a multi-dimensional array-based language that uses a range of special graphic symbols that are often imprinted on the keyboard for ease of entry.
It excels at concisely describing complex functions, such as the example provided on the APL Wikipedia entry for picking 6 pseudo-random, non-repeating integers between 1 and 40 and sorting them in ascending order:
x
[
⍋
x
←
6
?
40
]
Part of what made it possible to bring the power of APL processing to a portable system like the IBM 5100 was the IBM PALM processor, which implemented an emulator in microcode to allow e.g. running System/360 APL code on a 5100, as well as BASIC.
Despite [Bradford]’s claim that the 5100 was not a commercial success, it’s important to remember the target market. With a price tag of tens of thousands of (inflation-adjusted 2023) dollars, it bridged the gap between a multi-user mainframe with APL and far less capable single-user systems that generally only managed BASIC. This is reflected in that the Commodore SuperPET supported APL, and the 5100 was followed by the 5110 and 5120 systems, and that today you can download GNU APL which implements the ISO/IEC 13751:2001 (APL2) standard.
We’ve previously looked at the Canadian-made MCM/70
, another portable APL machine that embodied the cyberdeck aesthetic before William Gibson even gave it a name.
Top image: The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 42 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709689",
"author": "APL_Guy",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T13:19:54",
"content": "Programming in APL was my first job in the field, at STSC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6710530",
"author": "wrljet",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,068.892105 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/19/its-an-audio-distortion-analyzer-just-not-the-one-you-were-hoping-for/ | It’s An Audio Distortion Analyzer, Just Not The One You Were Hoping For | Jenny List | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"audio",
"bang & olufsen",
"distortion meter"
] | An audio distortion analyzer is a specialist piece of analogue test equipment that usually costs a lot of money and can be hard to track down on the second hand market. Finding one is a moment of luck for the average engineer then, but [Thomas Scherrer OZ2CPU]’s discovery
isn’t quite what he might have hoped for
. Nonetheless, his Bang and Olufsen K3 Distortion meter DM1 from 1979 is still an interesting and high quality piece of test equipment, and the video below the break makes for a worthwhile watch.
Bang and Olufsen are best known for high-end design Hi-Fi units, thus it’s a surprise to find that in the past they also manufactured test equipment. This distortion meter isn’t a general purpose one, instead it’s designed to measure tape recorders in particular, and it uses an elegant technique. Instead of injecting a sine wave and removing it from what comes out in order to measure the products of the distortion, it records a 333 Hz sine wave onto a tape, then measures the strength of its 3rd harmonic at 1 kHz as an indication of distortion. It’s a working distortion meter made with clever analogue circuitry for a fraction of the cost of the more conventional models that HP would have sold you at the same time, even if it doesn’t give the same THD figure you might have been looking for.
If distortion interests you,
it’s a subject we’ve looked at in the past
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709607",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T09:09:01",
"content": "About old audio analyzer gears, i have a nice one to restore: a Meguro MK-668C Wow Flutter Meter, in rather good shape with its gorgeous japanese nixie tubes display.But i’m unable to locate user and servi... | 1,760,372,068.933674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/when-is-an-engineer-not-an-engineer-when-hes-a-canadian-engineer/ | When Is An Engineer Not An Engineer? When He’s A Canadian Engineer | Jenny List | [
"Engineering",
"News"
] | [
"chartered engineer",
"engineer"
] | In medieval Europe, many professions were under the control of guilds. These had a monopoly over that profession in their particular city or state, backed up with all the legal power of the monarch. If you weren’t in the guild you couldn’t practice your craft. Except in a few ossified forms they are a thing of the past, but we have to wonder whether that particular message ever reached Western Canada.
An electoral candidate with an engineering degree who practices what any sane person would call engineering,
has been ordered by a judge to cease calling himself an engineer
. The heinous crime committed by the candidate, one [David Hilderman], is to not be a member of the
guild
Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. We get it that maybe calling a garbage truck driver a waste collection engineer may be stretching it a little, but here in the 21st century we think the Canadian professional body should be ashamed of themselves over this case. Way to encourage people into the engineering profession!
Here at Hackaday, quite a few of us writers are engineers. Stepping outside our normal third person, I, [Jenny List], am among them. My electronic engineering degree may be a little moth-eaten, but I have practiced my craft over several decades without ever being a member of the British IEE. No offence meant to the IEE, but there is very little indeed they have to offer me. If the same is true in Canada to the extent that they have to rely on legal sanctions to protect their membership lists, then we think perhaps the problem is with them rather than Canadian engineers. You have to ask, just how is an engineering graduate who’s not a guild member supposed to describe themselves? Some of us need to know, in case we ever find ourselves on holiday in Canada!
Header: Joe Gratz,
CC0
. | 218 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709306",
"author": "Jared",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T16:41:47",
"content": "Why should engineering graduates have exclusive claim over the title Engineer anyways? The Corps of Royal Engineers employed Military Engineers 200 years before APEGA/APEGS claimed the term.Most discussion ... | 1,760,372,069.347568 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/renewable-energy-beyond-electricity/ | Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"green hydrogen",
"hydrogen",
"wind power"
] | Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage.
Hydrogen as Fuel
Provided that there’s a supply of water nearby, turbines, solar farms, or even excess electricity on the grid, hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis. This hydrogen could then be transported for use as a fuel, thus decoupling the need for a renewable resource like a wind farm to be physically connected to the bulk electric grid. Often wind resources are extremely far from population centers so an alternative energy delivery system that doesn’t involve building long transmission lines
could make sense in some situations
. Some experiments find that hydrogen can be pumped in much the same way that natural gas currently is, although it doesn’t have the same energy content per unit volume.
Hydrogen could alternatively be used locally as an energy storage method as well
, using excess energy to produce hydrogen during situations where the dispatcher would otherwise curtail the wind farm, with the hydrogen stored and used later to generate electricity at a time when the wind isn’t blowing. This could be a viable alternative to battery storage at wind farms, especially as current forecasts expect a significantly large percentage of all new batteries to be used in electric vehicles.
Producing hydrogen by electrolysis is not currently done on a large scale because it’s not the most efficient way of producing hydrogen, but there are two reasons for that which are slowly becoming less relevant. First, with an arbitrarily large amount of free renewable energy the cost of that energy becomes less of an issue. Second, most industrial hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels, which is not a great long-term method when it comes to climate change. But this may be an increasingly useful avenue of exploration in the years to come.
Hydrogen as an Intermediary
Hydrogen does have a number of downsides, though. The obvious issues of dealing with flammable gasses aside, hydrogen molecules are extremely tiny and are thus difficult to contain in traditional storage vessels. Any small imperfection will cause the gas to leak out much more rapidly than other fuels.
Much to Toyota’s chagrin
, as they are deeply invested in hydrogen technology with little to show for it, there is also no developed hydrogen infrastructure largely because electricity is far superior as a energy transportation method. To mitigate these problems, however, a hydrogen-producing wind or solar farm could be put to use producing ammonia instead, with the electrolytic hydrogen only used as an intermediary instead of using it as a fuel source directly. This “green ammonia” can be burned directly or used in fuel cells for electricity production, and is much less of an escape artist than pure hydrogen.
Another downside to generating hydrogen or ammonia with renewable energy is that
it requires a large amount of water
, which may be less available as climate change progresses in a concerning number of areas other than the open ocean. However, in areas with enormous reserves such as the Great Lakes region in North America, the Amazon River Basin in South America, or the Lake Baikal area in Siberia, this could be a drop in the bucket. Not every place on earth lends itself to wind or solar energy production, but in general wind may be preferred because it tends to have a higher capacity factor than solar and uses less land area.
Other Uses for Renewable Energy
Wind turbines can still be put to more direct use than generating fuel or electricity, as any 17th century Netherlander would be able to confirm. They’re often used to directly pump water from wells for livestock in places without electricity just as they once pumped water to create the iconic Dutch polders.
They can also be used to directly generate heat
with no electric intermediary stage, which we covered briefly in this article. Although this is not in widespread use, it’s a conceivable future where wind technology is more easily-accessible and heating needs aren’t able to be met by more traditional sources.
Of course, as a global society we’ve largely settled on electricity as an energy transportation method for good reason instead of using flammable gasses like hydrogen. It’s instantaneous, efficient, and versatile, so anything looking to generate energy in other forms is going to be an extreme outlier. But as we hopefully transition to a post-fossil society, electrolytic hydrogen production methods may gain more widespread adoption. | 72 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709293",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T16:03:22",
"content": ">Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it.This is technically always, since wind or solar simply don’t re... | 1,760,372,069.045988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/mickey-shall-be-free/ | Mickey Shall Be Free! | Jenny List | [
"Art",
"Interest"
] | [
"copyright",
"Mickey Mouse",
"public domain"
] | The end of the year brings with it festive cheer, and a look forward into the new year to come. For those with an interest in intellectual property and the public domain it brings another treat, because every January 1st a fresh crop of works enter the public domain.
We’ll take a look at the wider crop around the day, but this year the big story is that Mickey Mouse, whose first outing was in 1928’s
Steamboat Willie,
is to get his turn to be released from copyright. [Jennifer Jenkins] from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain,
is using Mickey’s impending release to take a look at the law surrounding such a well-protected work
.
Mickey has perhaps the greatest symbolism of all intellectual property when it comes to copyright terms, having been the reason for the Disney Corporation’s successive successful attempts to have copyright terms extended. Now even their reach is about to come to an end, but beware if you’re about to use him in your work, for the Mickey entering the public domain is an early outing, without gloves or the colours and eyes of his later incarnations. Added to that, Disney have a range of trademarks surrounding him. The piece makes for an interesting read as it navigates this maze, and makes some worthwhile points about copyright and the public domain.
Last year,
we welcomed Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
to the public domain
. Meanwhile if you’re reading this in 2023, we believe our use of a header image featuring the 1928 Mickey
to be covered by the doctrine of fair use
. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709266",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T12:59:13",
"content": "I don’t know if I do like Mickey and Disney anymore.As a child, I loved reading Micky Maus and Donald Duck comics in Donald Duck pocket books, though. These stories were amazing.But that was another Mick(e... | 1,760,372,069.102753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/storage-media-forgotten/ | Storage Media Forgotten | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"data storage",
"removable disk"
] | These days, cheap removable storage is no problem. USB sticks are virtually free at moderate capacity and not unreasonable, even at relatively large sizes. They are rugged, work across platforms, and don’t require any exotic interfaces. But this hasn’t always been the case. In the 1990s, people wanted to store too much data for floppies, but weren’t willing to shell out for removable hard drives or tapes. Many companies identified this opportunity with, perhaps, the most successful being Iomega with the Zip drive. But there were others, including the
Avatar Shark
that [This Does Not Compute] remembers in a video you can see below.
Haven’t heard of the Shark? We had not either, but reviewers seemed to like it. The drive would fit in your pocket if you had a fairly large pocket. The 250 MB cartridge was smaller (but thicker) than a 3.5-inch floppy. It performed ok and connected to the parallel port which was common in those days.
The disks cost about $40, and the drive listed for $300 and was eventually available for around $200. You’d think these would sell, but according to the video, they didn’t sell well at all. Why? Part of it was a lack of brand recognition for the relatively new company, Avatar. In their early days, they targeted PC makers, not end-users. Another reason is that the rotating drives were not very robust for a portable device. In particular, transporting the portable drive with a disk in it was likely to result in data loss.
Another reason for consumer indifference was price. The price per megabyte was actually competitive. But lower-capacity disks were still large by consumer standards and cost less to buy. The lower-capacity drives were also cheaper. For example, the popular Zip drive was about $150, with disks about $15 or so. Sure, they held less than half, but 100 MB was a lot of storage in the 1990s.
Times sure have changed. While Zip drives are a distant memory for most, some classic Mac users
prize the SCSI versions
. It wasn’t that long ago that people were storing data on
drums with 200 strips of film inside
. | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709246",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T10:13:42",
"content": "Great now there will be a spike in making the unobtanium media disappear completley",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6709268",
"author": "Swo... | 1,760,372,069.540133 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/remembering-ed-roberts-the-home-computer-pioneer-you-should-have-heard-of-but-probably-havent/ | Remembering Ed Roberts, The Home Computer Pioneer You Should Have Heard Of But Probably Haven’t | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"altair",
"home computer",
"MITS altair"
] | We’re pretty familiar with such names as Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, Nolan Bushnell, and the other movers and shakers of the 1970s home computer world. But there’s one person who towered among them for a few years before cashing out and leaving the computer business to pursue the life he’d always wanted. [Gareth Edwards] for
Every
has
a fascinating profile of Ed Roberts
, the man who arguably started the home computer boom but is now an obscure figure.
Even if you’ve never heard of Ed Roberts, you’ve likely heard of the product his company brought to market. The MITS Altair 8800 was the first computer to be sold as a home computer rather than for business or scientific use, and though its toggle switch interface now seems extremely quaint, its influence on every microcomputer that followed has been immense.
As followers of the retrocomputing scene, we know about the Altair, but perhaps more interesting is the story of MITS. Formed by a group of US Air Force veterans to produce rocket telemetry equipment, it pivoted to calculators, and as that market imploded in the early 1970s, the computer was a big gamble to save it from bankruptcy. It’s one that paid off, and as someone used to seeing technological cycles of boom and bust, Ed cashed out at the peak of the first wave. He followed his long-held ambition of becoming a doctor, and when, in 2010, he was near the end of his life, the hospital caring for him was shocked to find itself being visited by Bill Gates. It’s an article about a fascinating individual well worth reading.
The Altair, meanwhile, is a project that appears quite often here at Hackaday.
Here’s a recreation of one as original as possible
. The
Mark 8
came out a little earlier but without complete kits or assembled units, so it didn’t get the traction — or the imitators — that the Altair did. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709217",
"author": "daveboltman",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T06:21:15",
"content": "I think that should be [Gareth Edwards]. Easy to confuse! Feel free to delete this message after correcting, if you like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,069.388489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/the-hot-chocolate-effect-explained/ | The Hot Chocolate Effect Explained | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"bubbles",
"hot chocolate effect"
] | This is the time of year when people in the Northern Hemisphere like to enjoy hot beverages like hot chocolate. [The Action Lab] uses
hot chocolate to demonstrate an odd acoustic effect
. Tapping a container of hot chocolate — or even just hot water — will make a sound at a certain frequency. But if you keep tapping, the frequency of the sound will gradually increase. Don’t know why? Don’t worry, neither did scientists until around 1980.
The secret is bubbles and the speed of sound through air vs a liquid. The speed of sound in the liquid and the height of the liquid in the cup set the frequency. However, the speed of sound changes based on the bubbles, which alters the frequency.
This is one of those subtle things you probably never noticed and, if you did, you probably didn’t think much about. Still, there’s a physics lesson around every corner. Besides, this is one experiment that you can end with a tasty beverage. You only need some mix and your ears or, if you prefer, a cell phone app to read audio frequencies. You can also just use hot tap water, but what fun is that?
Usually, we are talking about bubbles in the context of
futuristic display devices.
Then again,
not always
. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709206",
"author": "Sean",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T03:59:39",
"content": "I have been baffled by this phenomenon for years. I actually just showed it to my kids this weekend when we busted out the hot chocolate for the season. Excited to share the explanation!",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,372,069.591364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/hackaday-links-december-17-2023/ | Hackaday Links: December 17, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Disappointing news from the US Senate this week as
the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act” failed to advance
in the
sausage-making
legislative process.
We’ve previously covered this bill
, which aims to force vehicle manufacturers to provide the means to receive terrestrial AM broadcasts in their cars and trucks without the need for extra subscriptions or charges. The bill’s sponsors tried to get it through on a “unanimous consent” maneuver, but Senator Rand Paul decided he didn’t like the idea of the government mandating what equipment cars should have. The coverage we’ve seen on this bill leads us to believe its sponsors are missing the point. Instead of pitching this as an issue of freedom of choice in entertainment, what they should be concentrating on is the safety aspect of AM radio. We’ve seen
how much the government has invested in keeping AM stations on the air
in just about any foreseeable emergency, so it’s only natural to look at a car’s AM radio as essential safety equipment like airbags, antilock brakes, and backup cameras. Seems like that’s something that everyone can agree on.
Last week, NASA released a preview of
flight number 68 of the
Ingenuity
helicopter
on Mars, with a goal of covering a record-setting 828 meters. The flight was supposed to occur sometime last weekend, which gave us hope that we’d be able to feature the results on the flight here. However, try as we might we couldn’t find any news about how the flight went, or if it was scrubbed for some reason. That seems a little ominous to us; NASA is usually pretty forthcoming with news about their missions, even when they get delayed. We’re going to assume there was a scrub for some technical reason and hope for the best, because most of the other alternative explanations don’t bode well for the helicopter. Fingers crossed.
We don’t normally dabble in the occult here, but
occultation
is another matter entirely. Especially when it involves our favorite star Betelgeuse, which managed to be in the right place at the right time this week to get (very) briefly eclipsed by a main belt asteroid named Leona. To see the rare astronomical alignment, you had to be within a very narrow path — the only place to see it in the United States was southernmost Florida — and you had to be paying very close attention. The video below shows the supergiant star dimming as the asteroid passed in front of it, briefly but perceptibly. It’s a bit like what happens when we look for exoplanets as they transit the disk of their stars relative to our position; indeed, some of the data in
this article
looks a lot like the exoplanet data we’ve seen.
If you’ve ever been at a loss for just the right connector for the job, you’re in luck —
The Electronic Connector Book
should be able to help you out. This thing is a whopper — 730 pages, over 900 illustrations, and it appears to cover just about everything ever invented to get two or more pieces of wire hooked together. But as cool as such a book might be, perhaps even better is the companion website, where you can look up information on all kinds of connectors. It even has a visual search feature, which is fantastic when you don’t know what a connector is called, but you know what it looks like.
The interactive connector timeline chart
is a work of art, too.
And finally, if you’re a woodworker you surely know the name Lie-Nielsen, manufacturers of premium quality hand tools. Their planes are about the best you can buy, if you can afford them.
The video below
is a look at the process of making their
Number 62 low-angle jack plane
, from the foundry where the cast iron bodies of the plane are made right through to final assembly and inspection. The number of people involved is amazing, especially in an age where robots have taken over a lot of manufacturing processes. And it’s not like they eschew automation, either; there’s plenty of CNC machining involved. The foundry work is especially hands-on, and we’re equally impressed and appalled by how much the process — and the lack of safety equipment — resembles some of
the Retrotechtacular pieces
we’ve featured. If you enjoy either woodworking or toolmaking, you should check this one out. And make sure you stick around to the very last scene — you won’t be disappointed. | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709140",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T00:33:40",
"content": "The “AM for Every Vehicle Act” is pure politics. What is said on AM radio in the U.S. may be in disagreement with a certain political ideology, therefore it must be SILENCED! Dissent now is not only treason... | 1,760,372,069.640681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/a-360-view-of-a-classic-drive-in-speaker/ | A 360° View Of A Classic Drive-In Speaker | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"drive-in theater",
"fusion360",
"lm386",
"speaker"
] | Readers of a certain vintage no doubt have pleasant memories of drive-in theaters, and we are chuffed to see that a few hundred of these cinematic institutions endure today. While most theaters broadcast the audio on an FM station these days, the choice is still yours to use the chunky, often crackly speaker that attaches to the car window.
Seeking to relive the drive-in audio experience at home, [codemakesitgo] picked up a drive-in theater speaker on eBay and
turned it into a Bluetooth device that sounds much better than it did in its weather-beaten days outside.
There isn’t a whole lot to this build — it’s essentially a new speaker cone, a Bluetooth receiver, an amp, and a battery. The real story is in the way that [codemakesitgo] uses Fusion360 to bring it all together.
After 3D scanning the case, [codemakesitgo] made sure each piece would fit, using a custom-built model of the new speaker and a 3D model of a custom PCB. Good thing, too, because there is barely enough clearance for the speaker. Be sure to check out the brief demo video after the break. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709593",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T08:21:40",
"content": "There are many free text-to-speech converters that produce a much better quality voice than this Chinese woman that tries to speak English. It ruins the total experience.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,372,069.705943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/recycling-batteries-with-bacteria/ | Recycling Batteries With Bacteria | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"batteries",
"recycling",
"science"
] | Vehicle battery recycling is going to be a big deal with all the electric cars hitting the roads. What if you could do it more effectively with the
power of microbes
? (via
Electrek
)
“Li-ion” vehicle batteries can be any of a
number of different chemistries
, with more complex cathode makeups, like NCM (LiNi
x
Mn
y
Co
1-x-y
O
2
), being understandably more complex to separate into their original constituents. Researchers and companies in the industry are hoping to find economically-viable ways to get these metals back for both the environmental and economic benefits a
closed loop system
could provide.
Researchers in the UK developed a method using two species of bacteria to precipitate Ni, Mn, and Co from the liquid leached from cathodes. Li remained in the liquid where it could be processed separately like that obtained in
Li brine
. Mn was precipitated first by
S. oneidensis
MR-1
, and a following step removed Ni and Co with
D. alaskensis
G20. The researchers report that Ni and Co show promise for further separation via biological methods, but more research is required for this step.
If you’re looking for some more interesting ways bacteria can be harnessed for the energy system, checkout this
microbial fuel cell
, another
using soil
, and an enzyme derived from bacteria that can pull
electricity from thin air
. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709557",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T05:23:11",
"content": "It feels like this article is encouraging me to throw my batteries in the ocean.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6709602",
"author": "Johnu",
... | 1,760,372,069.842149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/simulate-a-better-termination/ | Simulate A Better Termination | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"SPICE",
"termination"
] | If you are making certain precision measurements, you know you need to terminate the connections with the right impedance, normally 50 ohms. Proper termination minimizes reflections on the line which can disturb measurements. Some instruments already have 50 ohm terminations, at least optionally. If not, you usually use little connector shells with the right resistor inside. [Joe Smith] decided to see if
he could improve on the normal terminations
using circuit simulation techniques. You can see a video of the work below.
In the process of testing, he also needs a resistive splitter, and, just like with the terminators, he shows you what’s going on inside. It was easy to compare since he had a scope that could independently set channels to have a 50-ohm termination or a 1 megaohm termination.
It is easy to see the signals don’t match without extra termination. You can also use the subtract function to show the exact error waveform. What’s more, since the signal is split, mismatches on one input will cause errors on the other input. There’s a solution for that, of course. The presumption, of course, is the LeCroy scope’s internal termination is “good” but this is an excellent method to at least compare two setups, even if you don’t know which is the best one.
Scopes aren’t the only place terminators come into play.
Calibrating a VNA
is another use case. You think of scope inputs and probes as just simple wire connections. Nothing could be
further from the truth
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709597",
"author": "Sm",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T08:35:30",
"content": "Thanks for linking to the video – I thought the topic was well explained by the presenter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6709628",
"author": "Mordae... | 1,760,372,069.798389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/old-prius-gets-upgraded-batteries/ | Old Prius Gets Upgraded Batteries | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"car",
"hybrid",
"lithium",
"nickel metal hydride",
"nimh",
"prius",
"replacement",
"vehicle"
] | So many of the batteries made today are lithium batteries of some sort, from mobile phones, laptops, and drones to electric cars and grid storage solutions. But this technology is relatively new; even as late as the 90s and early 00s the only widely-available batteries for things like power tools or the new hybrid vehicles coming on the market were nickel-metal hydride (NiMH). While it was good for the time, they don’t hold up to all of the advantages lithium has. There’s still plenty of hybrid vehicles on the road using these batteries, so if you’re driving an older Prius and want to give it a modern refresh,
there’s a quick option to swap your old batteries
.
Despite lithium technology being available for several decades, the switch to lithium for the Toyota Prius wasn’t instant, with many variants still using NiMH batteries as late as the 2020s largely because the NiMH batteries are less expensive and less maintenance-intensive than lithium batteries are. As these batteries lose capacity, the cars are still driveable but the advantages of the hybrid drivetrain won’t be as accessible anymore. The upgrade, from a company called
Project Lithium
, replaces these batteries with modern lithium technology that can improve the efficiency and performance of these cars even above their original capabilities since lithium batteries have more power density.
With the Toyota Prius being among the most reliable vehicles on the road thanks to the electric motor in the hybrid drivetrain taking a lot of stress off of the internal combustion engine, it’s often worth upgrading these old batteries to modern ones to squeeze every last mile from these workhorses as possible. With many of the replacement processes being almost as simple as lifting out an old battery and placing a new one in, it can be a no-brainer if that’s the only issue with the vehicle otherwise. This is also true of all-electric vehicles as well,
although the process to replace the battery can be a little more involved
.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip! | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709459",
"author": "Brad Granath",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T22:11:36",
"content": "They’ve been sold out for years. Plus, its very clear that battery chemistry that goes above and beyond the stock capacity does essentially nothing without having hacked the Battery Management system... | 1,760,372,069.763758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/hacking-an-nfc-e-paper-display-from-waveshare-with-mystery-mcu/ | Hacking An NFC E-Paper Display From Waveshare With Mystery MCU | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"eink",
"epaper"
] | These days e-paper (eInk) displays are everywhere, with stores being one of the largest users of smaller, monochrome versions of these persistent displays. This has also made them a solid target of hackers who seek to not only reverse-engineer and reuse discarded ones, but also ones sold to consumers, with [Aaron Christophel] recently reverse-engineering and
flashing custom firmware
(
GitHub source
) to a Waveshare
2.13″ NFC-Powered E-Paper
display.
What’s perhaps most notable is how locked-down and devoid of documentation these devices are. The board [Aaron] looked at did not have any markings on the main IC, and Waveshare did not provide more information other than the Android and iOS apps. This led to some matching of various NFC-enabled MCUs with the pinout, with the
Chivotech TN2115S2
rolling out as the most likely candidate. This is an 8 MHz Cortex-M0 MCU with not only NFC, but also an energy harvesting feature (up to 300 mW), which is why this e-paper tag can update the display without external power or a battery.
With the Chivotech datasheet being rather sparse, more reverse-engineering needed to be done, which included dumping the firmware and exploring it with Ghidra. During this, the secret key was discovered to make the Flash writeable along with how to control the peripherals and display. With this knowledge it’s now possible to make this tag display update without being limited by manufacturer-supplied tools and software, making it infinitely more useful. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709503",
"author": "Timmy!",
"timestamp": "2023-12-19T00:40:40",
"content": "So how long until the crackdown when stores are forced to hack-proof these things when people demand them to honour ridiculous mark-downs, because “that was the displayed price” 😆",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,372,071.651876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/ask-hackaday-what-do-you-do-when-you-cant-solder/ | Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder? | Lewin Day | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"crimps",
"scotchloks",
"solder seal",
"WAGO"
] | Ah, soldering. It’s great for sticking surface mount parts to a PCB, and it’s really great for holding component legs in a plated through-hole. It also does a pretty great job of holding two spliced wires together.
With that said, it can be a bit of a fussy process. There are all manner of YouTube videos and image tutorials on the “properest” way to achieve this job. Maybe it’s the classic Lineman’s Splice, maybe it’s some NASA-approved method, or maybe it’s one of those ridiculous ones where you braid all the copper strands together, solder it all up, and then realize you’ve forgotten to put the heat shrink on first.
Sure, soldering’s all well and good. But what about some of the other ways to join a pair of wires?
You Want Easy, Reliable, and Clean
Solder seal connectors have become a popular solution for splicing wires without the usual need for soldering skills. Credit:
Narva
These days, there are all kinds of ways to join a pair of wires. Some are relatively new-fangled and nifty, while others have been around since nearly the dawn of all this electrickery business. Let’s list off a few, and you can tell us your favorites and all the ones we missed in the comments.
First up is the
solder-seal connector
. Yes, you got us, this is still essentially soldering, but it’s kind of streamlined compared to doing it all by hand. We’re not entirely sure when the solder seal connector was invented, but it was probably in the 1980s, given the 1988 date on this
US patent for the invention.
Solder seal connectors are basically a piece of heat shrink tube with a blob of solder in the middle, and two blobs of heat-activated adhesive on either side. To use one, you take two wires, and then mesh the stripped ends together ready to be soldered. Then, you slide the solder seal connector over the join such that the solder bead is over stripped wire to be soldered. Heating the solder seal connector with the heat gun will melt the solder creating an electrical joint, while also shrinking the heat shrink and activating the adhesive to grab on to the insulation of each wire. You end up with a tough, waterproof joint in pretty much two easy steps. Plus it’s usually less blobby than your own efforts to solder a splice by hand.
Crimps can feel a bit old-school these days, but quality kit gets good results. Credit:
3M
Of course, then we have crimps. Crimps are great, if you use proper crimp tools and the right crimps that go with them. They’re a great way to make connections quickly and cleanly with zero heat. They’re credited in some contexts with being more reliable than solder joints, too, particularly in applications like aerospace or motorsport. Of course, if you use crappy crimp tools or crimps or just mismatch them, you’re in for a lot of pain. You’ll get pullouts and failures and all kinds of issues. They can also be expensive if you’re using super fancy crimps with certain connector families, but for joining two wires together, they’re usually pretty cheap.
For those uninterested in learning to operate a soldering iron or a crimp tool, there are even simpler solutions. 3M ScotchLoks, in their most primitive foldable form known as the 560, are considered a great way to join wires if you want to do a terrible car stereo install on the cheap. Go on, buy a $2000 beater off Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, pull out the stereo, and you’re sure to find a nest of these awful plastic monstrosities. You thread two wires through, and then force the clasp closed, which forces a metal blade to slice through the insulation and grip both wires.
If you find these in a car’s wiring harness… buy a different car. Credit:
3M
In practice, unless you have your wire types and gauges perfect, they often tend to cut or damage the wire and eventually fail. Worse if there’s movement that allows them to flex and chew their way through a wire. They also hurt your hands to use and offer no protection against the elements. Better solutions do exist in this category. More advanced
ScotchLok
and
PressLok
products exist, often with gel fillings that offer corrosion resistance and more reliable gripping of the wire without damage.
More recently, though,
Wago connectors
have grown in popularity. They’re a sort of deluxe-looking lever-close terminal block solution. When the lever is lifted, an internal metal contact is lifted. When the lever is placed back down, it grips the wire. By using a seperate lever and contact for each wire to be joined, the Wago connector can be used to join different wire types and gauges quite easily.
Wago connectors have become a popular splicing solution and you can even buy big jars full of them. Credit:
Wago
They’re becoming popular for use in all kinds of contexts, from DIY electrical work to more serious industrial uses.
We’ve listed a few of the most popular solder-ish and non-soldery ways to join wires and make electrical connections, now it’s over to you. What works, and what doesn’t? What did we miss? Sound off below and tell us your ultimate solutions for these jobs, especially when soldering isn’t the go-to.
Featured image: “
Streamlining multiple wires
” by [gratuit]. | 93 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709350",
"author": "Tadpole",
"timestamp": "2023-12-18T18:05:36",
"content": "Wagos cost a small fortune, but they *just might* be worth it. It’s also nice that you can connect solid wire core to braided wire easily with them. Personally I like the 1 slot extenders that you can use... | 1,760,372,072.134201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/18/the-superconference-badge-hack-chat/ | The Superconference Badge Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, December 20 at noon Pacific for the
Superconference Badge Hack Chat
with Elliot Williams and Voja Antonic!
There’s a lot to get excited about when October rolls around and you know Supercon is right around the corner. Catching up with old friends, making new ones, hanging out in the alley, catching the talks, and of course the food. But at the top of everyone’s list has to be The Badge. Finding out what cool bit of technology is going to be built into the badge and figuring out exactly how you’re going to hack it once you get your greedy mitts on it — now that’s excitement!
The 2023 Supercon badge was quite a hit, at least judging by
all the cool hacks
that people came up with. But what exactly went into getting this badge into everyone’s hands? A lot of work, that’s what, along with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And while there was plenty of work to go around and a lot of shoulders to the wheel, a lot of the work fell to Elliot and Voja. They’re going to be hopping into the last Hack Chat of the year to talk all about this amazing badge, from concept to conference, and all the hellish steps in between.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 20 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,071.322081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/roll-your-own-sdr/ | Roll Your Own SDR | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"sdr"
] | If you have software-defined radio hardware and you are only using someone elses’ software, you are missing out on half of the fun. [Tech Minds] shows you how easy it can be to roll your own software using
GNU Radio Companion
in a recent video.
GNU Radio usually uses Python, but with the companion software you rarely need to know any actual Python. Instead, you simply drag blocks around to represent filters, DSP processing, and other functions you need to create the processing for your application.
It is very simple to create sophisticated user interfaces with waterfalls, spectrum analyzers, filters, and more. The example in the video is a 40-meter receiver using an RTL-SDR. Of course, given the right hardware, GNU Radio will work with any frequency, from audio to anything you can get into your PC.
We have our
own video series on GNU Radio
, which hasn’t changed much over the years. Ours starts with audio since it is a good bet you have a sound card. Later, we graduate to using
real RF hardware
. While you usually think of GNU Radio as a radio receiver or transmitter, it also makes a fine
custom signal generator
. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708879",
"author": "RWood",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T06:49:28",
"content": "Another good source for learning about SDR and GNU Radio is the “Software Defined Radio with HackRF” series by Michael Ossmannhttps://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/Its centered around the HackRF device, but t... | 1,760,372,071.483854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/hubless-e-bike-is-nostalgic/ | Hubless E-Bike Is Nostalgic | Al Williams | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ebike",
"hubless",
"penny farthing"
] | [Chris Makes Stuff] is an aptly named channel. His recent video shows how he took a kid’s electric motorcycle toy and built a
“penny farthing” bicycle
. You might not know the bike by that name, but when you see it in the video below, you’ll recognize it. These Victorian-era bikes used a single large wheel before chain drives on a bike became a thing.
Of course, the big part of this — literally and figuratively — is the giant front wheel. There’s a second video showing
how it was built in layers using wood
.
The donor toy was a Razor MX350 which is a toy dirt bike for young kids. The bike didn’t work at first, so there is another video
about that repair and what’s inside of it
.
Could you build a copy of this? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of work. In addition, it is a lot of different kinds of work. Electrical repair, woodworking, and bending metal, at least. If you can pull it off, our hat’s off to you.
Not the first
hubless bike
we’ve seen, though. The last time we saw something that
looked like a Penny Farthing
, it didn’t look as vintage as this one, nor was it hubless. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708709",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T21:10:57",
"content": "My mistake, I started reading this article thinking it was about someone putting a hub motor into a Penny Farthing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,372,071.442431 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/the-logg-dogg-how-a-mysterious-logging-robot-leads-down-twisting-forestry-paths/ | The Logg Dogg: How A Mysterious Logging Robot Leads Down Twisting Forestry Paths | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"forestry"
] | There are many places where you’d want to use remotely controlled robots, but perhaps forestry isn’t the first application to come to mind. Yet there are arguments to be made for replacing something like a big logging machine with grapple for a much smaller robot. The reduced ground pressure can be beneficial in fragile ecosystems, and removing the operator is much safer if felling a tree goes wrong.
This is where a US company called Forest Robots tried to come in, with their Logg Dogg, of which [Wes] over at
Watch Wes Work
found a very unique prototype abandoned in a barn
, courtesy of Zuckerberg’s marketplace of wonders.
One of the two receivers on the Forest Robots’ Logg Dogg logging robot prototype. (Credit: Watch Wes Work)
After lugging the poor abandoned robot back into a warm repair shop, he set to work on figuring out what it was that he had bought. At the time he knew only that it was some kind of logging robot, but with no model number or name on the robot, it was tough to find information. Eventually he got tipped off about it being
the Logg Dogg
, with even a video of the robot in action, helpfully
uploaded to YouTube
by [Hankey Mountain Garage] and embedded below for your viewing pleasure.
As [Wes] noticed during teardown and inspection was that it has that distinct mix-and-match feel to it of a prototype, ranging from metric and US customary bolts to both European and US/Canadian supplied components. Although it has two RF receivers on the device, no remote(s) came with the device, and the seller only knew that it was already in the barn when they purchased the place. After getting the engine working again on the robot, [Wes] contacted one of the people behind the robot:
[Dean Edwards]
, a professor at the University of Idaho, hoping to learn more about this robot and how it ended up abandoned in a barn.
Hopefully we’ll find out in a Part 2 whether [Wes] got a response, and whether this robot will get a second chance at life. Meanwhile, in countries such as Portugal such robots are already
finding significant use
, including for
fire protection
in its forests, tackling difficult terrain more easily than humans. With forest fires an increasing risk, perhaps the Logg Dogg and kin could find a use there.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708680",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T20:15:45",
"content": "Logging is dangerous AF.It’s an obvious choice for automation. But not easy.Have to program it to finish off/dispose of tree sitting protestors…Without it being obvious.Was a problem just waiting for AI. Now... | 1,760,372,071.898235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/you-cant-make-what-you-cant-measure/ | You Can’t Make What You Can’t Measure | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"measurement",
"newsletter",
"rants"
] | What’s the most-used tool on your bench? For me, it’s probably a multimeter, although that’s maybe a tie with my oscilloscope. Maybe after that, the soldering iron and wire strippers, or my favorite forceps. Calipers must rate in there somewhere too, but maybe a little further down. Still, the top place, and half of my desert-island top-10, go to measuring gear.
That’s because any debugging, investigation, or experimentation always starts with getting some visibility on the problem. And the less visible the physical quantity, the more necessary to tool. For circuits, that means figuring out where all the voltages lie, and you obviously can’t just guess there. A couple months ago, I was doing some epoxy and fiberglass work, and needed to draw a 1/2 atmosphere vacuum. That’s not the kind of quantity you can just eyeball. You need the right measurement tool.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my disappointment in receiving a fan that wouldn’t push my coffee beans around in the homemade roaster. How could I have avoided this debacle? By figuring out the pressure differential needed and buying a fan that’s appropriately rated. But I lacked pressure and flow meters.
Now that I think about it, I could have scavenged the pressure meter from the fiberglassing rig, and given that a go, but with the cheap cost of sensors and amplifiers, I’ll probably just purpose-build something. I’m still not sure how I’ll measure the flow; maybe I’ll just cheese out and buy a cheap wind-speed meter.
When people think of tools, they mostly think of the “doers”: the wrenches and the hammers of this world. But today, let’s all raise a calibrated 350 ml glass to the “measurers”. Without you, we’d be wandering around in the dark.
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
! | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708591",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T15:24:00",
"content": "“What’s the most-used tool on your bench? For me, it’s probably a multimeter, although that’s maybe a tie with my oscilloscope. ”Or the clamp meter.https://youtu.be/kawFTI5-kqU",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,071.820874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/the-small-and-silly-synth-now-even-smaller-but-just-as-silly/ | The Small And Silly Synth Now Even Smaller (But Just As Silly) | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"CH32V003",
"midi",
"piezo",
"synth",
"synthesizer. monotonic",
"USB C"
] | What do you do when you’ve carved out a niche for yourself as a builder of small and useless synthesizers? Why, build
an even smaller and less useful synthesizer
, of course!
If you’ve been paying even a minimal amount of attention you’ll know right away that this comes to use from [mitxela], who while not playing with
volumetric POV displays
is often found building smaller and smaller synthesizers, including putting them
in DIN plug shells
. The current synth is based on his
“Silly Synth,”
which puts all the guts for the synth inside a USB connector. This time around, though, it’s USB-C, and rather than fitting everything inside the connector shell, the entire synth sits on a PCB that’s smaller than a tiny piezo speaker. The whole thing runs on a CH32V003 microcontroller, and aside from a few support components and the right-angle USB-C plug, not much else.
The PCB is what really shines in [mitxela]’s design, especially the routing. He’s got a 20-pin QFN chip on one side of the board and the USB plug right behind it on the other side to deal with, plus the big through-holes for the speaker and the physical connections on the plug. It’s quite a crowded design, but it gets the job done. What’s more, he panelized the design so that mass production is possible; the reason for this is revealed at the end of the video below.
Pretty much every time we see one of these “smallest synth” videos we’re convinced that we’re seeing the lower limit of what’s possible, but every time, [mitxela] goes ahead and proves us wrong. That’s fine, of course — we don’t mind being wrong about something like this.
Thanks to [hackbyte] and [Stephen Walters] for the tips. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708551",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T12:52:48",
"content": "There is still potential for improvement:– Use a MEMS speaker– Use a more powerful microcontroller for better synthesisTiny Wifi/BT dongles move the controller into the USB A connector. Would that maybe be... | 1,760,372,071.597976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/forget-the-altair-remember-the-mark-8/ | Forget The Altair! Remember The Mark-8! | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8 bit",
"8008",
"mark 8"
] | Calling any one computer the first hobby computer is fraught with peril. Most people think the MITS Altair 8800, first featured in Popular Electronics back in January 1975, was the first. Some might argue that others were first, but there is no doubt that the Altair started the hobby computer revolution from a practical standpoint. However, there was another computer that almost took the crown. It, too, appeared in a magazine — Radio and Electronics. But it was in the July 1974 issue. That computer was the Mark 8, and [Artem Kalinchuk] is
building a replica
that you can see started in the video below. This isn’t some Arduino work-alike. He has a pile of parts and some almost authentic-looking PCBs.
The Mark 8 used the 8008, not the 8080, so it was less powerful. [Artem] has been building a replica Altair, too. Check out his YouTube channel if you are interested in those.
Finding all the parts for such a project is a bit tricky. The schematics available have some errors, but others have created boards you can purchase, and they’ve been corrected. Some components will require modern replacements. However, he did find a CPU and some of the oddball logic and memory chips. We were curious about the total bill and if it was more or less than the original after adjusting for inflation.
The
original article
back in 1974 was just a teaser. You had to send in $5 for the complete plans. [Jon Titus], the designer, estimates that 7,500 plans were sold and about 400 sets of PCBs. If you could source the parts, build the boards (with no plated-through holes and, presumably, no solder mask), and troubleshoot the errors in the originals, you could have a working computer.
The project is just starting, but we are sure [Artem] will complete it, so stay tuned to see his progress. There are already videos about the
backplane
, the
power supply
, and the
LED register display
. The boards, by the way, are
the ones we’ve seen
from [Henk Verbeek]. If you want to use a 8008, but don’t have the stomach for the full build,
try a clock
. | 39 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708519",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T10:56:19",
"content": "The great thing about the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 were their use of expansion slots (S-100 etc) and the use of the 8080/8085/Z80.That way, they could be expanded into real Personal Computers running pro... | 1,760,372,071.732163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/take-the-minimal-pain-out-of-esp32-programming/ | Take The Minimal Pain Out Of ESP32 Programming | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"CH340",
"ESP32",
"programmer"
] | Perhaps without many of us realising it, our single board computers perform the task of making programming their processor or SoC a lot easier. They take care of setting the right lines or commands to put the chip in programming mode, they deal with timings, such that we simply fire our code from our dev environment without having to expend much thought. It’s not as though it’s difficult to program most microcontrollers, but there is usually a procedure to set the chip in programming mode. Tired of pressing buttons to achieve this with the ESP32, [DoganM95] took the time to create
an all-in-one USB ESP32 programming board
.
It’s a straightforward enough CH340C design that also has a USBC-PD chip on-board allowing powering of an attached ESP32 from PD sources. It’s all the stuff you’d find incorporated on a little dev board, without the ESP32, so while it’s nothing earth-shattering it’s also a neat and useful little addition to your arsenal. Unsurprisingly
it’s not the first time someone’s created a similar board for a commercially available ESP32 module
. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708497",
"author": "shays",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T09:48:54",
"content": "Mandatory could have used a 555",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6708931",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T09:51:... | 1,760,372,071.551604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/second-life-ups-mark-ii-a-ups-for-low-voltage-dc-applications/ | Second Life UPS Mark II: A UPS For Low-Voltage DC Applications | Maya Posch | [
"Battery Hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"dc ups",
"power supply",
"ups"
] | When you have a whole stack of devices and appliances that all have an AC to DC adapter and which you’d like to put on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS), you could do the obvious thing and get an off-the-shelf UPS with myriad AC outputs. In the case of a 19″ rack this means wrangling a power strip or two and any combination of differently sized AC/DC adapters into the rack, with questionable efficiency and waste heat dumped into the rack. This is where a DC-only UPS like [Maciej Grela]’s
Second Life UPS Mark II
provides an interesting alternative.
At its core it’s a pretty simple concept: A single 400Watt power supply handles the AC/DC conversion from mains to 24 VDC, which feeds the battery charger as well as the outputs. These outputs include 5 VDC, 12 VDC and V
rail
, with the latter being either the output from the PSU, or the battery voltage. In case of AC power failure, an
LT4416
dual power path controller handles the switch-over from the PSU output to the internal batteries. In the article, [Maciej] covers how the buck modules for the 12 & 5 VDC rails were sized, along with the conversion of an old rack-mounted network switch into a UPS.
The 18650s for the batteries (in 4S24P configuration) are all refurbished cells for a total of about 600 Wh, depending on the used cells. For the front panel the existing network port cut-outs were reused for pluggable connectors, along with easily accessible fuses for all rails. Although not a project for the faint of heart, and targeting those who enjoy a bit of spot welding battery packs, it could be an interesting project, especially when considering the option of using it with a 24+ VDC off-grid installation and cutting out the usual DC-AC-DC conversion.
Second Life UPS Mark II schematic. (Credit: Maciej Grela)
(Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip) | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709080",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T21:27:10",
"content": "I’ve found it easiest to get an automotive 12v lead-acid battery that’s still got some life in it. Easy to get or build a charger for that. Then a simple DC distribution board with fuses or breakers for diff... | 1,760,372,072.192993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/mind-control-no-not-like-that/ | Mind Control… No, Not Like That | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"mind control",
"peripherals",
"snake oil"
] | [Vintage Geek] found an interesting device from 1996 called “MindDrive” which claims you can control your computer with your brain. Oddly, though, it doesn’t connect to your head. Instead, it has a little finger sensor that looks like a pulse-ox sensor.
Did it work
? The video below will show you what it can and can’t do.
The company claims the device is the result of seven years of research. We suspect it is little more than a galvanometer, like a kid’s toy lie detector. There is a gold sensor and a Velcro strap. It is hard to imagine that it was feasible that “thinking left” would cause a change in your finger that the device can interpret.
The device came with software including things like “MindSkier” which is a scrolling ski game. [Vintage Geek] suspected it wouldn’t matter if he had the sensor on or not, but the software was smart enough to realize the sensor had no input. However, it was impossible to differentiate between random movement and just errors in “thought control.” The pinball game had the same issue. But it seems certain the games are just doing random actions.
The device
received some press
in its day, probably because one of the company’s partners, according to reports, was Walt Disney-owned Miramax studio. Miramax claimed that by 1997, they’d release short films controlled by your thoughts. Hmmm… The New York Times reported in 1996 that they didn’t believe the $140 device either. They compared it to a Magic 8 ball. They sidestepped the finger sensor with a grape and a wadded-up moist paper towel. Both of them were also able to “control” the device. Who knew?
A
headband
would have been more convincing. Sensing
nerve impulses
is possible, too, but hardly the same thing. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709063",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T20:12:12",
"content": "They just needed better software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6709064",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T20:14:4... | 1,760,372,072.235929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/the-dark-side-of-hacking-xmas-lights-literally/ | The Dark Side Of Hacking XMas Lights, Literally | Maya Posch | [
"LED Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"home automation"
] | When looking at the piles of cheap RGB, Bluetooth-controlled LED strips you can find for sale just about anywhere these days, integrating them into a home-automation setup is very tempting. Normally these strips are controlled via a special smartphone app, that speaks whatever dodgy protocol was thrown together for the LED strip controller in question. Reverse-engineering this Bluetooth protocol is fairly easy these days, as [Will Cooke]
describes in a recent tutorial
, although for him there was a bit of a tragic ending with one particular RGB set.
With previous experiences reverse-engineering the Bluetooth protocol with Wireshark under his belt and having published the BJ_LED repository for LED strips that use the MohuanLED app, reverse-engineering this new LED strip with the associated “iDeal LED” app seemed fairly routine. Initially it was indeed routine, with just a curveball in the form of some encryption that the
Jadx
decompiler used on the app couldn’t help with. Fortunately the key ended up floating around on the internet, and the protocol was wide open. That’s when disaster struck.
While trying to throw payloads at the LED controller to find hidden modes and settings, [Will] found that he could indeed increase the brightness beyond what the app supported, but poking at lighting modes beyond the 10 presets gave a nasty shock. Modes 1 through 10 worked fine, 11 also did something new, but when the controller was asked to switch to mode 12, it shut off. Permanently. Whether this corrupted the firmware or caused some other issue is unknown, but it’s a clear warning that reverse-engineering comes with potentially fried hardware.
We hope that [Will] can get an autopsy performed on this controller to see the cause of this seemingly permanent failure that persisted across hard resets and disconnecting from power overnight. The protocol for this controller has been
published on GitHub
for those who’d like to take their chances.
LED lights: LadyAda,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709011",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T15:31:44",
"content": "Everyone knows you should only turn it up to 11.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6709052",
"author": "CH",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T1... | 1,760,372,072.290108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/calculation-before-we-went-digital/ | Calculation Before We Went Digital | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"calculator",
"slide rule"
] | We have to like [Nicola Marras]. First, he wrote a great
mini-book about analog computers
. Then he translated it into English. Finally, he opened with a picture of Mr. Spock using an E6-B flight slide rule. What’s not to like? We suggest you settle in when you want to read it — there are almost 60 pages of text, photos, and old ads for things like slide rules and adding machines.
There is a lot of research here. We couldn’t think of anything missed. There’s a Pascalina, Ishango’s bone, a Babylonian spreadsheet, an abacus, and even Quipu. Toward the end, he gets to nomographs, adding machines, and the early calculators.
We badly want an IBM 223-3168 — an IBM pocket calculator that uses rotary wheels to add and subtract hexadecimal. We also badly want to add a Curta to our collection. While we have many odd slide rules, we’ll confess we never saw Consul the Educated Monkey, which was a multiplying and dividing slide rule for kids. We do, however, have
a Smarty Cat
. We also were not familiar with the French
Abaque Compteur Universelle
, which was used by the French railway system.
About the only place we mildly disagreed was the statement:
[The slide rule was] always sticking out of engineers’ pocket[s].
Everyone we knew wore theirs on the belt. Engineering students looked like they were carrying a short sword all around campus. Still, maybe someone had them in their pockets.
We’ve argued that
slide rules made for better engineers
or, at least, helped filter out the bad ones. We have always been fascinated with this old tech, from
the magic brain
to the
Leibniz wheel
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708980",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T13:19:21",
"content": "“Everyone we knew wore theirs on the belt. Engineering students looked like they were carrying a short sword all around campus. Still, maybe someone had them in their pockets.”Swiping part of was a child... | 1,760,372,072.393746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/17/the-laptop-every-british-kid-would-have-wanted-for-christmas-1983/ | The Laptop Every British Kid Would Have Wanted For Christmas 1983 | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"palmtop",
"spectrum",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | How can we convey to a world in which a 64-bit laptop can be a near-throwaway item, just how amazing a miniature laptop version of the 1980s Sinclair ZX Spectrum could have been? perhaps we don’t need to, because
here in 2023 there’s a real one
for all middle-aged geeks who had the original to drool over.
8-bit home computers were super-exciting for the kids of the day, but they were in no way portable and relied on a TV, frequently the family model in the living room. It’s safe to say that a portable version of one of those home computers, not in an Osborne-style luggable case but in a clamshell palmtop, would have been mind-blowing, so four decades later we’re fascinated by [Airrr17]’s portable Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
At its heart is a dev board using one of the STM32F4 series microcontrollers, and running the Spectrum as an emulator. Alongside that is an LCD, and perhaps what is physically the best part of this, a Spectrum keyboard complete with BASIC keyword decals, made with large-button tactile switches that have we think, printed paper on top. Add in a small lithium-polymer cell and associated electronics in a cute little palmtop case, and it’s about as good a portable Sinclair as we could have imagined.
All the details can be found in a GitHub repository
, and as if that weren’t enough there’s an assembly video we’ve placed below the break. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708925",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T09:22:37",
"content": "This would have been easily possible back then, too. I’d preferred an ZX81, though.There used to be portable black/white TVs running off batteries (mono cells aka D cells).The smaller portable TVs had an i... | 1,760,372,072.335227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/arduino-auto-glockenspiel-looks-proper-in-copper/ | Arduino Auto-Glockenspiel Looks Proper In Copper | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"glockenspiel",
"solenoid"
] | What is it about solenoids that makes people want to make music with them? Whatever it is, we hope that solenoids never stop inspiring people to make instruments like
[CamsLab]’s copper pipe auto-glockenspiel.
At first, [CamsLab] thought of striking glasses of water, but didn’t like the temporary vibe of a setup like that. They also considered striking piano keys, but thought better of it when considering the extra clicking sound that the solenoids would make, plus it seemed needlessly complicated to execute. So [CamsLab] settled on copper pipes.
That in itself was a challenge as [CamsLab] had to figure out just the right lengths to cut each pipe in order to produce the desired pitch. Fortunately, they started with a modest 15-pipe glockenspiel as a proof of concept. However, the most challenging aspect of this project was figuring out how to mount the pipes so that they are close enough to the solenoids but not too close, and weren’t going to move over time. [CamsLab] settled on fishing line to suspend them with a 3D-printed frame mounted on extruded aluminium. The end result looks and sounds great, as you can hear in the video after the break.
Of course, there’s more than one way to auto-glockenspiel.
You could always use servos. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708865",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T06:13:30",
"content": "Very coolThere is something just magical about live music. Its somehow “satisfying” to hear music being created from instruments as opposed to speakers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,372,072.452264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/16/conductive-cellulose-based-fibers-for-clothing-coming-soon/ | Conductive Cellulose-Based Fibers For Clothing: Coming Soon? | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"conductive fabric",
"conductive textiles",
"textiles"
] | Summary of the process of producing side-by-side PANI and cotton cellulose fibers. (Credit: Wongcheng Liu et al., 2023)
With the rise of ‘smart’ devices, it seems like only a matter of time before smart fabrics become an every day thing. Yet a complication with these is that merely threading copper wires into clothing is neither practical nor very durable, which is why researchers have been trying to find a way to combine cellulose-based fibers like cotton with another, conductive material like carbon to create an affordable, resilient material which can provide the pathways for these smart fabrics. Recently a team at Washington State University
created a version
that integrates
polyaniline
(PANI,
press release
for paywalled paper), which is a well-known conductive polymer.
A
recent review article
by Duan-Chao Wang and colleagues in Polymers covers the research in conductive fibers, with conductive additives ranging from carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene to various metallic compounds and conductive polymers. As noted by Wang et al., a major aspect to successful commercialization is enabling scaling and cost-effectiveness of producing such fibers. This is the core of the achievement by the WSU team, who used a side-by-side structure of a cellulose substrate and the PANI conductive covering, which should be easier to produce and more durable than previous attempts to merge these two materials into conductive fibers suitable for fabrics.
Other research by Zhang-Chi Ling and colleagues, as
reported earlier this year
in
NPG Asia Materials
, details the creation of composite, conductive fibers made from bacterial cellulose with in-situ entanglement of CNTs. With even 100,000 bending cycles not showing much degradation, this could be another good candidate for conductive fabrics. Which of these approaches will first hit mass-production is still anyone’s guess, but we might see them sooner rather than later. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6709024",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2023-12-17T16:13:52",
"content": "Guessing signal voltages and currents. Hv/power is probably deadly",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6709073",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timest... | 1,760,372,072.49782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/inside-electronic-gain-control/ | Inside Electronic Gain Control | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"electronic gain control",
"jfet",
"op-amp"
] | Normally, if you want to control the gain of an amplifier, you’ll use a variable resistor. You know, like a volume control. But what if you want to control the amplifier’s gain with a voltage? [Engineering Prof]
explains a circuit that can do this
using a pair of op amps and a pair of matched JFETs.
The analysis is simple because you assume the op amps are not in saturation, so you can assume that the op amp will do what it needs to do to make the input terminals equal. The left-hand op amp has one input grounded, so the output will drive the first FET to ensure the negative terminal is also 0V. It is easy to see that the current through R1 must then be the current through the FET, which is going to be the control voltage (which is negative) divided by R1.
The gate voltage on the first JFET’s gate is the same as the gate voltage on the second JFET. Since they are matched, you can assume the current through that transistor will be the same as the first transistor. If you make sure the control voltage stays in the linear region of the FET, the device works somewhat like a variable resistor.
Confusing? Watch the video below, and it will all be clear. We might suggest you
simulate it
if you really want to understand it. If you don’t like your simulator in a browser, there are
always choices
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708415",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T05:19:30",
"content": "Or if you’re like my old receiver, you just add a motor and a little belt to a potentiometer for the remote control",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6708... | 1,760,372,072.555559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/1d-led-pong-arduino-style/ | 1D LED PONG, Arduino-Style | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"1D Pong",
"arduino",
"leds",
"pong"
] | Maybe it’s just us, but isn’t it kind of amazing that in a world of pretty darn realistic games, PONG is still thrilling to play?
This 1D implementation by [newsonator] is about as exciting as it gets.
It works like you’d probably expect — the light moves back and forth between the two players. Keep it in the green and you have a nice, gentle volley going. Let it hit your red LED and you’ve lost a point. But if you can push your button while your yellow LED is lit, the light speeds up tremendously until the next button press in the green.
Our only wish is that subsequent yellow-light button presses would make it speed up even more. But there are really just the two speeds with the current programming.
Inside the cool laser-cut box is an Arduino Uno and a 9V battery, plus a current-limiting resistor and the all-important buzzer. We like how [newsonator] wired up the LEDs to the Arduino by soldering them to a row of header pins and sticking
that
into the Arduino so it can be used in other projects down the line. We also like how [newsonator] shoved a couple of dowels through the box to ultimately support the two buttons.
Check out the intro video after the break for the overall details. The build is done over a few different short videos which follow.
Although this is pretty small, it isn’t quite
the minimum viable. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708438",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-16T06:40:42",
"content": "That’s a fine idea for a game. Well done! 😃👍When I saw it, my first thought was how this could be implemented by TTL or relay technology.By using a shift register or a counting chain (relay), I thought, ... | 1,760,372,072.60451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/repairing-an-hp-power-supply/ | Repairing An HP Power Supply | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"autoranging",
"HP",
"power supply"
] | One of the interesting things about living in modern times is that a confluence of the Internet and rapid changes in the electronics industry means that test gear that used to be astronomically priced is now super affordable. Especially if, like [Frankie Mashockie], you can do a little repair work. He picked up
an HP6038A power supply
for $50. We couldn’t find the original list price, but even refurbs from “professional” sources go for around $800. However, the $50 price came with a “for parts” disclaimer.
The power supply is autoranging. You usually think of that as a feature of meters. In a power supply, autoranging means the device can adjust the voltage based on load as you can see explained in the video below.
The repair had some smoky bits, and it is part 1, so we presume there will be a part 2. The end of this video was pretty hopeful, and we are anxious to see how much more might be wrong with it.
HP
made a lot of power supplies
that are still out there. And, of course, there are also the
power supplies resident in most of our equipment
to repair, too. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708330",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T22:13:06",
"content": "$2675 in 1990 was the list price…. (Seehttp://hparchive.com/Catalogs/HP-Catalog-1990.pdfpg470)THese are nice units, even by today’s standards. 0.01% +-3mV regulation, 0.01% +-5mA in current mode, wit... | 1,760,372,072.782836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/hackaday-podcast-episode-248-cthulhu-clock-radio-transharmonium-thunderscan-and-how-to-fill-up-in-space/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 248: Cthulhu Clock Radio Transharmonium, Thunderscan, And How To Fill Up In Space | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Elliot sat down with Dan for the penultimate podcast of 2023, and what a week it was. We started with news about Voyager; at T+46 years from launch, any news tends to be bad, and the latest glitch has everyone worried. We also took a look at how close the OSIRIS-REx mission came to ending in disaster, all for want of consistent labels.
Elliot was charmed by a Cthulhu-like musical instrument, while Dan took a shine to a spark gap transmitter that’s probably on the FCC’s naughty list. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishably from magic, and we looked at the laser made possible by the magician-in-chief himself, C.V. Raman. Why would you stuff a PSU full of iron filings? Probably for the same reason you’d print fake markings on a 6502 chip. We also took a look at the chemistry and history of superglue, a paper tape reader that could lop off your arm, and rocket gas stations in space.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Grab a copy for yourself
if you want to listen offline.
Episode 248 Show Notes:
News:
Voyager 1 In Trouble As Engineers Scramble To Debug Issue With Flight Data System
Boeing 737 Pressurisation
(site appears to be down at press time; hopefully it comes back up)
What’s that Sound?
Guess the sound
for a chance to win a Podcast T-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
The Trans-Harmonium Is A Strange Kind Of Radio-Musical Instrument
Emily Francisco – Operations and Maintenance
Supercon 2022: Chris Combs Reveals His Art-World Compatibility Layer
Modern Spark Gap Transmitter Uses A Rotary Gap
Homemade Raman Laser Is Shaken, Not Stirred
Raman laser – Wikipedia
Open Source Raman Spectrometer Is Cheaper, But Not Cheap
TSP #230 – A Real-Life Tricorder! Agilent Raman Resolve Through-Barrier Chemical Analyzer – YouTube
Cheap Computer PSU Puts On Weight With Box Of Iron
ThunderScan: The Wild 1980s Product That Turned A Printer Into A Scanner
Folklore.org: Thunderscan
NASA Blames Probe Chute Failure On Wire Labels
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
LED Art Project Is Geometrically Beautiful
Hilarious Security Flaw In Counter Strike 2 Is Now Patched
Raspberry Pi Changes HATs
Dan’s Picks:
A Ham Radio Answering Machine
Hands On With Boondock Echo
When Is A 6502 Not Quite A 6502?
Fast Paper Tape For The Nuclear Family
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue
Glues You Can Use: Adhesives For The Home Shop
Artemis’ Next Giant Leap: Orbital Refueling | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,072.743301 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/mods-turn-junk-ups-into-a-long-endurance-beast/ | Mods Turn Junk UPS Into A Long-Endurance Beast | Dan Maloney | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"deep cycle",
"inverter",
"lead-acid",
"sla",
"Uninterruptible Power Supply",
"ups"
] | If you’ve got a so-called uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on your system, you’re probably painfully aware that the “uninterruptible” part has some pretty serious limits. Most consumer units are designed to provide power during a black out only long enough to gracefully shut down your system. But with a few hacks like these, you can
stretch that time out and turn it into a long-endurance UPS
.
As many good stories do, this one starts in the trash, where [MetaphysicalEngineer] spotted an APC home office-style UPS. It was clearly labeled “broken,” but that just turned out to be a dead battery. While he could have simply replaced it with a 12-volt sealed lead-acid battery, [Meta] knew that his computer setup would quickly deplete the standard battery. A little testing showed him that a car battery would extend the run time significantly, especially if he threw in some extra cooling for the onboard inverter.
His final design uses a marine deep-cycle battery in a plastic battery box with the UPS mounted on top. The vacated battery compartment made a great place to add a cooling fan, along with a clever circuit to turn it on only when the beeper on the UPS sounds, with a bonus volume control for the annoying sound. He also added accessories to the battery box top, including a voltmeter, a USB charger, and a switched 12-volt power outlet. And kudos for the liberal use of fuses in the build; things could get spicy otherwise. The video below shows the entire build along with all the testing. [MetaphysicalEngineer] managed to triple the estimated runtime for the load he’s trying to power, so it seems like a win to us.
If your needs run more toward keeping your networking gear running through a blackout, you might want to check out
this inverter-less DC UPS
. | 36 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708269",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T17:57:40",
"content": "A couple of months ago I scored a *really nice* industrial UPS rack-mount system. Both batteries are dead, but I knew that.Some of the people at the local makerspace work at a UPS company, and they claim t... | 1,760,372,073.121402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/this-week-in-security-traingate-dns-and-jmp-slides/ | This Week In Security: Traingate, DNS, And JMP Slides | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"dns",
"JMP",
"newag"
] | Remember Dieselgate, the scandal where certain diesel vehicles would detect an emissions test, and run cleaner for it, “cheating” the test?
Traingate may just put that one into perspective
. We’ll tell the story from the beginning, but buckle up for a wild and astonishing ride. It all starts with Polish trains getting a maintenance overhaul. These trains were built by Newag, who bid on the maintenance contract, but the contract was won by another company, SPS. This sort of overhaul involves breaking each train into its components, inspecting, lubricating, etc, and putting it all back together again. The first train went through this process, was fully reassembled, and then refused to move. After exhausting all of the conventional troubleshooting measures, SPS brought in the hackers.
Dragon Sector is a Polish research group, who gained some worldwide attention for
work on Toshiba laptop BIOS security
. And it turns out that these were the perfect group for the job. From cobbling together hardware to improving Ghidra’s support for Infineon TriCore architecture, there was a lot of work done to even get a toehold into the train’s systems. But finally they could do memory dumps, and compare the broken train with working ones. There was a set of configuration flags that seemed to hold the key. But this particular train was badly needed in service. So Newag, the original manufacturer, was finally contacted to complete the maintenance and get the train running again. Hackers are nothing, however, if not persistent. After pulling an all-nighter, and with literal minutes to spare, Dragon Sector was able to overwrite the memory of the broken train with a valid configuration, and it once again came to life.
So far, nothing here seems suspicious. Startup checks after maintenance could easily go awry, leading to this sort of situation. But Dragon Sector kept digging, refining their tools, and teasing more secrets out of the train firmware. And what they found was astonishing. Up first was GPS coordinates, corresponding to every train yard in Poland capable of doing this sort of maintenance overhaul. If a train was parked inside any maintenance yard but Newag’s for over 10 days, the flag would trigger and the train would be disabled. It’s hard to see that “feature” as anything but a blatant attempt to brick any train that didn’t come back to Newag for maintenance. But wait, there’s more.
Replacing certain components would lead to similar breakage, until an undocumented cheat code was tapped in to the main computer console on the train. In another case, a train would break after hitting a million kilometers. Yet another train was scheduled to break down with a bad compressor on a given date — and a programming error delayed that breakdown until a year later. All told, Dragon Sector looked at 29 trains across Poland, and found these wonderful little surprises in 24 of them. Through Poland’s CERT Polska, law enforcement agencies have been notified about this case.
In response,
Newag has accused Dragon Sector of slander and computer crimes
, as well as being threats to railway safety. All we can say is that we hope a thorough investigation will establish the truth of the case, and hold the true criminals to account.
It’s Always DNS
Ever wondered how a DNS server gets updates about DNS names? It turns out there are a couple ways. One is for clients to send updates directly, advertising their DNS name and IP address. DNS Dynamic updates are supported in multiple DNS servers, including Active Directory (AD), and in pretty much every implementation this has a reasonable security implementation. On the other hand, there is also DNS updates sent as part of a DHCP request. And those…
have problems
.
This write-up is very Active Directory focused, but it wouldn’t surprise us to find a similar problem in other DHCP servers. Namely, the DNS update isn’t authenticated. Any device that is given an IP address can request a DNS name at the same time. The way this works in a Microsoft server environment is the DNS service uses its own credentials to forward the DNS update to the DNS server. If those are two separate servers, and the name is already registered directly by another host, the update will fail. But an unclaimed name, or even the DHCP server’s name itself are up for grabs. And in the case of the DNS and DHCP services running on the same server, pretty much any DNS name is in play. And in an AD environment, that allows for all sorts of further attacks on authentication.
These issues have been reported to Microsoft, who consider them to be known issues, not quite worthy of a security fix. They are worth knowing about when building an AD network. To help keep us out of trouble, Akamai has written
Invoke-DHCPCheckup
as a powershell tool to check for issues.
Do the JMP Slide
There’s a technique used when writing exploits, the NOP slide. It’s a series of No Operation commands followed by the target shellcode. The idea is that a vulnerability will jump somewhere into this attacker-controlled memory area, but the exact destination can vary. This is used so often that blocks of 0x90 in data is one of the tells that it may be malicious. there is a problem with the NOP slide, in that it can take longer than you want to make it through all the NOP instructions to get to the juicy shellcode. And that’s where
the JMP slide comes into play
.
The basis is that we know how many bytes are left in the slide, so we can use JMP instructions to go right to the payload. That’s great, except for alignment. Namely, the x86 machine code freely mixes instructions and arguments. If you don’t know exactly where instruction will land in your buffer, how do you know if you’re about to execute a jmp, or execute the offset as an instruction? There are a couple obvious ways to approach this, like using 0x90 values as argument to JMP, followed by a much smaller NOP slide zone to catch the JMP.
That one is a bit of a challenge, too, because the JMP command is based on offsets that can be positive or negative, and 0x90 happens to be a negative offset. That can work, but the entire shellcode payload has to be constructed backwards to manage it. There is one other option, the conditional jump JCC opcodes. These are 0x70-0x7F in machine code, which manages to be positive offsets. The only problem there is that these jumps are conditional upon a register value, which is unknown. The final solution is to use the Jump if Greater opcode twice, followed by the Jump if Less or Equal opcode twice. Both are positive offsets, and both make steady progress though the JMP slide to eventually land in a small NOP slide to finally run shellcode. Clever!
Bits and Bytes
After getting fired, it may be tempting to burn your bridges on the way out. If that includes wiping code repositories, deleting log files, taking home proprietary code, stealing a work laptop, and impersonating colleagues…
maybe don’t
. A software engineer from First Republic Bank just couldn’t resist the temptation, and will serve two years in prison, three years of probation, and pay $529,000 in restitution for damages. Definitely not worth it.
And for a stark reminder why not everything needs to be connected to the network or Internet, see
the fallout from a cyberattack on Kyivstar in Ukraine
. This phone and Internet provider was taken down on Tuesday, in what appears to be a devastating data wiping attack. Banks and stores are closed due to payment processing being down, and at least one city had to manually disconnect their street lights from the power grid, because the software controller was disabled as a byproduct of the attack. Maybe the old mechanical timers were better after all. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708256",
"author": "BillyG",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T17:19:49",
"content": "Yet another train was scheduled to break down with a bad compressor on a given date — and a programming error delayed that breakdown until a year later.If true, I think the Poles should contract the Sicili... | 1,760,372,073.162898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/building-a-solar-powered-supercapacitor-based-speaker/ | Building A Solar-Powered, Supercapacitor-Based Speaker | Maya Posch | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Portable Audio Hacks"
] | [
"diy speaker",
"super capacitor"
] | Inspired by many months of hours-long load shedding in South Africa, [JGJMatt] decided to
make a portable speaker
that can play tunes for hours on a single charge and even charge off the integrated solar panel to top the charge off. None of this should sound too surprising, but what differentiates this speaker is the use of two beefy 400 F, 2.7 V supercapacitors in series rather than a lithium-ion battery on the custom PCB with the Ti
TPA2013D1
Class-D mono amplifier.
Insides of the speaker prior to stuffing and closing.
The reason for supercapacitors is two-fold. The first is that their lifespan is much longer than that of Li-ion batteries, the second that they can charge much faster. The disadvantages of supercapacitors come in the form of their lower energy density and linear discharge voltage. For the latter issue the TPA2301D1 amplifier has a built-in boost converter for an input range from 1.8 – 5.5 V, and despite the lower energy density a solid 6 hours of playback are claimed.
Beyond the exquisitely finished 3D printed PETG shell and TPU-based passive bass radiator, the functionality consists out of a single full-range speaker and an analog audio input (TRS jack and USB-C). To add Bluetooth support [JGJMatt] created a module consisting out of a Bluetooth module that connects to the USB-C port for both power and analog audio input.
Charging the speaker can be done via the USB-C port, as well as via the solar panel. This means that you can plug its USB-C port into e.g. a laptop’s USB-C port and (hopefully) charge it and play back music at the same time.
For those feeling like replicating this feat, the Gerbers, bill of materials, enclosure STLs, and everything else needed can be be found in the tutorial. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708187",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T13:43:33",
"content": "I hate batteries. This is amazing! I love living in the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6708284",
"author": "Dayjar Voo",
... | 1,760,372,073.045551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/15/its-a-microphone-and-a-spring-reverb-all-in-one/ | It’s A Microphone And A Spring Reverb All In One | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"microphone",
"piezo",
"reverb",
"spring reverb"
] | We’re so used to reverb effects being simply another software plugin that it’s easy to forget the electromechanical roots of the effect. Decades ago, a reverb would have been a metal spring fed at one end with a speaker and attached at the other to a microphone. You may not see them often in the 2020s,
which is probably why [Ham-made] has produced one
. It’s not the type with a speaker providing the sound, though. Instead, this is a microphone in its own right with a built-in spring line.
Perhaps it’s not the best microphone possible, with a somewhat heavy diaphragm and 3D printed body. But the hand-wound spring transmits the sound down to a piezo disk which serves as the electrical element, and the whole thing screws together into quite the usable unit. There are a selection of sample MP3 files that provide an interesting set of effect-laden sounds, so if you fancy building one yourself, you can judge the results.
We think this may be the first reverb microphone we’ve seen, but
we’re certainly no stranger to reverb project
s. More common by far, though, are plate reverbs, in which the physical element in the system is a metal plate rather than a spring. We like it when the
sound source is a Commodore 64
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708148",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T09:38:48",
"content": "That is just plain cool.it turns the microphone into an instrument in its own right.awsome idea,zillabuttuggly,hope they keep iterating and explore the full potential",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,072.989349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/laser-cut-zither-instrument-kicks-it-old-world-style/ | Laser Cut Zither Instrument Kicks It Old World Style | Drew Littrell | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"laser cutter",
"laser cutter projects",
"musical instruments",
"woodworking"
] | Learning to play an instrument takes a certain level of dedication — and you can add another layer of dedication on top of that when it’s an instrument not found at your local Guitar Center. But it’s an entirely new level of dedication when someone crafts the instrument from scratch. If you’re looking for an example, check out
this custom wooden zither
[Nicolas Bras] built from laser cut parts.
The basic design of the instrument utilizes the sloted interlocking edges that are then glued together in lieu of traditional fasteners. Standard sized guitar tuning pegs and the accompanying steel guitar strings were then strung across two laser-cut bridges held in place by the string tension alone. The project began as way for [Nicolas] to learn the capabilities of his newly acquired laser cutter, but he himself is no amateur when it comes to constructing one-of-a-kind musical instruments. Just last year, he
created a zither with bungee cords from the hardware store
.
Zithers are German in origin, though some of the earliest zither-like instruments date back to 400 BCE China. The laser cut version [Nicolas] created had five strings to hammer on, though the type used in classical music arrangements typically contain upwards of thirty strings. The zither family of instruments may have given way to the electric guitars of today — it’s always neat to see new tech leveraged to embrace some old world charm.
For more on the art of DIY music production, check out this post on myriad of
DIY musical instrument builds all played in concert
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708221",
"author": "Ed Hering",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T15:05:21",
"content": "That’s a hammered dulcimer, not a zither.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6708366",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2023-1... | 1,760,372,073.401999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/charging-while-driving-now-possible-in-michigan/ | Charging While Driving Now Possible In Michigan | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ehighway",
"electric truck",
"electric trucks",
"induction charger",
"truck",
"trucks"
] | Heavy vehicles like semi trucks pose a bigger challenge in electrifying the transportation fleet than smaller, more aerodynamic passenger cars. Michigan now has the
first public in-road charging system
in the United States to help alleviate this concern. [via
Electrek
]
Electreon, a company
already active in Europe
, won the contract to provide for the inductive coil-based charging system at the new Michigan Central Station research campus. Initial runs will be with a Ford E-Transit for testing, but there are plans to actually allow public use along the one mile (1.6 km) route in the near future.
Vehicles using the system need a special receiver, so we hope we’ll be seeing an open standard develop instead of having to have a different receiver for each road you drive on. This seems like it would be a more onerous swap than having to have three different toll road transponders. Unfortunately, the page about
wireless standards
on the Electreon website currently 404s, but CharIN, the standards body behind the
Combined Charging Standard (CCS)
did just launch a
task force for wireless power delivery
in September.
If you’re curious about other efforts at on-road charging, check out this
slot car system in Sweden
or
another using pantographs
. | 66 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708091",
"author": "rgm",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T03:17:30",
"content": "I don’t understand how a complicated system that’s less efficient is better than plugging in or swapping batteries?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "67080... | 1,760,372,073.361358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/sneakernet-power-transmission/ | Sneakernet Power Transmission | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"battery sharing",
"community",
"sneakernet"
] | Power outages in the face of natural disasters or more mundane grid failures can range from a mild inconvenience to a matter of life or death if you depend on electrical medical equipment. [Shareable] and [People Power Battery Collective] have partnered to develop a toolkit for communities looking to
share power with each other
in these situations.
Battery backup power isn’t exactly a new concept, so the real meat of this guide is how to build a network in your community so these relatively simple devices can be deployed effectively in the event of an emergency. We know that you can already handle your own backup power needs, but it pays to be a good neighbor, especially when those neighbors are deciding what to do when you’re releasing the factory-sealed smoke from your latest build on the community sidewalk.
For those who aren’t as technically-inclined as you, dear reader, there is also a handy
Battery Basics (PDF) guide
to help in selecting a battery backup solution. It is somewhat simplified, but it covers what most people would need to know. A note on fire safety regarding Li-ion batteries would probably be warranted in the Battery Basics document to balance the information on the risks of topping up lead-acid cells, but it otherwise seems pretty solid.
If you’re not quite ready to bug your neighbors, how about you build a backup battery first? How about
repurposing an e-bike battery
or this
backup power solution
for keeping a gas water heater working during a power outage? | 29 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708072",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2023-12-15T01:36:21",
"content": "Why? Just fire up your gas powered generator. Done! As long as you have gas, you have power. Simple.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6708080",
... | 1,760,372,073.47453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/quick-negative-voltage-for-an-op-amp/ | Quick Negative Voltage For An Op Amp | Al Williams | [
"hardware"
] | [
"negative power supply",
"negative rail",
"op-amp"
] | It is a classic problem when designing with op amps: you need the output to go to zero, but — for most op amps — you can’t quite get down to the supply rail. If your power options are a positive voltage and ground, you can’t get down to zero without a special kind of op amp which might not meet your needs. The best thing to do is provide a negative supply to the chip. Don’t have one? [Peter Demchenko]
can help
. He uses a simple two-transistor multivibrator along with some diodes and capacitors to generate a minimal negative voltage for this purpose.
The circuit is simple and only produces a small negative voltage. He mentions that into a 910 ohm load, he sees about -0.3V. Not much, but enough to get that op amp down to zero with a reasonable load. Unlike other circuits he’s used in the past, this one is efficient. With a 5-volt input, it draws less than 1.5 mA.
His
previous
circuit used LEDs and photocells, which led to low noise but wasn’t the best for efficiency. However, it is still a clever idea.
There are many ways to get a negative voltage like this. If you have an RS232 interface anyway, you might be able to swipe some from the port or your own driver, although it might be noisier than you want.
We’ve written extensively about “
the negative rail
” and how to get it. Of course, you can always throw a
module
at the problem. What’s your favorite way of getting a negative supply? | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6708022",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T21:32:48",
"content": "When designing op-amp circuits, you’re often using a chip with 2, 4, 6 etc. amplifiers on the same die when you only need 1,3,5… so you end up with an extra. Instead of using many parts to make an oscillator... | 1,760,372,074.009081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/disposable-vape-batteries-turned-usb-power-bank/ | Disposable Vape Batteries Turned USB Power Bank | Tom Nardi | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"cell balancing",
"charge controller",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"usb power bank"
] | It’s another one of those fun quirks about our increasingly cyberpunk world — instead of cigarette butts littering our streets, you’re more likely to find disposable vaporizers that have run out of juice. Unfortunately, while the relatively harmless paper remnants of a cig would eventually just fall apart when exposed to the elements, these futuristic caltrops are not only potentially explosive thanks to their internal lithium-ion battery but aren’t going anywhere without some human intervention.
So do the environment and your parts bin a favor: pick them up and salvage their internal cells. As
[N-Ender_3] shows with this build
, it’s cheap and easy to turn the remnants of a few vapes into a useful USB power bank. In this case, the enclosure is 3D printed, which makes it particularly form-fitting, but you could just as easily pack the cells into something else if you’re not a fan of extruded plastic.
The real star of the show here is an off-the-shelf USB power bank module, which handles safely charging the parallel-wired cells and stepping up the output to 5 V. As explained by [N-Ender_3] in the project description, there is a bit of a caveat here, though — you have to first charge all the cells up (after verifying they’re intact and working in the first place) fully before soldering them together. This simplistic charge module has no ability to individually balance the cells, so if they’re not all within 0.1 V or so of each other, things will start to go south on you.
As always,
there’s a level of risk when working with lithium-ion batteries
, but we figure they’re less likely to explode
when properly repurposed
than they are sitting on the street waiting to be run over. Probably. | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707984",
"author": "Michael Garber",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T19:53:30",
"content": "OK. so the module supplies 5V from the batteries. But how does on charge them?Wouldnt something like this be better:https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Charger-Discharge-Integrated-Lithium/dp/B098989NR... | 1,760,372,073.560336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/hacker-tactic-internal-esd-diode-probing/ | Hacker Tactic: Internal ESD Diode Probing | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Repair Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"debugging",
"debugging tools",
"esd diode",
"test equipment"
] | Humans are walking high voltage generators, due to all the friction with our surroundings, wide variety of synthetic clothes, and the overall ever-present static charges. Our electronics are sensitive to electrostatic discharge (ESD), and often they’re sensitive in a way most infuriating – causing spurious errors and lockups. Is there a wacky error in your design that will repeat in the next batch, or did you just accidentally zap a GPIO? You wouldn’t know until you meticulously check the design, or maybe it’s possible for you to grab another board.
Thankfully, in modern-day Western climates and with modern tech, you are not likely to encounter ESD-caused problems, but they were way more prominent back in the day. For instance, older hackers will have stories of how FETs were more sensitive, and touching the gate pin mindlessly could kill the FET you’re working with. Now, we’ve fixed this problem, in large part because we have added ESD-protective diodes inside the active components most affected.
These diodes don’t just help against ESD – they’re a general safety measure for protecting IC and transistor pins, and they also might help avoid damaging IC pins if you mix. They also might lead to funny and unexpected results, like parts of your circuit powering when you don’t expect them to! However, there’s an awesome thing that not that many hackers know — they let you debug and repair your circuits in a way you might not have imagined.
Debugging Wiring And Chips Alike
Here’s a simple scenario. You have a button connected to your Arduino, with some long wires, maybe it’s even on a screwy breadboard. One pin is connected to ground, and another is connected to a GPIO. You press this button, and nothing happens in your code. Why is that?
First, you’ll want to verify your connections. Arduino-internal ESD diodes let you do that with a single measurement at the button. Put your multimeter into diode test mode (or low-resistance measurement mode), then reverse your multimeter leads, putting the red lead on ground and black lead on the button pin. Then, touch the button pins and see if you can sense an internal diode – if not, your wiring is likely suspect.
This is not all, however. Do you have a broken PCIe GPU? It can be overwhelming – many things could be broken, where do you start? It could be the GPU chip itself, it could be one of the smaller memory chips, or it could be the VRM. An ESD diode test helps yet again. Put the red lead on GND, and check the card edge pins with PCIe diffpairs, probing behind series capacitors where those are present near the card edge.
The results are stunning – you can notice a GPU core chip failure that you wouldn’t normally. It’s simple – card edge-connected GPIOs will have a certain kind of voltage drop, and the PCIe link will also have a certain voltage drop, just a different one, because high-speed links need different ESD diode structures.
If one or few PCIe pins or GPIOs deviate from the PCIe or GPIO ESD diode value on all other pins, you might just have a broken core – this knowledge will save you a hefty amount of time if you are thinking of reballing the GPU or fixing some other areas like the VRM. It’s a super efficient way to test your tech, and of course, it works for other things like ICs.
There’s more – you are probing a board, and you want to know where a resistor goes. Is it a pull-down resistor, is it connected to some external connector, or is it part of some analog circuit? With red lead on ground again, check if there’s a diode – that’s how you can know it’s connected to a digital input of some sort, or floating.
Powerful, Simple, Friendly
Would you believe me if I told you there’s more? If you’ve ever browsed AliExpress for devboards or PC tech, you have likely seen these adapters with tons of LEDs and a battery board. These are tester boards for PC components, they are beautifully analog in how they operate, and it’s insanely easy to build your own – let me show you how.
Yep, these testers also test the presence of ESD diodes. Furthermore, the LED will shine with different brightness depending on the nature of the connection. It’s seriously awesome in how quickly you can test things at a fundamental level with these boards. If your desktop’s CPU doesn’t boot, it might just be a broken ball in its LGA socket, and plugging such a tester in will save you a metric kiloton of trouble debugging other things.
They are dead simple, too. If you want to test 20 or 200 connections at once, you only need a CR2032 battery and a bunch of LEDs – maybe some series resistors, but even those don’t seem necessary to me. The coin cell batteries have an internal resistance of their own, which helps us because we don’t need per-LED current limiting resistors – you can just shower a board in LEDs, add a coin cell holder, and make it into a debugger for anything.
As a USB-C zealot, of course, I’ve made a USB-C tester – and immediately tested it on some of my broken or mysterious USB-C ports, to great success. Here are
the KiCad files,
complete with a very broken-looking schematic.
For a start, this lets you check if any USB-C port you’re working with, is USB2-enabled or not. Is that docking station port “charger-only”, or can you also plug a flash drive in? The default answer is “charger-only”, but here, you can check for sure. However, it doesn’t end here – such a tester will give you an analog-ish value the same way that a multimeter test would!
An unhealthy USB-C port. Replacing the PD controller fixed it
The LED brightness will vary depending on what’s connected to the pin. For instance, is this CC pin connected to an IC digital pin, is it a dead short to GND, does it just go to a pull-down resistor, or is it disconnected? This tester will show you all through LED brightness alone. It’s hard to see on the pictures, but your eye will be able to distinguish between different pins and their roles, and there’s something deeply beautiful about it.
Is your USB-C port mechanically screwy, perhaps? Or is it just that a CC pin on it is shorted, and that’s why it only works in one orientation? Maybe one of the USB3 data pairs is broken because a capacitor flew off? I’ve already managed to debug all of these cases, using this board to fix a few dead USB-C ports.
Why So Unpopular?
By now, I’m seriously confused why we never saw such a tester for, say, MicroUSB ports. How come? It’d be super easy to have LEDs for VBUS, D+, D- and ID, with the ID pin LED telling you immediately whether the MicroUSB port on your smartphone is capable of OTG mode, and it’d cost about $1. There’s no shortage of RAM and CPU testers on Eastern platforms, and repair shops have long adopted them, but the hacker world is missing out on some tiny fun peripherals that are within the reach of our fingertips.
In short, internal ESD diode testing is a severely underappreciated hacker tactic. Whatever you want to do, whether it’s PC component repair, or checking cables, or testing your boards for shorts after reflow, probing for ESD diodes is easy, and can give you insights at the speed of light. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707967",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T18:54:45",
"content": "1970s TTL and NMOS were not so vulnerable to ESD, too.It was early CMOS and DRAM which were vulnerable to ESD. Modern CMOS has protective-circuits built-in to compensate for this design flaw.",
"parent... | 1,760,372,073.620873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/the-nintendo-switch-cpu-exposed/ | The Nintendo Switch CPU Exposed | Al Williams | [
"ARM",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"Nintendo Switch",
"Tegra X1"
] | Ever wonder what’s inside a Nintendo Switch? Well, the chip is an Nvidia Tegra X1. However, if you peel back a layer, there are four ARM CPU cores inside — specifically Cortex A57 cores, which take up about two square millimeters of space on the die. The whole cluster, including some cache memory, takes up just over 13 square millimeters. [ClamChowder] takes us inside
the Cortex A57 inside the Nintendo Switch
in a recent post.
Interestingly, the X1 also has four A53 cores, which are more power efficient, but according to the post, Nintendo doesn’t use them. The 4 GB of DRAM is LPDDR4 memory with a theoretical bandwidth of 25.6 GB/s.
The post details the out-of-order execution and branch prediction used to improve performance. We can’t help but marvel that in our lifetime, we’ve seen computers go from giant, expensive machines to the point where a game console has 8 CPU cores and advanced things like out-of-order execution. Still, [ClamChowder] makes the point that the Switch’s processor is anemic by today’s standards, and can’t even compare with an outdated desktop CPU.
Want to program the ARM in assembly language? We can
help you get started
. You can
even do it on a breadboard
, though the LPC1114 is a pretty far cry from what even the Switch is packing under the hood. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707945",
"author": "dinogon",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T17:48:57",
"content": "I can’t help but wonder if the four unused cores were back from the earlier days where they might’ve hoped to use them when the system was undocked…That said considering it’s basically just a slightly cus... | 1,760,372,073.664785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/how-germanys-troubled-pebble-bed-reactor-came-of-age-in-china/ | How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China | Maya Posch | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"nuclear reactors",
"pebble bed reactor"
] | Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.
As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.
With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant
into commercial operation
, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?
Flow Of The Pebbles
Photo of Peach Bottom Unit 1.
The idea of a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor and the PBR in particular was first coined by
Farrington Daniels
, a physical chemist by training, which led to the first of such a unit being built in the US as Unit 1 of the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant. With the concept of the High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) taking hold, the UK built a somewhat similar design in the form of the
Dragon
reactor, though the Peach Bottom unit was the first to produce electricity.
All of these HTGRs have in common that they use graphite as the neutron moderator, with helium as the coolant. Graphite is highly temperature resistant, and helium is an inert gas that will not undergo chemical reactions with other materials or substances. Additionally, helium is not susceptible to neutron capture and will thus not become radioactive over time. These operating parameters is where the ‘high-temperature’ part of the design comes from, as the reactor core can run at much higher temperatures.
Refueling floor at Fort Saint Vrain HTGR, 1972. (Credit: Bruce McAllister, EPA)
Whereas a typical pressurized light-water reactor (PWR) will have a reactor coolant inlet temperature of around 290°C and an outlet temperature of below 350°C, an HTGR’s inlet temperature is around 250°C, with around 750°C on the outlet. This puts it at or above the level of a standard coal-fired thermal plant’s steam temperature, and strongly increases its thermal efficiency over that of light- and heavy-water reactors. The US’s second HTGR (
Fort Saint Vrain
, in Colorado) was operational from 1979 to 1989 (one year past Peach Bottom Unit 1), but it being the first-of-a-kind (
FOAK
) of a commercial HTGR meant that many design issues were being ironed out during commercial operation, which eventually played a big role in its shutdown, and ultimately its conversion to a natural gas plant by 1996, as the US continued its general turn back to fossil fuels from nuclear power.
Beyond these two HTGRs, the
UHTREX
experimental reactor (1959 – 1971) at Los Alamos National Laboratory was also constructed, but used for testing fuel types rather than electricity production. This testing included direct cooling of the fuel without cladding, which enabled much higher burn-up as the fission products were able to move into the coolant flow.
With the shutdown of Fort Saint Vrain’s HTGR, the era of this reactor type in North America came to an end.
German Engineering Chops
Although the US and UK HTGRs used essentially fuel rods not unlike their water-cooled brethren, in Germany
Rudolf Schulten
– a professor at RWTH Aachen University – took it upon himself to develop a version using spherical fuel elements. This led to the world’s first PBR being built in the form of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor, or
AVR
. As the world’s first ever PBR prototype, it suffered a number of issues after its commissioning in 1967, like helium leakage. Other issues were
discovered after its shutdown
in 1967, in the form of pebbles stuck in the bottom graphite neutron reflector, and a fine graphite dust contaminated with fission products, the latter of which was traced down to the high reactor temperature of 950°C not working well with the bi-isotropic (BISO, two layers of pyrocarbon) coated fuel particles that caused contamination with radioactive isotopes.
After Die Wolke was published in 1987, it became part of the reading curriculum for schools in Germany (Credit: Ravensburger)
Years later, the prototype THTR-300 PBR was constructed, with commissioning in 1985. This used many of the lessons learned from the AVR, such as running the reactor at a lower temperature for an outlet temperature of 750°C and using TRISO (tri-isotropic with silicon carbon layer) coated fuel particles that are
good up to about 1800°C
. This reactor was however
shut down in 1988
due to the growing anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, which also affected what would have been the next step in the form of the modular ‘
HTR-Module
‘ (PDF) design developed by Siemens/Interatom. This modular design involves multiple reactor cores that are connected to a single steam generator, which eases scaling of the reactor total power.
When the HTR-Module project looked to be non-viable in Germany due to the societal resistance, a partnership with countries like China was established, with the Chinese
HTR-10
PBR starting construction in 1995. Much of the mainstream resistance against nuclear power in Germany can be traced back to the 1986 disaster at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant (ChNPP), which led to fear-filled writings like ‘
Die Wolke
‘ (The Cloud, translated as ‘Fall-Out’), which is a book that
became required reading
for Germany’s youth in which the effects of even a Chernobyl-style disaster are massively exaggerated.
The irony is perhaps that in a country which adores soaking in
radioactive radon spas
and
radioactive water
, the effects of the ChNPP disaster would be thus exaggerated, despite this disaster causing
a few dozen deaths
for those near the destroyed RBMK reactor core, no appreciable increase in cancers and
no genetic effects being passed down
to one’s offspring. Yet because fear speaks louder than evidence, Germany’s PBR technology died in Europe, met resistance in South Africa and found a warm embrace in China, a nation which saw itself faced with a rapidly growing population and associated power demands.
Enter The Dragon
HTR-PM primary loop.
Nuclear power has been a core tenet of China’s energy policy since the 20th century, with HTGR designs being one of the many puzzle pieces needed to make things work. Alongside many foreign light- and heavy-water designs ranging from US AP1000s and Soviet/Russian VVERs to Canadian CANDU PHWRs, China sought to gain experience with as many reactor designs as possible, to incorporate this into new designs for use in the Chinese market, as well as for its exports. With the HTR-10 acting as China’s first PBR design, it would prove the stepping stone for following prototypes.
Today, HTR-10 is still online, after having been commissioned in 2000 and serving as a testbed for many aspects of the design, including
various safety tests
(
alternative link
) such as the complete loss of forced cooling, which is one aspect where the reactor’s negative temperature reactivity and TRISO fuel should prevent any accidents. The next Chinese PBR became the HTR-PM, where the ‘-PM’ stands for ‘pebble-bed module’, and which implements the HTR-Module concept for the first time with two 100 MW
e
(250 MW
th
each) cores. After construction began in 2012, it was commissioned in 2021, reached full power in 2022 and commenced commercial operations in December of 2023.
With the successful operation of its second PBR, the logical next step with such a HTR-Module-based plant will be to ramp up the number of modules to 6, which will be done with the aptly-named
HTR-PM600
. Its design is unchanged from the HTR-PM, just with more modules to increase the thermal power, with as design goal to make it fully compatible with the steam generators in existing (Chinese) coal plants. Since coal boilers operate at much higher temperatures than conventional water-based nuclear fission reactors, this was not possible before.
Currently
there are 3,092 coal-fired plants
operating in China, many of which could likely have their boilers replaced with HTR-PM600 PBRs while retaining the rest of the infrastructure. Along with applications in the (petro)chemical and other industries where high temperatures are needed, the HTR-PM600 as well as other HTR-PM configurations could be used instead, while providing flexibility in terms of
load-following
, and the used fuel, with thorium also being an option; a resource that China has significantly more of than uranium in its soil.
High-Temperature Future
At this point in time, China is the only nation in the world with commercial HTGRs in operation, as well as the only nation to run PBRs. Japan has been running its own HTGR called the
HTTR
since 1999, which is of an HTGR design with fuel rods that’s more closely related to the US’s HTGRs. It
resumed operation
in August of 2021 and is considered an important testbed for its own HTGR ambitions.
Whether PBRs or other HTGRs will make their way back to Europe or the US any time soon is uncertain, although US start-ups like
X-energy
with its Xe-100 PBR are looking to make it in the commercial market. The bright side for such start-ups is probably that a lot of the hard R&D work has been done by now, with general design aspects and fuel design less of a complete guess like in the 1960s. Going from there to a competitive design and finding the right target market still remains a major challenge, one which probably has many players looking at China as its modular PBR tries to establish itself first in the green pastures of the Chinese market. | 57 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707908",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T15:58:55",
"content": "The fascinating article mentioned “Die Wolke” (the cloud), but not the famous children song “Karl der Käfer” of 1983 (Carl the bug).Luckily I’m here for you to fix that! 😁https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S... | 1,760,372,073.767924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-threatens-hackers-who-unbricked-their-trains/ | Polish Train Manufacturer Threatens Hackers Who Unbricked Their Trains | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"drm",
"newag",
"reverse engineering",
"right to repair",
"trains"
] | A week ago we covered the story of a Polish train manufacturer who was caught using software to brick their products after they had been repaired by in independent railway workshop. Now
404 Media
has a follow-up story
with more information, including the news that the hackers responsible for the discovery are now being threatened by the manufacturer.
The more we learn about this story the more interesting it becomes, as the Newag trains in question began failing after service as far back as 2021. In desperation after services were affected by the number of non-functional units, an employee searched online for Polish hackers and found a group called Dragon Sector. The group was able to find the issue, and are now being threatened with legal action by the manufacturer, who are citing possible safety issues.
It’s clear from where we are standing that Newag have been caught red-handed in some extremely dubious practices, and seem to have little sense of how their actions might not be the best in terms of protecting their reputation. We are guessing that the European regulators will become very interested in this case, and that meanwhile the order books of a company which puts DRM in its trains will start to look very empty indeed.
You can catch our original coverage as the story broke, here
.
Thanks [JohnU] for the tip. | 63 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707864",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T12:27:39",
"content": "After reading the previous and current article about the Newag trains, I must make a note “not to buy any of their trains”. Because, even bad publicity is good publicity. Meaning that if I have enough room an... | 1,760,372,073.934436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/when-is-a-typewriter-a-printer-when-it-has-a-parallel-port/ | When Is A Typewriter A Printer? When It Has A Parallel Port | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"giant keyswitch",
"KB2040",
"raspberry pi",
"Swintec",
"typewriter"
] | If you want to talk to a typewriter using something other than your fingers on the keys, you could do a lot worse than to pick up a specimen featuring a Centronics parallel port. That’s what happened to [mlupo], who came across an old Swintec 1146 CMP
and decided to hack it into an art installation.
At the push of a giant, clicky button, the typewriter now spits out family stories. This is all thanks to an Adafruit KB2040 keyboard driver being used in a new, exciting way — as a printer driver.
More specifically, the CircuitPython program running on the KB2040 takes in a text file and then sends the data one character at a time until a newline is reached. At that point, the typewriter sends a busy signal and the characters are typed.
As soon as the typewriter is no longer occupied, the data stream picks back up until the next newline or until the file is completely typed out.
Once [mlupo] figured out enough of the parallel port protocol, they were able to build a custom breakout board with the KB2040, a female parallel port, and a row of LEDs for debugging that [mlupo] kept because they look cool.
The KB2040 sets the values high on a series of the parallel port’s data pins, along with the port’s STROBE pin, which pulls low when data is ready. During each STROBE cycle, the high and low pins are read by the Swintec as a binary character.
Of course, you can always use the power of Pi to
build your own modern typewriter.
Thanks to [foamyguy] for the tip! | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707871",
"author": "h2odragon",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T12:50:44",
"content": "Long time ago, I had a serial terminal daisy wheel printer. Big Wide format tractor feed eating monster built into a desk, with a “clunk” style keyboard on it. Lovely.I used it as a printer a lot; becau... | 1,760,372,073.829034 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/porting-cp-m-to-a-z80-thing/ | Porting CP/M To A Z80 Thing | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"brother",
"CP/M"
] | It is hard to describe the Brother SuperPowerNote. It looks like a big old Z80-based laptop, but it says it is a notebook. The label on it says (with lots of exclamation marks) that it is a word processor, a communications system, a personal scheduler, and a spreadsheet organizer. Brother also promises on the label that it will “Increase your power to perform on the job, on the road or at home!” Plenty of exclamation marks to go around. The label also touts DOS or Windows, but [Poking Technology] didn’t want that.
He wanted CP/M
. See how he did it in the video below.
This is a very early laptop-style word processor with a floppy and a strange-looking screen. It also had serial and parallel ports, odd for a word processor, and probably justified the “communication system” claim on the label.
The device looked practically unused and came up immediately without the main battery and a replacement coin cell. The LCD was decidedly not like a modern LCD. It reminded us of a giant Sharp Zaurus. Want to see the insides? Jump to around the 24-minute mark.
The circuit board inside is fairly small, with a lot of empty space and some unpopulated components. Inside is a Z180, along with some memory chips. There’s also a very common floppy disk controller. While it would be possible to replace the ROM chip, it would be a pain, so instead, he dug through an executable file. That way, he was able to figure out how to load software.
Then, it was a matter of understanding the hardware with a logic probe and oscilloscope. Once the hardware gave up its secrets, it was easy enough to port CP/M. The extra 64K of memory available is now a disk cache, so the performance looks pretty good.
True, you probably aren’t going to get one of these venerable machines and run CP/M on it yourself. But the process is fascinating to watch, and we do love peeking inside this old hardware. Compared to a modern OS,
CP/M is fairly easy to bootstrap on a new system
, even
if it is an ESP32
. We’ve even seen CP/M taught to
use an Arduino from a Z80
. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707828",
"author": "portiz",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T07:48:13",
"content": "The label only claims Windows or DOS file compatibility, not OS support.Pretty cool video, thanks for the story!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "67078... | 1,760,372,074.063887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/the-geometry-of-transistors/ | The Geometry Of Transistors | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"bipolar junction transistor",
"bjt",
"npn",
"semiconductor",
"shape",
"transistor"
] | Building things in a lab is easy, at least when compared to scaling up for mass production. That’s why there are so many articles about fusion being right around the corner, or battery technology that’ll allow aviation to switch away from fossil fuels, or any number of other miraculous solutions that never come into being. They simply don’t scale or can’t be manufactured in a cost effective way. But even when they are miraculous and can be produced on a massive scale, as is the case for things like transistors, there are some oddities that come up as a result of the process of making so many.
This video goes into some of the intricacies of a bipolar junction transistor
(BJT) and why it looks the way it does.
The BJT in this video is a fairly standard NPN type, with three layers of silicon acting as emitter, base, and collector. Typically when learning about electronics devices the drawings of them are simplified two-dimensional block diagrams, but under a microscope this transistor at first appears nothing like the models shown in the textbook. Instead it resembles more of a bird’s foot with a few small wires attached. The bird’s foot shape is a result of attempting to lower the undesirable resistances of the device and improve its performance, and some of its other quirks are due to the manufacturing process. That process starts with a much larger layer of
doped
silicon that will eventually become the collector, and then the other two, much smaller, layers of the transistor deposited on top of the collector. This also explains while it looks like there are only two layers upon first glance, and also shows that the horizontal diagram used to model the device is actually positioned vertically in the real world.
For most of the processes in our daily lives, the transistor has largely been abstracted away. We don’t have to think about them in a computer that much anymore, and unless work is being done on high-wattage power electronics devices, radios, or audio amplifiers it’s not likely that an average person will run into a transistor. But this video goes a long way to explaining the basics of one of the fundamental building blocks of the modern world for those willing to take a dive into the physics.
Take a look at this video as well for an intuitive explanation of the close cousin of the BJT, the field-effect transistor
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707792",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T03:40:24",
"content": "Dr. Bergstrom spends what seems like a full minute with his head blocking the portion of the whiteboard he’s describing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"commen... | 1,760,372,074.112157 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/bluetooth-as-proxy-for-occupancy/ | Bluetooth As Proxy For Occupancy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"beacon",
"ble",
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth low energy",
"ESP32",
"occupancy",
"occupancy sensor",
"radio"
] | During [Matt]’s first year of college, he found in a roundabout way that he could avoid crowds in the dining hall by accessing publicly available occupancy data that the dining hall collected. Presumably this was data for the dining hall to use internally, but with the right API calls anyone could use the information to figure out the best times to eat. But when the dining hall switched providers, this information feed disappeared. Instead of resigning himself to live in a world without real-time data on the state of the dining hall, he recreated the way the original provider counted occupancy:
by using Bluetooth as a proxy for occupancy
.
Bluetooth devices like smartphones, fitness sensors, and other peripherals often send out advertising packets into the aether, to alert other devices to their presence and help initiate connections between devices. By sniffing these advertising packets, it’s possible to get a rough estimate of the number of people in one particular place, assuming most people in the area will be carrying a smartphone or something of that nature. [Matt]’s Bluetooth-sniffing device is based on the ESP32 set up to simply count the number of unique devices it finds. He had some trouble with large crowds, though, as the first ESP32 device he chose didn’t have enough RAM to store more than a few hundred IDs and would crash once the memory filled. Switching to a more robust module seems to have solved that issue, and with a few rounds of testing he has a workable prototype that can run for long periods and log at least as many Bluetooth devices passing by as there are within its range.
While [Matt] hasn’t deployed this to the dining hall yet, with this framework in place most of the work has been done that, at least in theory, one of these modules could be easily placed anywhere someone was interested in collecting occupancy data. He has plans to submit his project to the university, to research the topic further, and potentially sell these to businesses interested in that kind of data. This isn’t an idea limited to the ESP32, either.
We’ve seen similar projects built using the Raspberry Pi’s wireless capabilities
that perform similar tasks as this one.
Thanks to [Adrian] for the tip! | 59 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707772",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T02:15:43",
"content": "In most US jurisdictions, the maximum capacity for places of gathering such as dining halls are subject to the local Fire Marshal’s certification for the facility, and the venue can be fined if they excee... | 1,760,372,074.306529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/voyager-1-in-trouble-as-engineers-scramble-to-debug-issue-with-flight-data-system/ | Voyager 1 In Trouble As Engineers Scramble To Debug Issue With Flight Data System | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"jpl",
"voyager",
"Voyager 2"
] | Recently the team at JPL responsible for communication with the Voyager 1 spacecraft
noticed an issue
with the data it was returning from the Flight Data System (FDS). Although normally the FDS is supposed to communicate with the other subsystems via the telecommunications unit (TMU), this process seems to have broken down, resulting in no payloads from the scientific instruments or engineering sensors being returned any more, just repeating binary patterns. So far the cause of this breakdown is unknown, and JPL engineers are working through potential causes and fixes.
This situation is not unlike a
similar situation on Voyager 2
back in 2010 when the returned data showed a data pattern shift. Here resetting the memory of the FDS resolved the garbled data issue and the engineers could breathe a sigh of relief. This time the fix does not appear so straightforward, as a reset of the FDS on Voyager 1 did not resolve the issue with, forcing the team to consider other causes. What massively complicates the debugging is that each transmission to and from the spacecraft takes approximately 22.5 hours each way, making for an agonizing 45 hour wait to receive the outcome of a command.
We wish the JPL engineers involved all the luck in the world and keep our collective appendages crossed for Voyager 1. | 45 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707507",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T07:35:03",
"content": "It will be longer than 45 hours. There is the 160 bits per second data rate, so there would be delay on how long it would take to receive a useful sequence of diagnostic commands or codes (total RAM is 69.6... | 1,760,372,074.432484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/x86-enter-whats-that-second-parameter/ | X86 ENTER: What’s That Second Parameter? | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"assembly language",
"x86"
] | [Raymond Chen] wondered why the x86 ENTER instruction had a strange second parameter that seems to always be set to zero. If you’ve ever wondered, [Raymond]
explains what he learned
in a recent blog post.
If you’ve ever taken apart the output of a C compiler or written assembly programs, you probably know that ENTER is supposed to set up a new stack frame. Presumably, you are in a subroutine, and some arguments were pushed on the stack for you. The instruction puts the pointer to those arguments in EBP and then adjusts the stack pointer to account for your local variables. That local variable size is the first argument to ENTER.
The reason you rarely see it set to a non-zero value is that the final argument is made for other languages that are not as frequently seen these days. In a simple way of thinking, C functions live at a global scope. Sure, there are namespaces and methods for classes and instances. But you don’t normally have a C compiler that allows a function to define another function, right?
Turns out, gcc does support this as an extension (but not g++). However, looking at the output code shows it doesn’t use this feature, but it could. The idea is that a nested function can “see” any local variables that belong to the enclosing function. This works, for example, if you allow gcc to use its extensions:
#include <stdio.h>
void test()
{
int a=10;
/* nested function */
void testloop(int n)
{
int x=a;
while(n--) printf("%d\n",x);
}
testloop(3);
printf("Again\n");
testloop(2);
printf("and now\n");
a=33;
testloop(5);
}
void main(int argc, char*argv[])
{
test();
}
You can see that the testloop function has access to its argument, a local variable, and also a local variable that belongs to the test function. We aren’t saying this is a good idea, but it is possible, and it is common in certain other languages like Pascal, for example.
In some cases, this situation is handled by providing a linked list of stack frames. However, the Intel designers decided to do it differently. When you provide a non-zero second argument to ENTER, it copies an array of stack pointers into your local variable space. This makes your code potentially more efficient as it executes but exacts a penalty on function calls for nested functions.
As [Raymond] points out, though, it may be that no one uses this feature. Certainly, gcc doesn’t. If you want to make sure, try these commands with the above program in nest.c to check out 32-bit x86:
gcc -m32 -g -o nest nest.c gcc -m32 -s -c nest.c# now look at nest.s and/or disassemble nest using gdb
Of course, if you write your own assembly, you could use the feature as you see fit. The x86 has some
crazy instructions
. If you’ve ever wondered if you should learn assembly language, our commenters
would like a word with you
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707477",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T03:55:52",
"content": "“Presumably, you are a subroutine”Wow!I’ve never thought of myself that way!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6707481",
... | 1,760,372,074.349758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/nasa-blames-probe-chute-failure-on-wire-labels/ | NASA Blames Probe Chute Failure On Wire Labels | Tom Nardi | [
"Space"
] | [
"asteroid",
"Bennu",
"OSIRIS-REx",
"wiring"
] | When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule screamed its way through the upper atmosphere, it marked the first time the space agency had brought material from an asteroid back to Earth. Hundreds of thousands tuned into the September 24th live stream so they could watch the capsule land at the Utah Test and Training Range. But about ten minutes before the capsule was set to touchdown, keen eyed viewers may have noticed something a bit odd — when ground control called out that the vehicle’s drogue parachute was commanded to deploy…nothing seemed to happen.
Now NASA knows why it didn’t work as expected
, and it ended up being the sort of Earthly problem that we’d wager a few in this audience have run into themselves from time to time.
Put simply, the label “main” was inadvertently used to mark both the device that deployed the drogue chute, and the pyrotechnic charge that was used to cut its line. During assembly these two connections got mixed up, so that when the capsule’s avionics commanded to parachute to deploy, it actually ended up cutting its cord while it was still stored in the spacecraft.
You can probably guess what happened next. At the altitude where the parachute was supposed to be cut away, the door popped open and the already disconnected chute simply flew off.
This could have been a mission-ending mistake, but thankfully, the return capsule ended up landing safely even without the use of its high-speed drogue chute. It turns out that the main parachute was sturdy enough that it was able to handle the faster than expected deployment velocity. By the time the capsule reached the ground it was going the intended touchdown speed, and the samples were recovered safely, though its speedy descent did mean it landed about a minute ahead of schedule.
We were eagerly watching as
OSIRIS-REx reached out and snapped up some of Bennu in 2020
, and now that the samples have been delivered into scientist’s hands, we’re that much closer to learning about the nature of these near-Earth asteroids. | 38 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707459",
"author": "a",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T01:10:06",
"content": "The engineers must’ve breathed a sigh of relief after it landed safely anyways.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6707463",
"author": "Pearson",
... | 1,760,372,074.586617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/thunderscan-the-wild-1980s-product-that-turned-a-printer-into-a-scanner/ | ThunderScan: The Wild 1980s Product That Turned A Printer Into A Scanner | Lewin Day | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple",
"macintosh",
"scanner"
] | Back in the 1980s, printers were expensive things. Scanners were rare, particularly for the home market, because home computers could barely handle basic graphics anyway. Back in these halcyon days, an obscure company called Thunderware built a device to convert the former into the latter. It was known as the Thunderscan, and was a scanning head built for the Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Weird enough already,
but this device hides some weird secrets in its design.
The actual scanning method was simple enough; the device mounted a carriage to the printer head of the ImageWriter. In that carriage was an optical reflective sensor which was scanned across a page horizontally while it was fed through the printer. So far, so normal.
The hilarious part is how the scanner actually delivered data to the Macintosh computer it was hooked up to. It did precisely nothing with the serial data lines at all, these were left for the computer to command the printer. Instead, the output of the analog optical sensor was fed to a voltage-to-frequency converter, which was then hooked up to the handshake/clock-in pin on the serial port.
The scanner software simply looked at the rate at which new characters were becoming available on the serial port as the handshake pin was toggled at various frequencies by the output of the optical sensor. Faster toggling of the pin indicated a darker section of the image, slower corresponded to lighter.
Interestingly, [Andy Hertzfeld] also has
his own stories to tell on the development
, for which his software contribution seems to have netted him a great sum of royalties over the years. It’s funny to think
how mainstream scanners once were
; and yet we barely think about them today beyond a few niche uses. Times, they change.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip! | 27 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707424",
"author": "k-ww",
"timestamp": "2023-12-12T21:33:20",
"content": "In 1975 Exxon introduced the Quip fax machine, which used an external acoustic coupler. We had one at Q1, and I interfaced to it and used it to scan photographs into the system.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,074.504905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/cheap-computer-psu-puts-on-weight-with-box-of-iron/ | Cheap Computer PSU Puts On Weight With Box Of Iron | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"atx psu",
"fake"
] | Humans are funny creatures. For whatever reason, when handling a piece of electronics, we tend to equate heft with value. If something feels too light, it gives the impression of being cheap or inferior. As such, it’s not unheard of for gadgets to include a little chunk of metal that serves no purpose other than to add weight.
But a
recent discovery by the aptly named [RedditCringe990]
really takes things to a new low. Upon opening up the cheap power supply that came with their computer case, they noticed an odd little box that didn’t appear to have any electrical connection to the rest of the device. After unscrewing it from the metal body of the power supply and pulling the bottom panel off, they found it was packed full of iron filings.
At some level, you have to appreciate the attention to detail here. At first glance, especially if you were peeking through the PSU’s air vents, you could be forgiven for thinking the box was some kind of transformer. It’s even got some alphanumeric gibberish written on the side to help complete the look. Makes us wonder how many of these things might actually have gone undetected by less curious PC-builders.
As you might expect, the weighted box is only one of the issues with this particular PSU. As pointed out by fellow Redditor [Hattix], even the functional components are worthy of suspicion. There’s no protection on the input or output, no safety capacitor, and (unsurprisingly)
no regulatory marks
.
We’d say the thing might still be useful as a boat anchor, but now that the box of iron fillings has been removed, it’s probably not even heavy enough. Stay safe out there, folks. | 42 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707390",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2023-12-12T19:42:47",
"content": "To be honest I am surprised they used something as expensive as iron filings, and not just dirt. This is nothing new though. I recall the old Compaq computers weighed a ton and if someone started with one o... | 1,760,372,074.722876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/some-bacteria-could-have-a-rudimentary-form-of-memory/ | Some Bacteria Could Have A Rudimentary Form Of Memory | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science"
] | [
"bacteria",
"biology",
"E coli",
"memory",
"microbiology",
"research"
] | When we think of bacteria, we think of simple single-celled organisms that basically exist to consume resources and reproduce. They don’t think, feel, or remember… or do they? Bacteria don’t have brains, and as far as we know, they’re incapable of thought. But could they react to an experience and recall it later?
New research suggests that some bacteria could have
a rudimentary form of memory
of their experiences in the environment. They could even pass this memory down across generations via a unique mechanism. Let’s dive into the latest research that is investigating just what bacteria know, and how they happen to know it.
You’ve Been Here Before
In a groundbreaking study
undertaken at the University of Texas, researchers have uncovered a surprising capability in bacteria: the formation of memory-like responses. These findings have challenged our understanding of bacterial behavior and could open new avenues in microbial research. “Bacteria don’t have brains, but they can gather information from their environment, and if they have encountered that environment frequently, they can store that information and quickly access it later for their benefit,” said lead author Souvik Bhattacharyya, who studies antibiotic resistance in bacterial swarms.
The study focused on Escherichia coli, a model organism, to observe how bacteria respond to environmental stimuli. The research team found that E. coli can effectively store data of past encounters with specific conditions. Cellular iron levels are used to “remember” behavioural patterns. This phenomenon, described as an iron-based memory, enables bacteria to react more efficiently to familiar stimuli by drawing on this memory.
Bacteria, devoid of neurons and a nervous system, use iron levels as a cue to form memory-like responses. High iron levels in the single-celled organisms cause the bacteria to form biofilms and remain relatively stationary. Conversely, bacteria with low iron levels tend to undergo a swarming behavior, where bacteria move collectively over a surface. Remarkably, once exposed to low iron levels and an initial swarming event, the bacteria seem able to “recall” this state in future. When put in a similar situation again, these bacteria showed improved swarming ability, as if they had remembered how from their past encounter.
E. Coli use flagella to swim around during a swarming event. Credit:
CDC, public domain
Of course, it bears noting that bacteria don’t have the longest lives. However, the iron-based memory can be passed down through the generations. It’s not permanent, but can last through up to four generations. They’re entirely eliminated naturally by the seventh generation. Artificial manipulation of iron levels can extend this duration, suggesting a complex interplay between environmental factors and bacterial behavior.
The current working theory is that the bacteria are primed to swarm in low-iron environments so they can seek out more iron to sustain themselves. In a high-iron environment, there’s no need to waste energy moving about, so remaining stationary in a biofilm makes more sense to use the available resources already on hand.
This research has significant implications for combating bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance. Understanding how bacteria remember and respond to stressors like antibiotic exposure could lead to more effective therapeutic strategies. Iron levels, in particular, could be a target for new treatments, as they play a crucial role in bacterial virulence, according to Bhattacharyya,
The discovery of a rudimentary form of memory in bacteria is a major gain in the field of microbiology. It highlights that these microorganisms are far more sophisticated than we might otherwise imagine. It also underscores the need for continued research in understanding bacterial behaviors. This knowledge is vital for developing new strategies to fight bacterial infections and tackle antibiotic resistance. These problems aren’t going away anytime soon. Any research that can enlighten us further as to the secrets of bacterial behavior could be of great value in tackling these issues.
Featured image: “
Diverse e Coli
” by [Mattosaurus] | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707408",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-12-12T20:23:36",
"content": "Hmm, I thought it would have been something to do with epigenetics. Guess if you ever need a bacteria to testify for you it’ll have iron clad recall.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,372,074.64093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/12/oddball-lcds-reverse-engineered-thanks-to-good-detective-work/ | Oddball LCDs Reverse Engineered Thanks To Good Detective Work | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"chip on board",
"COB",
"decapping",
"driver",
"epoxy",
"lcd",
"reverse engineering"
] | Is there anything more discouraging to the reverse engineer than to see a black blob of epoxy applied directly to a PCB? We think not, because that formless shape provides no clue as to what chip lies beneath, and that means a lot of detective work if you’re going to figure out how to use this thing.
[Sudhir Chandra]’s detective story
starts with a bunch of oddball LCDs, slim 1×32 character units rather than the more familiar 2×16 displays. Each bore the dreaded black COB blob on the back, as well as a handful of SMD components and not much else. Googling revealed no useful documentation, and the manufacturer wasn’t interested in fielding calls from a hobbyist. Reasoning that most manufacturers wouldn’t spin up a custom chip for every display, [Sudhir] assumed there was an ST7066, a common LCD driver chip, underneath the blob, especially given the arrangement of external components. But a jumper set was bodged together under this assumption didn’t get the display going.
Next up were more destructive methods, to decap the COB and see what kind of numbers might be on the chip. Sandpaper worked at first, but [Sudhir] eventually turned to
the “Chips a la [Antoine]” method of decapping
, which uses heat and brute force to get at the goods. This got down to the chip, but [Sudhir]’s microscope wasn’t up to the task of reading the die markings.
What eventually cracked the case was tracing out the voltages across the various external resistors and matching them up to other chips in the same family as the ST7066, plus the realization that the long, narrow epoxy blob probably covered a similarly shaped chip, which led to the culprit: an ST7070. This allowed [Sudhir] to build an adapter PCB for the displays, with plans for a custom Arduino library to talk to the displays.
This was a great piece of reverse engineering and a good detective story to boot. Hats off to [Sudhir] for sticking with it. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707374",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2023-12-12T17:31:03",
"content": "I seem to recall an Arduino project that helps diagnose LCD display interfaces. It went through all the LCD interface methods while simultaneously printing out which one it was trying. You watched your LCD... | 1,760,372,074.807873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/5ghoul-the-14-shambling-5g-flaws-used-for-disruptive-attacks-on-smartphones/ | 5Ghoul: The 14 Shambling 5G Flaws Used For Disruptive Attacks On Smartphones | Maya Posch | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"5g",
"software define radio"
] | A team of researchers from the ASSET Research Group in Singapore have published the details of a collection of vulnerabilities in the fifth generation mobile communication system (5G) used with smartphones and many other devices. These fourteen vulnerabilities are
detailed in this paper
and a PoC detailing an attack using a software defined radio (SDR) is
provided on GitHub
. The core of the PoC attack involves creating a malicious 5G base station (gNB), which nearby 5G modems will seek to communicate with, only for these vulnerabilities to be exploited, to the point where a hard reset (e.g. removal of SIM card) of the affected device may be required.
Hardware Setup for 5Ghoul PoC testing and fuzzer evaluation. (Credit: Matheus E. Garbelini et al., 2023)
Another attack mode seeks to downgrade the target device’s wireless connection, effectively denying the connection to a 5G network and forcing them to connect to an alternative network (2G, 3G, 4G, etc.). Based on the affected 5G modems, the researchers estimate that about 714 smartphone models are at risk of these attacks. Naturally, not just smartphones use these 5G modem chipsets, but also various wireless routers, IoT devices, IP cameras and so on, all of which require the software these modems to be patched.
Most of the vulnerabilities concern the radio resource control (RCC) procedure, caused by flaws in the modem firmware. Android smartphones (where supported)
should receive patches
for 5Ghoul later this month, but when iPhone devices get patched is still unknown. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707849",
"author": "CJ",
"timestamp": "2023-12-14T10:50:24",
"content": "I assume power cycling the attacked device is the only option for those who have devices with eSIMs…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6707853",
"author... | 1,760,372,074.765348 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/public-power-wifi-and-shelter/ | Public Power, WiFi, And Shelter | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"bus stop",
"infrastructure",
"solar",
"wifi"
] | In the US, we’re starting to see some pushback against hostile architecture, and in this vein, [benhobby] built a
swanky public power and Wi-Fi access point
.
This beautiful piece of infrastructure has 400 watts of solar plugged into 1.2 kWh of battery storage, and can dispense those electrons through any of its 120 VAC, USB-C, or USB-A plugs. The uprights are 3″ aluminum tubing attached to a base consisting of cinder blocks and HDPE panels. Power receptacles are housed in 3D printed enclosures with laser cut acrylic fronts. Three outdoor lights illuminate the stop at night, triggered by a photosensor.
The electronics and battery for the system, including the networking hardware, are in a weatherproof box on each side that can be quickly disconnected allowing field swaps of the hardware. Troubleshooting can then take place back at a workshop. One of the units has already been deployed and has been well-received. [benhobby] reports “There’s one in the wild right now, and it gets plenty of visitors but no permanent tenants.”
Want to see some more interesting hacks for public infrastructure? Check out this
self-cooling bus stop
, this
bus bloom filter
, or this
public transit display
. | 39 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707720",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T21:36:58",
"content": "Very, very nice!Acrylic fronts for the outlets is the wrong choice, should be a more robust plastic such as polycarbonate. Acrylic will break, in the manner of glass, and polycarbonate will bend in the man... | 1,760,372,074.88585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/pcie-for-hackers-external-pcie-and-oculink/ | PCIe For Hackers: External PCIe And OCuLink | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"oculink",
"pci express",
"PCI-E",
"PCIe"
] | We’ve seen a lot of PCIe hacks on Hackaday, and a fair few of them boil down to hackers pulling PCIe somewhere it wasn’t meant to be. Today, we routinely can find PCIe x1, x2 and x4 links sitting around in our tech, thanks to the proliferation of things like NVMe SSDs, and powerful cheap SoCs that make PCIe appear at your fingertips.
In the PCIe For Hackers series, we’ve talked about PCIe and how cool it is, all the benefits it has for hackers, gave you
layout
and
interconnection rules,
and even went into things like
PCIe switches and bifurcation.
However, there’s one topic we didn’t touch much upon, and that’s external PCIe links.
Today, I’d like to tell you about
OCuLink
– a standard that hackers might not yet know as an option whenever we need to pull PCIe outside of your project box, currently becoming all that more popular in eGPU space. Essentially, OCuLink is to PCIe is what eSATA is to SATA, and if you want to do
an eGPU
or an external “PCIe socket”, OCuLink could work wonders for you.
Respectable Capabilities
Just like any high-speed standard, PCIe has some tight requirements when things get fast. Even though PCIe is known to be
not as sensitive to lower-quality links
due to its link training and generation downgrade abilities, at higher link speeds, even through-hole vs SMD sockets can make a difference. So, if you want to go high-throughput, you want proper cabling and connectors, intended for out-of-chassis use – and OCuLink gives you all of this,
at a low price.
OCuLink is pretty unprecedented when it comes to officially supported hardware for pulling PCIe links externally. There’s Thunderbolt, sure, but it has to convert PCIe into packets on a Thunderbolt link, so you can’t do a no-nonsense direct wireup and need proprietary tech, making you spend $100 or upwards on each end of the link. Your SoC likely doesn’t have Thunderbolt support, and that’s a good thing given just how much of a walled garden it still is.
OCuLink can give you a 4x or 8x PCIe link using 4i and 8i options respectively, with cheap connectors, reliable cables, plus, a lively and growing ecosystem. It is also a good demonstration of what you need to pull PCIe outside of comfortable enclosures it typically inhabits, and, it’s a reasonably open standard for all it provides. Let’s dig in!
Accessible Mechanics
First of all, what you want for such a standard is a well-defined pinout, a friendly connector, and abundance of connectors and cables in the real world. OCuLink hits all of these points, and, there’s a trove of hardware on places like Aliexpress and Amazon. If you have an M.2 M-key socket with a 4x link free, you can easily pull it out of your device through an OCuLink cable – there are $20 M.2 cards with OCuLink sockets on them. The same goes for desktop PCIe slots – there’s no shortage of cheap adapters.
From the looks of it, you wouldn’t want to crimp your own OCuLink cable – and you don’t have to. There’s cables easily available online, too, in different lengths and link widths – SFF-8611 and SFF-8612 are good keywords for anything OCuLink. They’re seriously cheap, you can get one for $10-$20. The cables are quite a bit more stiff than USB-C Thunderbolt-capable cables. Nevertheless, they’re easy to use, and there are even latching connectors in case you don’t want sudden disconnect.
OCuLink connectors look a bit like DisplayPort, and, they’re easy to find online. Just like USB-C, they have two sides, top and bottom, and the pin pitch makes it a requirement to do a two-row connector. You won’t see a SMD + THT version like we often get with USB-C sockets, sadly – you’ll have to do “pads under the package” stenciling and reflow. That said, it’s well within the range of a standard hot air gun and a bit of paste, or maybe even just iron-tinned pads and some flux!
Some Extra Circuitry
There are no power rails in
the OCuLink pinout,
which makes sense – that would’ve been an entire rabbit hole, given how varied PCIe devices can be. You’ll want to take care of power separately, and the same might just be the case for the REFCLK clock pair – it’s not included in the standard pinout. It’s possible to get REFCLK through OCuLink cables, and there are pinouts that use VSP pins for clock, so if your downstream device can’t recover clock from PCIe data, that’s what you might end up doing.
If you want to pull PCIe over a longer distance and make it more hotplug-friendly, you will also want
a PCIe retimer.
It will recondition your PCIe signal, helping it recover from any losses caused by the cable and the connectors involved. Often, a retimer will also provide some ESD protection as a bonus – if you want to do hotplug, remember that PCIe goes directly to a CPU/chipset/SoC as a rule and it usually has less strong ESD diodes, which makes it a pretty ESD-sensitive part of a system!
There’s also documentation from PCI-SIG themselves that you might be able to find online if you want it; on the practical side, there are
many community-aggregated resources.
Plus, people are doing DIY OCuLink adapters
more
and
more,
and
the pictured adapter
is
open-source,
even! I hope that, whoever reads this, takes care to open-source their projects – reference designs are always useful and allow everyone to build increasingly cool things!
Ever Growing And Worth Knowing
In production, OCuLink
has been used a lot in modern servers,
where it’s not uncommon to want PCIe half a meter away from the chipset, wired up to something like a bay full of NVMe drives. As tech trickles down, it’s also gaining more adoption in laptop space! Currently, it’s being used by eGPU tinkerers, with people adding OCuLink sockets to devices like GPD mini laptops, or full laptops like the Lenovo Thinkbook, with the latter sporting a third-party adapter option that hijacks a Logitech receiver socket Lenovo added in.
You can still put PCIe over USB3, HDMI and USB-C cables – that’s what we used to do before OCuLink! And, if you want a reference for how to do it right, taught by a modern-day ecosystem that does high-bandwidth connection without breaking a sweat, the list of OCuLink projects is only becoming larger – which is why you deserve knowing about it as an option. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707667",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T18:47:43",
"content": "“eSATA is to SATA”never used?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6707671",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T19:05:40"... | 1,760,372,075.024385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/the-trans-harmonium-is-a-strange-kind-of-radio-musical-instrument/ | The Trans-Harmonium Is A Strange Kind Of Radio-Musical Instrument | Lewin Day | [
"Art",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"piano",
"radio"
] | Pianos use little hammers striking taut strings to make tones. The Mellotron used lots of individual tape mechanisms. Meanwhile,
the Trans-Harmonium from [Emily Francisco]
uses an altogether more curious method of generating sound — each key on this keyboard instrument turns on a functional clock radio.
Electrically, there’s not a whole lot going on. The clock radios have their speaker lines cut, which are then rejoined by pressing their relevant key on the keyboard. As per [Emily]’s instructions for displaying the piece, it’s intended that the radio corresponding to C be tuned in to a local classical station. Keys A, B, D, E, F, and G are then to be tuned to other local stations, while the sharps and flats are to be tuned to the spaces in between, providing a dodgy mix of static and almost-there music and conversation.
It’s an interesting art piece that, no matter how well you play it, will probably not net you a Grammy Award. That would be missing the point, though, as it’s more a piece about “Collecting Fragments of Time,”
a broader art project
of which this piece is a part.
We do love a good art piece, especially those that repurpose old hardware to
great aesthetic achievement
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707643",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T17:10:58",
"content": "Wouldn’t it make more sense to use the alarms instead of the radios?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6707652",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
... | 1,760,372,074.949227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/13/radio-station-wwv-all-time-all-the-time/ | Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | Of all the rabbit holes we technical types tend to fall down, perhaps the one with the most twists and turns is:
time
. Some of this is due to the curiously mysterious nature of time itself, but more has to do with the various ways we’ve decided to slice and dice time to suit our needs. Most of those methods are (wisely) based upon the rhythms of nature, but maddeningly, the divisions we decided upon when the most precise instrument we had was our eyes are just a little bit off. And for a true time junkie, “a little bit off” can be a big, big problem.
Luckily, even the most dedicated timekeepers — those of us who feel physically ill when the clock on the stove and the clock on the microwave don’t match — have a place to go that’s a haven of temporal correctness: radio station WWV. Along with sister stations WWVB and WWVH, these stations are the voice of the US National Institutes for Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, broadcasting the official time for the country over shortwave radio.
Some might say the programming coming from these stations is a bit on the dry side, and it’s true that you can only listen to the seconds slip by for so long before realizing that there are probably better things to do with your day. But the WWV signals pack a surprising amount of information into their signals, some of it only tangentially related to our reckoning of time. This makes these stations and the services they provide essential infrastructure for our technological society, which in turn makes it worth your time to look into just how they do it.
First On The Air
Callsign WWV has been around and active longer than US commercial radio itself. WWV was assigned as an experimental license to the National Bureau of Standards, the predecessor of the NIST, back in 1919. By September of 1920, WWV was broadcasting weekly concerts on 600 kHz, beating Pittsburgh station KDKA to the airwaves by a couple of weeks.
Station WWV/WWVB in Fort Collins, Colorado. Source:
NIST
In those early days, WWV was very much a solution looking for a problem, alternating between music and farm market reports, and focusing on the Washington, DC area, where the NBS offices were located. In 1922, someone must have noticed that the “S” in NBS stood for “standards,” and WWV’s signal became a reference frequency standard for other broadcasters in the burgeoning industry. A succession of technological advances gradually increased the accuracy of WWV’s signals from a few tenths of a percent to the parts-per-million level, which was vital for allocating spectrum in the gold-rush years of the 20s and 30s.
WWV’s signature time programming didn’t start until nearly the end of WWII. Shortly thereafter, In 1948, station WWVH went on the air from the Hawaii Territory, in a nod to the country’s growing interest in events in the Pacific Basin. It wasn’t until 1950 that Morse time announcements gave way to the now-familiar voice time announcements; by the late 50s, frequency control on the station’s 5 MHz, 10 MHz, and 15 MHz frequencies was better than 200 parts per billion.
In 1966, the station moved to its current location in Fort Collins, Colorado, only about 80 km away from the NIST laboratories in Boulder, Colorado that house the US standards for time and frequency. The relocation put WWV on the same site as WWVB, a low-frequency (60 kHz) station that transmits nothing but encoded time signals at a scorching 70,000 watts effective radiated power (ERP). WWVB is designed to reach the entire United States for at least part of every day, and if you’ve got a “radio-controlled” clock or watch, chances are it’s listening to WWVB.
Atomically Accurate
The heart of WWV and WWVB operation in Fort Collins centers around the “Screen Room,” a Faraday cage-shielded room housing the station’s cesium frequency standards and time code generators. The three redundant oscillators derive their time and frequency information from the NIST Time Scale, called “UTC(NIST),” maintained at the Boulder NIST lab using a suite of hydrogen maser and cesium oscillators, which in turn are calibrated against a cesium fountain oscillator. The station oscillators are compared to UTC(NIST) every day and corrected as needed. Only one oscillator serves as the station master at a time; a supervisory system monitors the output of each oscillator and automatically promotes one of the backups to master status if anything goes wrong with the time signal.
Schematic of a WWV equipment rack, one of three located in the “Screen Room.” Source:
NIST
The station master cesium oscillator is the heartbeat of the entire system. Its 5 MHz signal — actually, at 1 part in 10
14
, that’s 5.00000000000000 MHz — gets divided down to multiple reference frequency signals that control both time code generators and transmitter carrier frequencies. WWV currently broadcasts on 2.5 MHz, 5.0 MHz, 10.0 MHz, 15.0 MHz, and 20.0 MHz, with an experimental signal at 25.0 MHz; WWVB still operates at 60 kHz.
Audio time signals and voice announcements are generated by the time code generators in the Screen Room. WWV uses a male voice for time announcements while WWVH, which transmits on some of the same frequencies, uses a female voice to avoid confusion. The announcements are concatenated from digitally recorded phrases spoken by professional announcers; WWV currently uses
the golden voice
of Atlanta’s John Doyle.
Sounds Around The Clock
While the voice announcements on WWV are certainly its biggest draw, there’s so much more going on in these signals. The audio signals are carefully engineered to relay the maximum amount of information in the most flexible way possible, giving users access to all sorts of valuable information. The most obvious component of the audio signal is the constant tick of seconds. Each tick is really a 1,000 Hz sine wave that lasts for five milliseconds — a mere five cycles — which sounds like a tick. The seconds signal sounds every second of each minute, except for the 29th and 59th seconds, and for whenever a leap second is called for. At the top of each minute, the seconds pulse is changed to a 1,5000 Hz tone and extended to 800 ms. For the first sixteen seconds of every minute, you might hear double clicks for certain seconds, which serve as correction indicators between Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and UT1, a time standard based on the rotation of the Earth. The number of doubled clicks tell you how many tenths of a second UTC and UT1 differ by; if the clicks are doubled from seconds 1 through 8, that means UT1 is ahead of UTC, whiles seconds 9 through 16 indicate that UT1 is lagging.
In addition to the ticks, the audio signal contains an audio tone that changes depending on the minute of the hour. Tones alternate between 500 Hz for the even-numbered minutes and 600 Hz for odd, with a 440 Hz “A440” tone used for the second minute of each hour. Certain other minutes are blocked out as reserved as well, but generally contain the tone normally designated for that minute. The audio tones, which can be used to calibrate audio equipment, are suppressed for one minute during the station identification announcements at the top of the hour and 30 minutes, and are suppressed entirely from 43 to 51 minutes and again for minute 59. The idea behind these blocks of silence is to prevent interference with WWVH’s signal, while the switch to A440 once each hour is meant to be used as a signal by systems that can receive WWV signals but don’t have the equipment to decode the subaudible time signals discussed below.
WWV by the hour. Every minute is jammed with all sorts of useful stuff. Source:
NIST
WWV also devotes several minutes of each hour to special announcements by official government agencies. Each announcement gets a 45-second block. Storm warnings from the National Weather Service are broadcast during minutes 8-11 when needed, with updates on GPS constellation status and geophysical alerts going out on minutes 14, 15, and 18. There’s also an interesting project called
the WWV/WWVH Scientific Modulation Working Group
, which aims to broadcast special signals once per hour (8 past the hour for WWV, 48 past for WWVH) to study the ionosphere and propagation. The signal is a series of chirps, tone sweeps, and broadband noise developed with the help of
Ham Radio Citizen Science Investigation
. Watch out — the audio is quite loud.
Automatic Time
In addition to the audible content, WWV sends out a separate coded time signal. The signal is continuously transmitted as a 100 Hz tone that uses binary-coded decimal (BCD) format. Each bit is squeezed into the space after the seconds tick finishes and consists of the 100 Hz tone at two different amplitudes. The length of time the tone stays at the high amplitude indicates whether the bit is a binary one or zero, or a “marker” bit. A full frame of time code data takes 59 seconds to send, with each frame containing fields for hours. minutes, and seconds, plus the day of the year, last two digits of the current year, flags for Day Saving Time and leap years, and the UT1 correction factor and sign. WWVB, whose only business is sending these time signals, has a slightly different frame arrangement, but uses the same encoding scheme.
All things considered, the amount of information jammed into WWV’s audio signal is pretty amazing. It’s also kind of fun to realize that WWV’s signal can consumed on so many different levels, from the casual listener just wanting to know the time to control of automatic systems and calibration of systems ranging from audio frequencies all the way into the lower reaches of the VHF band. | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6707603",
"author": "Jim Dahlberg",
"timestamp": "2023-12-13T15:34:43",
"content": "How can a relatively tiny watch or even a clock, pick up a 60KHz RF (?) signal, with wavelength of 5km, acouple thousand kilometers away? I know they work and it’s a strong signal, but that’s still ... | 1,760,372,075.496019 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.