[Mellow Labs] wanted to grab a multimeter that could do Bluetooth. Those are cheap and plentiful, but the Bluetooth software was, unsurprisingly, somewhat lacking. A teardown shows a stock Bluetooth module. A quick search found a GitHub with software. But then he had a fiendish idea: could you replace the Bluetooth module with an ESP32 and use WiFi instead of Bluetooth?
This was as good an excuse as any to buy a cheap logic analyzer. Armed with some logic captures, it was easy to figure out how to fake the meter into thinking a Bluetooth client was connected.
It is well known that pictographic languages that use Hanzi, like Mandarin, are difficult to work with for computer input and output devices. After all, each character is a tiny picture that represents an entire word, not just a sound. But did you ever wonder how China used telegraphy? We’ll admit, we had not thought about that until we ran into [Julesy]’s video on the subject that you can watch below.
There are about 50,000 symbols, so having a bunch of dots and dashes wasn’t really practical. Even if you designed it, who could learn it? Turns out, like most languages, you only need about 10,000 words to communicate. A telegraph company in Denmark hired an astronomer who knew some Chinese and tasked him with developing the code. In a straightforward way, he decided to encode each word from a dictionary of up to 10,000 with a unique four-digit number.
[Juan] describes himself as a software engineer, a lover of absurd humor, and, among other things, a player of Nethack. We think he should add computer game archaeologist to that list. In the 1990s, he played a game that had first appeared on USENET in 1987. Initially called “Middle-earth multiplayer game,” it was soon rebranded with the catchier moniker, Conquer.
It may not seem like a big thing today, but writing multiplayer software and distributing it widely was pretty rare stuff in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In 2006, [Juan] realized that this game, an intellectual predecessor to so many later games, was in danger of being lost forever. The source code was scattered around different archives, and it wasn’t clear what rights anyone had to the source code.
[Samcervantes] wanted a cyberdeck. Specifically, he wanted a Clockwork Pi uConsole, but didn’t want to wait three months for it. There are plenty of DIY options, but many of them are difficult to build. So [Sam] did the logical thing: he designed his own. The Bumble Berry Pi is the result.
The design criteria? A tactile keyboard was a big item. Small enough to fit in a pants pocket, but big enough to be useful. What’s more is he wanted to recycle some old Pi 3Bs instead of buying new hardware.
If you have a Nest thermostat of the first or second generation, you probably noticed it recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning them into — well — ordinary thermostats. Lucky for us [codykociemba] has been keeping up with various exploits for hacking the thermostat, and he started the NoLongerEvil-Thermostat project.
If you want to smarten up your thermostat again, you’ll need a Linux computer or, with some extra work, a Mac. The thermostat has a DFU-enabled OMAP loader. To access it, you have to plug it into USB and then reboot it. There is a narrow window for the loader to grab it, so you have to be running the software before you reboot or you’ll miss it.
You can control your thermostat again!
After that, the flash is relatively fast, but the Nest will look dead for a brief time. Then the No Longer Evil logo will show, and you are in business. We wish the hack simply replaced the Google software with a local website, but it doesn’t. It redirects all the network traffic to a custom URL. Then you can control your thermostat from the nolongerevil.com website. So we don’t know what will happen if they decide to stop hosting the remote server that powers this. You can also run the code locally if you’ve got a server up.
If you get another year out of your trusty thermostat, that’s a year you wouldn’t have had otherwise. We do worry a bit about putting an odd device on your network. In theory, the project is open source, but all the important bits are in a binary U-Boot image file, so it would take some work to validate it. To get you started, the command to dump the content is probably: dumpimage -T kernel -p 0 -o kernel uImage. Or, you could watch it with Wireshark for a bit.
We were happy to get some more use out of our Nest.
Years ago, no math education was complete without understanding how to compute a square root. Today, you are probably just reaching for a calculator, or if you are writing a program, you’ll probably just guess and iterate. [MindYourDecisions] was curious how people did square roots before they had such aids. Don’t remember? Never learned? Watch the video below and learn a new skill.
The process is straightforward, but if you are a product of a traditional math education, you might find his terminology a bit confusing. He will refer to something like 18b meaning “a three-digit number where the last digit is b,” not “18 times b,” as you might expect.
[Bob] calls his custom 16-bit computer “Bob’s Unnecessary Retro Processor” or BURP for short. While we suppose it is technically unnecessary, we love the look of it, and we hope he just used it to get the quirky acronym.
When we build custom CPUs they look suspiciously like FPGA development boards, but not BURP. We immediately thought of the IMSAI and the H8 when we saw it, but [Bob] points out it also borrows from the PDP-11.
