Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts

April 10, 2024 by Tom Nardi 40 Comments

Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years. According to their latest budget request, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.

Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the Lynx X-ray Observatory estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.

With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.

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Homebrew Network Card With No CPU

April 10, 2024 by Al Williams 16 Comments

A modern normal network card will have onboard an Ethernet controller which, of course, is a pre-programmed microcontroller. Not only does it do the things required to keep a computer on the network, it can even save the primary CPU from having to do certain common tasks required for communicating. But not [Ivan’s]. His homebrew computer — comprised of 7 colorful PCBs — now has an eighth card. You guessed it. That card connects to 10BASE-T Ethernet.

There’s not a microcontroller in sight, although there are RAM chips. Everything else is logic gates, flip flops, and counters. There are a few other function chips, but nothing too large. Does it work? Yes. Is it fast? Um…well, no.

He can ping others on the network with an 85 ms round trip and serve web pages from his homebrew computer at about 2.6 kB/s. But speed wasn’t the goal here and the end result is quite impressive. He even ported a C compiler to his CPU so he could compile uIP, a networking stack, avoiding the problems of writing his own from scratch.

Some compromises had to be made. The host computer has to do things you normally expect a network card to do. The MTU is 1024 bytes (instead of the more common 1500 bytes, but TCP/IP is made to expect different MTU sizes, which used to be more common when more network interfaces looked like this one).

Even on an FPGA, these days, you are more likely to grab some “IP” to do your Ethernet controller. Rolling your own from general logic is amazing, and — honestly — the design is simpler than we would have guessed. If you check out [Ivan]’s blog, you can find articles on the CPU design, its ALU, and even a VGA video card all from discrete logic. The whole design, including the network card is up on GitHub.

We love the idea of building a whole computer system soup to nuts. We wish we had the time. If you need a refresher on what’s really happening with Ethernet, our [Arya Voronova] can help.

Get Today’s Forecast In Classic 90s Weather Channel Style

April 10, 2024 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Remember when The Weather Channel actually had weather? It’s been a while, but we sure remember what a boon Local on the 8’s was when getting ready for the day. Not having to wait for the low-information national forecast on the morning shows or putting up with the antics of [Willard Scott] or [Al Roker] was just icing on the cake.

Recreating the retro look and feel of the Weather Channel experience is what this 1990s-style weather feed is all about, and we have to say that [Mitchell Scott] knocked it out of the park. Luckily, a lot of the heavy lifting was done already thanks to the WeatherStar 4000+ emulator project, which renders forecasts using online weather APIs in the distinctive retro graphics The Weather Channel used back in the day. He combined the graphics with the original smooth jazz soundtracks that TWC used back then; they’re online, because of course they are.

To really sell the look, [Mitchell] tracked down a period-correct Zenith TV with a 9″ CRT to display the feed from a Raspberry Pi 4’s composite video output. Why such a small screen? Easy. [Mitchell] wanted it on a shelf behind him to be visible during videoconferences. It’s a bit of a weird flex, but we respect it. Getting the composite video output working was a bit of a chore, as was tricking the TV into starting up on channel 14 so the feed is instantly visible.

The nostalgia is strong with this one, especially for weather geeks. For a more in-depth look at how The Weather Channel brought those local forecasts to cable, make sure you check out how the WeatherStar box was reverse-engineered.

Thanks to [USA-RedDragon] for the tip.

Wozamp Turns Apple II Into Music Player

April 10, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Besides obvious technological advancements, early computers built by Apple differed in a major way from their modern analogs. Rather than relying on planned obsolescence as a business model, computers like the Apple II were designed to be upgradable and long-term devices users would own for a substantially longer time than an iPhone or Macbook. With the right hardware they can even be used in the modern era as this project demonstrates by turning one into a music player.

The requirements for this build are fairly short; an Apple II with a serial card and a piece of software called surl-server which is a proxy that allows older computers to communicate over modern networks. In this case it handles transcoding and resampling with the help of a Raspberry Pi 3. With that all set up, the media player can play audio files in an FTP network share or an online web radio station. It can also display album art on the Apple II monitor and includes a VU meter that is active during playback.

Although the 11.52 kHz sampling rate and 5-bit DAC may not meet the stringent requirements of audiophile critics, it’s an impressive build for a machine of this era. In fact, the Apple II has a vibrant community still active in the retrocomputing world, with plenty of projects built for it including others related to its unique audio capabilities. And if you don’t have an original Apple II you can always get by with an FPGA instead.

Hackaday Europe Is Almost Here, Last Call For Tickets

April 9, 2024 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

By the time this post hits the front page, we’ll be just a few days away from the kickoff of Hackaday Europe 2024!

For those of you joining us in Berlin this weekend, we’ve got an incredible amount of content planned for you. Things get rolling on Friday with a pre-event meetup. But Saturday is when things really kick into high gear. Before the day’s out, we’ll have played host to nearly a dozen speakers and — literally — more workshops than we could fit into the schedule. Two workshops will be “floating” events that will happen once enough interested parties have congregated in one place. We’ll keep things going until well past midnight, which leads directly into Sunday. We want to get a few sessions of lightning talks packed in, so start coming up with your talk ideas now.

The Vectorscope will be making its European debut.

In addition, there will be food, music, camaraderie, badge hacking, and the general technolust surrounding a Hackaday event. In our humble and totally unbiased opinion, we put on some of the best and most unique hardware hacking meetups in the world — if you like reading Hackaday, you’ll love living it for a couple of days.

As of this writing, we still have a very few tickets for Hackaday Europe 2024 available. Want one? Head over to the Eventbrite page. But you better hurry. We’re talking a literal handful here, so don’t be surprised if they’ve dried up by the time you read this.

The workshops have all sold out, but as usual, we’ll be running a waiting list right up until the last minute: should anyone have to drop out of a workshop (which happens more than you might think), their spot will go to the person next in line. If you’d like to get on the list, email prize@hackaday.com with your name, ticket number, and the workshop you’re hoping to sneak into, and we’ll see what we can do.

But don’t let the workshops stop you. There’s still plenty to see, do, and experience. See you there!

How DEC’s LANBridge 100 Gave Ethernet A Fighting Chance

April 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Alan Kirby (left) and Mark Kempf with the LANBridge 100, serial number 0001. (Credit: Alan Kirby)

When Ethernet was originally envisioned, it would use a common, shared medium (the ‘Ether’ part), with transmitting and collision resolution handled by the carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) method. While effective and cheap, this limited Ethernet to a 1.5 km cable run and 10 Mb/s transfer rate. As [Alan Kirby] worked at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in the 1980s and 1990s, he saw how competing network technologies including Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) – that DEC also worked on – threatened to extinguish Ethernet despite these alternatives being more expensive. The solution here would be store-and-forward switching, [Alan] figured.

After teaming up with Mark Kempf, both engineers managed to convince DEC management to give them a chance to develop such a switch for Ethernet, which turned into the LANBridge 100. As a so-called ‘learning bridge’, it operated on Layer 2 of the network stack, learning the MAC addresses of the connected systems and forwarding only those packets that were relevant for the other network. This instantly prevented collisions between thus connected networks, allowed for long (fiber) runs between bridges and would be the beginning of the transformation of Ethernet as a shared medium (like WiFi today) into a star topology network, with each connected system getting its very own Ethernet cable to a dedicated switch port.

Emails Over Radio

April 9, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 37 Comments

The modern cellular network is a marvel of technological advancement that we often take for granted now. With 5G service it’s easy to do plenty of things on-the-go that would have been difficult or impossible even with a broadband connection to a home computer two decades ago. But it’s still reliant on being close to cell towers, which isn’t true for all locations. If you’re traveling off-grid and want to communicate with others, this guide to using Winlink can help you send emails using a ham radio.

While there are a number of ways to access the Winlink email service, this guide looks at a compact, low-power setup using a simple VHF/UHF handheld FM radio with a small sound card called a Digirig. The Digirig acts as a modem for the radio, allowing it to listen to digital signals and pass them to the computer to decode. It can also activate the transmitter on the radio and send the data from the computer out over the airwaves. When an email is posted to the Winlink outbox, the software will automatically send it out to any stations in the area set up as a gateway to the email service.

Like the cellular network, the does rely on having an infrastructure of receiving stations that can send the emails out to the Winlink service on the Internet; since VHF and UHF are much more limited in range than HF this specific setup could be a bit limiting unless there are other ham radio operators within a few miles. This guide also uses VARA, a proprietary protocol, whereas the HF bands have an open source protocol called ARDOP that can be used instead. This isn’t the only thing these Digirig modules can be used for in VHF/UHF, though. They can also be used for other digital modes like JS8Call, FT8, and APRS.

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