Day: September 28, 2015

Neato Botvac LiDAR Repair Includes Juicy Pics And A Tool Hack

September 28, 2015 by 4 Comments

It seems second nature to us and it’s one of the ways we hackers are different from the larger population… sometimes we absolutely insist on buying something that is already broken. Which is where we join [Anton] as he reverse engineers, debugs, and repairs a broken Neato Botvac’s LiDAR system all in the name of having clean floors at a fraction of the cost.

Now keep your head on a swivel ’cause along the way [Anton] has the all-too familiar point in his repair where he puts the original project on hold while he makes a specialized tool he needs to finish the job. It’s hard to tell which is more impressive: turning a laptop webcam into a camera capable of clearly viewing bond wires and (wait for it!) where they are attached on the Silicon, or that he (yeah, we were making a comparison…member?) went straight back to solving the original problem. [Anton] did split this project into two separate blog posts, the first one is linked above and it’s not until the second post that he fixes the original problem. Perhaps there was a bit of scope creep, which was the reason for the separate blog entries? At any rate, [Anton] does a great job documenting the process along with what he calls some ‘juicy pictures’ and you can see a few of them after the break.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Neato hack (there’s pun in there somewhere, commenters below us will surely wipe the floor with it). LiDar on the other hand has been covered more recently in a Police LiDAR Tear Down and another post relating more directly to [Anton’s] repair.

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Roundup: Retro Computers In Your Browser

September 28, 2015 by 51 Comments

There are two things that keep me from expanding my collecting old computers: the cost and the space required to house them. I do have my old original TRS-80, and an old serial terminal (see the video below). However, I got rid of my Data General hardware and I lost my old 1802 COSMAC Elf in some flooding. There have been a few replica retro computers of various degrees of fidelity and they are usually cheaper and smaller than the originals. I have a replica Altair, a replica Elf, and a replica KIM-1.

However, it is hard to justify the expense and the cost of either the real things or the replicas. It is even worse with the really large machines, some of which require special power or cooling and are hard to keep running. Another option, of course, is software simulation. Options like SIMH and Hercules work well, but they aren’t always graphical and it is a lot of work to set up a machine just to play with for a few hours or to show a student how it was done in the good old days.

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