Hackaday Links: February 7, 2016

For a very long time, the original, 11 foot-long on-screen model of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek the original series – “NCC one seven O one. No bloody A, B, C, or D.” – was housed in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Recent visitors may have noticed the Enterprise is no longer on display. It’s being restored by the finest aircraft conservators in the world. There are a few great videos showing off how much goes into restoring a cultural icon.

Last weekend Hackaday visited Sparklecon in Fullerton, CA. This means I was in LA on the last Saturday of the month. What’s so special about that? The W6TRW Swap Meet at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach. Here’s the pics from that. The best thing I found? A wooden acoustic coupler modem for $15. Once I told the guys at the booth what it was, the price went up to $20. Still worth it.

What’s the worst thing about modern computers? They’re all LCDs, and that means worse resolution, terrible colorspace, and monitors that are very, veeeerrrrryyyy wide. The consequence of this is a complete and total lack of screen savers. Never fear, because the flying toaster is back, this time as an SD card holder. It’s 3D printable, so if you have some white, silver, and black filament sitting around, you know what to do.

The USB Killer hit the tips line a few times this week for inexplicable reasons. We’ve seen it before, but we haven’t seen it again. Surprisingly, no one – outside a bizarre Indiegogo campaign that shouldn’t exist – has made their own USB killer. Here’s your call to action: build a USB killer, and I’ll test it out.

An SDIP-64 chip compared to a DIP-28 chip. Note the finer lead spacing on the SDIP device.
An SDIP-64 chip compared to a DIP-28 chip. Note the finer lead spacing on the SDIP device.

There’s more variety to your standard DIP-packaged chips than you might expect. The weirdest of these – at least when it comes to perfboard construction – is the SDIP, or Skinny Dual In-line Package. Instead of having a standard 0.1″ pitch between leads, the SDIP has a 0.070″ pitch. [Chuck] was having some problems looking for SDIP to DIP adapters until he found this amazing trick the connector companies don’t want you to know aboutJust plop the chip in at a 45º angle, bend a few pins, and you’re good to go.

25 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: February 7, 2016

  1. 45 degree angle makes sense for SPDIP. Standard perf board and breadboard have 0.1″ spacing and if you turn that into triangles (Right Isosceles Triangle), the hypotenuse is the square root of the sides, and square root of 0.1 is 0.07070707… so the SPDIP can fit at 45′ angle quite well.

    1. I derped. Square root of 2 is 1.41414 not 0.70707 and thus the correct answer is 0.141414″ spacing for angle SPDIP. The chip still fits neatly though.

      25 years since I did school geometry and I forget a step or 2 in computing.

      1. You were right the first time, since he puts 2 pins per row (0.141 per 2 pins = 0.071 per pin).
        Unfortunately, because of this the ‘trick’ cannot be used on a breadboard, you will short a good number of pins to their neighbors. Also probably won’t work for larger chips due to the slight mismatch of 0.070 vs .0707, which will accumulate to an entire pin for chips longer than ~10 pins long

        1. I just used this method to mount a 28 pin SDIP sn76488 complex sound generator on a scrap of perfboard that was mounted vertically to a 6×14 base piece. The base has 2 14-pin sections of header pins wired directly to the chip’s pins to plug into a breadboard. There are specialty SDIP-DIP converter sockets, but they’re pricey. I did this with scraps.

  2. Here’s a quick version of USB killer. Connect your computer of choice with a non-isolated power supply, then find a usb device with its own non-isolated power supply. Connect the two and see which survives (Dies). In my own case, the causalities were all the usb ports and a arduino clone back powered through a shield with a smps 5v power supply. the computer survived and is still in use.

  3. The ____ trick that ____ companies don’t want you to know about!”

    This is in any sapient person’s red flag box. Please don’t bring that kind of thing here, even ironically.

    That said, I got me a SDIP 3x8bit DAC chip and I think I know how I’m going to be using it someday.

  4. Don’t just restore the TOS Enterprise! Replace the lights with LEDs! Maybe even put a sound system in it to reproduce audio clips from TOS. Put a Bluetooth chip in it to interact with the public, (light up phasers and the sound of them firing).

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