Repairing Crystal Earpieces

February 7, 2017 by Al Williams 11 Comments

If you make crystal radios, you’ve probably got a few crystal earpieces. The name similarity is a bit coincidental. The crystal in a crystal radio was a rectifier (most often, these days, a germanium diode, which is, a type of crystal). The crystal in a crystal earpiece is a piezoelectric sound transducer.

Back in the 1960s, these were fairly common in cheap transistor radios and hearing aids. Their sound fidelity isn’t very good, but they are very sensitive and have a fairly high impedance, and that’s why they are good for crystal radios.

[Steve1001] had a few of these inexpensive earpieces that either didn’t work or had low sound output. He found the root cause was usually a simple problem and shares how to fix them without much trouble.

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Bus Pirate Commandeers I2C

February 7, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

The Bus Pirate is one of our favorite tool for quick-and-dirty debugging in the microcontroller world. Essentially it makes it easy to communicate with a wide variety of different chips via a serial terminal regardless of the type of bus that the microcontroller uses. Although it was intended as a time-saving prototyping device, there are a lot of real-world applications where a Bus Pirate can be employed full-time, as [Scott] shows us with his Bus Pirate data logger.

[Scott] needed to constantly measure temperature, and the parts he had on hand included an LM75A breakout board that has a temperature sensor on board. These boards communicate with I2C, so it was relatively straightforward to gather data from the serial terminal. From there, [Scott] uses a Python script to automate the process of gathering the data. The process he uses to set everything up using a Raspberry Pi is available on the project site, including the code that he used in the project.

[Scott] has already used this device for a variety of different projects around his house and it has already proven incredibly useful. If you don’t already have a Bus Pirate lying around there are a few other ways to gather temperature data, but if you have an extra one around or you were thinking about purchasing one, then [Scott]’s project is a great illustration of the versatility of this device.

A Six-Voice Synth Built On The Raspberry Pi

February 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Over the last few decades, audio synthesizers have been less and less real hardware and more and more emulations in software. Now that we have tiny powerful computers that merely sip down the watts, what’s the obvious conclusion? A six-voice polyphonic synthesizer built around the Raspberry Pi.

The exquisitely named ‘S³-6R’ synthesizer is a six-voice phase modulation synthesizer that outputs very high resolution (24-bit and 96 kHz) audio. It’s the product of R-MONO Lab, who have displayed interesting musical devices such as a recorder-based pipe organ in the past. This build is a bit more complex, offering up some amazing sounds, all generated on a Raspberry Pi 3.

While talk of oscillators and filters is great, what’s really interesting here is the keyboard itself. The S³-6R is using the Roland K-25m, a tiny MIDI keyboard meant to serve as a ‘dock’ of sorts for Roland’s recent re-releases of the classic Jupiter and Juno synths. Building a MIDI keyboard is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, and using this little keyboard dock is a cheap way to pipe MIDI notes into any project without a lot of fuss.

Below, you can check out the audio demos of the S³-6R. It’s a real synth and sounds great. We can only hope the software will be uploaded somewhere eventually.

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Printer Vulnerabilites Almost As Bad As IoT

February 7, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 30 Comments

Recently ZDNet and Gizmodo published articles outlining a critical flaw in a large array of personal printers. While the number of printers with this flaw is staggering, the ramifications are even more impressive. Ultimately, any of these printers could have documents sent to them stolen even if the document was only intended to be printed as a hard copy.

Luckily the people responsible for this discovery are white-hat in nature, and the release of this information has been made public so the responsible parties can fix the security flaws. Whether or not the “responsible party” is the manufacturer of the printer, though, is still somewhat unclear because part of the exploit takes advantage of a standard that is part of almost all consumer-grade printers. The standard itself may need to be patched.

Right now, however, it doesn’t seem clear exactly how deep the rabbit hole goes. We all remember the DDoS attack that was caused by Internet of Things devices that were poorly secured, and it seems feasible that networked printers could take some part in a similar botnet if a dedicated user really needed them. At the very least, however, your printed documents might not be secure at all, and you may be seeing a patch for your printer’s firmware in the near future.

33C3: Edible Soft Robotics

February 7, 2017 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Certainly one of the more entertaining talks of the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress was [Kari Love]’s talk on her experiments in mixing food with function. In [Kari]’s talk at the 2016 Hackaday Supercon, she talked extensively about working on soft robotic for NASA. At the 33C3, her focus was twofold: on a fun side project to make mobile robots out of stuff that you can eat, and to examine the process of creative engineering through the lens of a project like this.

If you look up edible robotics, you get a lot of medical literature about endoscopes that you can swallow, or devices that take samples while they’re inside you. That’s not what [Kari]’s after at all. She’s after a robot that’s made of candy, a yummy machine. And while this is still a work in progress, she demonstrated a video of an all-licorice cable-based actuator.

But more than that, she demonstrated all of the materials she’s looked at so far, and the research she’s done. To some extent, the process is the substance of this project, but there’s nothing wrong with some tasty revelations along the way.

This talk was a potpourri of helpful tips and novel facts. For instance, if you’re working in candy robotics, don’t eat your mistakes. That stomach ache that your mom always said you’d get? You will. Did you know that the gummi in gummibears is re-heatable and re-moldable? In addition, of the gels that she made, it was the most delicious. And finally, Pop Rocks don’t have enough CO2 in them to drive pneumatics. Who knew? [Kari] knows. And now you do too.

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Using A Lecher Line To Measure High Frequency

February 7, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 35 Comments

How do you test the oscillator circuit you just made that runs between 200MHz and 380MHz if all you have is a 100MHz oscilloscope, a few multimeters and a DC power supply? One answer is to put away the oscilloscope and use the rest along with a length of wire instead. Form the wire into a Lecher line.

That’s just what I did when I wanted to test my oscillator circuit based around the Mini-Circuits POS-400+ voltage controlled oscillator chip (PDF). I wasn’t going for precision, just verification that the chip works and that my circuit can adjust the frequency. And as you’ll see below, I got a fairly linear graph relating the control voltages to different frequencies.

What follows is a bit about Lecher lines, how I did it, and the results.

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AI Beats Poker Pros: Skynet Looms

February 7, 2017 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

There have been a few “firsts” in AI-versus-human gaming lately, and the computers are now beating us at trivia, chess and Go. But in some sense, none of these are really interesting; they’re all games of fact. Poker is different. Aside from computing the odds of holding the winning hand, where a computer would obviously have an advantage, the key to winning in poker is bluffing, and figuring out when your opponent is bluffing. Until recently, this has helped man beat the machine. Those days are over.

Chess and Go are what a game theorist would call games of perfect information: everyone knows everything about the state of the game just from looking at the board, and this means that there is, in principle, a best strategy (series of moves) for every possible position. Granted, it’s hard to figure these out because it’s a big brute-force problem, but it’s still a brute-force problem where computers have an innate advantage. Chess and Go are games where the machines should be winning. Continue reading “AI Beats Poker Pros: Skynet Looms” →