Day: April 12, 2017

32-Bit Processing For The Vectrex Arcade System

April 12, 2017 by 21 Comments

Alongside the Commodores, Ataris, Nintendos, and all the other game systems of the 80s, there was a single unique video game system that stood out from the pack. This was the Vectrex, a console with a built-in CRT meant to display vector graphics and only vector graphics. The video game crash of 1983 wasn’t kind to the Vectrex, but it still lives on with a reasonably popular homebrew scene. Still, these homebrew games are limited by the hardware itself. After thirty years, the Vectrex has an upgrade. The Vectrex32 is a coprocessor, designed for the Vectrex cartridge slot, that gives this ancient console better graphics and 32-bit capabilities.

There’s a whole site dedicated to this Vectrex add-on, and the hardware is pretty much what you would expect. There’s a fast PIC32 microcontroller on this cartridge, a USB port, and a dual-port memory chip that’s connected to the Vectrix’s native processor.

Since this add-on cartridge is effectively a computer itself,  the Vectrex32 can operate as a BASIC interpreter for the Vectrex. That’s something the original hardware couldn’t have done, and makes homebrew development much easier.

You can check out a few videos describing the functionality of the Vectrex32 below, along with a few gameplay videos of new homebrew games written specifically for the Vectrex.

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Fix-A-Brick 2: Nexus 5X Rises From The Ashes

April 12, 2017 by 49 Comments

It was but two weeks ago when I told my story of woe —  the tale of an LG Nexus 5X that fell ill, seemingly due to a manufacturing fault at birth. I managed to disassemble it and made my way through a semi-successful attempt at repair, relying on a freezer and hairdryer to coax it back to life long enough to backup my data. Try as I might, however, I simply couldn’t get the phone running for more than ten minutes at a time.

All was not in vain, however! I was rewarded for documenting my struggles with the vast experience and knowledge of the wider Internet: “Hairdryers don’t get as hot as heatguns!”

It turned out I had just assumed that two similar devices, both relying on a hot bit of metal and a fan as their primary components, must be virtually identical if rated at a similar power draw. I was wrong! Apparently the average hairdryer stays well cooler than 150 degrees Celsius to avoid melting one’s silky locks or burning the skin. I even learned that apparently, wet hair melts at a lower temperature than dry hair. Who knew?

Armed with this knowledge, I rushed out and bought the cheapest heat gun I could find — around $50. Rated up to 600 degrees C, this was definitely going to be hotter than the hairdryer. With the prevailing opinion being that I had not applied enough heat in general, I decided to also increase the heating period to 90 seconds, up from a quick 30 second pass originally.

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DIY DynDNS With ESP8266 And Dweets

April 12, 2017 by 38 Comments

You’re on a home router, and your IP address keeps changing. Instead of paying a little bit extra for a static IP address (and becoming a grownup member of the Internet) there are many services that let you push your current IP out to the rest of the world dynamically. But most of them involve paying money or spending time reading advertisements. Who has either money or time?!

[Alberto Ricci Bitti] cobbled together a few free services and an ESP8266 module to make a device that occasionally pushes its external IP address out to a web-based “dweet” service. The skinny: an ESP8266 gets its external IP address from ipify.org and pushes it by “dweet” to a web-based data store. Freeboard reads the “dweet” and posts the resulting link in a nice format.

Every part of this short chain of software services could be replaced easily enough with anything else. We cobbled together our own similar solution, literally in the previous century, back when we were on dialup. But [Alberto R B]’s solution is quick and easy, and uses no fewer than three (3!) cloud services ending in .io. Add an ESP8266 to the WiFi network that you’d like to expose, and you’re done.

Customize Your Ratios With A 3D-Printed Gearbox

April 12, 2017 by 14 Comments

Small DC motors are easy to find — you can harvest dozens from old printers and copiers. You might even get a few with decent gearboxes too. But will you get exactly the motor with exactly the gearing your project needs? Unlikely, but you can always just print a gearbox to get exactly what you need.

There’s nothing fancy about [fortzero]’s gearboxes. The motors are junk bin specials, and the gears are all simple spur gears 3D-printed from PLA. There are four gears in the train, each with a 2:1 reduction, giving a 16:1 overall ratio. The gears ride on brass shafts that are press-fit into the housing, and there’s not a bearing in sight — just a few washers to keep the gears spaced apart and plenty of grease. Despite the simplicity, the gearboxes turned out to be pretty capable, lifting a 3.5 kg load. The design files are available and should make it easy for you to get just the ratio you want for the motor you have.

Of course more complicated gearboxes are possible with a 3D printer, including a split-harmonic planetary gear, or a strain wave gear using a timing belt. No 3D printer? No problem! Just build a LEGO gearbox.

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