Twin Pis For Remote Computer Management

November 5, 2017 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

Sometimes you have a whole bunch of computers that you need to work with, and having a keyboard, monitor, and mouse for each one becomes too much to deal with. There are a multitude of solutions to this problem, but [Fmstrat] went the hacker route, and built their own.

The build is a rather unique way of controlling PCs remotely, but it does the job. A Raspberry Pi 3 is pressed into service as the core of the operation. It’s accessible over IP for remote control. Video is captured from the controlled machines through the combination of an HDMI-to-S-Video adapter and an analog video capture card plugged into the Pi. Keystrokes are sent in a roundabout way, first sent to a Pi Zero over a USB-to-Serial adapter. From there, the Pi acts as an emulated mouse and keyboard to the PC under control.

One caveat of remotely controlling computers over a network is that if things go pearshaped, it can become necessary to power cycle the machine. [Fmstrat] deals with this by fitting a relay board to the Pi 3, which is connected to the reset buttons of the machines under control.

It may not be the quickest, easiest, or industry standard way of controlling remote computers, but it works. [Fmstrat] tells us this build was primarily designed to get around the fact that there aren’t any decent cheap IP-KVM systems, and consumer motherboards don’t support the IPMI standard that would otherwise be useful here.

We particularly like the hard-wired relays for rebooting a machine – great for when a network dropout is stopping Wake-on-LAN packets from achieving their goal. While the conversion of HDMI outputs into analog video for capture is unusual and somewhat costly on a per-machine basis, it’s functional and gives the system the ability to work with any machine capable of outputting a basic analog video signal. With the Pi Zero keyboard emulation and analog video capture, we could see this being used with everything from modern computers to vintage 80s hardware. If you’ve ever needed to control an Amiga 2000 remotely for whatever reason, this could be the way to do it.

We’ve seen plenty of other KVM builds over the years, too – like this low-cost HDMI switcher.

Programming An Oscilloscope Breakout Game In Pure Data

November 5, 2017 by John Baichtal 3 Comments

[S-ol] wrote in to share his sweet breakout game played on an oscilloscope. Built in a weekend as part of a game development jam, Plonat Atek is a polar breakout game where the player attacks the center and the ball bounces around the perimeter. You can play it either on an oscilloscope or using an online emulator. [S-ol] wrote the game in Pure Data, a visual programming language for audio. The software controls the audio out channels and uses sound to control the game graphics. He also made use of the Zexy extension for Pure Data.

One of the cool things about this setup is that since the game is programmed with sound, all the sound effects also double as visual effects

We love oscilloscopes, and not just because they’re useful as hell. They also make sweet vector displays, like this analog pong game that uses a scope for a display. Even when they’re not being used for retrogaming they can be capable of some pretty amazing graphics.

Hackaday Links: Remember, Remember

November 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Buckle up, buttercup because this is the last weekly Hackaday Links post you’re getting for two weeks. Why? We have a thing next weekend. The Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th (and also the 10th, because there’s a pre-game party), and it’s going to be the best hardware con you’ve ever seen. Don’t have a ticket? Too bad! But we’ll have something for our Internet denizens too.

So, you’re not going to the Hackaday Supercon but you’d like to hang out with like-minded people? GOOD NEWS! Barnes & Noble is having their third annual Mini Maker Faire on November 11th and 12th. Which Barnes & Noble? A lot of them. Our reports tell us this tends to be geared more towards the younger kids, but there are some cool people doing demonstrations. Worst case scenario? You can pick up a copy of 2600.

PoC || GTFO 0x16 is out! Pastor Laphroaig Races The Runtime Relinker And Other True Tales Of Cleverness And Craft! This PDF is a Shell Script That Runs a Python Webserver That Serves a Scala-Based JavaScript Compiler With an HTML5 Hex Viewer; or, Reverse Engineer Your Own Damn Polyglot.

In, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be stupid’ news, I received an interesting product announcement this week. It’s a USB C power bank with an integrated hand warmer. Just think: you can recharge your phone on the go, warm your hands in the dead of winter, and hope your random battery pack from China doesn’t explode in your pocket. I’m not linking to this because it’s that dumb.

You can now cross-compile ARM with GCC in Visual Studio.

The iPhone X is out, and that means two things. There are far too many YouTube videos of people waiting in line for a phone (and not the good kind), and iFixit did a teardown. This thing is glorious. There are two batteries and a crazy double-milled PCB stack with strange and weird mezzanine connectors. The main board for the iPhone X is completely unrepairable, but it’s a work of engineering art. No word yet on reusing the mini-Kinect in the iPhone X.

Speaking of irreparable computers, the Commodore 64 is not. [Drygol] recently came across a C64 that was apparently the engine controller for a monster truck found on the bottom of the ocean. This thing was trashed, filled with rust and corrosion, and the power button just fell off. Prior to cleaning, [Drygol] soldered a new power button, bowered it up, and it worked. The crappiest C64 was repairable. A bit of cleaning, painting the case, and the installation of an SD2IEC brought this computer back to life, ready for another thirty years of retrogaming and BASIC.

The Zynq from Xilinx is one of the most interesting parts in recent memory. It’s a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 combined with an FPGA with a little more than a million reconfigurable gates. It’s been turned into a synth, a quadcopter, all of British radio, and it’s a Pynq dev board. Now there’s a new part in the Zynq family, an RFSoC that combines the general ARM/FPGA format with some RF wizardry. It’s designed for 5G wireless and radar (!), and one of those parts we can’t wait to see in use.

Do you keep blowing stuff up when attaching a USB to UART adapter to a board? Never fear, because here’s one with galvanic isolation. This is done with a neat digital isolator from Maxim

Mergers And Acquisitions: Broadcom, Qualcomm, And One Hundred Billion Dollars

November 5, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 76 Comments

Rumors have been circulating this last weekend of the largest semiconductor acquisition ever. Broadcom might buy Qualcomm for the princely sum of one hundred Billion dollars.

You will most likely be familiar with both Qualcomm and Broadcom for their wireless and cellphone chipsets. As far as the Maker community is concerned, Broadcom makes the chipset for the Raspberry Pi, but in the context of a two hundred Billion dollar company, a ‘maker’ focused Linux dev board is the equivalent of a rounding error on a balance sheet.

This news comes a little more than a year after the announcement that Qualcomm is snatching up NXP, and two years after the news of NXP is merging with Freescale. The industry is in a state of consolidation.

This proposed deal follows several other semiconductor mergers and acquisitions including NXP and Freescale, Intel and Altera, Avago and Broadcom, On Semiconductor and Fairchild, and the one we’re most befuddled with, Atmel and Microchip. Why are these companies merging? Because they’re sitting on mountains of cash. All of these mergers with the exception of Avago and Broadcom, have been for single-digit Billions of dollars. The merger of Broadcom and Qualcomm — if it happens — will be the largest merger of two semiconductor companies ever. That’s easy to do when both Broadcom and Qualcomm are on the top ten list of largest semiconductor companies, but it is evidence enough that the mergers and acquisitions in the industry are not slowing down.

Homemade LED Clock Stands Test Of Time

November 5, 2017 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

In an era when you might get chastised if your mobile phone is more than two years old, it’s easy to forget that hardware was not always meant to be a temporary commodity. We acknowledge a few standout examples of classic hardware still surviving into the modern era, such as vintage computers, but they’re usually considered to be more of a novelty than an engineering goal. In a disposable society, many have forgotten that quality components and a well thought out design should give you a service life measured in decades, not months.

A perfect example of this principle is the beautiful LED clock built 40 years ago by [Davide Andrea]. A teenager at the time, [Davide] built this clock to be used by the local radio station, as clocks that showed seconds were important for timing radio shows. Finding it in storage recently, [Davide] took to the /r/electronics subreddit to report that it still works fine after all these years.

Cracking open the case shows a unique and highly functional construction style. Notches cut into the side panels of the case accept individual protoboards in a “blade” type configuration, with the blades connected by a handful of individual wires. No digging through the parts bin for a “worthless” old IDE cable to tear up back in the 1970’s.

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Mendocino Motor Drives Cubicle Conversations

November 5, 2017 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

Mendocino motors are solar-powered electric motors that rely on pseudo-levitation. The levitation comes from magnets mounted on either end of the shaft, which repel same-field magnets fixed below them into the base. When light shines on the solar panels, current flows through connected magnet wire windings, creating an electromagnetic field that interacts with a large stationary magnet mounted underneath. These constantly repelling forces spin the shaft, and the gaps between the solar panels provide the on-off cycle needed to make it spin 360°.

As [Konstantin] discovered, building this simple motor and getting it to spin depends on a lot of factors. The number of windings, the weight of each solar panel, and the magnet sizes all figure in. [Konstantin]’s struggles are your gain, however. His Instructable takes the guesswork out of the tolerances and he designed a nice, open-source 3D-printed structure to boot.

You’re right, these motors can’t do much work. But it would definitely look cool on your desk and might even start a conversation or two. If not, whip up this little electromagnetic train.

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Repair Job Fixes Compressor, Gets It Online

November 5, 2017 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

We’ll never cease to be amazed at the things people try to put on the Internet of Things. Some are no-brainers, like thermostats, security cameras, and garage door openers. Others, like washing machines and refrigerators, are a little on the iffy side, but you can still make a case for them. But an IoT air compressor? What’s the justification for such a thing?

As it turns out, [Boris van Galvin] had a pretty decent reason for his compressor hacks, and it appears that the IoT aspect was one of those “why not?” things. Having suffered the second failure of his compressor’s mechanical pressure switch in a year, and unwilling to throw good money after the $120 that went into replacing the first contactor, [Boris] looked for a cheaper and more interesting way to control the compressor. An ESP8266 dev board made interfacing the analog pressure sensor a snap, and while he was at it, [Boris] added a web interface with a nice graphical air pressure gauge and some on-off controls. Now he can set the pressure using his phone and switch it off in the middle of the night without going outside. That’s an IoT win right there.

No air compressor? No worries — build your own from an old fridge. The non-IoT kind, preferably.