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
Hum, that C64 repair looks familiar… hey, wait…
https://hackaday.com/2017/07/02/hackaday-links-july-2-2017
Of note the one in the article is a black C64.
“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.”
For the price tag it better be an engineering Picasso.
All top phones are that price now, and apple does have some unique features, albeit the same ones as in their cheaper models. Except for the mini kinnect of course, so that mini kinnect is pretty pricey. They should really get some killer apps for that feature other than animated emoji (which is standard with many webcams for years already), and other than a simple unlock.
Glad I ‘bowered” up my computer to read this ;) I chose red for the color of my auto-correct line vs the standard HaD white heh heh.
I can’t be the only one that appreciated the C64 power-supply’s double duty as a foot warmer.
Friends don’t let friends use untested C64 power-supplies for anything.
I own two C64s, but have never used a C64 because I don’t want to ruin either with the ancient power supply.
Those old supplies are based around a big classic transformer and some simple parts, those are pretty robust I would think.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for RFSoC based hacks – we asked about them for commercial projects and were quoted several thousand each (at volume). They’re pretty high-spec ADCs added onto what are already pricey FPGAs fabrics so not really in the realm of hobbyists or even a lot of professionals who don’t have mega budgets (separate ADC + FPGA will still be far cheaper for most people and still tick all your boxes).
Note: These are Zync with Ultrascale+ FPGA fabrics, not the cheaper Zync-7000/Artix ones which are used in the projects listed above (the zync-7000 are sold as the “cost optimised” version).
Plus, that is all before considering which devices are supported in the free version of VIvado – which if they’re not will result in a costly license (only the smallest/cheapest devices are in the free WebPack).
Maybe we’ll get lucky, and a competitor will bring out a cheaper version. One (or 2) ADC’s /DAC’s with DSP control etc.
Texas Instruments or Analog Devices are the logical choices to make enhanced ADC /DAC’s.
Yep. Their target applications tell a lot about the intended markets.
Remote Radio for M-MIMO
Mobile/Chip Tester
Test & Measurement Instrumentation
5G Baseband
Cable Access Remote-PHY
Wireless Backhaul
Remote Radio for M-MIMO
Phased Array EW / Radar
From:
https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/rfsoc.html
Pray tell, might there be a link to the new Zynq RFSoC?
https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/rfsoc.html
As someone with a Nexus 6P and Raynaud’s disease I would would buy one of the USB batteries.
“Episodes are often triggered by cold or emotional stress”
Would be a bit stressful if it burst out in lithium conflagration.