Installing LibreBoot The (Very) Lazy Way

August 20, 2018 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

Recently I was given a somewhat crusty looking ThinkPad T400 that seemed like it would make a good knock around machine to have on the bench, if it wasn’t for the fact the person who gave it to me had forgotten (or perhaps never knew) the BIOS password. Cleaning the machine up, putting more RAM in it, and swapping the wheezing hard drive for an SSD would be a relatively cheap way to wring a few more years of life from the machine, but not if I couldn’t change the boot order in BIOS.

Alright, that’s not entirely true. I could have installed an OS on the SSD from my desktop and then put it into the T400, but there was something else at play. The locked BIOS gave me the perfect excuse to install LibreBoot on it, which is one of those projects I’ve had in the back of my mind for years now. Replacing the BIOS with something entirely different would solve the password issue, but there was only one problem: the instructions for flashing LibreBoot onto the T400 are intimidating to say the least.

You’re supposed to take the entire machine apart, down to pulling the CPU cooler off and removing the display. All so you can flip the motherboard over to access a flash chip between the CPU and RAM that’s normally covered by a piece of the laptop’s frame. Oh how I hated that diabolical chunk of magnesium which kept me from my silicon quarry. Flashing the chip would take a few minutes, but YouTube videos and first hand accounts from forums told me it could take hours to disassemble the computer and then put it back together after the fact.

Deep into that darkness I peered, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting. Then a thought came to me: maybe I could just cut the thing. If it was a success, it would save me hours of work. If it failed, well, at least the computer didn’t cost me anything. Time to roll the dice.

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Build A Fun CPU In Your Browser

August 20, 2018 by Al Williams 16 Comments

A rite of passage for a digital designer is to build a CPU. That may seem a formidable task and if you are thinking of building a modern CPU like the one in your PC, it is. However, a simple CPU is well within the reach of anyone who can sling some logic gates or HDL. We’ve even seen CPUs built in Minecraft. Now you can play nandgame and build a CPU step-by-step in your browser.

The game is based on the popular From NAND to Tetris site. True to the name you start out with a single NAND gate as a tool. From there you build an inverter, an AND gate, adders, flip flops, registers, and the like. You get a little help from the accompanying text and there are some blacked out hints if you get stuck.

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An Upcycled Speaker Box With Hidden Features

August 20, 2018 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

At first glance, this fire engine red speaker box built by [NoshBar] looks straightforward enough. Just an MDF case and couple of drivers recovered from a trashed stereo. But the array of controls and connectors on the front, and a peek on the inside, shows there’s more to this particular project than meets the eye.

Built almost entirely from parts [NoshBar] found in the trash, construction started with some salvaged MDF IKEA shelves and their corresponding twist lock cam fittings. We don’t usually see those style cam fittings used to build DIY enclosures, but if it works for all those furniture manufacturers why not?

A pair of Sony stereo speakers he found gave up their internals, and a TPA3116 amplifier board off of eBay drives them. He’s wired up an audio pass-through mode for using headphones when the amplifier is powered off, and dual inputs so he can switch between PC and PS4.

But the audio components are only half of what’s inside that shiny red exterior. [NoshBar] packed in an ATX PSU and broke out the 3.3 V, 5 V, and 12 V lines to the front panel so he can use it as a bench power supply for his Arduino projects. It’s also home to a gigabit Ethernet switch and a Raspberry Pi acting as a file server.

We’re always amazed at what hackers are able to accomplish with parts they’ve literally pulled out of the trash, from a waterwheel to charge your phone to a functional CNC router. It seems there’s plenty of treasure in your local dumpster if you’re willing to get a little dirty.