Open Source Synthesizers Hack Chat

January 21, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Matt Bradshaw is a musician, maker, and programmer with a degree in physics and a love for making new musical instruments. You may remember his PolyMod modular digital synthesizer from the 2018 Hackaday Prize, where it made the semifinals of the Musical Instrument Challenge. PolyMod is a customizable, modular synthesizer that uses digital rather than analog circuitry. That seemingly simple change results in a powerful ability to create polyphonic patches, something that traditional analog modular synths have a hard time with.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, in which we’ll cover:

The hardware behind the PolyMod, and the design decisions that led Matt to an all-digital synth
The pros and cons of making music digitally
Where the PolyMod has gone since winning the Musical Instrument Challenge semifinals

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Open Source Synthesizers Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 23, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. And don’t forget to check out the Modular Synth Discussion, a very active chat that digs into the guts of all sorts of modular synthesizers.

Human Augmentation For Weight Loss

January 21, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 17 Comments

If you read almost any article about powered human implants, you will encounter the same roadblock, “it could be so much better with more powerful batteries.” Our fleshy power systems are different from electrical systems, but we are full of moving parts, so [Xudong Wang] and fellow researchers have harnessed that power (Sci Hub Alt) and turned it right back into something else our body understands.

The goal of this project is to control obesity by tricking the vagus nerve into thinking we are full as we digest our current meal. The treatment has already been proven with battery-powered implants, but this version uses the oscillations of the stomach for power and sends the generated power right where it is needed. A control group of rats showed no change over 100 days, but those with this implant shed more than a third of their body weight. This may need some tuning but its effectiveness seems to be heading the right way, and it is surgically reversible.

The device is a triboelectric generator coated in polyimide and Ecoflex™ with gold electrodes that wrap around the vagus nerve at the gastro-esophageal junction. The generator presses against the stomach from outside and the rhythm of the muscles generates the signal that the stomach is full so it becomes a loop of digesting ⇄ sated.

Another handful, of implants don’t need power from inside the body and use RFID technology.
Via IEEE Spectrum.

Alexa, Remind Me Of The First Time Your Product Category Failed

January 21, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 94 Comments

For the last few years, the Last Great Hope™ of the consumer electronics industry has been voice assistants. Alexas and Echos and Google Homes and Facebook Portals are all the rage. Over one hundred million Alexa devices have been sold, an impressive feat given that there are only about 120 Million households in the United States, and a similar number in Europe. Look to your left, look to your right, one of you lives in a house with an Internet connected voice assistant.

2018 saw a huge explosion of Internet connected voice assistants, in sometimes bizarre form factors. There’s a voice controlled microwave, which is great if you’ve ever wanted to defrost a chicken through the Internet. You can get hardware for developing your own voice assistant device. 2019 will be even bigger. Facebook is heavily advertising the Facebook Portal. If you haven’t yet deleted your Facebook account, you can put the Facebook Portal on your kitchen counter and make video calls with your family and friends through Facebook Messenger. With the Google Home Hub and a Nest doorbell camera, you too can be just like Stu Pickles from Rugrats.

This is not the first time the world has been enamored with Internet-connected assistants. This is not the first time the consumer electronics industry put all their hope into one product category. This has happened before, and all those devices failed spectacularly. These were the Internet appliances released between 1999 and 2001: the last great hurrah of the dot-com boom. They were dumb then, and they’re dumb now.

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Front Door Camera Sends Automatic Alerts By Text

January 21, 2019 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

In these turbulent times, journalists fearmonger and honest citizens fear for the safety of their homes and themselves. Adding some security features can allay these fears, and with the advent of cheap technology, front door cameras have become popular. There’s a wide array of options on the market, but short of watching hours of logged video, they’re not always super useful. Adding some smarts can really help – as [Peter Quinn] has done.

For this project, [Peter] decided on a JeVois smart camera. More than just a USB webcam, it also packs a quad-core processor running machine vision algorithms. This allows object recognition and other tasks to be run on the camera itself. In this setup, [Peter] configured the JeVois camera to detect people. When a human is detected upon the doorstep, the camera sends a message to the connected Raspberry Pi over serial. The Raspberry Pi then captures a JPEG still from the camera over the USB connection, and, using Twilio, sends a notification to [Peter]’s phone.

It’s a well-integrated system that automatically photographs visitors to [Peter]’s home, requiring little to no interaction from the user. We’ve seen other integrated machine vision platforms, too – such as the OpenMV, which got its start as a Hackaday Prize entry, way back in 2017.

The Greatest Computer Ever Now Gets A New, Injection Molded Clear Case

January 21, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made. It was a powerhouse when it was launched almost exactly thirty years ago today. You could stuff 128 Megabytes of RAM into it, an absolutely ludicrous amount of RAM for 1989. You could put Ethernet in it. You could turn the 1-bit black or white internal display into an 8-bit grayscale display. I think there was a Lisp card for it. These were just the contemporaneous hacks for the SE/30. Now, people are actively developing for this machine and putting Spotify on it. There’s a toolbar extension for Macs of this era that will let you connect to a WiFi network. You’ll be hard pressed to find a computer that still has a fanbase this big thirty years after release.

Now, there’s a project to create new injection molded cases for the Mac SE/30 (and the plain ‘ol SE). These cases will be clear, just like Apple prototypes of the era. It’s also one of the most difficult injection molding projects retrocomputer enthusiasts have ever taken up.

Over the years, we’ve seen some interesting projects in the way of creating new plastic cases for old computers. The most famous is perhaps the remanufacturing of Commodore 64C cases. Instead of a purely community-driven project, this was an accident of history. The story goes that one guy, [Dallas Moore], went to an auction at an injection molding factory. The owner mentioned something about an old computer, and wheels started turning in someone’s head. A Kickstarter later, and everyone who wanted a new C64 case got one. You could get one in translucent plastic to go with the retro aesthetic.

New cases for the Amiga A1200 have also been made thanks to one fan’s Solidworks skills and a Kickstarter campaign. There is, apparently, a market for remanufactured cases for retrocomputers, and it’s just barely large enough to support making new injection molding tooling.

So, about that SE/30. The folks on the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forums are discussing the possibility of making a new case for the greatest computer Apple will ever make. The hero of this story is [maceffects] who has already modeled the back ‘bucket’ of the SE/30 and printed one out on a filament printer (check out the videos below). This was then printed in clear SLA, and the next step is crowdfunding.

While this isn’t a complete case — a front bezel would be needed to complete the case — it is an amazing example of what the retrocomputing community can do. The total cost to bring this project to fruition would be about $15,000 USD, which is well within what a crowdfunding campaign could take in. Secondary runs could include a translucent Bondi Blue polycarbonate enclosure, but that’s pure speculation from someone who knows what would be the coolest project ever.

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Sly Guy Nabs Pi Spy

January 20, 2019 by Ted Yapo 38 Comments

When one of [Christian Haschek’s] co-workers found this Raspberry Pi tucked into their network closet, he figured it was another employee’s experiment – you know how that goes. But, of course, they did the safe thing and unplugged it from the network right away. The ensuing investigation into what it was doing there is a tour de force in digital forensics and a profile of a bungling adversary.

A quick check of everyone with access to that area turned up nothing, so [Christian] shifted focus to the device itself. There were three components: a Raspberry Pi model B, a 16GB SD card, and an odd USB dongle that turned out to be an nRF52832-MDK. The powerful SoC on-board combines a Cortex M4 processor with the RF hardware for BLE, ANT, and other 2.4 GHz communications. In this case, it may have been used for sniffing WiFi or bluetooth packets.

The next step was investigating an image of the SD card, which turned out to be a resin install (now called balena). This is an IoT web service that allows you to collect data from your devices remotely via a secure VPN. Digging deeper, [Christian] found a JSON config file containing a resin username. A little googling provided the address of a nearby person with the same name – but this could just be coincidence. More investigation revealed a copyright notice on some mysterious proprietary software installed on the Pi. The copyright holder? A company part-owned by the same person. Finally, [Christian] looked into a file called resin-wifi-01 and found the SSID that was used to set up the device. Searching this SSID on wigle.net turned up – you guessed it – the same home address found from the username.

But, how did this device get there in the first place? Checking DNS and Radius logs, [Christian] found evidence that an ex-employee with a key may have been in the building when the Pi was first seen on the network. With this evidence in hand, [Christian] turned the issue over to legal, who will now have plenty of ammunition to pursue the case.

If you find the opportunity to do some Linux forensics yourself, or are simply interested in learning more about it, this intro by [Bryan Cockfield] will get you started.

Building And Controlling 19 LEDs & Five Buttons From Five Outputs

January 20, 2019 by Richard Baguley 3 Comments

Numbers are hard enough in English, but [Sadale] decided to take things a step further by building a calculator that works in Toki Pona. The result is Ilo Nanpa, an awesome hardware calculator that works in this synthetic minimal language. This is a bit harder than you might think, because Toki Pona doesn’t have digits in the same way that Neo-Latin languages like English do. Instead, you combine smaller numbers to make bigger ones. One is Wan, Two is Tu, but three is Wan Tu (1+2). As you might expect, this makes dealing and representing larger numbers somewhat complicated.

Ilo Nanpa gets around this in a wonderfully elegant way, and with some impressive behind the scenes work. The calculator has 16 LEDs, nine buttons and a slider switch, but they are all controlled and read through just five IO pins on the STM8S001J3 controller that runs the device.

That’s because {Sadale] did some remarkable work with multiplexing and charlieplexing. Multiplexing is controlling more outputs than there are control inputs by using rows and columns: it is how the LED display you are probably reading this on can be controlled by just a few wires. By switching through these rows and columns at a higher speed than the eye can see, you create the illusion of a single, continuous display.

Charlieplexing takes this a step further by using multiple voltages on a single connection to further split the signal. With the clever use of voltage dividers the directional properties of LEDs and multiple voltage levels, the Ilo Nanpa runs all of the LEDs and senses all of the buttons and the slider from just five pins. That’s a remarkably neat piece of design, and it is worth spending some time looking over the excellent explanation of the process that [Sadale] wrote to see how it is done, and poring over the code for the device to see how he programmed this all into a single low powered chip. And, while you are reading, you might pick up a few words of Toki Pona. Tawa Pona!

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