Day: July 15, 2020

Arduino Plays NES Games

July 15, 2020 by 14 Comments

Watching the advancement of technology is interesting enough by looking at improved specifications for various components as the years go by. But clock speeds, memory size, and power consumption are all fairly intangible compared to actual implementation of modern technology when compared to days of yore. For example, this $40 microcontroller can do what a video game console was able to do in the 80s for a tenth of the (inflation adjusted) price.

The NESDUE is an emulator for NES games which runs completely on an Arduino Due. The Arduino does have some limitations that have to be worked around to get the Nintendo to work, though. For one, it needs to be overclocked to be playable and it also needs a workaround to get past the memory limit of 96 kB of RAM. From there, a small screen is wired up along with a controller (from a Super Nintendo) and the gaming can begin.

This is an impressive feat for an Arduino platform to accomplish, especially with the amount of memory tweaking that has to happen. This might be the most advanced gaming system available that runs everything on an Arduino, right up there with the Arduinocade which can provide an arcade-like experience straight from the Arduino as well.

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The Many Methods Of Communicating With Submarines

July 15, 2020 by 36 Comments

It sometimes seems hard to believe that we humans have managed to explore so little of what we have so much of: the seas. Oceans cover something like 70 percent of the world’s surface, but we’ve only mapped 20 percent of the ocean floor. The 228,000 ocean-dwelling species that we know about represents about ten percent of the estimated total aquatic species. And almost all the life we know about, and the area that we’ve explored thoroughly, is limited to the first few hundred meters from the surface.

The paucity of our deep-water investigatory efforts has a lot to do with the hostility of the sea to those who haven’t evolved to survive in it. It takes extreme engineering and fantastically expensive machines to live and work even a few meters down, and even then submariners quickly become completely isolated from the rest of the world once they’re down there. Underwater communication is particularly challenging, since the properties of seawater confound efforts to use it as a communications medium.

Challenging though it may be, underwater communication is possible, and in this article we’ll take a look at a few modalities that have made operating under the sea possible, and a new technology that might just extend the Internet below the waves.

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X-Ray Sleuthing Unveils The Fake In Your Adaptors

July 15, 2020 by 36 Comments

Lets face it, the knock-off variety of our favourite adaptors, cables and accessories are becoming increasingly challenging to spot. We would be the first to admit, to have at some point, been stooped by a carefully crafted counterfeit by failing to spot the tell-tale yet elusive indicators such as the misplaced font face, the strategically misspelled logo or perhaps the less polished than expected plastic moulding and packaging. When you finally come around to using it, if you are lucky the item is still more or less functionally adequate, otherwise by now the inferior performance (if not the initial cost!) would have made it pretty obvious that what you have is infact a counterfeit.

[Oliver] recently found himself in a similar situation, after acquiring a seemingly original Lightning to Headphone Adaptor. Rather than dismay, [Oliver] decided to channel this energy into an excellent forensic investigation to uncover just what exactly made this imitation so deceptive. He began by comparing the packaging, printed typeface and the plastic moulding, all of which gave very little away. [Oliver] concluded that atleast superficially, the clone was rather good and the only way to settle this was to bring out the X-ray, of course!  

The resulting images of the innards make it blatantly obvious as to why the adaptor is indeed very fake. For a start, compared to the original adaptor, the clone hosts a far more thin BOM count! If you are really serious in getting some training to better spot counterfeits, check out a post we featured earlier on the subject!

DIY Dongle Breathes Life Into Broken Ventilators

July 15, 2020 by 51 Comments

We have a new hero in the COVID-19 saga, and it’s some hacker in Poland. Whoever this person is, they are making bootleg dongles that let ventilator refurbishers circumvent lockdown software so they can repair broken ventilators bought from the secondhand market.

The dongle is a DIY copy of one that Medtronic makes, which of course they don’t sell to anyone. It makes a three-way connection between the patient’s monitor, a breath delivery system, and a computer, and lets technicians sync software between two broken machines so they can be Frankensteined into a single working ventilator. The company open-sourced an older model at the end of March, but this was widely viewed as a PR stunt.

This is not just the latest chapter in the right-to-repair saga. What began with locked-down tractors and phones has taken a serious turn as hospitals are filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients, many of whom will die without access to a ventilator. Not only is there a shortage of ventilators, but many of the companies that make them are refusing outside repair techs’ access to manuals and parts.

These companies insist that their own in-house technicians be the only ones who touch the machines, and many are not afraid to admit that they consider the ventilators to be their property long after the sale has been made. The ridiculousness of that aside, they don’t have the manpower to fix all the broken ventilators, and the people don’t have the time to wait on them.

We wish we could share the dongle schematic with our readers, but alas we do not have it. Hopefully it will show up on iFixit soon alongside all the ventilator manuals and schematics that have been compiled and centralized since the pandemic took off. In the meantime, you can take Ventilators 101 from our own [Bob Baddeley], and then find out what kind of engineering goes into them.