Converting An Atari 2600 Into A Home Computer; Did That Ever Work?

February 29, 2020 by Al Williams 19 Comments

[Tony] posted an interesting video where he looks at the Atari 2600 and the way many companies tried to convert it into a real home computer. This reminded us of the ColecoVision, which started out as a video game but could expand to a pretty reasonable computer.

It might seem silly to convert a relatively anemic Atari video game into a computer, but keep in mind that computers were pretty expensive in those days. Not to mention, the Atari itself was a fair investment back then, too.

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Media Streamer With E-Ink Display Keeps It Classy

February 29, 2020 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

The Logitech SqueezeBox was a device you hooked up to your stereo so you could stream music from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box or your desktop computer over the network. That might not sound very exciting now, but when [Aaron Ciuffo] bought it back in 2006, it was a pretty big deal. The little gadget has been chugging all these years, but the cracks are starting to form. Before it finally heads to that great electronics recycling center in the sky, he’s decided to start work on its replacement.

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, building a little device to stream digital audio from a NAS is easy these days. But a Pi hooked up to a USB speaker isn’t necessarily a great fit for the living room. [Aaron] didn’t necessarily want his replacement player to actually look like the SqueezeBox, but he wanted it to be presentable. While most of us probably would have tried to make something that looked like a traditional piece of audio gear, he took his design is a somewhat more homey direction.

The Raspberry Pi 4 and HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro live inside of a wooden laser cut case that [Aaron] designed with OpenSCAD. We generally associate this tool with 3D printing, but here he’s exporting each individual panel as an SVG file so they can be cut out. We especially like that he took the time to add all of the internal components to the render so he could be sure everything fit before bringing the design into the corporeal world.

While the case was definitely a step in the right direction, [Aaron] wasn’t done yet. He added a WaveShare e-Paper 5.83″ display and mounted it in a picture frame. Software he’s written for the Raspberry Pi shows the album information and cover art on the display while the music is playing, and the current time and weather forecast when it’s idle. He’s written the software to plug into Logitech’s media player back-end to retain compatibility with the not-quite-dead-yet SqueezeBox, but we imagine the code could be adapted to whatever digital media scheme you’re using.

Over the years, we’ve seen a number of SqueezeBox replacements. Many of which have been powered by the Raspberry Pi, but even the ESP8266 and ESP32 have gotten in on the action recently.

Desktop PCB Mill Review

February 29, 2020 by Al Williams 19 Comments

[Carl] wanted to prototype his circuits quickly using printed circuit boards. He picked up a Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Mill and made a video about the results. His first attempt wasn’t perfect, as you could notice under the microscope. A few adjustments, though, and the result was pretty good.

Be warned, this mill is pretty expensive — anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000. The company claims it is a better choice than a conventional cheap mill because it uses a 26,000 RPM spindle and has high-resolution steppers. Because of its low backlash and high accuracy and repeatability, the company claims it can easily mill boards with 6 mil traces.

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The IoT Trap

February 29, 2020 by Elliot Williams 65 Comments

I’m sure that you’ve heard about the Sonos speaker debacle. (If not, read about it on Hackaday.) Basically, a company that sells a premium Internet-connected speaker wanted to retire an older product line, and offered a 30% discount to people who would “trade in” their old speakers for new ones. The catch: they weren’t really trading them in, but instead flashing a “self-destruct” firmware and then taking it to the recycling.

Naturally, Sonos’ most loyal customers weren’t happy about intentionally bricking their faithful devices, a hubbub ensued, and eventually the CEO ended up reversing course and eating crow. Hackaday’s own Gerrit Coetzee wrote up our coverage and mentioned that maybe Sonos just couldn’t afford to support the service for the old products any more, and didn’t want them to remain in the wild. So much so, that it’s worth 30% of the cost of their current product to get out from under the implicit contract.

By buying one of these IoT devices, you’re paying more money up front for the promise that the company will keep supporting the service that it relies on into the future. But providing this service costs money, and as more and more “products” are actually services in disguise, we’ve seen case after case of working machines shut down because the company doesn’t want to keep paying for the service. It doesn’t seem to matter if the company is small, like Sonos, or an immensely wealthy monopoly player like Google. Somehow, the people planning these products have a much shorter lifetime in mind than their customers do, and fail to make the up-front price cover costs.

This puts these companies in a tough spot. The more a customer loves the device, the longer they’ll want to keep it running, and the worse the blowback will be when the firm eventually has to try to weasel its way out of a “lifetime” contract. And they are alienating exactly their most loyal customers — those who want to keep their widget running longer than might even be reasonable. Given that this whole business model is new, it’s not surprising that some firms will get it wrong. What’s surprising to me is how many fall into the IoT trap.

So take this as a cautionary tale as a consumer. And if you’re in a company offering a product that depends on a service to continue to function, ask yourself if you’re really going to be able to support it for the customer’s idea of the lifetime of the product. What looks like a great deal at a five-year horizon might bankrupt your company at ten. Will you, or your customers, be willing to throw their devices away? Should they be?

Watch Linux Boot On Your Hackaday Superconference Badge

February 29, 2020 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Last year’s Hackaday Superconference badge was an electronic tour de force, packing an ECP5 FPGA shoehorned into a Game Boy-like form factor and shipping with a RISC-V core installed that together gave an almost infinite badge hacking potential. It did not however run Linux, and that’s something [Greg Davill] has addressed, as he’s not only running Linux on his badge, but also a framebuffer that allows him to use the badge screen as the Linux terminal screen. Finally you can watch Linux boot on your Superconference badge itself, rather than over its serial port.

He’s achieved this by changing essentially everything: from the new VexRiscv CPU core, to new video drivers and a VGA terminal courtesy of Frank Buss, now part of the LiteVideo project. It’s not quite a fully fledged Linux powerhouse yet, but you can find it in a GitHub repository should you have a mind to try it yourself. Paging back through his Twitter feed reveals the effort he’s put into this work over the last few months, and shows that it’s been no easy task.

For those keeping score at home, this is an open hardware design, running an open CPU core, with community-designed open-source peripherals, compiled by an open-source toolchain, running an open-source operating system. And it’s simply a fantastic demo for the badge, showing off how flexible the entire system is. One of the best parts of writing for Hackaday is that our community is capable of a huge breadth of amazing pieces of work, and this is an exemplar of that energy. We can’t wait to see what Greg and any other readers tempted to try it will come up with.

If you’d like to refresh your memory over the 2019 Supercon badge, here’s our write-up at the time.

A 3D-Printed Bass Guitar

February 29, 2020 by Jenny List 1 Comment

A visit to the hardware hacking area of the recent Hacker Hotel hacker camp in the Netherlands would bring plenty of interesting pieces of hardware to delight the eye. Among them though was one to delight the ear, and on hearing it we asked whether its creator could put it online so we could share it with you. [XDr4g0nX]’s bass guitar is 3D printed, and while it still contains some non-3D-printed parts it’s still a very effective musical instrument.

This is not the first model he’s produced, he told us, an earlier guitar was entirely 3D-printed but proved not to be rigid enough. Tuning such an instrument merely resulted in its bowing out of shape and becoming unplayable as well as out of tune. This one has hefty steel bars for rigidity, though it uses a Yamaha neck rather than 3D-printing the whole instrument. The main body of the instrument has to be printed in multiple parts and epoxied together, which he’s done without some of the ugly seams that sometimes disfigure prints of this nature.

Having heard it, we’d be hard pressed to tell it wasn’t a more traditional guitar, but then again since people have made guitars from all kinds of scrap it’s not the first home build we’ve encountered.

A Mini USB Keyboard That Isn’t A Keyboard

February 29, 2020 by Jenny List 12 Comments

A useful add-on for any computer is a plug-in macro keyboard, a little peripheral that adds those extra useful buttons to automate tasks. [Sayantan Pal] has made one, a handy board with nine programmable keys and a USB connector, but the surprise is that at its heart lies only the ubiquitous ATmega328 that you might find in an Arduino Uno. This isn’t a USB HID keyboard, instead it uses a USB-to-serial chip and appears to the host computer as a serial device. The keys themselves are simple momentary action switches, perhaps a deluxe version could use key switches from the likes of Cherry or similar.

The clever part of this build comes on the host computer, which runs some Python code using the PyAutoGui library. This allows control of the keyboard and mouse, and provides an “in” for the script to link serial and input devices. Full configurability is assured through the Python code, and while that might preclude a non-technical user from gaining its full benefit it’s fair to say that this is not intended to compete with mass-market peripherals. It’s a neat technique for getting the effect of an HID peripheral though, and one to remember for future use even if you might not need it immediately.

More conventional USB keyboards have appeared here in the past, typically using a processor with built-in USB HID support such as the ATmega32u4.