About As Cold As It Gets: The Webb Telescope’s Cryocooler

May 5, 2022 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

If you were asked to name the coldest spot in the solar system, chances are pretty good you’d think it would be somewhere as far as possible from the ultimate source of all the system’s energy — the Sun. It stands to reason that the further away you get from something hot, the more the heat spreads out. And so Pluto, planet or not, might be a good guess for the record low temperature.

But, for as cold as Pluto gets — down to 40 Kelvin — there’s a place that much, much colder than that, and paradoxically, much closer to home. In fact, it’s only about a million miles away, and right now, sitting at a mere 6 Kelvin, the chunk of silicon at the focal plane of one of the main instruments aboard the James Webb Space telescope makes the surface of Pluto look downright balmy.

The depth of cold on Webb is all the more amazing given that mere meters away, the temperature is a sizzling 324 K (123 F, 51 C). The hows and whys of Webb’s cooling systems are chock full of interesting engineering tidbits and worth an in-depth look as the world’s newest space telescope gears up for observations.

Continue reading “About As Cold As It Gets: The Webb Telescope’s Cryocooler” →

Photo of the spectrophotometer in question, with a screenshot of the decoding software on the right

Exporting Data From Old Gear Through LCD Sniffing

May 5, 2022 by Arya Voronova 27 Comments

[Jure Spiler] was at a flea market and got himself a spectrophotometer — a device that measures absorbance and transmittance of light at different wavelengths. This particular model seems to be about 25 years old, and it’s controlled by a built-in keyboard and uses a graphical LCD to display collected data. That might have been acceptable when it was made, but it wasn’t enough for [Jure]. Since he wanted to plot the spectrophotometry data and be able to save it into a CSV file, hacking ensued.

He decided to tap into the the display communication lines. This 128×64 graphical display, PC-1206B, uses a 8-bit interface, so with a 16-channel logic analyzer, he could see the data being sent to the display. He even wrote decoder software – taking CSV files from the logic analyzer and using primitive optical recognition on the decoded pixels to determine the digits being shown, and drawing a nice wavelength to absorbance graph. From there, he set out to make a standalone device sniffing the data bus and creating a stream of data he could send to a computer for storage and processing.

[Jure] stumbled into a roadblock, however, when he tried to use an Arduino for this task. Even using a sped-up GPIO library (as opposed to notoriously inefficient digitalRead), he couldn’t get a readout frequency higher than 80 KHz – with the required IO readout rate deemed as 1 MHz, something else would be called for. We do wonder if something like RP2040 with its PIO machinery would be better for making such captures.

At that point, however, he found out that there’s undocumented serial output on one of the pins of the spectrophotometer’s expansion port, and is currently investigating that, having shelved the LCD sniffing direction. Nevertheless, this serves as yet another example for us, for those times when an LCD connection is all that we can make use of.

We’ve seen hackers sniff LCD interfaces to get data from reflow ovens, take screenshots from Game Boys and even equip them with HDMI and VGA ports afterwards. With a skill like this, you can even give a new life to a vintage calculator with a decayed display! Got an LCD-equipped device but unsure about which specific controller it uses? We’ve talked about that!

Continue reading “Exporting Data From Old Gear Through LCD Sniffing” →

TWANG32 Brings LED Strip Gaming To The ESP32

May 5, 2022 by Jenny List 1 Comment

Under the Hackaday TV is a modern game console, it’s a well-known model that many of you also probably have, and its main feature is a 3D accelerator which allows it to create the beautifully rendered worlds we’ve all come to know and love. [Mircemk] eschews such fripperies with the Twang project, because it’s a game that’s not 3D, nor 2D, but 1D. The display, indeed the entire gaming surface, is a single strip of addressable LEDs which can be seen int he video below the break.

Behind it all is an ESP32, and a unique one-dimensional joystick using an accelerometer. There’s an audio channel with a little piezoelectric speaker too, and the LED strip is a particularly high-density one from DFRobot. Because this is an ESP32-driven device it has WiFi, upon which is exposed an access point for a network over which is served the game stats as a web page. It may not displace that modern console, but it’s certainly inventive.

Long-time Hackaday readers will be aware that this is only the latest of a long line of one-dimensional games, including a 1D take on the famous PONG.

Continue reading “TWANG32 Brings LED Strip Gaming To The ESP32″ →