GCore: Make Portable Devices With Less Frustration

July 9, 2022 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[Dan Julio]’s gCore (short for Gadget Core) is aimed at making GUI-based portable and rechargeable gadgets much easier to develop. gCore is the result of [Dan]’s own need for a less tiresome way to develop such hardware.

A touchscreen is great, but high-quality power control and charging features are what really make a portable device sing.

[Dan] found that he seemed to always be hacking a lot of extra circuitry into development boards just to get decent power management and charge control. To solve this, he designed his own common hardware platform for portable gadgets and the gCore was born.

While the color touchscreen is an eye-catching and useful addition, the real star of his design is the power management and charging features. Unlike most development hardware, the gCore intelligently shares load power with charging power. Power on and power off are also all under software control.

Sound intriguing? That’s not all the gCore has to offer, and you can learn more from the project page at hackaday.io (which has a more in-depth discussion of the design decisions and concept.) There are also some additional photos and details on [Dan]’s website.

[Dan] is no stranger to developing hardware. The tcam-mini thermal imager (and much more) is his work, and we have no doubt the gCore’s design and features are informed directly by [Dan]’s actual, practical development needs.

Easier Self Hosting With Umbrel

July 9, 2022 by Al Williams 12 Comments

While it is undeniable that cloud-based services are handy, there are people who would rather do it themselves. For many of us, it is because we want what we want the way we want it. For others, it is a distrust of leaving your personal data on someone’s server you don’t control. Umbrel is a Linux distribution just for people who want to self-host popular applications like NextCloud or Home Assistant. [ItsFoss] has a good review that points out some of the plusses and minuses of the early version of Umbrel.

What’s really interesting, though, is the approach the distro takes to installing software. Like most modern distributions, Umbrel has a package manager. Unlike most, though, the packages are actually docker containers. So when you install an app, it is preconfigured and lives in its own bubble, unlikely to conflict with other things you might install.

We also like that it has a specific build for a Raspberry Pi, although it will work on other 64-bit hardware and you can even install it within docker on top of your normal operating system. Of course, the docker container concept is also a drawback — at least for now — because it can be difficult to adjust settings inside the container compared to a more conventional install.

It amazes us that hardware has become so capable that it is easier to just duplicate entire operating systems than it is to work out the required dependency interactions. Still, it works, and in most cases, it works well.

If you want to know more about Docker, we’ve covered it a few times in the past. You can even use it for very simple development cases if you like.

Continue reading “Easier Self Hosting With Umbrel” →

Part of a picture showing all kinds of different CAN devices in a car

CAN Peripheral For RP2040, Courtesy Of PIO

July 9, 2022 by Arya Voronova 31 Comments

[Kevin O’Connor] writes to us about his project, can2040 – adding CAN support to the RP2040. The RP2040 doesn’t have a CAN peripheral, but [Kevin] wrote code for the RP2040’s PIO engine that can receive and send CAN packets. Now we can all benefit from his work by using this openly available CAN driver. This library is written in C, so it’s a good fit for the lower-level hackers among us, and in all likelihood, it wouldn’t be hard to make a MicroPython wrapper around it.

The CAN bus needs a peripheral for the messages to be handled properly, and people have been using external chips for this purpose until now. These chips, [Kevin] tells us, have lately been unavailable due to the chip shortage, making this project more valuable. The documentation is extensive and accessible, and [Kevin] details how to best use this driver. With such a tool in hand, you can now turn your Pico into a CAN tinkering toolkit, or wire up some CAN devices for use in your own projects!

[Kevin] says this code is already being used in Klipper, a framework powering 3D printers and other machines like them. As for your own purposes, you can absolutely use such a CAN tool to hack on your car – here’s a treasure trove of car hacking documentation, by the way! Thanks to the PIO engine, there seems to be no end to the RP2040’s versatility – you can even drive HDMI monitor with this PIO-based DVI code.

Continue reading “CAN Peripheral For RP2040, Courtesy Of PIO” →

Sneeze Into Your Hand, Not Your Elbow With This Nose-Shaped Sanitizer Dispenser

July 9, 2022 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

You’ve got to love a language like German, where not only is it possible for a word or two to stand in for a complex concept, but you don’t even need to speak the language to make a good guess at what it all means. Of course when your project is a giant nose that mock-sneezes sanitizer into your hands, it doesn’t really matter that you call it Der niesende Desinfektionsmittelspender. Humor based on bodily functions is, after all, the universal language.

Working knowledge of German or not, figuring out exactly what [Nina] is doing here isn’t too difficult. Judging by the video below and the build log, the idea is to detect the presence of a hand underneath the dispenser with a simple IR reflective sensor hooked to some kind of microcontroller — an ESP32 in this case. Audio clips of sneezes are stored on an SD card and played back through a small speaker, while a hobby servo pushes the button on an atomizer. It seems as if selecting the proper dispenser was the hardest thing about the project; [Nina] finally settled on a battery-operated mister that was just the right size to fit into the nose. Oh, didn’t we mention the giant, pink, 3D-printed nose that houses the whole thing? Sorry about that — it’s quite subtle and easy to miss.

Anyway, the whole project is a lot of fun and brought a genuine laugh when we saw it. It’s a clever way to poke gentle fun at the germaphobes who came up with other, less whimsical methods of dispensing hand sanitizer. But let’s face it, they ended up being proven pretty much on the mark about things.

Continue reading “Sneeze Into Your Hand, Not Your Elbow With This Nose-Shaped Sanitizer Dispenser” →

When Is One Pixel Cooler Than Millions?

July 9, 2022 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

On vacation, we went to see a laser show – one of the old school variety that combines multiple different lasers of many different colors together into a single beam, modulates them to create different colors, and sends it bouncing off galvos to the roof of a planetarium. To a musical score, naturally.

When I was a kid, I had no idea how they worked, but laser shows were awesome. As a younger grownup hacker, and after some friends introduced me to the dark arts, I built my own setup. I now know how they work from the deepest innards out, and they are no less awesome. Nowadays, you can get a capable set of galvos and drivers for around a hundred bucks from the far east, it’s fair to say that there’s no magic left, but the awesome still remains.

RGB laser — “laser show” by Ilmicrofono Oggiono

At the same time, lasers, and laser shows, are supremely retro. The most stunning example of this hit me while tearing apart a Casio projector ages ago to extract the otherwise unobtainable brand new 455 nm blue laser diodes. There I was pulling one diode out of an array of 24 from inside the projector, and throwing away the incredibly powerful DSP processor, hacking apart the precision optical path, and pulling out the MEMS DLP mirror array with nearly a million little mirrors, to replace it with two mirrors, driven around by big old coil-of-wire electromagnets. Like a caveman.

But still, there’s something about a laser show that I’ve never seen replicated – the insane color gamut that they can produce. It is, or can be, a lot more than just the RGB that you get out of your monitor. Some of the colors you can get out of a laser (or a prism) are simply beautiful in a way that I can’t explain. I can tell you that you can get them from combining red, blue, green, cyan, and maybe even a deep purple laser.

What you get with a laser show pales in comparison to the multi-megapixel projectors in even a normal movie theater. Heck, you’ve really got one pixel. But if you move it around fast enough, and accompany it with a decent soundtrack, you’ve still got an experience that’s worth having while you still can.

[Banner image from a positively ancient RGB laser hack. We need more! Send us yours!]

Your Console, Your Cartridge, You Choose? Nintendo Faces A Challenge

July 9, 2022 by Jenny List 30 Comments

If you read our articles, you’ll notice that we will usually feature images related to the subjects we talk about. If they came from another source and they’re not CC-licensed or similar then they are the property of someone else but we are using them under a doctrine known as fair use. Excerpts of copyrighted material may be used under fair use for the purposes of such things as journalistic reporting, so for example we can use a copyrighted picture of Captain America were we to write about Marvel superheroes. Some content owners still try to stop this, and it’s one of them that [Linus Tech Tips] has in their sights as they have published a guide to running Nintendo Switch games on a Steam Deck without they believe giving any justifiable cause for the notoriously litigious game giant to take action. It’s full of carefully blurred Nintendo IP, and there is no coverage of pirate software downloads.

On one hand it’s about a heavy-handed console developer taking down small online content producers, but there’s another angle which is far more relevant to the hardware community who read Hackaday. It also has application in the field of software emulation, because while the console manufacturer would prefer to stop all but their own unmodified hardware running a game there should be nothing to stop a legally owned piece of software or hardware being run in any way its owner chooses. This is the central thesis explored at the end of the video, and the gimmick of trying to draw Nintendo into the open on the matter is their way of bringing publicity to it.

Even though [Linus Tech Tips] is probably one of the most viewed technology YouTube channels, it’s clear that Nintendo will have the deeper pockets should they choose to rise to the bait. So we’re sure their lawyers are all over this as we write, but we’d be interested to see whether the claims made in the video are enough to see it stay up. It would be nice to think that it might cause Nintendo to reconsider some of their policies, but we’re not holding our breath. Continue reading “Your Console, Your Cartridge, You Choose? Nintendo Faces A Challenge” →

Mis-captured signal transitions shown on the screen of the LA104, with problematic parts circled in red.

When Your Logic Analyzer Can’t Tell Good And Bad Signals Apart

July 9, 2022 by Arya Voronova 17 Comments

[Avian] has picked up a Miniware LA104 – a small battery-powered logic analyzer with builtin protocol decoders. Such analyzers are handy tools for when you quickly need to see what really is happening with a certain signal, and they’re cheap enough to be sacrificial when it comes to risky repairs. Sadly, he stumbled upon a peculiar problem – the analyzer would show the signal glitching every now and then, even at very low bitrates. Even more surprisingly, the glitches didn’t occur in the signal traces when exported and viewed on a laptop.

He dug into the problem, as [Avian] does. Going through the problem-ridden capture files helped him realize that the glitch would always happen when one of the signal edges would be delayed by a few microseconds relative to other signal edges — a regular occurrence when it comes to digital logic. This seems to stem from compression being used by the FPGA-powered “capture samples and send them” part of the analyzer. This bug only relates to the signal as it’s being displayed on the analyzer’s screen, and turned out that while most of this analyzer’s interface is drawn by the STM32 CPU, the trace drawing part specifically was done by the FPGA using a separate LCD interface.

It would appear Miniware didn’t do enough testing, and it’s impossible to distinguish a good signal from a faulty one when using a LA104 – arguably, the primary function of a logic analyzer. In the best of Miniware traditions, going as far as being hostile to open-source firmware at times, the FPGA bistream source code is proprietary. Thus, this bug is not something we can easily fix ourselves, unless Miniware steps up and releases a gateware update. Until then, if you bought a LA104, you can’t rely on the signal it shows on the screen.

When it comes to Miniware problems, we’ve recently covered a Miniware tweezer repair, requiring a redesign of the shell originally held together with copious amount of glue. At times, it feels like there’s something in common between glue-filled unrepairable gadgets and faulty proprietary firmware. If this bug ruins the LA104 for you, hey, at least you can reflash it to work as an electronics interfacing multitool.