Year: 2022

Custom Sony Camera Remote Built With ESP32

October 21, 2022 by 10 Comments

Whether you’re shooting video or photos, having a camera remote can really improve your productivity. No longer do you have to run back to the camera to press its tiny buttons! [Frank Zhao] is a Sony user, so decided to whip up a custom remote using the ESP32 for his Alpha camera, adding special features along the way.

The build communicates with the camera over WiFi, but can fall back to Infrared if there’s an issue with the radio link. It’s built around the M5StickC, which is a pre-built device featuring an ESP32 and a small display in a handheld form factor. It let him build the remote in half the size of the official Sony device. With limited buttons on board, though, he relies on the IMU to control many advanced features with motion gestures.

The remote enables a bunch of functionality that Sony didn’t bake into its cameras from the factory. There’s a sound-activated shutter release, dual shutter mode, and several timer-based tools including astrophotography modes. There’s also a big knob you can add for focus pulls, and a mode to reset the auto-focus when you’re frustrated that it isn’t working properly. Some of the features work better than others, as sometimes, the camera doesn’t respond to commands quickly enough. Regardless, it’s pretty neat that [Frank] has unlocked so much extra functionality with his custom $20 remote.

We’ve seen other homebrewed tools open up new creative possibilities for cameras before, too. If you’ve got your own nifty camera hacks, let us know on the tipsline!

HP-41C, The Forth Edition

October 21, 2022 by 45 Comments

If you have an HP-41 — arguably the best calculator ever made, you might not have noticed that there’s a version of Forth for it. The code was written a while back in assembly and will work on anything that actually emulates the device properly, such as a SwissMicros DM41X. [Calculator Clique] shows you how it works in a recent video that you can watch below.

The original code dates back to 1984, but some recent detective work by [Angel Margin] has the code running again. If you know about synthetic programming on the 41C and the oddities of its internal architecture, you can’t help but be impressed.

Of course, Forth is meant to be easy to port over, but if you read about some of the architectural challenges, you start to realize this could be one of the more difficult implementations you’ve ever seen. Don’t forget you have what is, by today’s standards, an extremely limited amount of resources.

That being said, calling the HP41C a calculator is almost a crime. It is really a tiny computer hiding inside a calculator case. Then again, the best calculators always are.

We wonder if the code would run on an emulated 41C? Were you part of the TI calculator gang? No problem.

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Unconventional Longboard Built From Single Slice Of Tree

October 20, 2022 by 21 Comments

Typically, skateboards and longboards are made out of many laminated layers of wood. This gives them a pleasing flex that produces a comfortable ride. However, it’s not the only way to do things. [DesignCo] went for an unconventional design, using a large slice out of a tree instead.

The benefit of using a section of tree trunk for a board is that it has a very attractive look with all the rings visible. To turn it into a board, it was first roughly cut to shape, before being planed down to a uniform thickness. Further shaping was then achieved with the use of a flap wheel on an angle grinder. The wood was finished with several coats of tung oil before being given a final seal with matte lacquer. A solid steel tail was then prepared to match, shaped with an nice curve and with two bolts screwed in. These bolts were then epoxied into the board, joining the two, and trucks installed underneath.

The final build looks stunning, and is ride-able too. It’s likely a little slipperier than a board with grip tape, and it probably wouldn’t handle bumps as well as a traditional design. Long boards are rarely about performance anyway, though, and this board looks like great fun to get around on.

We’ve seen non-traditional longboards before, too. Video after the break.

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A solar inverter that asks for a password on its display

Decompiling Software To Fix An Old Solar Inverter

October 20, 2022 by 16 Comments

It’s a fact of life that electronic devices become obsolete after a few years. Sometimes this is because technology has moved on, but it can also happen that a perfectly functional device becomes near-useless simply because the original manufacturer no longer supports it. When [Buy It Fix It] found a pair of second-hand Power-One Aurora solar inverters, he ran into an issue for which he needed access to the service menu, which happened to be password-protected. The original manufacturer had ceased to exist, and the current owner of the brand name was unable to help, so [Buy It Fix It] had to resort to reverse engineering to find the password.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archive, [Buy It Fix It] was able to download the PC software bundle that originally came with the inverters. But in order to access all features, a password was required that could only be obtained by registering the unit with the manufacturer. That wasn’t going to happen, so [Buy It Fix It] fired up dnSpy, a decompiler and debugger for .NET programs. After a bit of searching he found the section that checked the password, and by simply copying that section into a new program he was able to make his own key generator.

With the service password now available, [Buy It Fix It] was able to set the inverter to the correct voltage setting and hook it up to his solar panels. Interestingly, the program code also had references to “PONG”, “Tetris” and “tiramisu” at various places; these turned out to be Easter eggs in the code, containing simple versions of those two games as well as a photo of the Italian dessert.

Inside the software archive was also another program that enabled the programming of low-level functions within the inverter, things that few users would ever need to touch. This program was not written in .NET but in C or something similar, so it required the use of x32dbg to look at the machine code. Again, this program was password-protected, but the master password was simply stored as the unencrypted string “91951” — the last five digits of the manufacturer’s old phone number.

The inverter was not actually working when [Buy It Fix It] first got it, and his repair video (also embedded below) is also well worth watching if you’re into power electronics repair. Hacking solar inverters to enable more features is often possible, but of course it’s much easier if the entire design is open source.

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A Homebrew AC Upgrade For The Fluke 8840A

October 20, 2022 by 9 Comments

[William Dudley] picked up a Fluke 8840A bench multimeter at an auction, but was sad to find out that it was reading resistances inaccurately. It was also missing the optional board to enable AC measurements. Desiring to use the otherwise lovely meter, he set about repairing and upgrading the device.

Thankfully, the 8840A was from a time when Fluke used to openly publish schematics in its manuals. Thus, combined with taking a look at some photos online, it was straightforward for [William] to recreate the original AC “Option 09” board to enable the desired functionality. As is usually the way, his efforts didn’t work first time, but after some bodge wires were installed, all was well. [William] reports the measurements are “reasonable, maybe even sufficient” with no calibration undertaken.

Repairing the resistance issue was easy. It turned out to be corrosion on the selector switches, revealed when high-resistance measurements were accurate, but low-resistance measurements weren’t. A bit of flick-flacker with some contact cleaner sprayed into the switches got things working again nicely.

It’s nice to see old hardware restored to full functionality, particularly when it’s as attractive and well-built as an old Fluke meter. Bringing back old tools from the dead? You know we wanna hear about it!

ERRF 22: Building A Library Of Filament Colors

October 20, 2022 by 10 Comments

If you’ve ever paged through the color samples at the hardware store trying to match a particular color, you know how hard it can be. Not only are there nearly limitless color variations, but each manufacturer has their own formulas and tints. Often times, the only way to get the exact color you need is to get it custom mixed.

Unfortunately, that’s not really an option when it comes to filament for your 3D printer. Will that roll of orange from Hatchbox actually match the orange from Overture? That’s where the Filament Librarian comes in. Created by [Joe Kaufeld], the project aims to catalog and photograph as many 3D printer filaments as possible so you can see exactly what you’re getting.

Now of course, if it was as easy as looking at pictures of filament swatches on your computer, you wouldn’t need this service to begin with. So what’s the trick? A custom automated camera rig, powered by the Raspberry Pi, is used to position, light, and photograph each filament sample in the library. So while [Joe] can’t promise your monitor is showing a perfect representation of each filament’s color, you can at least be sure they will all look correct in relation to each other. So for example, the site can help you figure out if the local Microcenter stocks anything that comes close to matching Prusament’s Galaxy Silver PLA.

[Joe] brought a collection of his samples along with his slick camera setup to the 2022 East Coast RepRap Festival so attendees could see first-hand how he adds a new filament to the database. With an easy-to-use touch-screen interface, it takes just seconds to get the camera ready for the next shot.

Now that he’s got the hardware and the procedure down, [Joe] is asking the community to help out by providing him with filament samples to process. It doesn’t take much: all he asks is you snip him off a couple meters of filament, write down what it is and who makes it on a pre-made form, and drop it in the mail. If you’re in the US, you can send it directly to his address in Indiana, and for those on the other side of the globe, he’s got a drop point in the Netherlands you can use.

We love a good passion project here at Hackaday, so here’s hoping that the Filament Librarian receives plenty of new filament samples from all over the planet to feed into that fancy camera setup of his.

An ortholinear keyboard with predominantly blank white keycaps. There are two red keycaps on the bottom outside corners. The center of the keyboard houses a large LCD in portrait orientation on a red PCB.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Keezyboost40 Is A Cyberdeck Masquerading As A Keyboard

October 20, 2022 by 5 Comments

There’s something to be said for über-powerful cyberdecks, but there’s also a certain appeal to less powerful decks squeezed into a tiny form factor. [Christian Lo] has designed a cyberdeck that looks like a simple ortholinear keyboard but is running a more flexible environment.

There are games and animations you can play on QMK, but [Lo] felt that a different framework would give him more flexibility to really stretch the limits of what this Raspberry Pi Pico-powered deck could do. He decided to go with a Rust-based firmware with the keyberon library and says, “it felt like I was in control of the firmware.” While the board is using Rust for now, [Lo] says he’s open to conversations about other firmware options to achieve his goals, like a virtual pet game for the board.

The PCB is described as “bog standard” with the possible exception of placing the Pi in a cutout on the board to keep things as low profile as possible. The trade-off comes in the form of reduced board rigidity and potentially increased strain on the connections to the microcontroller.

Looking for more cool cyberdecks? Check out the Winners of the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest or go see all the entries on the Contest Page.
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