How Framework Laptop Broke The Hacker Ceiling

October 30, 2023 by Arya Voronova 25 Comments

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Framework laptop over the past two years – back in 2021, they announced a vision for a repairable and hacker-friendly laptop based on the x86 architecture. They’re not claiming to be either open-source or libre hardware, but despite that, they have very much delivered on repairability and fostered a hacker community around the laptop, while sticking to pretty ambitious standards for building upgradable hardware that lasts.

I’ve long had a passion for laptop hardware, and when Hackaday covered Framework announcing the motherboards-for-makers program, I submitted my application, then dove into the ecosystem and started poking at the hardware internals every now and then. A year has passed since then, and I’ve been using a Framework as a daily driver, reading the forums on the regular, hanging out in the Discord server, and even developed a few Framework accessories along the way. I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen unfold in this ecosystem, both from Framework and the hackers that joined their effort, because I feel like we have something to learn from it.

If you have a hacker mindset, you might be wondering – just how much is there to hack on? And, if you have a business mindset, you might be wondering – how much can a consumer-oriented tech company achieve by creating a hacker-friendly environment? Today, I’d like to give you some insights and show cool things I’ve seen happen as an involved observer, as well as highlight the path that Framework is embarking upon with its new Framework 16.

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All Inverters Are (Not) Created Equal

October 30, 2023 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Building a crystal clock source for a CPU used to be a bit of an effort but these days, there’s nothing to it. Even if your CPU or other device needs an external clock, you just slap in an inverter, a crystal, and two capacitors together, and you are done, right? Maybe not. [Dave Collins] got interested in the common circuit and pulled out his scope and an array of different kinds of inverters. He looked at inverters and NAND gates and a few common circuit configurations.

This is one of those things you just assume is of little importance, but it turns out your choice of circuit architecture and active device can have a big impact on the output. But who has time to do all the testing? Thanks to [Dave] you don’t have to.

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Creating A New Metal Rohde & Schwarz EB200 Miniport Receiver Dial Knob

October 30, 2023 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Recently [Roberto Barrios] got his hands on a Rohde & Schwarz EB200 monitoring and surveillance receiver that, despite its late 90s vintage, was in mint condition. Aside from damage to the main dial, that is, which was very much broken. With no off-the-shelf replacement available in 2023, the obvious answer was to get a close-enough dial knob with the rough proportions and use a lathe to machine it into shape. Initially, [Roberto] had used some filler material to replace the front of the original knob that was missing, but this was a decidedly inferior tactile experience with questionable long-term reliability.

Dimensions of the Rhode & Schwarz EB200 dial knob. (Credit: Roberto Barrios)

The challenge in replacing the original knob with a proper replacement was in how the dial knob is mounted on the receiver, as an internally threaded shell that goes on the internal dial encoder assembly. With a lathe at his behest, taking an off-the-shelf dial knob that accepts a 6 mm shaft and turning it into a compatible knob was a straightforward affair. Removing the excess material and creating the internal 1 mm pitch thread allowed the newly made knob to fit on the receiver like an OEM part. The only niggle was having to remove 1.8 mm off the face of the brass body to get the knob to sit close to the front panel.

Unlike the old patched-up knob, this new one is fully out of metal and has the absolutely essential feature of the recessed area for easy fine-tuning. Although perhaps not the most exciting fix for old gear, it’s decidedly essential to keep it functional.