The splitter with a 3D-printed case and three yellow cables coming out of it, powering two phones and one powerbank at the same time

Split A USB-C PD Port Into Three Port-ions

July 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

There’s no shortage of USB-C chargers in all sorts of configurations, but sometimes, you simply need a few more charging ports on the go, and you got a single one. Well then, check out [bluepylons]’s USB-C splitter, which takes a single USB-C 5V/3A port and splits it into three 5V/1A plugs, wonderful for charging a good few devices on the go!

This adapter does things right – it actually checks that 3A is provided, with just a comparator, and uses that to switch power to the three outputs, correctly signalling to the consumer devices that they may consume about 1A from the plugs. This hack’s documentation is super considerate – you get detailed instructions on how to reproduce it, every nuance you might want to keep in mind, and even different case options depending on whether you want to pot the case or instead use a thermal pad for a specific component which might have to dissipate some heat during operation!

This hack has been documented with notable care for whoever might want to walk the journey of building one for themselves, so if you ever need a splitter, this one is a wonderful weekend project you are sure to complete. Wonder what kind of project would be a polar opposite, but in all the best ways? Why, this 2kW USB-PD PSU, most certainly.

A FreeCAD sticker, a FreeCAD pencil, a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher SAO PCB and the board-to-be-encased next to each other

FreeCAD Foray: Shells For All Our PCBs

July 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 57 Comments

Are you the kind of hacker who tries to pick up FreeCAD, but doesn’t want to go through a tutorial and instead pokes around the interface, trying to transfer the skills from a CAD suite you’ve been using before? I’ve been there too, and in my experience, FreeCAD doesn’t treat such forays lightly. It’s a huge package that enables everything from architecture to robotics design, so if you just want a 3D-printed case for a PCB project, the hill can be steep. So let’s take that first simple project as an example, and see if it helps you learn a little bit of FreeCAD.

As motivation, I recently built a USB-C PSU board that uses a DC PSU and does the USB-C handshaking to provide 20 V to a laptop. It is currently my only 100 W USB-C PSU, and my 60 W PSU just died, which is why I now use this board 24/7. I have brought it on two different conferences so far, which has highlighted a problem – it’s a board with tons of exposed contacts, which means that it isn’t perfectly travel-friendly, and neither it is airport-friendly – not that I won’t try and bring it anyway. So, currently, I have to watch that nothing shorts out – given the board has 3.3 V close to 20 V at 9 A, it’s a bit of a worry.

This means I have to design some sort of case for it. I was taught SolidWorks in the half a year that I spent in a university, and honestly, I’m tired of the licensing and proprietary format stuff. When it comes to more hobbyist-accepted tools like Fusion360, I just don’t feel like exchanging one proprietary software for another. So, FreeCAD is the obvious choice – apart from OpenSCAD, which I know and love, but I don’t always want to think up fifteen variable names for every silly little feature. That, and I also want to fillet corners every now and then.

For a full-open-source workflow, today’s PCB is designed with KiCad, too. Let’s see about installing FreeCAD, and the few things you need to import a KiCad board file into FreeCAD.

Continue reading “FreeCAD Foray: Shells For All Our PCBs” →

Showing the modchip installed into a powered up Xbox, most of the board space taken up by a small Pi Pico board. A wire taps into the motherboard, and a blue LED on the modchip is lit up.

An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene

June 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 44 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a modchip that adds features to your game console, you might have noticed sanded-off IC markings, epoxy blobs, or just obscure chips with unknown source code. It’s ironic – these modchips are a shining example of hacking, and yet they don’t represent hacking culture one bit. Usually, they are more of a black box than the console they’re tapping into. This problem has plagued the original XBOX hacking community, having them rely on inconsistent suppliers of obscure boards that would regularly fall off the radar as each crucial part went to end of life. Now, a group of hackers have come up with a solution, and [Macho Nacho Productions] on YouTube tells us its story – it’s an open-source modchip with an open firmware, ModXO.

Like many modern modchips and adapters, ModXO is based on an RP2040, and it’s got a lot of potential – it already works for feeding a BIOS to your console, it’s quite easy to install, and it’s only going to get better. [Macho Nacho Productions] shows us the modchip install process in the video, tells us about the hackers involved, and gives us a sneak peek at the upcoming features, including, possibly, support for the Prometheos project that equips your Xbox with an entire service menu. Plus, with open-source firmware and hardware, you can add tons more flashy and useful stuff, like small LCD/OLED screens for status display and LED strips of all sorts!

If you’re looking to add a modchip to your OG XBOX, it looks like the proprietary options aren’t much worth considering anymore. XBOX hacking has a strong community behind it for historical reasons and has spawned entire projects like XBMC that outgrew the community. There’s even an amazing book about how its security got hacked. If you would like to read it, it’s free and worth your time. As for open-source modchips, they rule, and it’s not the first one we see [Macho Nacho Productions] tell us about – here’s an open GameCube modchip that shook the scene, also with a RP2040!

Continue reading “An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene” →

A graphic representing the features of a Sleep Number smart bed, showing individually controlled heated zones

Root Your Sleep Number Smart Bed, Discover It Phoning Home

June 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 63 Comments

Did you know you can get a “smart bed” that tracks your sleep, breathing, heart rate, and even regulates the temperature of the mattress? No? Well, you can get root access to one, too, as [Dillan] shows, and if you’re lucky, find a phone-home backdoor-like connection. The backstory to this hack is pretty interesting, too!

You see, a Sleep Number bed requires a network connection for its smart features, with no local option offered. Not to worry — [Dillan] wrote a Homebridge plugin that’d talk the cloud API, so you could at least meaningfully work with the bed data. However, the plugin got popular, Sleep Number didn’t expect the API to be that popular. When they discovered the plugin, they asked that it be shut down. Tech-inclined customers are not to be discouraged, of course.

Continue reading “Root Your Sleep Number Smart Bed, Discover It Phoning Home” →

Two of these boards next to each other, one showing the front, assembled, side with the MCU and supporting components soldered on, and the other showing the back, patch panel, side, with wires connecting the MCU pads to testpoints leading to the supporting components

Try Out MCUs With This Jumperable TSSOP20 Adapter

June 29, 2024 by Arya Voronova 7 Comments

There are so many new cool MCUs coming out, and you want to play with all of them, but, initially, they tend to be accessible as bare chips. Devboards might be hard to get, not expose everything, or carry a premium price. [Willmore] has faced this problem with an assortment of new WCH-made MCUs, and brings us all a solution – a universal board for TSSOP20-packaged MCUs, breadboard-friendly and adaptable to any pinout with only a few jumpers on the underside.

The board brings you everything you might want from a typical MCU breakout – an onboard 3.3V regulator, USB series resistors, a 1.5K pullup, decoupling capacitors, and a USB-C port. All GPIOs are broken out, and there’s a separate header you can wire up for all your SWD/UART/USB/whatever needs – just use the “patch panel” on the bottom of the board and pick the test points you want to join. [Willmore] has used these boards for the CH32Vxxx family, and they could, no doubt, be used for more – solder your MCU on, go through the pin table in the datasheet, do a little point-to-point wiring, and you get a pretty functional development board.

Continue reading “Try Out MCUs With This Jumperable TSSOP20 Adapter” →

Screenshot of the blog post, showing how you can optimize your battery level measurement resistor dividers, among many other things

Making Your Wireless Keyboard Truly Low-Power

June 26, 2024 by Arya Voronova 45 Comments

The basics of keyboard design are tried and true at this point, but there are still a few aspects yet unconquered. One of them is making your keyboards wireless. You might think it’s easy, but if you just slap a wireless-enabled microcontroller onto your board, you’ll soon be left with a dead battery. Rejoice – [Pete Johanson], creator of ZMK, tells all that you want to know about making your keyboard low-power.

In a lengthy blog post, he goes through everything that a typical keyboard consists of, and points out factor after factor that you never knew could cause a spike in power consumption. Are you using muxes or config options that will force your MCU to always stay alert? Is your voltage regulator’s quiescent current low enough, and can the same be said about other parts you’re using? Does your MCU have to work extra hard transmitting bytes because you’ve put a copper fill under its antenna? Most importantly, is the firmware you’re using designed to optimize power consumption at its core?

If you’ve ever thought about designing low-power keyboards, hell, any low-power device, you seriously should read this post – it will set you at ease by giving you a checklist of things to do, and it also links to quite a few other useful resources, like the ZMK power profiler. Perhaps, if you’re building a wireless keyboard or just creating battery-powered device, you should consider ZMK, as it sure seems to be written with energy efficiency in mind.

Want to learn more about what it takes to build a low-power device? Our 2023 Low-Power Contest attracted a wide range of entrants, and they’ve shared a flurry of methods and tricks you can use to build any sort of battery-juice-sipping gadget.

screenshot of the code defining a hid descriptor by using essentially macros for common descriptor types

Coupling STM32 And Linux? Consider HID Over I2C

June 26, 2024 by Arya Voronova 25 Comments

If you’re pairing a tiny Linux computer to a few peripherals — perhaps you’re building a reasonably custom Pi-powered device — it’s rightfully tempting to use something like an STM32 for all your low-level tasks, from power management to reading keyboard events.

Now, in case you were wondering how to tie the two together, consider HID over I2C, it’s a standardized protocol with wide software and peripheral support, easily implementable and low-power. What’s more, [benedekkupper] gives you an example STM32 project with a detailed explanation on how you too can benefit from the protocol.

There are several cool things about this project. For a start, its code is generic enough that it will port across the entire STM32 lineup nicely. Just change the pin definitions as needed, compile it, flash it onto your devboard and experiment away. Need to change the descriptors? The hid-rdf library used lets you define a custom descriptor super easily, none of that building a descriptor from scratch stuff, and it even does compile-time verification of the descriptor!

The project has been tested with a Raspberry Pi 400, and [benedekkupper] links a tutorial on quickly adding your I2C-HID device on an Linux platform; all you need is DeviceTree support. Wondering what’s possible with HID? We’ve seen hackers play with HID aplenty here, and hacking on the HID standard isn’t just for building keyboards. It can let you automate your smartphone, reuse a laptop touchpad or even a sizeable Wacom input surface, liberate extra buttons on gamepads, or build your own touchscreen display.