Author: Arya Voronova

466 Articles

Supercon 2023: Thea Flowers Renders KiCad Projects On The Web

October 1, 2024 by 8 Comments

Last year’s Supercon, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Thea [Stargirl] Flowers, who told us about her KiCanvas project, with its trials, its tribulations, and its triumphs. KiCanvas brings interactive display of KiCad boards and schematics into your browser, letting you embed your PCB’s information right into your blog post or online documentation.

Give the KiCanvas plugin a URL to your KiCad file, and it will render your file in the browser, fully on the fly. There’s no .jpg to update and re-upload, no jobs to re-run each time you find a mistake and update your board – your files are always up to date, and your audience is always able to check it out without launching KiCad.

Images are an intuitive representation for schematics and PCB files, but they’re letting hackers down massively. Thea’s KiCanvas project is about making our KiCad projects all that more accessible to newcomers, and it’s succeeded – nowadays, you can encounter KiCanvas schematic embeds in the wild on various hackers’ blogs. The Typescript code didn’t write itself, and neither was it easy – she’s brought a fair few war stories to the DesignLab stage.

A hacker’s passion to share can move mountains. Thea’s task was a formidable one, too – KiCad is a monumental project with a decades-long history. There are quite respectable reasons for someone to move this particular mountain – helping you share your projects quickly but extensively, and letting people learn about your projects without breaking a sweat.

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HP WebOS TouchPad Gets With The USB-C Times

October 1, 2024 by 9 Comments

Despite HP shuttering their WebOS project some time ago, the operating system has kept a dedicated following. One device in particular, the HP TouchPad, was released just a month before webOS went under and is still a favorite among hackers — giving the device the kind of love that HP never could. [Alan Morford] from the pivotCE blog shares the kind of hack that helps this device exist in a modern-day world: a USB-C upgrade for charging and data transfer.

The inline micro USB port used is a perfect fit for a USB-C upgrade, with only small amounts of PCB and case cutting required. Just make sure to get a breakout that has the appropriate 5.1 K resistors onboard, and follow [Alan]’s tutorial closely. He shows all the points you need to tap to let your TouchPad charge and transfer data to your computer, whether for firmware flashing or for daily use.

This hack doesn’t preserve the USB-OTG feature, but that’s fixable with a single WUSB3801. Apart from that, this mod is perfect for keeping your webOS tablet alive and kicking in today’s increasingly USB-C dominated world. Once you’ve done it, you might want to take care of your PlayStation 4 controllers and Arduino Uno boards, too.

IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch

September 30, 2024 by 11 Comments

It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an outstanding hack that adds a dual SIM slot to a US-sold eSIM iPhone 15/15 Pro, while preserving its exclusive mmwave module. No doubt, making use of the boardview files and schematics, it shows us that smartphone modding isn’t dead — it could be that we need to acknowledge the new tools we now have at our disposal.

When different hardware features are region-locked, sometimes you want to get the best of both worlds. This mod lets you go the entire length seamlessly, no bodges. It uses a lovely looking flexible printed circuit (FPC) patch board to tap into a debug header with SIM slot signals, and provides a customized Li-ion pouch cell with a cutout for the SIM slot. There’s just the small matter of using a CNC mill to make a cutout in the case where the SIM slot will go, and you’ll need to cut a buried trace to disable the eSIM module. Hey, we mentioned our skills needed to catch up, right? From there, it appears that iOS recognizes the new two SIM slots seamlessly.

The video is impressive and absolutely worth a watch if modding is your passion, and if you have a suitable CNC and a soldering iron, you can likely install this mod for yourself. Of course, you lose some things, like waterproofing, the eSIM feature, and your warranty. However, nothing could detract from this being a fully functional modkit for a modern-day phone, an inspiration for us all. Now, perhaps one of us can take a look at building a mod helping us do parts transplants between phones, parts pairing be damned.

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Switch Your RP2040 Between 3.3 V And 1.8 V

September 30, 2024 by 5 Comments

Ever want to build a RP2040 devboard that has everything you could ever want? Bad news,  “everything” also means adding 1.8 V GPIO voltage support. The good news is that this write-up by [xenia] explains the process of adding a “3.3 V/1.8 V” slide switch onto your board.

Some parts are obvious, like the need to pick a flash chip that works at either voltage, for instance. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. But there’s more you’d be surprised by, like the crystal, a block where the recommended passives are tuned for 3.3 V, and you need to re-calculate them when it comes to 1.8 V operation – not great for swapping between voltages with a flick of a switch. Then, you need to adjust the bootloader to detect the voltage supplied — that’s where the fun begins, in large part. Modifying the second stage bootloader to support the flash chip being used proved to be quite a hassle, but we’re graced with a working implementation in the end.

All the details and insights laid out meticulously and to the point, well-deserved criticism of Raspberry Pi silicon and mask ROM design choices, code fully in Rust, and a success story in the end – [xenia]’s write-up has all you could wish for.

Want to learn more about the RP2040’s bootloader specifically? Then check this out — straight out of Cornell, a bootloader that’s also a self-spreading worm. Not only is it perfect for updating your entire RP2040 flock, but it also teaches you everything you could want to know about RP2040’s self-bringup process.

Some SPI Flash Chip Nuances Worth Learning

September 29, 2024 by 13 Comments

Some hackers have the skills to help us find noteworthy lessons in even the most basic of repairs. For instance, is your computer failing to boot? Guess what, it could just be a flash chip that’s to blame — and, there’s more you should know about such a failure mode. [Manawyrm] and [tSYS] over at the Kittenlabs blog show us a server motherboard fix involving a SPI flash chip replacement, and tell us every single detail we should know if we ever encounter such a case.

They got some Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 boards for cheap, and indeed, one of the BIOS chips simply failed — they show you how to figure that one out. Lesson one: after flashing a SPI chip, remember to read back the image and compare it to the one you just flashed into it! Now, you might be tempted to take any flash chip as a replacement, after all, many are command-compatible. Indeed, the duo crew harvested a SPI chip from an ESP32 board, the size matched, and surely, that’d suffice.

That’s another factor you should watch out for. Lesson two is to compare the SPI flash commands being used on the two chips you’re working with. In this case, the motherboard would read the BIOS alright and boot just fine, but wasn’t able to save the BIOS settings. Nothing you couldn’t fix by buying the exact chip needed and waiting for it to arrive, of course! SPI flash command sets are fun and worth learning about — after all, they could be the key to hacking your “smart” kettle. Need a 1.8 V level shifter while flashing? Remember, some resistors and a NPN transistor is more than enough.

Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

September 29, 2024 by 17 Comments

Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and decided to figure out just what this laptop’s deal is.

Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.

All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors — same goes for certain electric cars.

Switching Regulators: Mistake Fixing For Dummies

September 19, 2024 by 30 Comments

Some time ago, while designing the PCB for the Sony Vaio replacement motherboard, I went on a quest to find a perfect 5 V boost regulator. Requirements are simple – output 5 V at about 2A , with input ranging from 3 V to 5 V, and when the input is 5 V, go into “100% duty” (“pass-through”/”bypass”) mode where the output is directly powered from the input, saving me from any conversion inefficiencies for USB port power when a charger is connected. Plus, a single EN pin, no digital configuration, small footprint, no BGA, no unsolicited services or offers – what more could one ask for.

As usual, I go to an online shop, set the parameters: single channel, all topologies that say “boost” in the name, output range, sort by price, download datasheets one by one and see what kind of nice chips I can find. Eventually, I found the holy grail chip for me, the MIC2876, originally from Micrel, now made by Microchip.

MIC2876 is a 5 V regulator with the exact features I describe above – to a T! It also comes with cool features, like a PG “Power good” output, bidirectional load disconnect (voltage applied to output won’t leak into input), EMI reduction and efficiency modes, and it’s decently cheap. I put it on the Sony Vaio board among five other regulators, ordered the board, assembled it, powered it up, and applied a positive logic level onto the regulator’s EN pin.

Immediately, I saw the regulator producing 3 V output accompanied by loud buzzing noise – as opposed to producing 5 V output without any audible noise. Here’s how the regulator ended up failing, how exactly I screwed up the design, and how I’m creating a mod board to fix it – so that the boards I meticulously assembled, don’t go to waste.

Some Background… Noise

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