Author: Bryan Cockfield

1852 Articles

Teleconferencing Like It’s 1988: Connecting Vintage Hardware To Zoom

September 23, 2020 by 9 Comments

Hang up your car phone and toss that fax machine in the garbage. Even back in the late 80s it was possible to do away with these primitive technologies in favor of video conferencing, even though this technology didn’t catch on en masse until recently. In fact, Mitsubishi released a piece of video conferencing equipment called the VisiTel that can be put to use today, provided you can do a bit of work to get it to play along nicely with modern technology.

[Alex] was lucky enough to have one of these on hand, as soon as it was powered up he was able to get to work deciphering the messaging protocol of the device. To do this he showed the camera certain pictures with known properties and measured the output waveforms coming from the device, which were AM modulated over an RJ9 connection which he had changed to a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

It communicates in a series of pictures instead of sending an actual video signal, so [Alex] had a lot of work to do to properly encode and decode the stream. He goes into incredible detail on his project page about this process and is worth a read for anyone interested in signal processing. Ultimately, [Alex] was able to patch this classic piece of technology into a Zoom call and the picture quality is excellent when viewed through the lens of $399 80s technology.

We have been seeing a lot of other hacks around video conferencing in the past six months as well, such as physical mute buttons and a mirror that improves eye contact through the webcam.

Displaying Incoming Server Attacks By Giving Server Logs A Scoreboard

September 23, 2020 by 9 Comments

In the server world, it’s a foregone conclusion that ports shouldn’t be exposed to the greater Internet if they don’t need to be. There are malicious bots everywhere that will try and randomly access anything connected to a network, and it’s best just to shut them off completely. If you have to have a port open, like 22 for SSH, it’ll need to be secured properly and monitored so that the administrator can keep track of it. Usually this is done in a system log and put to the side, but [Nick] wanted a more up-front reminder of just how many attempts were being made to log into his systems.

This build actively monitors attempts to log into his server on port 22 and notifies him via a numerical display and series of LEDs. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in a 3D-printed case, and works by interfacing with a program called fail2ban running on the server. fail2ban‘s primary job is to block IP addresses that fail a certain number of login attempts on a server, but being FOSS it can be modified for situations like this. With some Python code running on the Pi, it is able to gather data fed to it from fail2ban and display it.

[Nick] was able to see immediate results too. Within 24 hours he saw 1633 login attempts on a server with normal login enabled, which was promptly shown on the display. A video of the counter in action is linked below. You don’t always need a secondary display if you need real-time information on your server, though. This Pi server has its own display built right in to its case.

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This DIY Drill Press Is Very Well Executed

September 22, 2020 by 22 Comments

Plenty of projects we see here could easily be purchased in some form or other. Robot arms, home automation, drones, and even some software can all be had with a quick internet search, to be sure. But there’s no fun in simply buying something when it can be built instead. The same goes for tools as well, and this homemade drill press from [ericinventor] shows that it’s not only possible to build your own tools rather than buy them, but often it’s cheaper as well.

This mini drill press has every feature we could think of needing in a tool like this. It uses off-the-shelf components including the motor and linear bearing carriage (which was actually salvaged from the Z-axis of a CNC machine). The chassis was built from stock aluminum and bolted together, making sure to keep everything square so that the drill press is as precise as possible. The movement is controlled from a set of 3D printed gears which are turned by hand.

The drill press is capable of drilling holes in most materials, including metal, and although small it would be great for precision work. [ericinventor] notes that it’s not necessary to use a separate motor, and that it’s possible to use this build with a Dremel tool if one is already available to you. Either way, it’s a handy tool to have around the shop, and with only a few modifications it might be usable as a mill as well.

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A Motorcycle Dashboard Straight From The ECU

September 21, 2020 by 12 Comments

Classic motorcycles are the wild west of information displays. Often lacking even basic instrumentation such as a fuel gauge and sometimes even a speedometer, motorcycles have come a long way in instrument cluster design from even 20 years ago. There’s still some room for improvement, though, and luckily a lot of modern bikes have an ECU module that can be tapped into for some extra information as [Sophie Wheeler] illustrates with her auxiliary motorcycle dashboard.

This display is built for a modern Honda enduro, and is based upon an ESP32 module. The ESP32 is tied directly into the ECU via a diagnostic socket, unlike other similar builds that interface with a CAN bus specifically. It can monitor all of the bike’s activity including engine temperature, throttle position, intake air temperature, and whether or not the bike is in neutral. [Sophie] also added an external GPS sensor so the new display can also show GPS speed and location information within the same unit.

[Sophie] credits a few others for making headway into the Honda ECU. [Gonzo] created a similar build using a Raspberry Pi and more rudimentary screen but was instrumental in gathering the information for this build. If you’re looking for a display of any kind for your antique motorcycle which is lacking an ECU, though, we would suggest a speedometer made with nixie tubes.

Boost Your Animation To 60 FPS Using AI

September 20, 2020 by 43 Comments

The uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to expand, with one of the more recent implementations being video processing. A new method can “fill in” frames to smooth out the appearance of the video, which [LegoEddy] was able to use this in one of his animated LEGO movies with some astonishing results.

His original animation of LEGO figures and sets was created at 15 frames per second. As an animator, he notes that it’s orders of magnitude more difficult to get more frames than this with traditional methods, at least in his studio. This is where the artificial intelligence comes in. The program is able to interpolate between frames and create more frames to fill the spaces between the original. This allowed [LegoEddy] to increase his frame rate from 15 fps to 60 fps without having to actually create the additional frames.

While we’ve seen AI create art before, the improvement on traditionally produced video is a dramatic advancement. Especially since the AI is aware of depth and preserves information about the distance of objects from the camera. The software is also free, runs on any computer with an appropriate graphics card, and is available on GitHub.

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Commodore 64 Mini Man Makes Matching Mini Monitor

September 17, 2020 by 8 Comments

While putting together a retro computer is a great project and can teach a lot about the inner workings of electronics, hooking that 70s- or 80s-era machine up to a modern 144 Hz 1440p display tends to be a little bit anticlimactic. To really recreate the true 8-bit experience it’s important to get a CRT display of some sort, but those are in short supply now as most are in a landfill somewhere now. [Tony] decided to create a hybrid solution of sorts by 3D printing his own Commodore replica monitor for that true nostalgia feel.

This build is a matching mini scale replica of the Commodore 1702 monitor, a color monitor produced by Commodore specifically for their machines. At the time it was top-of-the-line and even included an early predecessor of the S-Video method of video signalling. This monitor was modeled in Fusion 360 and then sent to the 3D printer for assembly, then populated with a screen with a period-correct 4:3 aspect ratio, required electronics for handling the Commodore’s video signal, and even includes an upgrade over the original monitor: stereo speakers instead of the single-channel speaker that was featured in the 80s.

While this monitor doesn’t use a CRT, it’s an impressive replica nonetheless, right down to the Commodore serial number sticker on the back. If you need a Commodore 64 to go along with it, there are plenty of possibilities available to consider like this emulated C64 on a Raspberry Pi or these refurbished OEM Commodores.

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Improving More Leaf Design Flaws

September 16, 2020 by 19 Comments

[Daniel] was recently featured here for his work in improving the default charging mode for the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle when using the emergency/trickle charger included with the car. His work made it possible to reduce the amount of incoming power from the car, if the charging plug looked like it might not be able to handle the full 1.2 kW -3 kW that these cars draw when charging. Thanks to that work, he was able to create another upgrade for these entry-level EVs, this time addressing a major Leaf design flaw that is known as Rapidgate.

The problem that these cars have is that they still have passive thermal management for their batteries, unlike most of their competitors now. This was fine in the early ’10s when this car was one of the first all-electric cars to market, but now its design age is catching up with it. On long trips at highway speed with many rapid charges in a row the batteries can overheat easily. When this happens, the car’s charging controller will not allow the car to rapid charge any more and severely limits the charge rate even at the rapid charging stations. [Daniel] was able to tweak the charging software in order to limit the rapid charging by default, reducing it from 45 kW to 35 kW and saving a significant amount of heat during charging than is otherwise possible.

While we’d like to see Nissan actually address the design issues with their car designs while making these straighforward software changes (or at least giving Leaf owners the options that improve charging experiences) we are at least happy that there are now other electric vehicles in the market that have at least addressed the battery thermal management issues that are common with all EVs. If you do own a Leaf though, be sure to check out [Daniel]’s original project related to charging these cars.

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