Do You Know The CR816?

March 19, 2017 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

Hackaday readers (and writers) are an odd bunch. While the rest of the tech press falls over for the newest, shiniest CPU on the market, we’re the type who’s more interested the unexplored dark corners of metaphorical Silicon Alley. So when someone comes to us with a good writeup of a chip that we’d never heard about, we’re all ears.

[Remy]’s writeup of the CoolRISC 816 microcontroller CPU makes it obvious that he shares our taste for the esoteric. It has a 22-bit “RISC” instruction set. It has a dedicated 8-to-16 bit multiplier. Some of the instructions are so un-reduced that [Remy] calls bunk on its RISC claims. All of the operations, including the un-RISC ones, run in a single cycle. And the CoolRISC does this by cheating — the last stages of the pipeline run not on every clock tick, but on the rising and falling flanks of the clock respectively.

Why all these odd bits? They make the job of the assembly programmer, or compiler designer, a lot easier. With all single-cycle instructions, counting cycles is the same as counting lines of code. The not-really-RISC instructions are great for compiling C into. So what happened? [Remy] speculates that the MSP430, another not-really-RISC microcontroller that came out about the same time, ate the CoolRISC’s lunch. The MSP430 is a 16-bit machine, and chances are good that you’ve heard of TI. The same may not be true of Xemics, maker of the CoolRISC.

But still it’s nice to have someone saying the eulogy for this strange little chip. Or maybe the reports of the CR816’s death are premature — it seems to be inside TI’s bq20x80 chip that’s used in a number of battery power monitors. Oh, the irony! Indeed, watch [Charlie Miller] tear into a battery and find a CR816.

Have any of you used a CR816? What’s the strangest microcontroller architecture that you’ve ever seen?

Welcome To The Drone Wars

March 18, 2017 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

“DroneClash” is a competition to be held on December 4th (save the date!) in a hangar at Valkenburg airfield in the Netherlands. The game? Teams try to destroy each others’ quadcopters, navigate through a “Hallway of Doom, Death, and Destruction”, and finally enter a final phase of the game where they try to defend their “queen” drone while taking out those of their opponents.

This sounds like crazy and reckless fun. Surprisingly, it’s being sponsored by the Technical University of Delft’s Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) lab. The goal is to enable a future of responsible drone use by having the ability “to take them out if necessary”.

Drone development has grown hugely in recent years, and you can see the anti-drone industry growing too. Ideally, these developments keep each other in check and result in a safe and responsible incorporation of drones in our daily lives. We are organising DroneClash to generate new ideas in order to encourage this process.

We do have to ask ourselves why anyone would want to use another quadcopter to take out illegally operated quadcopters — there must be a million more effective means from a policing standpoint. On the other hand, if we were re-shooting “Hackers” right now, and looking for a futuristic sport, we would swap out rollerblading for drone combat. Registration opens this week. Gentlebots, start your engines.

Continue reading “Welcome To The Drone Wars” →

[Kwan]’s Clock Displays Seconds, And Thirds

March 18, 2017 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

We have no idea if the background story is true or not, but we’re not going to let something like “truth” get in the way of a good story. The way [Kwan3217] tells it, first there were hours on sundials. Then when these were divided into sixty minute sections, they were called “minutes”. “Seconds” comes from a second division by sixty, into “second minutes”. The “third” division into sixty would give a time unit that lasts a sixtieth of a second.

[Kwan3217] built a clock that displays these third minutes. Weighing in at just a tiny bit over 16.6666 milliseconds each, the thirds’ hand is going to be spinning pretty fast, so he used LEDs. And if you’re going to display thirds, you’ve got to get them right, so he backs the clock up with GPS. There’s a full video playlist about it, and phenomenal detail in the project logs. Continue reading “[Kwan]’s Clock Displays Seconds, And Thirds” →

Are You Down With MPPT? (Yeah, You Know Me.)

March 17, 2017 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

Solar cells have gotten cheaper and cheaper, and are becoming an economically viable source of renewable energy in many parts of the world. Capturing the optimal amount of energy from a solar panel is a tricky business, however. First there are a raft of physical prerequisites to operating efficiently: the panel needs to be kept clean so the sun can reach the cells, the panel needs to point at the sun, and it’s best if they’re kept from getting too hot.

Along with these physical demands, solar panels are electrically finicky as well. In particular, the amount of power they produce is strongly dependent on the electrical load that they’re presented, and this optimal load varies depending on how much illumination the panel receives. Maximum power-point trackers (MPPT) ideally keep the panel electrically in the zone even as little fluffy clouds roam the skies or the sun sinks in the west. Using MPPT can pull 20-30% more power out of a given cell, and the techniques are eminently hacker-friendly. If you’ve never played around with solar panels before, you should. Read on to see how!

Continue reading “Are You Down With MPPT? (Yeah, You Know Me.)” →

NASA’s 2017-2018 Software Catalog Is Out

March 16, 2017 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Need some help sizing your beyond-low-Earth-orbit vehicle? Request NASA’s BLAST software. Need to forecast the weather on Venus? That would be Venus-GRAM (global reference atmospheric model). Or maybe you just want to play around with the NASA Tensegrity Robotics Toolkit. (We do!) Then it’s a good thing that part of NASA’s public mandate is making their software available. And the 2017-2018 Software Catalog (PDF) has just been released.

Unfortunately, not everything that NASA does is open source, and a substantial fraction of the software suites are only available for code “to be used on behalf of the U.S. Government”. But still, it’s very cool that NASA is opening up as much of their libraries as they are. Where else are you going to get access to orbital debris engineering models or cutting-edge fluid dynamics modelers and solvers, for free?

We already mentioned this in the Links column, but we think it’s worth repeating because we could use your help. The catalog is 154 pages long, and we haven’t quite finished leaf through every page. If you see anything awesome inside, let us know in the comments. Do any of you already use NASA’s open-source software?

The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself

March 13, 2017 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

If you’re building a smart watch these days (yawn!), you’ve got to have some special sauce to impress the jaded Hackaday community. [Dominic]’s NeoPixel SmartWatch delivers, with his own take on what’s important to have on your wrist, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

There’s no fancy screen. Instead, the watch gets by with a ring of NeoPixels for all its notification needs. But notification is what it does right. It tells [Dominic] when he’s got an incoming call of course, but also has different flashing color modes for SMS, Snapchat, and e-mail. Oh yeah, and it tells time and even has a flashlight mode. Great functionality for a minimalistic display.

But that’s not all! It’s also got a light sensor that works from the UV all the way down to IR. At the moment, it’s being used to automatically adjust the LED brightness and to display current UV levels. (We imagine turning this into a sunburn alarm mode.) Also planned is a TV-B-Gone style IR transmitter.

The hardware is the tough part of this build, and [Dominic] ended up using a custom PCB to help in cramming so many off-the-shelf modules into a tiny space. Making it look good is icing on the cake.

Thanks [Marcello] for the tip!

Continue reading “The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself” →

NeoJoints Make WS2812 LEDs Even More Fun

March 12, 2017 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

What’s more fun than individually addressable RGB LEDs? Many, many individually addressable RGB LEDs. What’s more fun than all the miscellaneous soldering involved in connecting many of these cheap and cheerful strips together? Well, basically anything. But in particular, these little widgets that [todbot] designed help make connecting up strips of RGB LEDs a snap.

[todbot]’s connectors aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but they’re one of those things that you need the moment you first lay eyes on them. And they’re a testament to rapid prototyping: the mounting holes and improved routing patterns evolved as [todbot] made some, soldered them up, mounted them, and then made some more. We’d like to see some odd angles, of course, but that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange. Everything is up on GitHub, so you can go check it out.

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention, and she’s got many kids. Which is to say that we’ve seen a variation of this hack before precisely because other folks have stared at this matrix-of-strips problem before and come up with similar solutions. Still, we really like the mounting holes and overall aesthetic of [todbot]’s solution, and if you ever find yourself joining WS2812 strips together, give it a try.