Digitizing Sound On An Unmodified Sinclair ZX81

March 25, 2023 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Whatever the first computer you used to manipulate digital audio was, the chances are it came with dedicated sound hardware that could play, and probably record, digitized audio. Perhaps it might have been a Commodore Amiga, or maybe a PC with a Sound Blaster. If you happen to be [NICKMANN] though, you can lay claim to the honor of doing so on a machine with no such hardware, because he managed it on an unmodified Sinclair ZX81.

For those of you unfamiliar with the ZX, it embodied Clive Sinclair’s usual blend of inflated promises on minimal hardware and came with the very minimum required to generate a black-and-white TV picture from a Zilog Z80 microprocessor. All it had in the way of built-in expansion was a cassette interface, 1-bit read and write ports exposed as 3.5 mm jacks on its side. It’s these that in an impressive feat of hackery he managed to use as a 1-bit sampler with some Z80 assembler code, capturing a few seconds of exceptionally low quality audio in an ’81 with the plug-in 16k RAM upgrade.

From 2023 of course, it’s about as awful as audio sampling gets, but in 1980s terms it’s pulling off an almost impossible feat that when we tried it with a 1-bit PC speaker a few years later, we didn’t succeed at. We’re impressed.

The ’81 may be one of the simplest of the 8-bit crop, but in its day it set many a future software developer on their career path. It’s still a machine that appears here today, from time to time.

A Studio Condenser Microphone For A Constrained Budget

March 22, 2023 by Jenny List 20 Comments

As the Internet has turned so many of us into content creators, we’ve seen the quality of webcams and microphones steadily increase to the point at which even a fairly modestly-equipped YouTuber now captures their wisdom at a quality far exceeding that you might have found in some broadcast studios not so long ago. Still, decent quality costs money, and for that reason [Spirit532] has built his own high quality condenser microphone for less expenditure.

The capsule and body are off-the-shelf items — what he’s produced is the bias voltage supply and preamplifier. In both cases these are the interesting parts of a condenser microphone, so their circuit bears a second look.

The condenser microphone takes a diaphragm and turns it into one side of a capacitor. If you apply a charge to this capacitor, the voltage over it changes minutely with the capacitance as the diaphragm vibrates. Thus to have a usable audio signal level a high-voltage bias supply is required to provide the charge, and a very high impedance preamplifier circuit to catch the signal without draining the capacitor.

His bias supply is a charge pump using a string of diodes and capacitors fed by a chain of CMOS inverters, with an RC filter and resistor chain to provide that super-high impedance. The preamplifier meanwhile is a unity gain high-impedance op-amp with an inverting stage to provide a balanced connection. For good measure the circuit also includes a phantom power supply.

This is an interesting project for anyone with an interest in audio. if you’re further interested in condenser microphones, how about also looking at electret microphones?

Info Sought On A Forgotten Cuban Radio

March 21, 2023 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Some of the daily normalities of life in the Cold War seem a little surreal from our perspective in 2023, when nuclear bombers no longer come in to land just down the road and you can head off to Poland or Czechia on a whim. Radio amateurs were one of the few groups of civilians whose activities crossed the geopolitical divide, and even though an operator on the other side from ours couldn’t buy a shiny Japanese radio, their homebrew skills matched anything we could do with our Western soldering irons.

[Bill Meara N2CQR] is particularly interested in one line of Cold War-era Communist homebrew radios, the tube-based Cuban “Islander” and its solid-state “Jaguey” sibling. It’s a homebrew double-sideband transceiver design built using readily-available Soviet TV parts, and though he’s published what he can find, he’s on the lookout for more info about these interesting rigs.

The mechanics of a DSB transceiver are simple enough, in that an oscillator and balanced mixer can serve as both modulator and as direct conversion receiver. The fuzzy black and white photographs give frustratingly little detail, but we’re impressed by the quality of what we can see. We have readers all over the world (including we hope, some in Cuba), so perhaps if you know something about these radios you can give Joe a hand. It’s a design that deserves to be appreciated.

For more epic Cold War hackery on the Communist side, read our colleague [Voja Antonic]’s story of his personal computer odyssey.

New Part Day: TI Jumps In To The Cheap MCU Market

March 21, 2023 by Jenny List 72 Comments

One of the interesting areas in the world of new parts recently has been at the lower end of the microcontroller market. Not because the devices there have new capabilities or are especially fast, but because they are cheap. There are now quite a few parts from China under 10 cents apiece, but have the Western manufacturers been able to follow suit? Not quite, but Texas Instruments has a new line of ARM Cortex M0+ parts that get under 40 cents in volume in their cheapest form.

That bottom-of-the-range chip is the MSPM0L1105, a single-core 32 MHz part with 32k of Flash and 4k of RAM. It’s got all the usual peripherals you’d expect on a small microcontroller, but the one which made our heads turn was the on-board 1.45-Msps ADC. On a cheap chip, that’s much faster than expected.

So there’s another microcontroller, and it’s not as cheap as some of its competition, so what? Aside from that ADC there are several reasons to be interested, it has TI’s developer support if you’re in that ecosystem, and inevitably it will find its way on to the dev boards and SBCs we use in our community. It remains to be seen how it will fare in terms of the chip shortage though.

Meanwhile, here’s a reminder of that cheaper competition.

Thanks to the several friends who delivered this tip.

It’s A 486 Computer, On A Breadboard

March 18, 2023 by Jenny List 52 Comments

Ever since the 1970s, a frequent project has been to take a microprocessor and construct a computer system on a breadboard or stripboard. Usually these machines feature a familiar 8-bit processor such as a 6502 or a Z80 because of their breadboard-friendly DIP packages, but there is surprisingly little reason why some of the more recent silicon can’t be treated in the same way. [FoxTech] is leading the way on this, by making a breadboard computer using an 80486DX.

A 1990-era 32-bit desktop CPU seems unpromising territory for this application, but its architecture is surprisingly accessible. It needs a breakout board to gain access to its various lines, but beyond that it can be interfaced to in a very similar way to those earlier chips.

So far there are two videos in the series, which we’ve placed below the break. The first one introduces the project and shows the basic set-up. A 486 running NOPs may produce a pretty light show, but as he starts to show in the second video, it’s capable of more. The eventual aim is to have a simple but fully functional breadboard computer, so he’s starting with logic to decode the 32-bit bus on the 486 into the 8-bit bus he’s going to use.

It’s fascinating to learn about how the 32-bit 486 handles its interfacing and deals with four bytes at once, and we’re very much looking forward to seeing this project play out. The 486 may be on life support here in 2023, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still receive some love.

Continue reading “It’s A 486 Computer, On A Breadboard” →

The Singularity Isn’t Here… Yet

March 17, 2023 by Jenny List 110 Comments

So, GPT-4 is out, and it’s all over for us meatbags. Hype has reached fever pitch, here in the latest and greatest of AI chatbots we finally have something that can surpass us. The singularity has happened, and personally I welcome our new AI overlords.

Hang on a minute though, I smell a rat, and it comes in defining just what intelligence is. In my time I’ve hung out with a lot of very bright people, as well as a lot of not-so-bright people who nonetheless think they’re very clever simply because they have a bunch of qualifications and diplomas. Sadly the experience hasn’t bestowed God-like intelligence on me, but it has given me a handle on the difference between intelligence and knowledge.

My premise is that we humans are conditioned by our education system to equate learning with intelligence, mostly because we have flaky CPUs and worse memory, and that makes learning something a bit of an effort. Thus when we see an AI, a machine that can learn everything because it has a decent CPU and memory, we’re conditioned to think of it as intelligent because that’s what our schools train us to do. In fact it seems intelligent to us not because it’s thinking of new stuff, but merely through knowing stuff we don’t because we haven’t had the time or capacity to learn it.

Growing up and making my earlier career around a major university I’ve seen this in action so many times, people who master one skill, rote-learning the school textbook or the university tutor’s pet views and theories, and barfing them up all over the exam paper to get their amazing qualifications. On paper they’re the cream of the crop, and while it’s true they’re not thick, they’re rarely the special clever people they think they are. People with truly above-average intelligence exist, but in smaller numbers, and their occurrence is not a 1:1 mapping with holders of advanced university degrees.

Even the examples touted of GPT’s brilliance tend to reinforce this. It can do the bar exam or the SAT test, thus we’re told it’s as intelligent as a school-age kid or a lawyer. Both of those qualifications follow our educational system’s flawed premise that education equates to intelligence, so as a machine that’s learned all the facts it follows my point above about learning by rote. The machine has simply barfed up what it has learned the answers are onto the exam paper. Is that intelligence? Is a search engine intelligent?

This is not to say that tools such as GPT-4 are not amazing creations that have a lot of potential to do good things aside from filling up the internet with superficially readable spam. Everyone should have a play with them and investigate their potential, and from that will no doubt come some very interesting things. Just don’t confuse them with real people, because sometimes meatbags can surprise you.

Review: XHDATA D-219 Short Wave Radio Receiver

March 15, 2023 by Jenny List 93 Comments

As any radio amateur will tell you, the world of radio abounds with exciting possibilities. Probably the simplest pursuit of them all is that of the SWL, or short wave listener, who scours the airwaves in search of interesting stations. SWLs will often have fully-featured setups with high-end general-coverage communications receivers and tuned antenna arrays, but it can start with the cheapest of radios at its bottom end. Such a radio is the subject of this review, the XHDATA D-219 is a miniature portable receiver that costs under ten dollars, yet is currently the talk of the town in SWL circles. This interest is in no small amount due to its being an especially low-price way to get your hands on a shortwave radio using one of the SIlicon Labs integrated software-defind radio receiver chips. We don’t often review a consumer radio here at Hackaday, but with an avid eye for unexpected gems at the cheaper end of the market this one’s worth a second look.

What Do You Get For Your Tenner?

A picture of the radio on my bench — This form factor is very typical for cheap “world band” radios.

I ordered my D-219 from the XHDATA website, spending about £10 including the postage from China. The usual wait ensued before the package landed on my doormat, and inside was the radio in its box with an instruction leaflet. It’s a small unit about 135 mm x 75 mm x 30 mm, and it follows closely the form factor of other similar radios.

On the top is the extensible antenna with an on-off switch and sockets for headphone and 5 V power, on the side are side-on knobs for tuning and volume, while on the front is the speaker and old-style multi-band tuning display.

On the back is a flip-up stand and a hatch for a pair of AA cells. There’s a band switch covering AM, nine different shortwave bands from 4.75 MHz to 22 MHz, the east Asian FM band from 64 MHz to 87 MHz, and the international FM band from 87 MHz to 108 MHz. The tuning indicator is very old-school, a vertical bar that moves across a frequency scale with the tuning knob. Continue reading “Review: XHDATA D-219 Short Wave Radio Receiver” →