2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question

November 8, 2023 by Jenny List 66 Comments

Since the very early 1990s, we have become used to ubiquitous digital mobile phone coverage for both voice and data. Such has been their success that they have for many users entirely supplanted the landline phone, and increasingly their voice functionality has become secondary to their provision of an always-on internet connection. With the 5G connections that are now the pinnacle of mobile connectivity we’re on the fourth generation of digital networks, with the earlier so-called “1G” networks using an analogue connection being the first. As consumers have over time migrated to the newer and faster mobile network standards then, the usage of the older versions has reduced to the point at which carriers are starting to turn them off. Those 2G networks from the 1990s and the 2000s-era 3G networks which supplanted them are now expensive to maintain, consuming energy and RF spectrum as they do, while generating precious little customer revenue.

Tech From When Any Phone That Wasn’t A Brick Was Cool

A 1990s Motorola phone — If this is your phone, you may be in trouble. Digitalsignal, CC BY-SA 3.0.

All this sounds like a natural progression of technology which might raise few concerns, in the same way that nobody really noticed the final demise of the old analogue systems. There should be little fuss at the 2G and 3G turn-off. But the success of these networks seems to in this case be their undoing, as despite their shutdown being on the cards now for years, there remain many devices still using them.

There can’t be many consumers still using an early-2000s Motorola Flip as their daily driver, but the proliferation of remotely connected IoT devices means that there are still many millions of 2G and 3G modems using those networks. This presents a major problem for network operators, utilities, and other industrial customers, and raises one or two questions here at Hackaday which we’re wondering whether our readers could shed some light on. Who is still using, or trying to use, 2G and 3G networks, why do they have to be turned off in the first place, and what if any alternatives are there when no 4G or 5G coverage is available? Continue reading “2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: RiscOS 5.28

November 8, 2023 by Jenny List 35 Comments

On a mundane day at some point in late 1987, though I didn’t grasp exactly what it would become at the time, I sat in front of the future. My school had a lab full of BBC Micros which I’d spent the previous few years getting to know, but on that day there was a new machine in one corner. It was a brand-new Acorn Archimedes, probably an A300, and it was the first time I had used an operating system with a desktop GUI. The computer was the first consumer application of the ARM processor architecture which has since gone on to conquer the world, and the operating system was called Arthur, which hasn’t. That’s not to say that Arthur is forgotten though, because it was soon renamed as RiscOS, managed to outlive both Acorn and the Archimedes, and still survives as a maintained though admittedly niche operating system to this day. So my Daily Driver this month is the current generation of RiscOS, version 5.28, and the machine I’m running it on is a Raspberry Pi 4. For a computer with an ARM core that’s designed and sold by a company based in Cambridge just like the original Acorn, it’s the most appropriate pairing I can think of.

Probably the Smallest OS In This Series

A beige desktop with no monitor, keyboard and mouse in front. It shows signs of yellowing with age. — The first ARM product, an Acorn Archimedes A310. mikkohoo, CC BY-SA 4.0.

At one point the Raspberry Pi folks even featured the Pi version of RiscOS on their website, but for those missing it there it’s freely downloadable as a disk image from the RiscOS Open site. Having spent most of its life as a closed-source product it’s been opened up over the last decade, and you can grab the source if you’re interested. When it’s normal for an OS download to run into the many gigabytes, it’s a bit of a shock to grab one that’s a shade under 140 megabytes and can be written to a 2 gigabyte SD card. This makes it probably one of the quickest operating system installs I have ever done, with all steps completed in a very short time. Sticking the SD card into the Pi it boots to a desktop in about 32 seconds which is only 5 seconds less than the latest Raspberry Pi OS image, so sadly that compactness doesn’t net you any extra speed. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: RiscOS 5.28” →

The Golden Age Of Gadget Catalogs

November 8, 2023 by Jenny List 22 Comments

Among Hackaday’s readership are likely to be many gadget enthusiasts who live for the latest electronics and who have obsessively followed gadget trends for most of their lives. You possess elite AliExpress-fu, and like the hipsters, you were into everything long before it was cool. It’s safe to say the Internet has revolutionized the world of the gadget freak, but in a time before even dial-up access there was another way into this most technophilic of pastimes. As soon as there was consumer electronics there were mail-order catalog companies slaking the thirst of the gadget-crazy, and [Cabel Sasser] is here with a look at both their heyday and their swansong.

A full page advert for a "Corporate cockpit" all-in-one wordprocessor computer. — Drew, just shut up and take my money!

He has a particular focus on the catalog produced during the 1980s by DAK Industries Inc, a North Hollywood California based company that was the work of an entrepreneur named Drew Kaplan. He presented a glittering array of the latest and greatest tech of the era, and packaged it with riveting descriptions and beautifully-shot glossy photographs. [Cabel] was hooked, and we would certainly have been too. There were digital watches with outrageous functionality, portable briefcase computers, novelty telephones, Hi-Fi components at knock-down prices, and plenty of cassette tapes to play in them.

Their signature was an engaging copy-writing style that really made you want the product, and here we enter an interesting story in itself. There was another mail order gadget company in the 1970s which used exactly the same formula but running full-page adverts, similar enough to be obviously connected in some way. Had DAK stolen the idea? Not quite, for these were the product of a man called Joseph Sugarman, who also ran a “Learn my formula for sales success” course. Drew Kaplan didn’t hesitate to attribute his success to the Sugarman course, leaving us with the surprising conclusion that there’s more to the “Learn my formula” business than simply making money from marks prepared to pay for the course.

Here at Hackaday we occasionally venture into purple prose for fun, but we’re not trying to sell you any consumer electronics. We can’t help a professional admiration for the copy-writing in these catalogs though, and since they’re all available for download from Internet Archive we’re going to spend a while wallowing in tech nostalgia. It’s a place we’ve been to before.

Reduce The Pi 5’s Power Consumption At A Stroke

November 6, 2023 by Jenny List 18 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the new wunderkind single-board computer on the block, so new in fact that users are still finding out its quirks. One of those quirks is a surprisingly high power consumption when powered down, despite halting the SoC, it leaves the power on and consumes over a watt even in standby. [Jeff Geerling] has a solution, and it’s a simple config change.

It’s useful to know how to fix this, and we’re indebted to him for finding it, but it’s hardly the most complex of hacks. Where the interest lies is in why the board leaves the lights turned on when nobody’s at home in the first place. It seems that some HATs have an issue when the 3V3 rail shuts down, but the 5V rail doesn’t. The Raspberry Pi foundation took the most compatible route and kept the rails on all the time. Perhaps future OS releases will come up with something more elegant, but at least there *is* a fix.

If you’re new to the Pi 5, you can take a look at our review of a preview model, and see why it’s the closest yet to a usable everyday PC that they’ve produced.

What Parts Should You Desolder?

November 5, 2023 by Jenny List 28 Comments

A rite of passage for a young electronics enthusiast used to be collecting an array of surplus boards from whatever could be found, and using them as sources of parts to desolder. It was possible with a bit of work and searching to build all manner of electronic projects without spending much at all. Many hardware hackers know their way around consumer electronics from the decade before their teenage years as a result. Secondhand components can still be used, but the type of components to be found has changed, as well as those needed. [ElectricMonkeyBrain] takes a look, and asks “What should you desolder?”.

As a general rule, he lands on the premise that it’s worth hanging on to the expensive stuff rather than the cheap stuff. Large capacitors, power semiconductors, and inductors aren’t cheap at all, and in the case of the inductors they can yield both ferrite parts and enameled wire for rewinding to suit. We’re surprised that he advocates holding on to electrolytic capacitors as a kit of many values is now pretty cheap, but it’s understandable that if you lack the part and it’s there on a motherboard in front of you, it’s worth desoldering. Finally, he discusses cases, something we’ve been tempted by a few times more than we’d like to mention.

In a world of easy online ordering, it’s useful to be reminded that sometimes there’s still space for salvaged parts, after all, no delivery service is as quick as reaching under your bench for an old ATX power supply to raid. As always though, don’t amass too much of it.

Continue reading “What Parts Should You Desolder?” →

Flash Programmer Shows Some Nifty Tricks

November 5, 2023 by Jenny List 13 Comments

A handy tool to have on the bench is a Flash chip programmer, and the ones based around the CH341A USB bus converter chip are readily available. But the chip is capable of so much more than simply programming nonvolatile memory, so [Tomasz Ostrowski] has created a utility program that expands its capabilities. The software provides easy access to a range of common i2c peripherals. He’s got it talking to smart batteries, GPIOs, environmental sensors, an OLED display, and even an FM radio module. The code can all be found in a GitHub repository. The software is Windows-only so no fun and games for Linux users yet — but since it’s open source, new features are just a pull request away.

The CH341A is much more than an i2C controller, it also supports a surprising range of other interfaces including SPI, UARTs, and even a bidirectional parallel printer port. Maybe this software will serve to fire the imagination of a few others, and who knows, we could see more extended use of this versatile chip. Oddly we’ve featured these programmer boards before, though in a tricky flashing job.

Proposed European Electronic ID Law Raises Concerns

November 2, 2023 by Jenny List 39 Comments

The harmonisation of standards for electronic identification across the EU should normally be soporific enough to send even the most Club-Mate-hyped hacker straight to sleep, but as Computer Weekly reports, discussion of this reform in the EU corridors of power has caused significant unrest among cyber security experts. Just how can providing Europeans with a harmonised digital ID be so controversial? As you might imagine, the devil lies in the detail.

At issue is the eIDAS Regulation, a system which, in the words of its website: “ensures that people and businesses can use their own national electronic identification schemes (eIDs) to access public services available online in other EU countries,” and “creates a European internal market for trust services by ensuring that they will work across borders and have the same legal status as their traditional paper-based equivalents,” and the point of concern lies with its application to websites. The EU want to ensure that Europeans can digitally verify businesses as well as individuals they deal with, and since that includes websites, they want to insert a provision allowing countries to mandate their own trusted root certificates. At a stroke, this opens the potential for state actors to snoop on all encrypted online traffic, something which would compromise the security of all.

Sadly for Europeans, this isn’t the only questionable online regulation effort from that region.

Thanks [Joyce Ng] for the tip.