The Hackaday Summer Camp Survival Guide

August 3, 2022 by Jenny List 19 Comments

It’s a feature of summer for us, the round of hacker camps in which members of our community gather in fields and spend a few days relaxing and doing what we do best. This summer I’ll have been to four of them by September, one of which was unexpected because a last-minute ticket came my way. For Hackaday they’re a chance to connect with our readers and maybe see come of the coolest stuff in person.

If you consult the wiki for your hacker camp of choice then you’ll usually find a page of tips about what to bring. Starting with a tent and a sleeping bag and probably going on to sunscreen, a hat, and maybe how to avoid dehydration. I’d probably add spare toilet paper and disinfectant spray in case the toilets are nightmarish. All very practical stuff, but expressed in a dry list format that doesn’t really tell you what to expect. A hacker camp can be overwhelming if you’ve not been to one before, so how do you get the best out of it? Here are a few tips based on our experience. Continue reading “The Hackaday Summer Camp Survival Guide” →

Self-Hosted Pi Pico Development

August 1, 2022 by Jenny List 31 Comments

Older readers and those with an interest in retrocomputing may remember the days when a computer might well have booted into a BASIC interpreter. It was simultaneously a general purpose device that could run any software it would load, and also a development environment. Not something that can be said for today’s development boards which typically require a host computer on which to write code. Have we lost something along the way? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in [lurk101]’s self-hosted development environment for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

It presents itself as a shell, with a flash file system, a port of the vi editor, and a C compiler. We might think of vi as being more at home on a UNIX-derived system, but in this case it’s a port of the vi included in BusyBox. Meanwhile the compiler comes from amacc project.

Of course, this still requires a terminal of some type which in practice will mean a host computer. But the feat is nevertheless an interesting one, and we can see that it might not be impossible given the Pico’s surprising versatility to being some of the terminal features onto the chip itself.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first attempt we’ve seen to put a command line interface on a development board.

Electrolytes, They’re What Dehydrated Hackaday Writers Crave!

July 27, 2022 by Jenny List 106 Comments

The oddly prophetic 2006 comedy film Idiocracy features an isotonic drink called Brawndo, whose marketing continuously refers to its electrolytes as a miraculous property. Brawndo is revealed in the film to be useless for agricultural irrigation, but yesterday perhaps a couple of Hackaday writers could have used a bottle or two. At the MCH hacker camp, the record heat of a Dutch summer under the influence of global warming caused us to become dehydrated, and thus necessitated a trip to the first aid post for some treatment. We’d done all the right things, staying in the shade, keeping as cool as we could, eating salty foods like crisps, and drinking plenty of liquids, so what had gone wrong?

Perhaps Club-Mate Should Have An Isotonic Version

The answer will probably be obvious to trained observers, we’d become deficient in those electrolytes. Our bodily stocks of sodium and potassium salts had become exhausted by sweat and all that extra water requiring trips to the toilet, so while we weren’t dehydrated in liquid terms we had exhausted some of the essentials to our cellular function.

The symptoms would have been easy to spot given the right training, but at a hacker camp it was too easy to attribute a headache and tiredness to a late night. For me the point at which it became obvious something was significantly wrong came when my thought processes started to slow down and my movement became a lot less easy. I’m a long-distance walker and cyclist, yet here I was walking like an octogenarian. If I’d know what to spot I might also have noticed that I had stopped sweating despite the heat. I found a friend (Thanks Gasman!), and together we made our way to the first aid post. MCH2022 first aiders were very efficient, and I was given a cup of oral rehydration salts which restored me to health in a matter of minutes. Continue reading “Electrolytes, They’re What Dehydrated Hackaday Writers Crave!” →

McTerminals Give The Hamburglar A Chance

July 25, 2022 by Jenny List 46 Comments

The golden arches of a McDonald’s restaurant are a ubiquitous feature of life in so many parts of the world, and while their food might not be to all tastes their comforting familiarity draws in many a weary traveler. There was a time when buying a burger meant a conversation with a spotty teen behind the till, but now the transaction is more likely to take place at a terminal with a large touch screen. These terminals have caught the attention of [Geoff Huntley], who has written about their surprising level of vulnerability.

When you’re ordering your Big Mac and fries, you’re in reality standing in front of a Windows PC, and repeated observation of start-up reveals that the ordering application runs under an administrator account. The machine has a card reader and a receipt printer, and it’s because of this printer that the vulnerability starts. In a high-traffic restaurant the paper rolls often run out, and the overworked staff often leave the cabinets unlocked to facilitate access. Thus an attacker need only gain access to the machine to reset it and they can be in front of a touch screen with administrator access during boot, and from that start they can do anything. Given that these machines handle thousands of card transactions daily, the prospect of a skimming attack becomes very real.

The fault here lies in whoever designed these machines for McDonalds, instead of putting appropriate security on the software the whole show relies on the security of the lock. We hope that they don’t come down on the kids changing the paper, and instead get their software fixed. Meanwhile this isn’t the first time we’ve peered into some McHardware.

Is 3D Printing Up To A Turntable?

July 23, 2022 by Jenny List 20 Comments

Thanks to a feature by Prusament because it uses their filament, we’ve been interested to read about the SongBird turntable from the British outfit Frame Theory (Note: at time of writing, they have an expired certificate). It’s a commercial product with an interesting twist for the Hi-Fi business: buy the completed turntable or buy a kit of parts and print the rest yourself.

We’re always interested to see new things here at Hackaday but we’re not in the business of promoting commercial products without a tech angle. This turntable has us interested then not because it happens to be 3D printed but because it’s instantly raised our curiosity over how suitable 3D printing is as a medium for a high quality audio component. Without descending into audiophile silliness we cannot overstate the effect that rigidity and mass of turntable components has on its audio quality. Take a look at this one we featured in the past for an extreme example.

So looking more closely at the design, we find that the chassis is aluminium, which makes sense given its visibly thin construction. Close examination of the photos on their site also reveals the tonearm to be made of carbon fibre tube, so it’s clear that they’ve put some effort into making a better turntable rather than a novelty one. This does raise the question though: manufacturing practicalities aside could you 3D print the whole thing? We think that a 3D printed chassis could replace the aluminium one at the cost of much more bulk and loss of the svelte looks, but what about the tonearm? Would one of the carbon-fibre-infused filaments deliver enough stiffness? It would be particularly interesting we think, were someone to try.

Pet Docking Station Was Two Decades In The Making

July 22, 2022 by Jenny List 14 Comments

There are some projects which once might have been entirely appropriate, but which now seem sacrilegious. [Dave Luna]’s PC docking station in a Commodore Pet 64 case might at first sight seem to be one of them, but there’s a little more to it than gutting a cherished retrocomputer.

A much younger [Dave] had a dead Pet 64, and because over two decades ago such a thing was considered junk, set about converting it to a PC case. In the way of all ambitious projects it stalled, so here in 2022 he was starting with the metal case and keyboard of a Pet 64 rather than the full computer.

Into the case went a small color TFT monitor, a USB3 hub, a DisplayLink adapter, and and an Arduino Micro doing the job of USB-ifying the Commodore keyboard. The result is a pretty cool docking station, but one which he admits isn’t as nice to use as he’d like. Viewed through rose tinted glasses any PET was an amazing machine in its day, but a slightly lackluster keyboard and a tiny screen don’t quite have the same allure in a world of 4K monitors. Still, we’d have one on our desk.

The Pet appears in quite a few projects that have made it to these pages, for example showing YouTube videos.

Continue reading “Pet Docking Station Was Two Decades In The Making” →

The Casio Smartwatch You Never Had

July 20, 2022 by Jenny List 26 Comments

In a way, you have to feel a bit sorry for the engineers at Casio. They can produce the most advanced digital watches ever to grace the wrist, but their work will forever be associated with one of their more lowly creations. The Casio F91 is the archetypal digital watch — it’s affordable, it’s been in production since the Ark, it does the job so well that it’s become a design classic, and it remains a very tough act to follow.

If it has a flaw though, it’s that the functions of a watch from 1989 are very basic. Wouldn’t it be nice if a Casio F91 could be a modern smartwatch! Well thanks to [Pegor] it can, with a complete re-engineering of the classic watch’s internals. Now the simple classic timepiece is fully up-to-date!

All the Casio internals are removed, and a new movement holder supports a fresh PCB with an OLED display mounted via a flexible sub-PCB. The brains comes courtesy of a Texas Instruments CC2640 BLE microcontroller. This gives it a 15-day battery life, which is nothing like what the original watch would have but compares favorably to smartwatches. He admits that the software needs some work, but with hardware this well-executed we hope that others can contribute some improvements.

This is probably the most impressive F91 hack we’ve seen, but it’s by no means the first revamped Casio we’ve shown you.