Author: Jenny List

3070 Articles

Winamp Taken Down: Too Good For This Open Source World

October 16, 2024 by 58 Comments

If you picked today in your hackerspace’s sweepstake on when Winamp would pull their code repository, congratulations! You’re a winner! The source for the Windows version of the venerable music player was released on GitHub three weeks ago, and after some derision over its licence terms, a bunch of possible open source violations, and the inadvertent release of some proprietary third-party code, it’s been taken down. We’re sure that if you still have a burning desire to look at it then it won’t be too difficult to find a copy through your favorite search engine, leaving the question of what really just happened.

It’s fairly obvious that the owners of the code lacked some level of understanding of just what open source really is, based on their not-really-open licence and all those code leaks. They did back down on not allowing people to create forks, but it’s evident that they didn’t anticipate the reaction they got. So were they merely a bit clueless, or was it all just a publicity stunt involving a piece of software that’s now of more historical than practical interest? It’s possible we’ll never know, but the story has provided those of us sitting on the fence eating popcorn with some entertainment.

An Arduino Triggers A Flash With Sound

October 15, 2024 by 38 Comments

To capture an instant on film or sensor with a camera, you usually need a fast shutter. But alternately a flash can be triggered with the scene in the dark and the shutter wide open. It’s this latter technique which PetaPixel are looking at courtesy of the high-speed class at Rochester Institute of Technology. They’re using a cheap sound sensor module and an Arduino to catch instantaneous photographs, with students caught in the act of popping balloons.

Continue reading “An Arduino Triggers A Flash With Sound” →

Portable Pi Palmtop Provides Plenty

October 13, 2024 by 11 Comments

We’ve seen many portable laptops using the Raspberry Pi series of boards in the decade-plus since its launch. The appeal of a cheap board that can run a desktop Linux distro without requiring too much battery is hard not to fall for. Over the years, the bar has been raised from a Pi stuck to the back of one of those Motorola netbook accessories, through chunky laptops, to some very svelte and professional-looking machines. A recent example comes from [Michael Mayer], whose Portable Pi 80 is a palmtop design that we’d be happy to take on the road ourselves.

At its heart is a Pi Zero 2, combining as it does a tiny form factor with the useful power of its Pi 3-derived processor. This is mated to a Waveshare 7-inch display, and in the bottom half of the machine sits a 40% mechanical keyboard. Alongside this are a pair of 18650 cells and their associated power modules. The little Arduino, which normally handles the keyboard, has been relocated due to space constraints, which brings us to the case. A project like this one is, in many ways, a task of assembling a set of modules, and it’s in the case that the work here really shines. It’s a 3D-printable case that you can download from Printables, and it’s very nice indeed. As we said, we’d be happy to use one of these.

Portable computing has come a very long way. Often the keyboard can make it or break it.

Have You Heard Of The Liquid Powder Display?

October 12, 2024 by 10 Comments

Over the decades the technology behind flat panel displays has continuously evolved, and we’ve seen many of them come and go. Among the popular ones there are a few that never quite made the big time, usually because a contemporary competitor took their market. An example is in a recent [Wenting Zhang] video, a mystery liquid powder display. We’d never heard of it, so we were intrigued.

The first segment of the video is an examination of the device, and a comparison with similar-looking ones such as a conventional LCD, or a Sharp Memory LCD. It’s clearly neither of those, and the answer finally came after a lot of research. A paper described a “Quick response liquid powder” as a mechanism for a novel display, and thus it was identified. It works by moving black and white electrically charged powder to flip a pixel from black to white, and its operation is not dissimilar to the liquid-based e-ink displays which evidently won that particular commercial battle.

The process of identifying the driver chip and pinout should be an essential watch for anyone with an interest in display reverse engineering. After a lot of adjusting timing and threshold voltages the dead pixels and weird effects fall away, and then it’s possible to display a not-too-high-quality image on this unusual display, through a custom PCB with an RP2040. Take a look at the video below the break.

We’ve seen [Wenting Zhang]’s work here a few times before, most recently in a very impressive mirror-less camera project.

Continue reading “Have You Heard Of The Liquid Powder Display?” →

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Corporation Prolok

October 11, 2024 by 7 Comments

In the 2020s we’re used to software being readily accessible, and often free, whether as-in-beer or as-in-speech. This situation is a surprisingly new one, and in an earlier era of consumer software it was most often an expensive purchase. An anti-piracy industry sprang up as manufacturers tried to protect their products, and it’s one of those companies that [GloriousCow] examines in detail, following their trajectory from an initial success through to an ignominious failure driven by an anti-piracy tech too extreme even for the software industry.

Vault Corporation made a splash in the marketplace with Prolok, a copy protection system for floppies that worked by creating a physically damaged area of the disc which wouldn’t be present on a regular floppy. The write-up goes into detail about the workings of the system, including how to circumvent a Prolok protected title if you find one. This last procedure resulted in a lawsuit between Prolok and Quaid Software, one of the developers of circumvention tools, which established the right of Americans to make backup copies of their owned software.

The downfall of Vault Corporation came with their disastrously misjudged Prolok Plus product, which promised to implant a worm on the hard disks of pirates and delete all their files in an act of punishment. Sensing the huge reputational damage of being tied to such a product the customers stayed away, and the company drifted into obscurity.

For those interested further in the world of copy protection from this era, we’ve previously covered the similar deep dives that [GloriousCow] has done on Softguard’s Superlok as well as the Interlock system from Electronic Arts.

A Flip Digit Clock, Binary Style

October 8, 2024 by 7 Comments

Flip digit clocks are a prized piece of consumer electrical ephemera, providing as they do a digital display without significant electronics. Making your own flip digit display involves some drudgery in the production of all those flip cards, but how would it seem if the complexity was reduced? Go from base 10 to base 2 for example, and a binary flip digit display can be made from flip dot display parts. [Marcin Saj] has done just that, resulting in a timepiece that’s a few bits out of the ordinary.

Under the hood though it’s slightly more conventional, with the trusty ATmega328 and Arduino bootloader, whose software drives the dot electromagnets via a set of MOSFET drivers. It’s a nice project which if you want there’s a Kickstarter to buy one, but the files are also available from a GitHub repository if you’d like to have a go for yourself. Meanwhile you can see it in action in the video below the break.

We like this clock, as it’s different from the norm in Arduino clocks. It’s not however the first flip dot clock we’ve seen, this one has a full dot matrix display.

Continue reading “A Flip Digit Clock, Binary Style” →

Barbie’s Video Has Never Looked So Good

October 8, 2024 by 8 Comments

For those who missed it, there’s been something of a quiet revolution in the world of analogue video over the last year, due to the arrival of inexpensive “MiniDVR” devices. These little modules are a complete video recorder including battery, recording PAL or NTSC composite video and audio to SD card. They’ve become the box of choice for camcorder enthusiasts, but that’s not where the fun ends. [Max Vega] has taken a Barbie video camera toy from 2001 and added a MiniDVR to make it into a fully self-contained novelty camcorder. But this isn’t a simple case of duct-taping the DVR to the toy, instead it’s a comprehensive upgrade resulting in a device which could almost have been a real product.

The original toy had a small transmitter which could send over a short distance to a receiver that connected to a domestic VCR, so all that circuitry had to go. The camera itself is a small enough module in the fake lens assembly, with an easily identifiable output cable with the required composite signal. The video below the break steps through the proces of making the space for the MiniDVR module, and putting in extensions for all its buttons, and the SD card. Finally it has a new power supply module with an associated USB-C input, providing juice to both DVR and camera.

The result has what we can only describe as a pleasingly retro feel, in that it’s not of high quality and the colour is, well, Never The Same. But when a smartphone can record HD video that’s not the point, instead it’s there to be a retro toy, and in that it succeeds completely.

Continue reading “Barbie’s Video Has Never Looked So Good” →