Author: Jenny List

3537 Articles

A Modern Take On A Piece Of Old Test Equipment

December 15, 2019 by No comments

The HP 11947A is something of a footnote in the back catalogue of Hewlett Packard test equipment. An attenuator and limiter with a bandwidth in the megahertz rather than the gigahertz. It’s possible that few laboratories have much use for one in 2019, but it does have one useful property: a full set of schematics and technical documentation. [James Wilson] chose the device as the subject of a clone using surface mount devices.

The result is very satisfyingly within spec, and he’s run a battery of tests to prove it. As he says, the HP design is a good one to start with.   As a device containing only passive components and with a maximum frequency in the VHF range this is a project that makes a very good design exercise for anyone interested in RF work or even who wishes to learn a bit of RF layout. At these frequencies there are still a significant number of layout factors that can affect performance, but the effect of conductor length and  stray capacitance is less than the much higher frequencies typically used by wireless-enabled microcontrollers.

The Boxy All-In-One Nintendo 64 Your 1990s Self Always Wanted

December 15, 2019 by 16 Comments

In 1997, chances are that if you didn’t have a Nintendo 64 already, you wanted one. (Never mind that the games cost the GDP of a small country.) It gave you both the supreme game designing talent of Shigeru Miyamoto and graphics that left the Sony behind. The trouble, though, was that like all consoles, the N64 required a large TV set and a load of wires. There was never a compact all-in-one version that integrated console, display, and speakers in the same package, and that was something [Mason Stooksbury] evidently considered to be a shame. A couple of decades late, he’s created the all-in-one Nintendo 64 appliance that the games giant never made in the ’90s, and we’re lucky enough to be able to take a look at it.

The starting point for the build is entirely in-period, the shell of a late-1990s Compaq CRT monitor. In the front goes a laptop display panel with a monitor conversion board, leaving plenty of space behind for a pair of full-size speakers. On top of the speakers sits a bare N64, with the controller ports brought out to the front panel below the screen. It’s not all retro though, there is also an HDMI converter and an HDMI output to drive a modern TV if desired. The N64 itself has an interesting backstory, it was his original console from back in the day that died following a lightning strike, and he brought it back to life decades later after some research revealed that the N64 PSU has a fuse.

Would an all in one ’64 have sold like hot cakes in ’97? Probably, and we’d be featuring all sorts of hacks on them today. As it is, portable N64s seem to feature most often here.

The Home-Made Drill Press Of Your Dreams

December 15, 2019 by 24 Comments

We are lucky to live in an age when tools have almost never been so affordable, when if we’d like a drill press on our benches we can pick one up for not a lot from our nearest discount store. If the cheapest tools aren’t very good quality then even the better ones aren’t that much more expensive. It’s evident that [Workshop DIY] has the resources to buy a decent drill press if he wanted one, but we’re fortunate that instead he’s taken the time to build one of his own from scratch (Russian language audio, Anglophones will have to enable YouTube subtitle translation).

The press itself is made entirely from box section steel tube, with what looks like 25mm square used for the base and 50mm for the vertical shaft. Instead of a rack and pinion to raise and lower the tool it has a slider that runs on a set of bearings and is lifted with a bicycle chain. The chuck itself is mounted to a shaft that runs through another set of bearings to the large pulley and motor from a washing machine. The result is a beautifully made drill press that seems to work very effectively. It may lack an adjustable table or selectable speeds, but we certainly couldn’t build it better than he has. Take a look, the video is below the break.

It shouldn’t be surprising what can be made in a well-appointed metalworking shop, perhaps we have been blinded by the convenience of readily available tools. If you’d like to see more, take a look at this DIY engine crane.

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Why Is Your Cellphone Not A More Useful Computer?

December 14, 2019 by 130 Comments

Sometimes when you are browsing randomly through the tech feeds, up pops an article that just crystallizes a nascent thought that had been simmering below the surface for a long time, and is enough to make you sit up and say “Yes! I agree completely with that!”. Such a moment came with [Cheapscatesguide]’s post: “My Fantasy: A Cellphone I can Use as a Desktop Computer“, in which the pertinent question is asked that if smartphones are so powerful, why are they not much better at being more than, well, smartphones?

Readers with long memories may recall that the cellphone-as-computer idea is one that has been tried at least once before. The Motorola Atrix appeared in the early years of this decade, and was a high-end smartphone that could be slotted into both desktop replacement and netbook-style base stations and used as a Linux-based personal computer. Unfortunately it was both eye-wateringly expensive and disappointingly slow due to a hobbled operating system, so it failed to set the market alight. There was a brief moment when unsold Atrix netbook docks were available on the surplus market and became popular platforms as a Raspberry Pi desktop interface, but this experiment seems to have put paid to the idea of one device to truly rule them all.

If we had to hazard a guess as to why this has failed to happen, we’d finger both the manufacturer’s desire not to undermine their lucrative sales in other sectors, and both their and the carriers’ desire to lock down the devices as much as possible. A manufacturer such as Apple will for example never  produce an iPhone that can replace a desktop, because it would affect their MacBook sales. Oddly in another form we’re nearly there, this piece is being worked on with a Chromebook, a device that has a useful browser, a functional Android layer, and (because it’s a 64-bit model) an officially supported and useful Debian layer. We don’t expect this to translate into a phone any time soon though.

From another angle, we’ve asked in the past why we aren’t hacking old cellphones.

Moto Atrix lapdock picture: ETC@USC [CC BY-SA 2.0].

Via Hacker News.

Reflection On A Decade Of Hackerspace Expansion

December 13, 2019 by 44 Comments

A few days ago I was invited to a party. Party invites are always good, and if I can make it to this one I’ll definitely go. It’s from a continental European hackerspace, and it’s for their tenth birthday party. As I spent a while checking ferries and flights it struck me, a lot of the spaces in my sphere are about a decade old. I went to London Hackspace’s 10th earlier in the year, and a host of other British hackerspaces aren’t far behind. Something tells me I’ll be knocking back the Club Mate and listening to EDM of some form at more than one such party in the coming year.

For most of the decade since I found the then-recently-established mailing list of my local hackerspace I’ve spent a lot of my time involved in more than one space. I’ve been a hackerspace director, a member, and many roles in between and I’ve seen them in both good times and bad ones. Perhaps it’s time to sit back and take stock of that decade and ask a few questions about hackerspaces. How have they fared, what state are they in now, and where are they going?

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Patch, Or Your Solid State Drives Roll Over And Die

December 10, 2019 by 117 Comments

Expiration dates for computer drives? That’s what a line of HP solid-state drives are facing as the variable for their uptime counter is running out. When it does, the drive “expires” and, well, no more data storage for you!

There are a series of stages in the evolution of a software developer as they master their art, and one of those stages comes in understanding that while they may have a handle on the abstracted world presented by their development environment they perhaps haven’t considered the moments in which the real computer that lives behind it intrudes. Think of the first time you saw an SQL injection attack on a website, for example, or the moment you realised that a variable type is linked to the physical constraints of the number of memory locations it has reserved for it. So people who write software surround themselves with an armoury of things they watch out for as they code, and thus endeavour to produce software less likely to break. Firmly in that arena is the size of the variables you use and what will happen when that limit is reached.

Your Drive Is Good For About 3 Years And 9 Months

Sometimes though even developers that should know better get it wrong, and this week has brought an unfortunate example for the enterprise wing of the hardware giant HP. Their manufacturer has notified them that certain models of solid-state disk drives supplied in enterprise storage systems contain an unfortunate bug, in which they stop working after 32,768 hours of uptime. That’s a familiar number to anyone working with base-2 numbers and hints at a 16-bit signed integer in use to log the hours of uptime. When it rolls over the value will then be negative and, rather than the drive believing itself to be in a renewed flush of youth, it will instead stop working.

Egg on the faces of the storage company then, and an urgently-released patch. We suspect that if you own a stack of these drives you will already know about the issue and be nervously pacing the racks of your data centre.

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Hackaday Superconference: An Analog Engineer Dives Into RF

December 9, 2019 by 6 Comments

Those of us who work with electronics will usually come to the art through a particular avenue that we master while imbibing what we need from those around it. For example, an interest in audio circuitry may branch into DSP and microcontrollers as projects become more complex. Some realms though retain an aura of impossibility, a reputation as a Dark Art, and chief among them for many people is radio frequency (RF). Radio circuitry is often surprisingly simple, yet that simplicity conceals a wealth of complexity because the medium does not behave in the orderly manner of a relatively static analogue voltage or a set of low-frequency logic levels.

Chris Gammell is a familiar face to many Hackaday readers for his mastery of much electronic trickery, so it comes as something of a surprise to find that RF has been one of the gaps in his knowledge. In his talk at the Hackaday Superconference he took us through his journey into RF work, and the result is a must-watch for anyone with a curiosity about radio circuitry who didn’t know where to start.

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