Author: Jenny List

3571 Articles

The Barn Find IBM 360 Comes Home

December 8, 2019 by 29 Comments

It’s a story that may be familiar to many of us, that of bidding on an item in an online auction and discovering once we go to pick it up that we’ve bought a bit more than we’d bargained for. We told you earlier in the year about the trio of Brits who bought an IBM System/360 mainframe computer from the mid 1960s off of a seller in Germany, only to find in the long-abandoned machine room that they’d bought not just one but two 360s, and a System/370 to boot. Their van was nowhere near big enough for all three machines plus a mountain of cabling, documentation, and period storage media, so they moved it to a hastily-rented storage unit and returned home to work out what on earth to do next.

Now we’ve received an email from the trio with some good news; not only have they managed to bring their hoard of vintage big iron computing back home, but also they’ve found a home for it in the rather unusual surroundings of a former top-secret UK Government signals intelligence station. With the help of a friendly specialist IT relocation company they unleashed it from their temporary storage and into the truck for the UK. It’s a tale of careful packing and plenty of wrapped pallets, as we begin to glimpse the true extent of the collection as you can see in the video below the break, because not only have they secured all the hardware but they also have a huge quantity of punched cards and disk packs. The prospect of a software archaeology peek into how a 1960s mainframe was used by its original customer is a particularly interesting one, as it’s likely those media contain an ossified snapshot of its inner workings.

We’re hoping to follow this project as it evolves, and see (we hope) a room full of abandoned junk transformed into a facsimile of a typical 1960s business computing setup. If you’d like to catch up, read our original coverage of the find.

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This CPU Has Only One Instruction

December 7, 2019 by 37 Comments

Most of us will be familiar at some level with the operation of a basic CPU, usually through exposure to microprocessors of the type that find their way into our projects. We can look at its internal block diagram and get how it works, see the registers and ALU, follow the principles of a von Neumann architecture, and understand that it has an instruction set with different instructions for each of its functions. We all know that this only describes one type of CPU though, and thus it’s always interesting to see alternatives. [Ike Jr] then has a project that should provide a lot of interest, it’s a CPU that only has a single instruction. It can only move data from one place to another, which seems to preclude any possibility of computation. How on earth can it work?

The machine has a set of registers as well as memory, and it achieves computation by having specific registers where we might expect to see instructions. For example the AND register is a two-position stack, that when it is full computes the AND of its two pieces of data and places the result in a general purpose register. The write-up goes into significant detail on the CPU’s operation, and while it’s unlikely the world will move en masse to this architecture it’s still a very interesting read. For now this is a machine that exists in software simulation rather than in silicon, and he’s working to release it so enthusiasts for unusual CPUs can have a go.

The idea of having registers that compute reminds us of a transport triggered architecture machine, being not the same as a one instruction CPU with a more conventional computing instruction.

Abstract PCB header image: Harland Quarrington/MOD [OGL v1.0].

Not-Quite-So-Hot Stuff: A Thermal Exam On The Latest Raspberry Pi

December 6, 2019 by 53 Comments

When the Raspberry Pi 4 was first launched, one of its few perceived flaws was that it had a propensity to get extremely hot. It’s evidently something the Pi people take very seriously, so in the months since they have addressed the problem with a set of firmware updates. Now they’ve taken a look at the effect of the fixes in a piece on the Raspberry Pi web site, and it makes for an interesting comparison.

The headline figure is that all updates together remove about a watt of power from the load, a significant quantity for what is still a board that can run from a capable phone charger. Breaking down the separate parts of the updates is where the meat of this story lies though, as we see the individual effects of the various USB, memory, power management and clocking updates. In temperature terms they measure an on-load drop from 72.1 °C to 58.1 °C, which should be a significant improvement for any Pi 4 owner.

There is a debate to be had over in what role a computer such as a Pi should serve. As successive revisions become ever more desktop-like in their capabilities, do they run the risk of abandoning the simplicity of a cheap Linux box as a component that makes us come back for more? It’s a possibility, but one they have very well addressed by developing the Pi Zero. They have also successfully avoided the fate of the Arduino — inexorably tied to its ATmega powered original line despite newer releases. As we have frequently said when reviewing Raspberry Pi competitors, it’s the software support that sets them apart from the herd, something this power-draw story demonstrates admirably.

Don’t Forget The Baby!

December 5, 2019 by 47 Comments

It must be a common worry among parents, that they might forget their offspring and leave them in the car where they would succumb to excessive heat. So much so that [Matt Meerian] has produced an alarm that issues a verbal reminder to check for the youngster when the vehicle is turned off.

It’s a simple enough device, with an ATmega328, an off-the-shelf MP3 module, and a power supply regulator to deliver 5 V into a pair of supercapacitors from the vehicle accessory socket’s 12 V. The idea is that the  power is cut when the vehicle ignition is turned off, and that the supercaps have enough energy within them to play the reminder sample for the driver to check for forgotten children.

We can’t help remarking that a percentage of cars leave their accessory sockets turned on all the time, so it would be interesting to ponder how one might detect the car being turned off in that case. He muses about using a surplus cell phone instead of his ATmega328, perhaps the MEMS sensor on a phone could also be used to detect the vibrations of the engine stopping as it was turned off. Such cars notwithstanding, this unit is a straightforward solution to the problem in hand.

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A Mini Vending Machine To Ramp Up Your Sales

December 3, 2019 by No comments

A common sight in the world of hackerspaces is an old vending machine repurposed from hawking soda cans into a one-stop shop for Arduinos or other useful components. [Gabriel D’Espindula]’s mini vending machine may have been originally designed as an exercise for his students and may not be full sized, but we can see it or machines like it taking away some of the demand for those surplus models.

Its construction mimics that of some older 3D printers in using laser-cut ply to form the components of a box. Behind a clear lockable door are the shelves containing the products, at the back of which are continuous rotation servos that will drive the spiral Archimedes screws that eject the products. To the side is a membrane keypad and display, and the whole is drawn together with an STM32 board and an Arduino. It supports both RFID card login and keyboard login, and though it’s not finished we can see it forming the basis of a very useful system.

He’s posted the most recent progress in the form of a video that we’ve placed below the break. All the various files are available for download, so should you fancy one yourself then you have a good chance of success.

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Landbeest, A Single Servo Walking Robot

November 29, 2019 by 14 Comments

Walking robots have a rich history both on and off the storied pages of Hackaday, but if you will pardon the expression, theirs is not a field that’s standing still. It’s always pleasing to see new approaches to old problems, and the Landbeest built by [Dejan Ristic] is a great example.

It’s a four-legged walker with a gait dictated by a cam-and-follower mechanism that allows it to perform the full range of leg movement with only one motor. Each cam can control more than one leg in synchronisation, and in his most recent prototype, there are two such mechanisms that work on opposite corners of a four-legged machine. The legs are arranged in such a way that the two corner-to-corner pairs pivot at their centres in a similar manner to a pair of scissors; allowing a servo to steer the robot as it walks.

The result certainly isn’t as graceful as [Theo Janssen]’s Strandbeest, from which it evidently takes inspiration for its name, but it’s no less capable for it. After the break you can see a video he’s posted which clearly illustrates its operation and demonstrates its ability to traverse obstacles.

The only thing that’s missing are the files and software should you wish to create your own. He’s unapologetic about this, pointing out that he’d prefer to wait until he is satisfied with it before letting it go. Since he’s put a lot of work in so far and shows no sign of stopping, we’re sure he’ll reach that point soon enough.

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That’s It, No More European IPV4 Addresses

November 29, 2019 by 83 Comments

When did you first hear concern expressed about the prospect of explosive growth of the internet resulting in exhaustion of the stock of available IP addresses? About twenty years ago perhaps? All computers directly connected to the internet must have an individual unique address, and the IPv4 scheme used since the 1980s has a 32-bit address space that provides only 4,294,967,296 possibilities. All that growth now means that IPv4 addresses are now in short supply, and this week RIPE, the body which allocates them in Europe, has announced that it no longer has any to allocate. Instead of handing new address blocks they will instead now provide ones that have been relinquished for example by companies that have gone out of business, and parties interested can join a waiting list.

Is the Internet dead then? Hardly, because of course IPv6, the replacement for IPv4, has been with us for decades and has a much larger 128-bit address space. The problem is that there is a huge installed base of IPv4 infrastructure which has always been cited as the reason to delay its adoption, so the vast majority of the internet-connected world has remained with IPv4. Even in an IPv4 world there are opportunities to be more efficient in the use of addresses such as the network address translation or NAT that many private networks use to share one address between many hosts, so it’s not quite curtains for your smart TV or IoT light bulb even though the situation will not get any easier.

The mystery comes in why after so many years we still use IPv4 so much. Your home router and millions like it will pick up an IPv4 address from your broadband provider’s pool, and there seems little reason why it can not instead pick up an IPv6 address and contain a gateway between the two. The same goes for addresses outside the domestic arena, and even in out community we find that IPv6 networks at events are labelled as experimental. Perhaps this news will spur the change, but meanwhile we don’t expect to be using an IPv6 address day-to-day very soon.

We know among Hackaday’s readership there will be people close to the coalface when it comes to IPv6 adoption. As always the comments are open, and we’d like to hear your views.

Header: Robert.Harker [CC BY-SA 3.0].