Author: Jenny List

3291 Articles

Sad Without A SID? This Comes Pretty Close

July 24, 2018 by 36 Comments

The MOS Technologies 6851, popularly known as the SID, is a legendary sound synthesiser integrated circuit from the early 1980s that is most famous for providing the Commodore 64 home computer with its ability to make noise. At the time it was significantly better than what could be found in competitor machines, making it a popular choice for today’s chiptune and demo scene artists.

There’s a snag for a modern-day SID-jockey though, the chip has been out of production for a quarter century and is thus in short supply. Emulation is a choice, but of little use for owners of original hardware so it’s fortunate that [Petros Kokotis] has produced a SID replacement using a Teensy 3.6.

The operation is simple enough, the Teensy provides all the requisite SID data lines via some level shifters for the host microcomputer, and uses [Frank Boesing]’s ReSID library to do the heavy lifting part of being a SID. You can download the code from a GitHub repository, and he’s posted a video we’ve put below the break showing a prototype in action with a real Commodore 64. The audio quality isn’t brilliant due to a phone camera recording from a very tinny speaker, but notwithstanding that it has the air of the real thing.

This isn’t the first SID we’ve seen here. How about a MIDI synth using one?

Continue reading “Sad Without A SID? This Comes Pretty Close” →

Fail Of The Week: ESP Walkie, Not-So-Talkie

July 23, 2018 by 51 Comments

The ESP8266 has become such a staple of projects in our community since it burst onto the scene a few years ago. The combination of a super-fast processor and wireless networking all on the same chip and sold in retail quantities for relative pennies has been irresistible. So when [Petteri Aimonen] needed to make a wireless intercom system for cycling trips it seemed an obvious choice. Push its internal ADC to sample at a high enogh rate for audio, and stream the result over an ad-hoc wi-fi network.

The result was far from satisfactory, as while early results with a signal generator seemed good, in practice it was unusable. Significant amounts of noise were entering the pathway such that the resulting audio was unintelligible. It seems that running a wireless network causes abrupt and very short spikes of power supply current that play havoc with audio ADCs.

He’s submitted it to us as a Fail Of The Week and he’s right, it is a fail. But in a way that’s an unfair description, because we can see there is the germ of a seriously good idea in there. Perhaps with an external ADC, or maybe with some as-yet-to-be-determined filtering scheme, an ESP8266 walkie-talkie is one of those ideas that should be taken to its conclusion. We hope he perseveres.

IHC Badge: It’s Not (Quite) A Nokia

July 22, 2018 by 16 Comments

Electronic conference badges are an integral part of our culture, and have featured many times here. The norm for a badge is an exquisitely designed printed circuit board with some kind of microcontroller circuit on it, often a display, and some LEDs.

This is not enough though for [Mastro Gippo], for he has given us an interesting alternative, the shell of a Nokia 3310 mobile phone fitted with a new motherboard holding an ESP32 module, and of course that classic display. It is to be the badge for IHC Camp, which initialism if you hadn’t guessed stands for Italian Hacker Camp, and which will run from the 2nd to the 5th of August 2018 in Padova, Italy. It’s worth reminding readers, at the time of writing IHC tickets are still available, so get ’em while they’re hot!

The board itself is a beautiful piece of work, and aside from the Nokia’s keyboard and display it holds the ESP module and an STM32F103 microcontroller that handles all the peripherals. There is no microphone, after all this is a badge rather than a phone, but there is space for a LoRa module. He’s done another fascinating post about the PCB design, including the on-board wireless antenna.

We have seen a lot about badges from the #BadgeLife scene surrounding the USA’s DEFCON courtesy of our colleague [Brian Benchoff], so it is particularly interesting to see badges from the opposite side of the Atlantic. This is an artform whose journey still has a way to go, and we’ll be along for the ride!

Old Phone, New Remote Switch

July 21, 2018 by 38 Comments

With mobile phones now ubiquitous for the masses in much of the world for over two decades, something a lot of readers will be familiar with is a drawer full of their past devices. Alongside the older smartphone you’ll have a couple of feature phones, and probably at the bottom a Nokia candybar or a Motorola flip phone. There have been various attempts over the years to make use of the computing power the more recent ones contain through using their smartphone operating systems, but the older devices remain relatively useless.

[Vishwasnavada] has a neat plan though, using an ancient phone as a remote trigger device, by interfacing it with an Arduino. There are many ways this could be achieved depending on the model of the phone in question, but one thing common to nearly all devices is a vibration motor. Removing the motor and taking its power line to a GPIO allows the Arduino to sense when the phone is ringing. The idea then is that a call can be placed to the phone which is not picked up, but because it triggers the vibration motor it can be used to make the microcontroller do something remotely. A hack with limited capabilities then, but one that is cheap and simple, uses a recycled device, and should work almost anywhere populated on the planet given the global reach of 2G networks.

This isn’t the first respin of a classic Nokia we’ve brought you, they will also talk data.

Hacking A Very Special 486

July 21, 2018 by 23 Comments

It’s fair to say that Moore’s Law is not delivering on its promise of advancing semiconductor capabilities as fast as it used to, as the limits of current fabrication techniques are being met. Where this is being written for example there are two laptops, one from the last year and one that is 11 years old, and while the new one is undeniably faster it has not overtaken the other by as much as a ten year gap between 1990s machines would have revealed.

So with older laptops being still so relatively quick, what possible attraction could there be for working on a machine from the 1990s, when the Moore’s Law curve was steeper? It’s something [Jim W] is doing, with his HP Internet Advisor (J2522B), and when you see the machine in question perhaps you’ll understand why. The J2522B is a laptop, but it’s no ordinary ’90s road warrior’s status symbol. This 486-powered beast is a piece of test equipment, specifically one for examining Ethernet ports, thus it’s built like a tank and is mains powered only. It boasts a 486DX4, 16 MB of memory, a then-colossal 1.3 GB hard drive, and an ISA Fast Ethernet card. Oh, and WIndows 95, which with a couple of decades’ hindsight seems an amusing choice to power a piece of security test equipment.  Impressive specs for the day, but the $20,000 price tag would still have been steep compared to a comparable laptop.

[Jim]’s machine is destined for classic gaming, though with only the little HP pop-out mouse you saw on their Omnibook range at the time, he needed a PS/2 port. Some chipset hunting found that, but at the cost of accidentally frying a MOSFET when a screen connector was incorrectly re-inserted. We’re then treated to a guide to substituting older MOSFETs with modern parts, useful in itself, but followed by a marvelous piece of bodge work as an SOIC-8 part is placed on a DPAK footprint.

This is an interesting series of posts, partly from a retro angle as they deal with an interesting machine, but also from a hacking angle as he’s getting closer to the vintage PC hardware than most of us to. Keep an eye on it, there is sure to be more in the pipeline.

Build A Boat With Your Buddies

July 20, 2018 by 20 Comments

It’s probably a dream common to many groups of friends among the Hackaday readership: go away together to a sunny island some time in the summer, take a load of beer and maybe a BBQ, and build something. Some of us get close to it at hacker camps such as Toorcamp or EMF, but few do it as well as [KristianKalm] and his friends. Their time on an island resulted in a boat, and what a boat it is!

To be fair, this is not a craft you’d sail the high seas in, its unique hull design rendered in single-skin plywood might have some stability issues and probably would have difficulty maintaining structural integrity in a high sea. But it’s perfect for their summer time backwater, with its electric outboard, steering wheel, and seat from a Russian saloon car.

The plans are fairly simple, cut from two sheets of ply it has an angular pointed front, sloping sides, and a fairly narrow bottom. Our experience with river boats would have led to a wider flat-bottomed hull, but this one looks stable enough for their purposes. Everything is held together with PVA glue and extra pieces of wood over the joints, something that amazingly keeps the water at bay. It is fairly obviously a rather basic and ever some might say rather ugly boat, but we’d guess there are few readers who wouldn’t want to give it a spin as part of a summer holiday.

If this has caught your fancy, don’t panic, the Northern Hemisphere still has some summer left, and all you need to do is find a plastic barrel!

Thanks [Keith Olson] for the tip!

The C.H.I.P Returns, Maybe

July 20, 2018 by 36 Comments

Remember the C.H.I.P? The little ARM-based and Linux-capable single board computer that was launched in 2015 at what was then a seemingly impossibly cheap price of $9, then took ages to arrive before fading away and the company behind it going under? Like a zombie, it has returned from the dead!

So, should we be reaching for the staples of zombie movies, and breaking out the long-playing records? Or should we be cautiously welcoming it back into the fold, a prodigal son to the wider family of boards? Before continuing, it’s best to take a closer look.

The C.H.I.P that has returned is a C.H.I.P Pro, the slightly more powerful upgraded model, and it has done so because unlike its sibling it was released under an open-source licence. Therefore this is a clone of the original, and it comes from an outfit called Source Parts, who have put their board up for sale via Amazon, but with what looks suspiciously like a photo of an original Next Thing Co board. We can’t raise Source Parts’ website as this is being written so we can’t tell you much about its originator and whether this is likely to be a reliable supplier that can provide continuity, so maybe we’d suggest a little caution until more information has emerged. We’re sure that community members will share their experiences.

It’s encouraging to see the C.H.I.P Pro return, but on balance we’d say that its price is not the most attractive given that the same money can buy you powerful boards that come with much better support. The SBC market has moved on since the original was a thing, and to make a splash this one will have to have some special sauce that we’re just not seeing. If they cloned the Pocket C.H.I.P all-in-one computer with keyboard and display, now that would catch our attention!

It all seemed so rosy for the C.H.I.P at launch, but even then its competitors doubted the $9 BoM, and boards such as the Raspberry Pi Zero took its market. The end came in March this year, but perhaps there might be more life in it yet.

Thanks [SlowBro] for the tip.