How Powerful Should An Electric Bike Be? The UK Is Asking

March 6, 2024 by Jenny List 119 Comments

As electric drives sweep their way to dominance in the automotive world, there’s another transport sector in which their is also continuing apace. Electric-assisted bicycles preserve the feeling of riding a bike as you always have, along with an electric motor to effortlessly power the rider over hill and dale. European electric two-wheelers are limited to a legal top speed of about 15 miles per hour and a 250 watt motor, but in a post-Brexit dash for independence the British government are asking whether that power should be increased to 500 watts.

The Westminster politicians think such a move will make electric bikes more attractive to consumers, and along with a move to motorcycle-style throttles rather than pedal-to-go throttles they want it to accelerate the take-up of greener transport in a country with plenty of hills. Meanwhile cycling groups and safety groups are concerned, the former whether the move is needed at all, and the latter over the fire risk from more powerful battery packs.

The Hackaday electric bike stable gives us a bit of experience on the matter, and our take is that with a 15 mile-per-hour limit there’s little point in upping the motor power. There’s a 350 watt European limit for three-wheelers though, which we could see would really benefit from a raise if applied to cargo bikes. We can however see that a readily-available supply of cheap 500 W motors would be worth having.

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Damn Small Linux 2024

March 5, 2024 by Jenny List 37 Comments

There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 286. Here in the 2020s, though, that divide is less stark. While a machine from the mid-2000s may no longer be considered quick, it can still run modern and useful software.

The problem facing the owner of such older hardware though is that as operating systems advance their requirements and eclipse their machine’s capabilities. A perfectly good machine becomes less useful, not because the tasks it needs to be used for are beyond it, but because the latest OS is built with higher-spec hardware in mind. The subject of today’s test is an operating system designed to make the best of older hardware, and it’s one with a pedigree. Damn Small Linux, or DSL, first appeared in 2005 as a tiny distro for the old machines of the day, and after a long hiatus it’s back with a 2024 edition.

Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Damn Small Linux 2024” →

Retrotechtacular: The Free Piston Engine

March 4, 2024 by Jenny List 20 Comments

We all know how a conventional internal combustion engine works, with a piston and a crankshaft. But that’s by no means the only way to make an engine, and one of the slightly more unusual alternatives comes to us courtesy of a vintage Shell Film Unit film, The Free Piston Engine, which we’ve placed below the break. It’s a beautiful period piece of mid-century animation and jazz, but it’s also an introduction to these fascinating machines.

We’re introduced to the traditional two-stroke diesel engine as thermally efficient but not smooth-running, and then the gas turbine as smooth but much more inefficient. The free piston engine, a design with opposed pistons working against compressed air springs and combining both compression and firing strokes in a single axis, doesn’t turn anything in itself, but instead works as a continuous supplier of high pressure combustion gasses. The clever part of this arrangement is that these gasses can then turn the power turbine from a gas turbine engine, achieving a smooth engine without compromising efficiency.

This sounds like a promising design for an engine, and we’re introduced to a rosy picture of railway locomotives, ships, factories, and power stations all driven by free piston engines. Why then, here in 2024 do we not see them everywhere? A quick Google search reveals an inordinately high number of scientific review papers about them but not so many real-world examples. In that they’re not alone, for alternative engine designs are one of those technologies for which if we had a dollar for every one we’d seen that didn’t make it, as the saying goes, we’d be rich.

It seems that the problem with these engines is that they don’t offer the control over their timing that we’re used to from more conventional designs, and thus the speed of their operation also can’t be controlled. The British firm Libertine claim to have solved this with their line of linear electrical generators, but perhaps understandably for commercial reasons they are a little coy about the details. Their focus is on free piston engines as power sources for hybrid electric vehicles, something which due to their small size they seem ideally suited for.

Perhaps the free piston engine has faced its biggest problem not in the matter of technology but in inertia. There’s an old saying in the computer industry: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM“, meaning that the conventional conservative choice always wins, and it’s fair to guess that the same applies anywhere a large engine has been needed. A conventional diesel engine may be a complex device with many moving parts, but it’s a well-understood machine that whoever wields the cheque book feels comfortable with. That’s a huge obstacle for any new technology to climb. Meanwhile though it offers obvious benefits in terms of efficiency, at the moment its time could have come due to environmental concerns, any internal combustion engine has fallen out of fashion. It’s possible that it could find a life as an engine running on an alternative fuel such as hydrogen or ammonia, but we’re not so sure. If new free piston engines do take off though, we’ll be more pleased than anyone to eat our words.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Free Piston Engine” →

A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later

March 3, 2024 by Jenny List 25 Comments

For a while around a quarter century ago PC motherboards came with a special slot, a little shorter than the PCI slots which ruled the roost back then, and offset from them further into the case. This was the Accelerated Graphics Port, or AGP, a standard created to more quickly serve the 3D graphics cards which were then taking the world by storm. It was everywhere for a few years, then in the mid-2000s it was replaced by PCI Express and faded into obscurity. [Peter] has a Socket 7-based NAS with an AGP slot, and was left wondering whether the unused port could be put to a worthwhile purpose.

AGP is a superset of PCI clocked at 66 MHz, and usually benefiting from having its own exclusive bridge to the processor bus. Thus he reasoned that he could make an AGP to PCI adapter and it might work, as the right connections are all there. A hacked-together version was made by butchering two riser cards, and when a network card worked quite happily he knew he was on to something and made a PCB. There’s a caveat that it only works with 66-MHz capable PCI cards so not everything will work, but if you’re one of the very few people who must be in the market for one, he can do you a PCB.

We’d normally end with a link to a related project here, but we must instead congratulate [Peter]. As far as we can find, this is Hackaday’s first AGP hack, two decades later. Continue reading “A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later” →

It’s A CoCo! No, It’s An Apple II!

March 2, 2024 by Jenny List 2 Comments

Original retrocomputing hardware is now decades old and showing its age, so the chances are it’s more common in 2024 to experience a machine from the 1970s or 1980s by way of an emulator on a modern machine than it is on the real hardware. There’s another more limited emulation scene as similar 8-bit machines emulate each other, for example when the very similar Dragon 32 and Tandy CoCo have a go at each other’s software. Rarest of them all though is when one classic machine emulates another with a different architecture, but that’s exactly what’s happened with [DragonBytes], who has persuaded a Tandy CoCo to emulate an Apple II.

The two machines have significant hardware differences, but we’re guessing that the project is helped a little by the Motorola 6809 in the CoCo and the MOS 6502 in the Apple having both in a sense been different visions of a successor to the Motorola 6800. Thus their architectures while different, are not diametrically opposed. The other hardware is certainly not so similar though, with Moto’s 6847 display chip in the Tandy being far more conventional than Steve Wozniak’s clever NTSC hacks to achieve a color display for minimal cost on the Apple.

The project is written in assembler, and doesn’t by any means claim to support all Apple modes, or be cycle accurate. But it’s a hugely impressive achievement nevertheless.

The CoCo has an enthusiastic following, and has appeared here a few times in the past. We particularly like this video player.

Designing A USB-C Upgrade PCB For The MX Ergo Mouse

March 2, 2024 by Jenny List 16 Comments

As the world of electronic gadgetry made the switch from micro USB to USB-C as the charging port of choice, many of us kept both of the required cables handy. But it’s fair to say that these days a micro USB port has become a pretty rare sight, and the once ubiquitous cable can be a bit elusive in the event that you encounter an older device that requires it.

[Solderking] has a high-end Logitech cordless mouse with just this problem, and so he replaced its micro USB socket with a USB-C port. That makes the task sound deceptively simple, because in fact he had to reverse engineer one of the device’s PCBs in its entirety, making a new board with the same outline and components, but sporting the new connector.

Instead of attempting to replicate the complex shape with geometry he started with a scan of the board and had Fusion 360 trace its outline before 3D printing a version of it to check fit in the Logitech case. Then it was a case of tracing the circuit, designing the replacement, and hand transferring the parts from board to board.

The result is a USB-C chargeable mouse, and while all the design files don’t appear to be online, it’s possible to download the Gerbers from a PCBWay page. On top of that there’s a YouTube video of the process which we’ve placed below the break.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody spin up a new board to add USB-C to an older device — this drop-in replacement for Sony’s DualShock 4 comes to mind. If you’ve got enough free space inside your particular gadget, you might be able to pull of a USB-C conversion with nothing more exotic than a hacked up Adafruit breakout board.

Continue reading “Designing A USB-C Upgrade PCB For The MX Ergo Mouse” →

If You Thought Sega Only Made Electronic Games, Think Again

March 1, 2024 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Most of us associate the name Sega with their iconic console gaming systems from the 1980s and 1990s, and those of us who maintain an interest in arcade games will be familiar with their many cabinet-based commercial offerings. But the company’s history in its various entities stretches back as far as the 1950s in the world of slot machines and eventually electromechanical arcade games. [Arcade Archive] is starting to tell the take of how one of those games is being restored, it’s a mid-1960s version of Gun Fight, at the Retro Collective museum in Stroud, UK.

The game is a table-style end-to-end machine, with the two players facing each other with a pair of diminutive cowboys over a game field composed of Wild West scenery. The whole thing is very dirty indeed, so a substantial part of the video is devoted to their carefully dismantling and cleaning the various parts.

This is the first video in what will become a series, but it still gives a significant look into the electromechanical underpinnings of the machine. It’s beautifully designed and made, with all parts carefully labelled and laid out with color-coded wiring for easy servicing. For those of us who grew up with electronic versions of Sega Gun Fight, it’s a fascinating glimpse of a previous generation of gaming, which we’re looking forward to seeing more of.

This is a faithful restoration of an important Sega game, but it’s not the first time we’ve featured old Sega arcade hardware.

Continue reading “If You Thought Sega Only Made Electronic Games, Think Again” →