[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Model B. The only problem was he needed a way to get software on to it. Cue a creative hack using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
When [Peter] received the machine, it already had a GoTek floppy emulator, which pulled disk images off a USB drive. However, he wanted an easier and quicker way to get disk images to and from the machine for development purposes. Swapping the USB drive to and from another machine seemed too tedious.
Instead, he decided to swap in a Pi Zero W for this purpose, setting it up to emulate a flash drive by following instructions from MagPi Magazine. This would allow him to use the SCP tool to copy disk images over to the Pi Zero W via its WiFi connection. Basically, the Pi Zero W was acting as a wirelessly-updated storage device hooked up to the GoTek floppy emulator.
It’s a nifty way of doing things. [Peter] could have set about creating his own floppy emulator from scratch with wireless capability included. However, there was no need. He just needed a wirelessly-accessible USB drive, and the Pi Zero W was more than happy to act in that role.
The BBC Micro is a beloved machine of many in the British Isles, and it had rather an extended family. If you’ve pulled off your own nifty hack on this classic machine, be sure to hit us up on the tipsline!
Dial-up modems used to be the default way of accessing the Internet, but times have moved on. They’re now largely esoteric relics from a time gone by. With regular old phone lines rather hard to come by these days, [Peter Mount] decided to try getting a pair of dial-up modems working over VoIP instead.
The build started with a pair of Linksys PAP2T VoIP phone adapters, which were originally designed for hooking regular phones up to VoIP systems. He paired each US Robotics modem with a PAP2T, and then hooked both into a VoIP Private Branch Exchange which he set up using 3cx on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. The Pi also acted as a server for the modems to connect to. It took a lot of fiddly configuration steps, but he found success in the end. On YouTube, he demonstrates the setup—with that glorious modem sound—communicating successfully at a rate of 9600 baud.
It’s nice to see this vintage hardware communicating in a what is effectively a simulated world created entirely within modern hardware. We’ve seen similar projects before, like this attempt to get dial-up going over Discord. If you’re doing your own odd-ball screechy communications experiments, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
Don’t ask us why, but hackers and makers just love building clocks. Especially in the latter case, many like to specialize in builds that don’t even look like traditional timepieces, and are difficult to read unless you know the trick behind them. [NerdCave] has brought us a pleasing example of such a thing, in the form of this gorgeous Fibonacci clock.
The build was inspired by an earlier Fibonacci clock that later became a Kickstarter project. Where that build used an Atmega328P, though, [NerdCage] landed on using a Raspberry Pi Pico W instead. The build throws the microcontroller board on a custom PCB, and sticks in inside an attractive 3D-printed enclosure. Black filmanet was used for the body, while white filament was used for the face of each square to act as a diffuser. Addressable RGB LEDs are used to illuminate the five square segments of the clock.
Obviously, you’re wondering how to read the clock. All you need to know is this. The first five numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1, 1, 2, 3, and 5. Each square on the clock represents one of these numbers—the side lengths of each square match these numbers. Red and green are used to represent hours and minutes, respectively, while a blue square is representing both. Basically, to get the hour, add up the values of red and blue squares, and to get the minutes, do the same with green and blue squares, but then multiply by 5. In the header image, the clock is displaying 8:55 PM… we think.
We talk a lot about patent disputes in today’s high-tech world. Whether it’s Wi-Fi, 3D printing, or progress bars, patent disputes can quickly become big money—for lawyers and litigants alike.
Where we see less of this, typically, is the world of sports. And yet, a recent football innovation has seen plenty of conflict in this very area. This is the controversial story of vanishing spray.
Patently Absurd
Vanishing spray has quickly become a common sight on the belts of professional referees. Credit: Balkan Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0
You might have played football (soccer) as a child, and if that’s the case, you probably don’t remember vanishing spray as a key part of the sport. Indeed, it’s a relatively modern innovation, which came into play in international matches from 2013. The spray allowed referees to mark a line with a sort of disappearing foam, which could then be used to enforce the 10-yard distance between opposing players and the ball during a free kick.
The product is a fairly simple aerosol—the cans contain water, butane, a surfactant, vegetable oil, and some other minor constituents. When the aerosol nozzle is pressed, the liquified butane expands into a gas, creating a foam with the water and surfactant content. This creates an obvious white line that then disappears in just a few minutes.
The spray was created by Brazilian inventor Heine Allemagne in 2000, and was originally given the name Spuni. He filed a patent in 2000, which was then granted in 2002. It was being used in professional games by 2001, and quickly adopted in the mainstream Brazilian professional competition.
The future looked bright for Allemagne and his invention, with the Brazilian meeting with FIFA in 2012 to explore its use at the highest level of international football. In 2013, FIFA adopted the use of the vanishing spray for the Club World Cup. It appeared again in the 2014 World Cup, and many competitions since. By this time, it had been renamed “9.15 Fair Play,” referring to the metric equivalent of the 10-yard (9.15 meter) distance for free kicks.
After its first use by FIFA, the use of vanishing spray quickly spread to other professional competitions, making its first appearance in the Premier League in 2014. Credit: Egghead06, CC BY-SA 4.0
The controversy came later. Allemagne would go on to publicly claim that the global sporting body had refused to pay him the agreed price for his patent. He would go on to tell the press he’d knocked back an initial offer of $500,000, with FIFA later agreeing to pay $40 million for the invention. Only, the organization never actually paid up, and started encouraging the manufacture of copycat products from other manufacturers. In 2017, the matter went to court, with a Brazilian ruling acknowledging Allemagne’s patent. It also ordered FIFA to stop using the spray, or else face the risk of fines. However, as is often the way, FIFA repeatedly attempted to appeal the decision, raising questions about the validity of Allemagne’s patent.
The case has languished in the legal system for years since. In 2020, one court found against Allemagne, stating he hadn’t proven that FIFA had infringed his products or that he had suffered any real damages. By 2022, that had been overturned on appeal to a higher court, which found that FIFA had to pay material damages for their use of vanishing spray, and for the loss of profits suffered by Allemagne. The latest development occurred earlier this year, with the Superior Court of Justice ruling that FIFA must compensate Allemagne for his invention. In May, CNN reported that he expected to receive $40 million as a result of the case, with all five ministers on the Superior Court ruling in his favor.
Ultimately, vanishing spray is yet another case of authorities implementing ever-greater control over the world of football. It’s also another sad case of an inventor having to fight to receive their due compensation for an innovative idea. What seems like an open-and-shut case nevertheless took years to untangle in the courts. It’s a shame, because what should be a simple and tidy addition to the world of football has become a mess of litigation that cost time, money, and a great deal of strife. It was ever thus.
2020 saw the world rocked by widespread turmoil, as a virulent new pathogen started claiming lives around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a rush on masks, air filtration systems, and hand sanitizer, as terrified populations sought to stave off the deadly virus by any means possible.
Despite the fresh attention given to indoor air quality and airborne disease transmission, there remains one technology that was largely overlooked. It’s the concept of upper-room UV sterilization—a remarkably simple way of tackling biological nastiness in the air.
These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has been the dominant way of using consumer optical media for some time.
Early CD players, like this top-loading Sony D-50, didn’t use caddies. Credit: Binarysequence, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Compact Disc, as developed by Phillips and Sony, was first released in 1982. It quickly became a popular format for music, offering far higher fidelity than existing analog formats like vinyl and cassettes. The CD-ROM followed in 1985, offering hundreds of megabytes of storage in an era when most hard drives barely broke 30 MB. The discs used lasers to read patterns of pits and lands from a reflective aluminum surface, encased in tough polycarbonate plastic. Crucially, the discs featured robust error correction techniques so that small scratches, dust, or blemishes wouldn’t stop a disc from working.
Notably, the first audio CD player—the Sony CDP-101—was a simple tray-loading machine. Phillips’ first effort, the CD100, was a top-loader. Neither used a caddy. Nor did the first CD-ROM drives—the Phillips CM100 was not dissimilar from the CD100, and tray loaders were readily available too, like the Amdek Laserdrive-1. Continue reading “Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely On Awkward Plastic Caddies?”→
The itch to investigate lurks within all us hackers. Sometimes, you just have to pull something apart to learn how it works. [Stephen Crosby] found himself doing just that when he got his hands on a Flume water monitor.
[Stephen] came by the monitor thanks to a city rebate, which lowered the cost of the Flume device. It consists of two main components: a sensor which is strapped to the water meter, and a separate “bridge” device that receives information from the sensor and delivers it to Flume servers via WiFi. There’s a useful API for customers, and it’s even able to integrate with a Home Assistant plugin. [Stephen] hoped to learn more about the device so he could scrape raw data himself, without having to rely on Flume’s servers.
Through his reverse engineering efforts, [Stephen] was able to glean how the system worked. He guides us through the basic components of the battery-powered magnetometer sensor, which senses the motion of metering components in the water meter. He also explains how it communicates with a packet radio module to the main “bridge” device, and elucidates how he came to decompile the bridge’s software.
When he sent this one in, [Stephen] mentioned the considerable effort that went into reverse engineering the system was “a very poor use” of his time — but we’d beg to differ. In our book, taking on a new project is always worthwhile if you learned something along the way. Meanwhile, if you’ve been pulling apart some weird esoteric commercial device, don’t hesitate to let us know what you found!
