Hacking A €15 8051-Based Portable Soldering Iron With Custom Firmware

March 7, 2023 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

With soldering irons being so incredibly useful, and coming on the heels of the success of a range of portable, all-in-one soldering irons from the likes of Waveshare and Pine64, it’s little wonder that you can get such devices for as little as 10 – 15 Euro from websites like AliExpress. Making for both a great impulse buy and reverse-engineering target, [Aaron Christophel] got his mittens on one and set to work on figuring out its secrets.

The results are covered in a brief video, as well as a Twitter thread, where this T12 soldering iron’s guts are splayed around and reprogrammed in all their glory. Despite the MCU on the PCB having had its markings removed, some prodding and poking around revealed it to be an STC8H3K62S2, an 8051-based MCU running at a blistering 11 MHz. As a supported PlaformIO target, reprogramming the MCU wasn’t too complicated after wiring up a USB-TTL serial adapter.

Completing this initial foray into these cheap T12 soldering irons is the GitHub repository, which contains the pin-outs, wiring diagrams and further information. Although [Aaron] indicates that he’ll likely not pursuing further development, the mixed responses by people to the overall quality of the firmware on the as-purchased T12 may inspire others to give it a shake.

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Graphene And Copper Nanowire Thermal Interface With Low Thermal Resistance

March 5, 2023 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

With the increasing waste heat production by today’s electronics in ever smaller spaces, drawing this heat away quickly enough to prevent thermal throttling or damage is a major concern. This is where research by Lin Jing and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering demonstrates a thermal interface material (TIM) that should provide a significant boost here. In the article, published in ACS Nano (paywalled; open access preprint alternative) the construction of this copper and graphene ‘sandwich’ TIM is described, along with tests.

The general idea is to use pillars between the two surfaces that can quickly carry the heat from the hot surface to the cool one. Although pure copper versions exist and do work, they suffer from the complications of having to build up these copper pillars in place, and subsequent oxidation reducing the effectiveness. While graphene and similar materials have shown superior heat-transfer capabilities, interfacing these materials with copper and other metals has proven problematic.

What Lin Jing et al. demonstrate in this study is to use essentially the pure copper approach, but to combine it with earlier research by Raghav Garg et al. (2017), who demonstrated how to grow 3-dimensional graphene structures. By cladding the copper pillars with graphene, this material improves heat transfer by 60%, while preventing oxidation of the metal. While the challenge is obviously to transfer these findings to something that can be mass-produced for consumer devices, it demonstrates how much potential there is in the use of graphene, which is a relatively new material for such applications due to how hard it was to produce until recently.

Assessing The Micromirror Device From A DLP Printer For Maskless Lithography Duty

March 4, 2023 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Inspired by the idea of creating a maskless lithography system using a digital micromirror device (DMD), [Nemo Andrea] tore into an Anycubic Photon Ultra, DLP & resin-based 3D printer to take a look at its projector system. Here Anycubic isn’t the maker of what is called the ‘optical engine’, which would be eViewTek’s D2 projector and its siblings. This projector assembly itself is based around the Ti DLP300s, which we covered a while back when it was brand new. Since that time Anycubic has released the Photon Ultra and Photon D2 3D printers based around these optical engines.

Using DMD for lithography isn’t a new thing, as [Nemo] points out, referencing the μMLA system by Heidelberg Systems. What would be new is using a freely available and rather affordable DMD (even if it requires sacrificing a 3D printer) to obtain its optical engine in order to create an open and more affordable lithography platform than commercial ‘contact us for a quote’ option.

No doubt it’s a challenging project, but perhaps the nice side effect of having affordable DLP 3D printers out and about is that their DMDs are now also significantly more accessible than they were previously. We wish [Nemo] all the best in this endeavor, as a maskless lithography machine would be just that addition to any hobbyist’s toolset that we are no doubt waiting for.

(Thanks to Jerry for the tip)

Trying (and Failing) To Restore A 1970s CDC 10MB Hard Drive

February 28, 2023 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

One fun aspect of 1970s-era hard disk drives is that they are big, clunky and are fairly easy to repair without the need for a clean room. A less fun aspect is that they are 1970s-era HDDs and thus old and often broken. While repairing a CDC 10 MB HDD for the upcoming VCF East event, the folks over at [Usagi Electric], this led to quite a few struggles, even after a replacement 14″ platter was found to replace the crashed platter with.

These CDC HDDs are referred to as Hawk drives, and they make the associated 8-bit Centurion TTL logic-based computers so much faster and easier to work with (for a 1970s system, of course). Despite the large size of the components involved and the simple, all through-hole nature of the PCBs, issues that cropped up ranged from corroded DIP switches, to head alignment sensors, a defective analog board and ultimately a reported bad read-write head.

Frustratingly, even after getting the platters to spin up and everything moving as intended, it would seem that the remaining problem is that of possibly bad read-write heads, as in plural. Whether it’s due to age, previous head crashes onto platters, or something else, assembling a working Hawk drive turned out to be somewhat more complicated than hoped.

We definitely hope that the bunnies can get a working Hawk together, as working 1970s HDDs like these are become pretty rare.

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Repurposing Old Smartphones: When Reusing Makes More Sense Than Recycling

February 28, 2023 by Maya Posch 89 Comments

When looking at the specifications of smartphones that have been released over the past years, it’s remarkable to see how aspects like CPU cores, clockspeeds and GPU performance have improved during this time, with even new budget smartphones offering a lot of computing power, as well as a smattering of sensors. Perhaps even more remarkable is that of the approximately 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year, many will be discarded again after a mere two years of use. This seems rather wasteful, and a recent paper by Jennifer Switzer and colleagues proposes that a so-called Computational Carbon Intensity (CCI) metric should be used to determine when it makes more sense to recycle a device than to keep using it.

What complicates the decision of when it makes more sense to reuse than recycle is that there are many ways to define when a device is no longer ‘fit for purpose’. It could be argued that the average smartphone is still more than good enough after two years to be continued as a smartphone for another few years at least, or at least until the manufacturer stops supplying updates. Beyond the use as a smartphone, they’re still devices with a screen, WiFi connection and a capable processor, which should make it suitable for a myriad of roles.

Unfortunately, as we have seen with the disaster that was Samsung’s ‘upcycling’ concept a few years ago, or Google’s defunct Project Ara, as promising as the whole idea of ‘reuse, upcycle, recycle’ sounds, establishing an industry standard here is frustratingly complicated. Worse, over the years smartphones have become ever more sealed-up, glued-together devices that complicate the ‘reuse’ narrative.

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MorphOS: A Modern Operating System For PowerPC

February 27, 2023 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

When it comes to modern operating systems for PowerPC-based systems like pre-Intel Macs, or other PowerPC-based systems like older or newer AmigaOS-compatible systems, there is an increasing lack of options. For 32-bit PPC, official Linux support has been dropped already, leaving only unofficial builds and of course AmigaOS as well as AmigaOS-like operating systems. So what do you do if you have a PPC-based Mac system lying around which you do not simply want to run the same old, unsupported copy of MacOS on? In a recent video, [Michael MJD] decided to give MorphOS 3.17 a shot on a Mac G4 Cube.

Originally created for the now-defunct Pegasos PPC-based series of computers and PPC accelerator cards for Amiga systems, MorphOS is based on the proprietary Quark microkernel, In its current release, it supports a range of G4 and G5-based Apple systems, as well as the AmigaOne 500 and X5000, with some asterisks. In addition to its own applications it supports AmigaOS applications, including those targeting the m68k architecture, via its JIT emulator.

A cursory look at the community shows that MorphOS finds use for being a fast and relatively up to date alternative OS for especially PPC-based Macs. The price tag of €79 per system (transferable to a new system) should offer some guarantee of continued development, which includes e.g. the Wayfarer browser for MorphOS, which is based on Webkit, but optimized for e.g. Altivec.

Although installing MorphOS went relatively smoothly for [Michael] (with just a monitor-related glitch), he did not try too much beyond an initial impression of the GUI and preinstalled applications. There is also a 30-minute timer on the trial version (resettable via reboot) that ended [Michael]’s look at this OS.

What do you run on your PPC-based machines, and have you used MorphOS? What are your thoughts on this OS?

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Compact Ultrasonic Holographs For Single Step Assembly Of Matter In 3D

February 27, 2023 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Creating three-dimensional shapes from basic elements or even cells is an important research topic, with potentially many applications in the fields of medicine and general research. Although physical molds and scaffolding can be used, the use of ultrasonic holographs is in many ways preferable. Using ultrasonic sound waves into a liquid from two or more transducers shaped to interact in a predetermined manner, any particulates suspended in this liquid will be pushed into and remain in a specific location. Recent research by [Kai Melde] and colleagues has produced some fascinating results here, achieving recognizable 3D shapes in a liquid medium.

These are some of the most concrete results produced, following years of research. What distinguishes ultrasonic holography from light-based xolography is that the latter uses photon interference between two light sources in order to rapidly 3D print an object within the print medium, whereas ultrasonic holography acts more as a ultrasonic pressure-based mold. Here xolography is also more limited in its applications, whereas ultrasonic holography can be used with for example biological tissue engineering, due to the gentle pressure exerted on the suspended matter.

For ongoing medical research such as the growing of organs (e.g. for transplantation purposes), scaffolding is required, which could be assembled using such a technique, as well as the manipulation and assembly of biological tissues directly.