ATtiny85 Mouse Jiggler Lets You Take A Break

June 3, 2024 by Tom Nardi 53 Comments

The good news is that more and more people are working from home these days. The bad news is that some of the more draconian employers out there aren’t too happy about it, to the point of using ~~spyware~~ software to keep tabs on their workers. Better make that bathroom break quick — Big Brother is watching!

One simple way to combat such efforts is a mouse jiggler, which does…well it does exactly what it sounds like. If you find yourself in need of such a device, the WorkerMouse from [Zane Bauman] is a simple open source design that can be put together with just a handful of components.

The WorkerMouse is designed to be assembled using through-hole parts on a scrap of perfboard, but you could certainly swap them out for their SMD variants if that’s what you have on hand. The circuit is largely made up out of passive components anyway, except for the ATtiny85 that’s running the show.

[Zane] decided to embrace modernity and couple the circuit with a USB-C breakout board, but naturally you could outfit it with whatever USB flavor you want so long as you’ve got a cable that will let you plug it into your computer.

The project’s C source code uses V-USB to connect to the computer and act as a USB Human Interface Device (HID). From there, it generates random speed and position data for a virtual mouse, and dumps it out every few seconds. The end result is a cursor that leaps around the screen whenever the WorkerMouse is plugged in, which should be enough to show you online while you step away from the computer. As an added bonus, [Zane] has put together a nice looking 3D printable enclosure for the board. After all, the thing is likely going to be sitting on your desk, might as well have it look professional.

If you’ve got the time to get a PCB made, you might also be interested in the MAUS we covered last year, which also keeps the ATtiny85 working so you don’t have to.

CH32V003 Makes For Dirt Cheap RISC-V Computer

May 31, 2024 by Tom Nardi 35 Comments

These days, when most folks think of a computer they imagine a machine with multiple CPUs, several gigabytes of RAM, and a few terabytes of non-volatile storage for good measure. With such modern expectations, it can be difficult to see something like a microcontroller as little more than a toy. But if said MCU has a keyboard, is hooked up to a display, and lets you run basic productivity and development software, doesn’t that qualify it as a computer? It certainly would have in the 1980s.

With that in mind, [Olimex] has teased the RVPC, which they’re calling the “world lowest cost Open Source Hardware All-in-one educational RISC-V computer” (say that three times fast). The tiny board features the SOIC-8 variant of the CH32V003 and…well, not a whole lot else. You’ve got a handful of passives, a buzzer, an LED, and the connectors for a PS/2 keyboard, a power supply, and a VGA display. The idea is to offer this as a beginner’s soldering kit in the future, so most most of the components are through-hole.

On the software side, the post references things like the ch32v003fun development stack, and the PicoRVD programmer as examples of open source tools that can get your CH32V computer up and running. There’s even a selection of retro-style games out there that would be playable on the platform. But what [Olimex] really has their eye on is a port of VMON, a RISC-V monitor program.

When paired with the 320×200 VGA text mode that they figure the hardware is capable of, you’ve got yourself the makings of an educational tool that would be great for learning assembly and playing around with bare metal programming.

It might not have the timeless style of the Voja4, but at least you can fit it in a normal sized pocket.

Thanks to [PPJ] for the tip.

Old Spotify Car Thing Hacks Gain New Attention

May 30, 2024 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

If you haven’t heard by now, Spotify is shutting down support for their “Car Thing” on December 9th of this year. Once that happens the automotive media player will officially be useless, with users being advised to literally throw them in the trash come December 10th. Call it an early Christmas present from your friends at the multi-billion dollar streaming company.

Surely the hardware hacking community can do a bit better than that. As it turns out, there’s actually been a fair amount of hacking and research done on the Car Thing, it’s just that most of it happened a couple years back when the device first hit the market. Things stagnated a bit in the intervening years, but now that the clock is ticking, there’s far more interest in cracking open the gadget and seeing what else we can do with it.

[lmore377]’s Car Thing macropad hack from 2022.

The car-thing-reverse-engineering repository on GitHub has a wealth of hardware and software information, and has been something of a rallying point for others who have been poking around inside the device. Unsurprisingly, the Car Thing runs Linux, and with relatively minor work you can gain U-Boot and UART access. With just 512 MB of RAM and a Amlogic S905D2 chip that’s similar to what powers the Radxa Zero, it’s not exactly a powerhouse. Then again, we’ve seen plenty of awesome projects done with less.

If you’re more into the step-by-step approach, security researcher [Nolen Johnson] did a write-up about getting access to the Car Thing’s internal Linux system back in 2022 that’s certainly worth a look. As you’d imagine, there’s also a few YouTube videos out there that walk the viewer through gaining access to the hardware. This one from [Dinosaur Talks Tech] not only provides a good overview of how to get into the system, but covers flashing modified versions of the stock firmware to unlock various features and tweaking the internal Linux OS.

Interestingly enough, while we’ve seen plenty of homebrew hardware players for Spotify over the years, this is the first time the Car Thing has ever crossed our path. Something tells us though that this isn’t the last time we’ll hear about this forlorn Linux gadget.

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Printing A Replacement Case For The ThinkPad 701c

May 29, 2024 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Even among ThinkPads, which are nearly universally loved by hardware hackers and Linux tinkerers alike, the 701c is a particularly rare and desirable machine. Best known for it’s “butterfly” slide out keyboard, the IBM-designed subnotebook from the mid-1990s has gained a following all its own, with active efforts to repair and restore any surviving specimens still out in the wild.

[polymatt] has already taken on a number of 701c restoration projects, but the recent release of a 3D printable case for the vintage laptop is arguably the most impressive to date. After spending an untold number of hours with an original case and a pair of calipers, the final design has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license — in other words, you’re free to print one to spruce up your 701c, but don’t run off a stack of them and start trying to move them on Etsy.

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Printed Case Lets Pair Of RTL-SDRs Go Mobile

May 29, 2024 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

We’ll admit to not fully knowing what [Jay Doscher] has planned for the pair of RTL-SDR Blog V4 software defined radios (SDRs) that are enclosed in the slick 3D printed enclosure he’s designed. But when has that ever stopped us from appreciating a nice design when we see one?

Inside the ventilated enclosure is the aforementioned pair of RTL-SDR Blog V4 (SDRs), as well as a StarTech USB hub that they’re plugged directly into. It seems like it wouldn’t take much to adapt this design to any other pair of USB gadgets, such as flash drives or WiFi adapters.

In fact, if they’re smaller than the RTL-SDR [Jay] has used here, you could probably get away with only needing to modify the one side panel of the case.

The simple modularity of the design, with two end pieces and the top and bottom plates, makes such modifications easy as you don’t need to reprint the whole thing if you just want a different antenna aperture. It also makes it easy to print without support material, and with just a few tweaks, looks like it could be adapted to use laser-cut panels for the sides. This would not only be faster than printing, but depending on the material, could make for a very stout enclosure.

We’ve covered several designs from [Jay] over the years, including a number of heavy-duty mobile “doomsday” computers that certainly fit in with this same design aesthetic. After all, why not face the end of the world with a little style?

Rotary Phone Lives On As Arduino Kitchen Timer

May 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

It’s safe to say that few people still use rotary phones on a daily basis. Hell, most of us don’t even use landline telephones anymore. But just because these classic phones are no longer being used for their original purpose doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doomed to become e-waste.

[Scott-28] recently sent in a particularly well-documented project that turned an antique rotary phone into a digital kitchen timer using an internal Arduino. While we’re not sure practical is a word most folks would use to describe the resulting device, it’s certainly a conversation starter, and the details on how it was all implemented make for an interesting read.

As explained in the README, [Scott-28] first used an oscilloscope to figure out the pulses generated by the phone’s dial. From there, it was relatively easy to connect the dial to one of the pins on an Arduino Uno to determine which numbers the user had entered. The trickier part was getting the original bells to work — in North America, it takes up to 90 VAC to get a phone’s ringer going, which is quite a bit more than the lowly Arduino can handle.

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Feast Your Eyes On These AI-Generated Sounds

May 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

The radio hackers in the audience will be familiar with a spectrogram display, but for the uninitiated, it’s basically a visual representation of how a range of frequencies are changing with time. Usually such a display is used to identify a clear transmission in a sea of noise, but with the right software, it’s possible to generate a signal that shows up as text or an image when viewed as a spectrogram. Musicians even occasionally use the technique to hide images in their songs. Unfortunately, the audio side of such a trick generally sounds like gibberish to human ears.

Or at least, it used to. Students from the University of Michigan have found a way to use diffusion models to not only create a spectrogram image for a given prompt, but to do it with audio that actually makes sense given what the image shows. So for example if you asked for a spectrogram of a race car, you might get an audio track that sounds like a revving engine.

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