Author: Al Williams

4336 Articles

SparcStation 1+ Finally Gets Attention

August 9, 2025 by 12 Comments

We can’t throw stones. [Leaded Solder] picked up a SparcStation 1+ in 2018 and found it only produced illegal instruction errors. We’re sure he’s like us and meant to get back to it, and, instead, it sat on the bench, taking up space. You eventually have to move it, though, so seven years later, it was time for another go at it.

The first pass back in 2018 revealed that the machine had an interesting life. The full-sized hard drive was salvaged from an Apple computer. Removing the drive resolved the illegal instruction error. The drive seemed to work, but there was still nothing that suggested the machine would fully boot up. The next step was to try booting from a floppy, but that didn’t work either. The floppy cable had been surgically altered, again hinting this machine had seen some tough love.

Fast forward to 2025. This time, a Pi Pico-based SCSI emulator would stand in for the aging and suspect hard drive. Unfortunately, as noted, this machine has undergone some extensive and strange surgery. The power cable feeding the emulator had been rewired backwards, exposing the poor Pi Pico to 12 V, with predictable results. Luckily, it didn’t seem to phase the SparcStation.

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Learn C With A Lisp

August 9, 2025 by 19 Comments

One reason Forth remains popular is that it is very simple to create, but also very powerful. But there’s an even older language that can make the same claim: LISP. Sure, some people think that’s an acronym for “lots of irritating spurious parenthesis,” but if you can get past the strange syntax, the language is elegant and deceptively simple, at least at its core. Now, [Daniel Holden] challenges you to build your own Lisp as a way to learn C programming.

It shouldn’t be surprising that LISP is fairly simple. It was the second-oldest language, showing up in the late 1950s with implementations in the early 1960s. The old hardware couldn’t do much by today’s standards, so it is reasonable that LISP has to be somewhat economical.

With LISP, everything is a list, which means you can freely treat code as data and manipulate it. Lists can contain items like symbols, numbers, and other lists. This is somewhat annoying to C, which likes things to have particular types, so that’s one challenge to writing the code.

While we know a little LISP, we aren’t completely sold that building your own is a good way to learn C. But if you like LISP, it might be good motivation. We might be more inclined to suggest Jones on Forth as a good language project, but, then again, it is good to have choices. Of course, you could choose not to choose and try Forsp.

Student Drone Flies, Submerges

August 5, 2025 by 17 Comments

Admit it. You’d get through boring classes in school by daydreaming of cool things you’d like to build. If you were like us, some of them were practical, but some of them were flights of fancy. Did you ever think of an airplane that could dive under the water? We did. So did some students at Aalborg University. The difference is they built theirs. Watch it do its thing in the video below.

As far as we can tell, the drone utilizes variable-pitch props to generate lift in the air and downward thrust in water. In addition to the direction of the thrust, water operations require a lower pitch to minimize drag. We’d be interested in seeing how it is all waterproofed, and we’re unsure how deep the device can go. No word on battery life either. From the video, we aren’t sure how maneuverable it is while submerged, but it does seem to have some control. It wouldn’t be hard to add a lateral thruster to improve underwater operations.

This isn’t the first vehicle of its kind (discounting fictional versions). Researchers at Rutgers created something similar in 2015, and we’ve seen other demonstrations, but this is still very well done, especially for a student project.

We did see a submersible drone built using parts from a flying drone. Cool, but not quite the same.

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AI Code Review The Right Way

August 1, 2025 by 29 Comments

Do you use a spell checker? We’ll guess you do. Would you use a button that just said “correct all spelling errors in document?” Hopefully not. Your word processor probably doesn’t even offer that as an option. Why? Because a spellchecker will reject things not in its dictionary (like Hackaday, maybe). It may guess the wrong word as the correct word. Of course, it also may miss things like “too” vs. “two.” So why would you just blindly accept AI code review? You wouldn’t, and that’s [Bill Mill’s] point with his recent tool made to help him do better code reviews.

He points out that he ignores most of the suggestions the tool outputs, but that it has saved him from some errors. Like a spellcheck, sometimes you just hit ignore. But at least you don’t have to check every single word.

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Robots Are Coming For Your Berry Good Job

July 31, 2025 by 29 Comments

We don’t know if picking blackberries at scale is something people enjoy doing. But if you do, we have bad news. The University of Arkansas wants to put you out of a job in favor of your new robot overlord. It turns out that blackberries in Arkansas alone are a $24 million business. The delicate berries are typically hand-picked.

The robot hand that can do the same job has three soft fingers and tendons made from guitar strings. Each finger has a force sensor at the tip so it can squeeze the berries just right. How much force does it take to grab a blackberry? To find out, researchers placed sensors on the fingers of experienced pickers and used the data to guide their design. Researchers claim they were inspired by the motion of a tulip opening and closing each day.

Your berry picking job is safe for now, though. They don’t have the vision system to actually find the berries. Not yet, anyway. Of course in the meantime, the gripper could be used for anything that needs a delicate touch.

Oddly, everyone seems to want to develop robots to pick agricultural items. We are usually more interested in a different kind of picking.

One Man’s Trash… Bicycle Edition

July 30, 2025 by 2 Comments

[Remy van Elst] found an obsolete bike navigation system, the Navman Bike 1000, in a thrift store for €10. The device was a rebadged Mio Cyclo 200 from 2015. Can a decade-old GPS be useful? Well, the answer depends on a little reverse engineering.

There were some newer maps available, but they wouldn’t download using the official software. Out comes WireShark and mitmproxy. That allowed [Remy] to eavesdrop on what was going on between the box and its home server. From there he could intercept the downloaded software image, which in turn yielded to scrutiny. There was one executable, but since the device mounted as a drive, he was able to rename that executable and put his own in using the same name.

The device turns out to run Windows CE. It could even run DOOM! Once he was into the box with a file manager, it was fairly straightforward to add newer software and even update the maps using OpenStreetMaps.

This is a great example of how a little ingenuity and open source tools can extend the life of consumer electronics. It isn’t always as easy to find an entry point into some device like this. Then again, sometimes it’s a little easier than maybe it should be.

We’d all but forgotten Windows CE. We see many people using WireShark, but fewer running mitmproxy. It sure is useful.

Linux Fu: The Cheap Macropad Conundrum

July 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from suspicious Google Drive accounts. Will they work with Linux? Maybe.

Of course, if you don’t mind the keypad doing whatever it normally does, that’s fine. These are little more than HID devices with USB or Bluetooth. But what do those keys send by default? You will really want a way to remap them, especially since they may just send normal characters. So now you want to reverse engineer it. That’s a lot of work. Luckily, someone already has, at least for many of the common pads based around the CH57x chips.

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