Debugging PCBs With Augmented Reality

February 5, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

Mihir Shah has designed many a PCB in his time. However, when working through the development process, he grew tired of the messy, antiquated methods of communicating design data with his team. Annotating photos is slow and cumbersome, while sending board design files requires everyone to use the same software and be up to speed. Mihir thinks he has a much better solution by the name of InspectAR, it’s an augmented reality platform that lets you see inside the circuit board and beyond which he demoed during the 2019 Hackaday Superconference.

The InspectAR package makes it easy to visualise signals on the board.

The idea of InspectAR is to use augmented reality to help work with and debug electronics. It’s a powerful suite of tools that enable the live overlay of graphics on a video feed of a circuit board, enabling the user to quickly and effectively trace signals, identify components, and get an idea of what’s what. Usable with a smartphone or a webcam, the aim is to improve collaboration and communication between engineers by giving everyone a tool that can easily show them what’s going on, without requiring everyone involved to run a fully-fledged and expensive electronics design package.

The Supercon talk served to demonstrate some of the capabilities of InspectAR with an Arduino Uno. With a few clicks, different pins and signals can be highlighted on the board as Mihir twirls it between his fingers. Using ground as an example, Mihir first highlights the entire signal. This looks a little messy, with the large ground plane making it difficult to see exactly what’s going on. Using an example of needing a point to attach to for an oscilloscope probe, [Mihir] instead switches to pad-only mode, clearly revealing places where the user can find the signal on bare pads on the PCB. This kind of attention to detail shows the strong usability ethos behind the development of InspectAR, and we can already imagine finding it invaluable when working with unfamiliar boards. There’s also the possibility to highlight different components and display metadata — which should make finding assembly errors a cinch. It could also be useful for quickly bringing up datasheets on relevant chips where necessary.

Obviously, the electronic design space is a fragmented one, with plenty of competing software in the market. Whether you’re an Eagle diehard, Altium fanatic, or a KiCad fan, it’s possible to get things working with InspectAR. Mihir and the team are currently operating out of office space courtesy of Autodesk, who saw the value in the project and have supported its early steps. The software is available free for users to try, with several popular boards available to test. As a party piece for Supercon, our very own Hackaday badge is available if you’d like to give it a spin, along with several Arduino boards, too. We can’t wait to see what comes next, and fully expect to end up using InspectAR ourselves when hacking away at a fresh run of boards!

Tipping Points In The Climate System: The Worst Kind Of Positive Feedback

February 5, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 266 Comments

With global temperatures continuing to break records in recent years, it’s important to cast an eye towards the future. While efforts to reduce emissions remain in a political quagmire, time is running out to arrest the slide into catastrophe.

Further compounding the issue are a variety of positive feedback loops that promise to further compound the problem. In these cases, initial warming has flow-on effects that then serve to further increase global temperatures. Avoiding these feedback mechanisms is crucial if the Earth is to remain comfortably livable out to the end of the century.

A Multitude of Causes

The issue of climate change often appears as a simple one, with the goal being to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent negative consequences for human civilization. Despite this, the effects of climate change are often diffuse and intermingled. The various climate systems of the Earth interact in incredibly complex ways, and there are many mechanisms at play in these feedback effects that could tip things over the edge.

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Serious Repair Work On The Amiga 600

February 5, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

The Amiga will be forever loved for bringing serious multimedia capabilities to the home computer market. However, these machines are now showing their age, and keeping them running can take a bit of work. [Drygol] isn’t one to shy away from the task, however, and set about repairing a few Amiga 600s that came his way.

First up on the docket is replacing the many electrolytic capacitors that tend to leak over the years. They can cause corrosion, destroying traces and other components, as well as failing themselves. [Drygol] is an old hand at this now, whipping out the hot air station and some copper shielding to protect delicate connectors from melting. A simple recap was enough to get one machine up and running, but the other was more recalcitrant. When swapping a dud CPU out, a pad was destroyed on the PCB. This necessitated some careful tracing, followed by a drill hole through the PCB to allow a bodge wire to run the signal from the other side of the board.

There’s also plenty of upgrades to be done; S-Video outputs instead of the crummy old RF modulator, and special interrupt switches that help when cracking games and doing assembly programming. Thanks to a rich aftermarket and vivid community, researching and performing mods is easy thanks to writeups and parts available online.

It’s a great example of the basic techniques one must master to keep old hardware on the boil. Learn to recap, refit, and hunt for problems, and you’ll be well on your way to maintaining your retro fleet for years to come. We’ve seen [Drygol]’s work before too – this vampiric A500 is a particular treat!

Writing Dance Bangers Like It’s 1990 Again

February 4, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 14 Comments

Dance and house music exploded in a big way at the end of the 1980s. Typically the product of well-equipped studios with samplers and mixers worth thousands of dollars, it was difficult for the home gamer to get involved. That was, until the advent of the glorious Amiga, as [cTrix] ably demonstrates.

Sampling on your Amiga often meant sneaking off with the family hi-fi.

The video explains the history of both the music and the hardware, and highlights just why the Amiga was so special. Packing stereo audio and a four-channel sound chip, it had the grunt to pump out the tunes. All it was lacking was an audio input – which is where third-party hardware stepped in. Parallel-port analog-to-digital converters hit the market in a big way, letting users sample audio on their home computer without breaking the bank.

[cTrix] then proceeds to demonstrate how one would go about producing a dance track on an Amiga way back in 1990. A home stereo is used to play records, hooked up to a Stereo Master parallel port sampler. With a bunch of drum, piano, and synth samples recorded and saved on disk, a tracker is then used to assemble the track. It’s then compared with other music from the era as a great example of how things used to be done.

Overall, the Amiga will long have a legacy as the machine that brought real multimedia capabilities to the home computer. It’s one of our favourites, though keeping them going can be tough sometimes. Video after the break.

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Nifty Soundbender Built From EBay Modules

February 4, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

Custom audio greeting cards are a trifling gimmick, and a hefty investment compared to their paper-based colleagues. However, the technology inside can be twisted and hacked towards more interesting ends, as [lonesoulsurfer] demonstrates with his sound-bending build.

Rather then go to the trouble and expense of gutting a greeting card, [lonesoulsurfer] simply purchases the sound recording module off eBay which often turns out cheaper anyway. It’s hacked with a couple extra buttons and a speed control, and then wired up with a reverb module that itself gets tweaked to add an echo mode. It’s all bundled up with a speaker and microphone and installed in a case that formerly held an ignition tuning analyzer from the 1970s.

The final result is quite handsome, with a wooden panel holding the speaker and a smattering of knobs, buttons, and switches to play with. After recording an audio sample, it’s possible to speed it up, slow it down, and add echo and reverb until you’re left with something unrecognizable and weird. We’ve actually seen similar projects before, like this author’s first ever article for these hallowed pages. Video after the break.

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How Many Smartphones Does It Take To Make A Traffic Jam?

February 3, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 42 Comments

Online mapping services pack in a lot of functionality that their paper-based forebearers could simply never imagine. Adding in metadata for local landmarks, businesses and respective reviews, and even live traffic data, they have the capability to deliver more information than ever before – and also correspondingly, shape human behaviour. [Simon Weckert] decided to explore this concept with a cheeky little hack.

Pictured: All it takes to create a traffic jam on Google Maps!

The hack targets the manner in which Google collects live traffic data for display on Google Maps. When users load the app, Google takes location data from individual phones, tracking them as they travel along roadways. Large numbers of users travelling slowly down a road indicate there’s heavy traffic, and thus Google will display corresponding warnings on their maps and redirect users to take alternative paths.

To pull off the hack, [Simon] placed 99 smartphones in a handy-cart, tugging them behind him as he walked slowly down a series of streets. In the video, this is overlaid with Google’s map data captured at the time. The app updates the maps with orange and red lines down the roads which [Simon] travelled with his 99 pretend drivers, indicating a traffic jam.

We’d love to know whether [Simon] ran 99 individual SIM cards with data access, or if the hack was perpetrated with the use of a WiFi hotspot for cheaper internet access. Reddit comments note that Google will likely swiftly work on methods to prevent such tomfoolery in future. It’s simple to see that 99 individual users reporting the exact same location and speed at the same time would be trivial to filter out from traffic monitoring in future.

It’s both a commentary on the power we give these apps in our lives, as well as a great demonstration of how easily such systems can be trifled with. We first reported on Google’s traffic monitoring back in 2009, when it was a technology in its infancy. Video after the break.

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Growing Human Neurons Hooked Up To Electrodes

February 2, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 11 Comments

Philosophers have long mused about the concept of a “brain in a jar”, but thus far, it’s remained the preserve of science fiction rather than reality. However, after reading some scientific papers, [Justin] wanted to attempt the feat himself, so set out to grow some human neurons on an electrode array.

The project builds on [Justin]’s earlier work, using his DC sputtering rig to coat a glass microscope slide with electrodes. The first layer is silver for high conductivity, with an added gold layer for biocompatibility. The screw cap from a Falcon tube is then epoxied on to act as a reservoir for culture media for the neurons. Finally, an air filter is added to allow the biological mixture to breathe.

This was [Justin]’s first attempt at culturing neurons, and there were plenty of hurdles along the way. The custom culture assemblies had issues with the epoxy bonds leaking or failing entirely, leading to only one slide making it through the sterilization process. Additionally, the neurons were accidentally added in too high a quantity. While some growth was observed under the microscope, [Justin] was unable to detect any real signal from the system.

Despite a poor final result, plenty was learned along the way. [Justin] has already put plans into place to fix some of the pitfalls of the original experiment, and we look forward to seeing future updates from the project. Video after the break.

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