A purple PCB with many DIP chips including a 6502

Hackaday Prize 2022: Reuse Those DIP Chips To Make A 1980s-Style Single-Board Computer

May 28, 2022 by 30 Comments

With the Great Chip Shortage still delaying deliveries of new components, now might be a good time to look around your lab and inspect those piles of chips that you thought “might come in handy one day”. Chances are you’ll find a good stack of 74xx series logic, once ubiquitous but today mostly obsolete thanks to powerful microcontrollers and FPGAs. It would be a shame to let them go to waste, so why not use them to make a neat 1980s-style computer?

With this idea in mind, [Anders Nielsen] designed the ABN6502: a single-board computer based on the venerable 6502 processor, but with relatively modern interfaces like a VGA monitor output, a PS/2 keyboard connector and even a wireless module to simplify firmware uploads from a PC. One design requirement was to minimize the number of new components needed; the average hacker interested in building the ABN6502 will probably have many of the chips lying around somewhere in their workshop.

The component list reads like a typical bill of materials for a 6502-based computer, but comes with a lot of flexibility to allow for part subsititution. For the CPU, both the classic NMOS 6502 as well as the modern CMOS-based 65C02 are supported, along with their 6522 companion chip that provides I/O ports and timers. A ROM socket can hold either modern, fast flash chips or traditional but slow UV-erasable EPROMs.

Instead of using DRAM chips with their complicated refresh requirements, [Anders] went for 32 KB of SRAM to implement the main memory; unaffordable in the ’80s but easily available today. Standard 74xx series logic chips glue all the components together, again with several options to add or remove features as the user prefers. Pin headers bring out the I/O ports for easy connection to external peripherals.

The ABN6502’s software library is currently limited to a bootloader, but a complete development toolchain based on the CC65 compiler should make it easy to develop all kinds of programs on this platform. We’ve already featured the clever wireless ROM flashing system, as well as a demonstration of the 6502 driving RGB LEDs.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: Reuse Those DIP Chips To Make A 1980s-Style Single-Board Computer” →

3D Print Glass With A Laser Cutter

May 28, 2022 by 15 Comments

We’re all familiar with FDM 3D printing, and some of the more well-heeled or adventurous among us may even have taken a faltering step into the world of SLA printers. But for most of us there’s a step further in 3D printing that remains beyond our reach. SLS, or Selective Laser Sintering, creates prints from powder by melting it layer by layer using a laser, and has the advantage of opening up more useful materials than the polymer stock of the other methods. It’s not entirely unreachable though, as [Kenneth Hawthorn] shows us by using a laser cutter to produce SLS prints from powdered glass.

He evolved the technique of repeated fast passes with the laser to gradually melt more glass together as opposed to slower passes. He achieved a resolution as low as 0.1 mm, though he found a better glass color when the laser was less tightly focused. It raises the concern that glass powder is abrasive and thus a threat to any mechanism, thus he’s being extremely careful with the fan settings.

This may not be quite in the league of an SLS printer costing thousands of dollars, but it’s a technique that bears more investigation and could no doubt be refined for more custom fused glass creations. He tells us he was inspired by a previous Hackaday post about sintering sand, and of course we’d like to remind readers of a 3D printer that did the same job with the power of the sun.

The Box: Think Outside Of It

May 28, 2022 by 19 Comments

There’s no single recipe for creativity, as far as I know. But this week on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were talking about a number of hacks that were particularly inventive, out-of-the-box, or just simply “how did they think of that?”. One possible route to something new is learning from other disciplines.

We were talking about an inspiring video about 3D printing fabrics. At the moment, the design world is going crazy for all things 3DP, so it’s no surprise to see someone with a design background asking herself how to make stuff that comes off the 3D printer more flexible, and fit her needs a little bit better. But what if those of us on the building-purely-functional side of things took what the fabric folks learned and applied it to our work? You’d get something like this hybrid approach to folding mechanisms, or this approach to remove supports from your prints.

I’m continually surprised by how much the home-gamer can learn from industry, and this week was also no exception. [Anne Ogborn]’s piece on handling bulk material draws mostly on the hard work of engineers who are worried about properly emptying gigantic grain silos or feeding tons of screws into small boxes to ship out to customers. But the same physics are at work when you’re designing an automatic dry cat food dispenser for your next vacation, just on a smaller scale.

How about you? What things have you learned from other disciplines, possibly entirely unrelated ones, that have helped you with your hacking?

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A modified Ghostbusters Proton Pack

Track Down Ghosts In Your WiFi With The Pwnton Pack

May 28, 2022 by 6 Comments

If there’s something weird in your Network Neighborhood, who you gonna call? If you want your WiFi troubles diagnosed in style, try calling [Travis Kaun] — he might just show up wearing the amazing Pwnton Pack. Built from a replica Proton Pack similar to those used in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters, it’s a portable wireless security diagnostics kit that should be able to pinpoint any weaknesses in your wireless network.

Inside, it’s got a Mark VII WiFi Pineapple, which is a portable device designed for security testing purposes, as well as a Raspberry Pi running Pwnagotchi: a deep learning-based WiFi sniffer that aims to capture those network packets that help maximize your chances of brute-forcing the WPA key. These two devices are connected to an array of antennas, including a cool rotating 5 GHz panel antenna to scan the surrounding area.

Naturally, the Pwnton Pack also includes a Neutrona Wand, which in this case contains a 2.4 GHz Yagi antenna hooked up to an ESP32 programmed to perform deauthentication attacks. An Arduino Nano drives an LED matrix that shows scrolling Pac-Man ghosts, while a dedicated sound board provides movie sound effects. The whole system is powered by three LiPo battery packs, and can even be remotely operated if desired.

Sadly, it doesn’t come with one of those ghost traps to suck up wayward WiFi networks, but the range of tools available should help to catch any kind of weird phantoms hiding in your system. We’ve spotted a few Proton Packs before, but never one with such advanced functionality. Security testing systems tend to be a bit less conspicuous, after all. Continue reading “Track Down Ghosts In Your WiFi With The Pwnton Pack” →

Linux And C In The Browser

May 28, 2022 by 45 Comments

There was a time when trying to learn to write low-level driver or kernel code was hard. You really needed two machines: one to work with, and one to screw up over and over again until you got it right. These days you can just spin up a virtual machine and roll it back every time you totally screw up. Much easier! We don’t think it is all that practical, but [nsommer] has an interesting post about loading up a C compiler and compiling Linux for a virtual machine. What’s different? Oh, the virtual machine is in your browser.

The v86 CPU emulator runs in the browser and looks like a Pentium III computer with the usual hardware. You might think it is slow and it certainly isn’t going to be fast as a rocket, but it does translate machine code into WebAssembly, so performance isn’t as bad as you might think.

The post goes into detail about how to build and create a simple machine web page that hosts v86. Once you cross-compile the kernel you can boot the machine up virtually. The other interesting part is the addition of tcc which is a pretty capable C compiler and much smaller and faster than the very traditional gcc.

The tcc build is tricky because the normal build process compiles the compiler and then uses the same compiler to build the default libraries. When cross-compiling, this doesn’t work well because the library you want for the host compile is different from the library you want to target for the second pass. You’ll see how to work around that in the post. The post continues to show how to do remote debugging and even gets QEMU into the mix. Debugging inside v86 doesn’t seem to work so far. There are more posts on this topic promised.

Honestly, this is one of those things like teaching a chicken to play checkers. It can be done, there’s little practical value, but it is still something to see. On the other hand, if you spend the weekend working through this, your next Linux porting project ought to seem easy by comparison.

Amazing what you can pull off with WebAssembly. If you need a quick introduction, check this one out from [Ben James].

Electronic Dice Is Introduction To Microcontroller Programming

May 27, 2022 by 10 Comments

By now most of us are familiar with the Arduino platform. It’s an inexpensive and fairly easy way into the world of microcontrollers. For plenty of projects, there’s no need to go beyond that unless you have a desire to learn more of the inner workings of microcontrollers in general. [Cristiano] was interested in expanding some of his knowledge, so he decided to build this electronic dice using a PIC microcontroller instead of the Arduino platform he was more familiar with.

As a result, this project is set up as a how-to for others looking to dive further into the world of microcontrollers that don’t have the same hand-holding setup as the Arduino. To take care of the need for a random number for the dice, the PIC’s random number generator is used but with the added randomness of a seed from an internal timer. The timer is started when a mercury tilt switch signals the device that it has been rolled over, and after some computation a single digit number is displayed on a seven-segment display.

While it might seem simple on the surface, the project comes with an in-depth guide on programming the PIC family of microcontrollers, and has a polish not normally seen on beginner projects, including the use of the mercury tilt switch which gives it a retro vibe. For some other tips on how to build projects like this, take a look at this guide on how to build power supplies for your projects as well.

Continue reading “Electronic Dice Is Introduction To Microcontroller Programming” →

3D Print A Colour TV

May 27, 2022 by 36 Comments

The oldest form of television used a spinning disk with a progression of holes — a Nipkow disk — to slice the image into lines for display. They’re surprisingly simple machines and capable of unexpectedly high-quality images despite their relatively low resolution. Even better, in an age of microcontrollers and bright LEDs, making one that works is not the chore it might once have been. [Markus Mierse] has created one that uses an Arduino Mega and a set of 3D printed parts, so there’s no excuse for not having a spinning disk TV on your shelf.

The Arduino Mega is chosen because it has enough lines to drive three six-bit DACs for each of red, green, and blue. The disk is driven by a PWM motor controller, and synchronization is taken care of by a piece of reflective tape and an IR proximity sensor. Images and video are read from an SD card and displayed on the screen in glorious 32-line colour. The full build process can be seen in the video below the break.

A surprise when viewing mechanical TV is that its quality is much better than the meager resolution would have you believe, and this one with its colour display is much better than the usual monochrome devices. It’s hardly HDTV, but it acquits itself well and would provide an excellent talking point.

If you’re curious about Nipkow disks, they’re a subject we’ve examined in the past.

Continue reading “3D Print A Colour TV” →