Test Pattern Generator For SCART And RGB TVs

September 19, 2025 by Tyler August 1 Comment

CRTs don’t last forever, and neither do the electronics that drive them. When you have a screen starting to go wonky, then you need a way to troubleshoot which is at fault. A great tool for that is a pattern generator, but they’re not the easiest to come by these days. [baritonomarchetto] needed a pattern generator to help repair his favourite arcade machine, and decided to make his own DIY Portable RGB CRT Test Pattern Generator.

One of the test patterns available from the device. This TV appears to be in good working order.

While he does cite [Nicholas Murray]’s RP2040 test pattern generator as a starting point (which itself builds on the PicoVGA library once featured here), he couldn’t just build one. That worthy project only outputs VGA and because [baritonomarchetto] is in Europe, he needed a SCART connector. Since he’s working on arcade machines, he needed non-SCART RGB signals, too. The arcade signals need to be at higher voltages (TLL level) than the RGB signal you’d find in SCART and VGA.

The upshot is while he’s using [Nicholas]’s code for the RP2040, he’s rolled his own PCB, including a different resistor ladders to provide the correct voltages depending on if he’s dealing with a home TV or arcade CRT. To make life easier, the whole thing runs off a 9V battery.

If you’re wondering what the point of these test patterns is, check out this 1981-vintage pattern generator for some context from the era. If a digital replica doesn’t float your boat, it is possible to recreate the original analog circuitry that generated these patterns back when the CRT was king.

Haasoscope Pro: Open-Everything 2 GHz USB Oscilloscope

September 19, 2025 by John Elliot V 26 Comments

Our hacker [haas] is at it again with the Haasoscope Pro, a full redesign of the original Haasoscope, which was a successful Crowd Supply campaign back in 2018.

This new Pro version was funded on Crowd Supply in April this year and increases the bandwidth from 60 MHz to 2 GHz, the vertical resolution from 8 to 12 bits, and the sample rate from 125 MS/s to 3.2 GS/s. Selling for $999 it claims to be the first open-everything, affordable, high-bandwidth, real-time sampling USB oscilloscope.

The firmware and software are under active development and a new version was released yesterday.

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Unobtanium No More; Perhaps We Already Have All The Elements We Need

September 19, 2025 by Jenny List 69 Comments

It’s been a trope of the news cycle over the past decade or so, that there’s some element which we all need but which someone else has the sole supply, and that’s a Bad Thing. It’s been variously lithium, or rare earth elements, and the someone else is usually China, which makes the perfect mix of ingredients for a good media scare story. Sometimes these things cross from the financial pages to the geopolitical stage, even at times being cited in bellicose language. But is there really a shortage?

The Colorado School of Mines say perhaps not, as they’ve released a paper from an American perspective pointing out that the USA already has everything it needs but perhaps doesn’t realize it. We’re surprised it seems to have passed unnoticed in a world preoccupied with such matters.

We’ve covered a few stories about mineral shortages ourselves, and some of them even point to the same conclusion reached by the School of Mines, that those mineral riches lie not in the mines of China but in the waste products closer to American industry. In particular they point to the tailings from existing mines, a waste product of which there is a huge quantity to hand, and which once stripped of the metal they were mined for still contain enough of the sought-after ones to more than satisfy need.

The history of mining from medieval lead miners processing Roman tailings to 19th century gold miners discovering that their tailings were silver ore and on to the present day, includes many similar stories. Perhaps the real story is economic both in the publicity side and the mining side, a good scare story sells papers, and it’s just cheaper to buy your molybdenum from China rather than make your own. We’ll keep you posted if we see news of a tailings bonanza in the Rockies.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 338: Smoothing 3D Prints, Reading CNC Joints, And Detecting Spicy Shrimp

September 19, 2025 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

In Hackaday news, we’ve got a new contest running! Read all about the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, sponsored by DigiKey, and check out the contest page for all the details. In sad news, American Science & Surplus are shuttering online sales, leaving just the brick and mortar stores in Wisconsin and Illinois.

On What’s That Sound, it’s a results show, which means Kristina gets to take a stab at it. She missed the mark, but that’s okay, because [Montana Mike] knew that it was the theme music for the show Beakman’s World, which was described by one contestant as “Bill Nye on crack”.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a really cool way to smooth your 3D prints in situ. JWe take a much closer look at that talking robot’s typewriter-inspired mouth from about a month ago. Then we discuss several awesome technological feats such as running code on a PAX credit card payment machine, using the alphabet as joinery, and the invention of UTF-8 in general. Finally, we discuss the detection of spicy shrimp, and marvel at the history of email.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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Imagining The CPS-1: An Early 70s 4-bit Microcomputer From Canada

September 19, 2025 by John Elliot V 3 Comments

[Michael Gardi] wrote in to let us know about his project: CPS-1: Imagining An Early 70s 4-bit Microcomputer.

The CPS-1 was the first Canadian microprocessor-based computer. It was built by Microsystems International Ltd. (MIL) in Ottawa between 1972 and 1973 and it is unknown how many were made and in what configurations. The CPS-1 supported a 12-bit address bus and a 4-bit data bus. MIL also developed the supporting hardware including RAM. The processor was called the MIL 7114.

[Michael] worked in collaboration with [Zbigniew Stachniak] from York University Computer Museum. [Zbigniew] had developed a MIL CPS-1 Emulator and [Michael]’s job was to implement a front panel hardware interface for the emulator which runs on a Raspberry Pi. The only complication: there are no remaining CPS-1 computers, and no known photographs, so no one can say for sure what a real front panel might have looked like!

With a bit of guess work and 3D printing, as well as some inspiration from contemporaneous hardware such as the DEC PDP-11, [Michael] came up with an implementation. He used an IO extender HAT which adds 32 IO pins to the existing Pi GPIO pins that are accessible via an 3-wire I2C interface. This was enough hardware to support the 26 switches and 29 LEDs on the panel. There’s a brief demo of the custom printed switches in the video embedded below.

If you’re interested in old school 4-bit tech you might also like to check out 4-bit Single Board Computer Based On The Intel 4004 Microprocessor.

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This Week In Security: The Shai-Hulud Worm, ShadowLeak, And Inside The Great Firewall

September 19, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 6 Comments

Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a story to cover about malware getting published to a repository. Last week it was millions of downloads on NPM, but this week it’s something much more concerning. Malware published on NPM is now looking for NPM tokens, and propagating to other NPM packages when found. Yes, it’s a worm, jumping from one NPM package to another, via installs on developer machines.

It does other things too, like grabbing all the secrets it can find when installed on a machine. If the compromised machine has access to a Github account, a new repo is created named Shai-Hulud, borrowed from the name of the sandworms from Dune. The collected secrets and machine info gets uploaded here, and a workflow also uploads any available GitHub secrets to the webhook.site domain.

How many packages are we talking about? At least 187, with some reports of over 500 packages compromised. The immediate attack has been contained, as NPM has worked to remove the compromised packages, and apparently has added filtering code that blocks the upload of compromised packages.

So far there hasn’t been an official statement on the worm from NPM or its parent companies, GitHub or Microsoft. Malicious packages uploaded to NPM is definitely nothing new. But this is the first time we’ve seen a worm that specializes in NPM packages. It’s not a good step for the trustworthiness of NPM or the direct package distribution model.

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The Inside Story Of The UK’s Great CB Petrol Scam

September 19, 2025 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Looking at gasoline prices today, it’s hard to believe that there was a time when 75 cents a gallon seemed outrageous. But that’s the way it was in the 70s, and when it tripped over a dollar, things got pretty dicey. Fuel theft was rampant, both from car fuel tanks — remember lockable gas caps? — and even from gas stations, where drive-offs became common, and unscrupulous employees found ways to trick the system into dispensing free gas.

But one method of fuel theft that escaped our attention was the use of CB radios to spoof petrol pumps, which [Ringway Manchester] details in his new video. The scam happened in the early 80s, only a few years after CB became legal in the UK but quite a while since illegal use had exploded. The trick involved a CB transceiver equipped with a so-called “burner,” a high-power and highly illegal linear amplifier used to boost the radiated power of the signal. When keyed up in the vicinity of dispensers with digital controls, the dispensing rate on the display would appear to slow down markedly, while the pump itself stayed at the same speed. The result was more fuel dispensed than the amount reported to the cashier.

If this sounds apocryphal, [Ringway] assures us that it wasn’t. When the spoofing was reported, authorities up to and including Scotland Yard investigated and found that it was indeed plausible. The problem appeared to be the powerful RF signal interfering with the pulses from the flowmeter on the dispenser. The UK had both 27 MHz and 934 MHz CB at the time; [Ringway] isn’t clear which CB band was used for the exploit, but we’d guess it was the former, in which case we can see how the signals would interfere. Another thing to keep in mind is that CB radios in the UK were FM, as opposed to AM and SSB in the United States. So we wonder if the same trick would have worked here.

At the end of the day, no matter how clever you are about it, theft is theft, and things probably aren’t going to go well for you if you try to pull this off today. Besides, it’s not likely that pumps haven’t been hardened against these sorts of attacks. Still, if you want a look inside a modern pump to see if you can find any weaknesses, have at it. Just don’t tell them where you heard about it.

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