In the retrocomputing world, [DosDude1] is a name spoken with more than a little respect. He’s back again with a long-awaited hack for PowerPC Macintosh: soldered RAM upgrades!
We’ve been loving the variety of entries to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge. Many a clock has been entered, to be sure, but also some projects that step well outside simple timekeeping. Case in point, this AM transmitter from [oldradiofixer.]
The software-only transmitter uses an ATTiny85 processor to output an AM radio signal in the broadcast band. It transmits a simple melody that you can tune in on any old radio you might have lying around the house. Achieving this was simple. [oldradiofixer] set up the cheap microcontroller to toggle pin PB0 at 1 MHz to create an RF carrier. Further code then turns the 1MHz carrier on and off at varying rates to play the four notes—G#, A, G#, and E—of the Twilight Zone theme. This is set up to repeat every second—hence, it’s a perfectly valid entry to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge!
It’s a simple project, but one that demonstrates the basics of AM radio transmission quite well. The microcontroller may not put out a powerful transmission, but it’s funny to think just how easy it is to generate a broadcast AM signal with a bit of software and a length of wire hanging off one pin. Video after the break.
[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.
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.
Setting up a file server can be intimidating to the uninitiated. There are many servers to choose from, and then you need to decide how to install it — Docker? Kubernates? Well, what’s all that then? [9001] has come to the rescue with Copyparty, a full-featured file server in a single Python script.
It’s light enough to run on nearly anything, and getting it running could not be easier: run copyparty-sfx.py, and you’ve got a server. There’s even a 32-bit .exe for older Windows machines — Windows 2000 seems to be the oldest version tested.
Browsers supported: almost all of them.
It’ll connect to anything, both in terms of the variety of protocols supported, and the browsers its web interface loads in. The GitHub documentation says browser support : “Yes”, which is pretty accurate going down the list. Sadly Copyparty’s pages do not work in NACA Mosaic, but IE4 is A-OK.
There’s, FTP, TFTP, HTTP/HTTPS, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, with unp/zeroconf/mdns/ssdp, etc etc. You need to check the readme for all features, some of which — like transcoding — are only available when dependencies such as ffmpeg installed on the server. Alternatively you can watch the video embedded below to get walked through the features. If the video whets your appetite, can also visit a read-only Copyparty server being demoed on a NUC sitting in [9001]’s basement.
Over the years we’ve seen plenty of folks create personal servers, but the focus is generally on the hardware side of things. While those with more software experience might prefer to configure the various services involved manually, we can definitely see the appeal of a project like Copyparty. In some ways it’s the inverse of the UNIX Philosophy: instead of doing one thing perfectly, this program is doing everything [9001] could think of, and doing it “good enough”.
As with many cyberdecks, it uses the Raspberry Pi as its powerhouse. There are a couple of nice touchscreens and a decent keyboard, plus the usual ports and some nice programmable controls. These are none of them out of the ordinary for a cyberdeck, but what really shines with this one is the attention to detail in the mechanical design. Those touchscreens rotate on ball bearings, the hinges are just right, the connections to the Pi have quick release mechanisms, and custom PCBs and ribbon cables make distributing those GPIOs a snap.
On top of all that the aesthetics are on point; this is the machine you want to take into the abandoned mining base with you. Best of all it’s all available from the linked GitHub repository, and you can marvel as we did at the video below the break.
Humans have long admired the sound of birdsong, but to fully appreciate how technically amazing it is, you need an ultrasonic microphone. [Benn Jordan] recently created a video about using these microphones to analyze a collection of bird calls, even training a starling to repeat an image encoded in sound, and has some recommendations for amateurs wanting to get started in computational ornithology.
In the first part of the video, [Benn] set up automated ultrasonic recorders at home, made recordings in Florida and rural Georgia, and visited a starling named “The Mouth,” famous for his ability to mimic human sounds. As a demonstration of his abilities, [Benn] drew a simple bird shape in a spectrogram, converted it into sound, and played it for The Mouth several times. Initially, it didn’t seem that the starling would repeat it, but while he was analyzing his recordings later, [Benn] found the characteristic bird shape. The Mouth had been able to repeat it almost pitch-perfectly. It was in this analysis that the ultrasonic microphones showed their worth, since they were able to slow down the birds’ complex vocalizations enough to detect their complex structures without losing audio quality. Continue reading “AVIF: The Avian Image Format”→
