Hackaday Podcast Episode 270: A Cluster Of Microcontrollers, A Rocket Engine From Scratch, And A Look Inside Voyager

May 10, 2024 by No comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they get excited over the pocket-sized possibilities of the recently announced 2024 Business Card Challenge, and once again discuss their picks for the most interesting stories and hacks from the last week. There’s cheap microcontrollers in highly parallel applications, a library that can easily unlock the world of Bluetooth input devices in your next project, some gorgeous custom flight simulator buttons that would class up any front panel, and an incredible behind the scenes look at how a New Space company designs a rocket engine from the ground up.

Stick around to hear about the latest 3D printed gadget that all the cool kids are fidgeting around with, a brain-computer interface development board for the Arduino, and a WWII-era lesson on how NOT to use hand tools. Finally, learn how veteran Hackaday writer Dan Maloney might have inadvertently kicked off a community effort to digitize rare documentation for NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.

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 your very own copy of the podcast right about here.

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Reflecting On The State Of Game Boy Emulation In 2024

May 10, 2024 by 11 Comments

Considering the decades that have passed since Nintendo’s Game Boy was considered the state-of-the-art in mobile gaming, you’d imagine that the community would have pretty much perfected the emulation of the legendary family of handhelds — and on the whole, you’d be right. Today, you can get open source emulators for your computer or even smartphone that can play the vast majority of games that were released between the introduction of the original DMG-1 “brick” Game Boy in 1989 through to the final games published for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s.

But not all of them. While all the big name games are handled at this point, there’s still a number of obscure titles (not all of which are games) that require specialized hardware accessories to properly function. To bring the community up to speed on where work is still required, [Shonumi] recently provided a rundown on the emulation status of every commercial Game Boy accessory.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 782: Nitric — In Search Of The Right Knob

May 8, 2024 by No comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Rak Siva and Steve Demchuck to talk about Nitric! That’s the Infrastructure from Code framework that makes it easy to use a cloud back-end in your code, using any of multiple providers, in multiple programming languages.

The group chatted about the role and form of good documentation, as well as whether a Contributor License Agreement is ever appropriate, and what a good CLA would actually look like. Don’t miss it!
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Bluepad32 Brings All The Controllers To Your MCU

May 7, 2024 by 14 Comments

As much as we enjoy spinning up our own solutions, there are times when you’ve got to look at what’s on the market and realize you might be out of your league. For example, take Bluetooth game controllers. Sure, you could make your own with a microcontroller, some buttons, and a couple joysticks. But between the major players like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, as well as independent peripheral companies like 8BitDo, there’s some seriously impressive hardware out there that can be easily repurposed.

How, you ask? Well, Bluepad32 by [Ricardo Quesada] would be a great place to start. This Apache v2.0 licensed project allows you to easily interface with a wide array of commercially available BT controllers, and supports an impressive number of software and hardware platforms. Using the Arduino IDE on the ESP32? No problem. CircuitPython on Adafruit’s PyPortal? Supported. There’s even example code provided for using it on Linux and Mac OS. Sorry Windows fans — perhaps there’s a sassy paperclip or sentient dog built into your OS that can instruct you further.

A few of the controllers supported by Bluepad32.

The nature of the Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) protocol means that, at least in theory, pretty much all modern devices should be supported by Bluepad32 automatically. But even still, it’s hard not to be impressed by the official controller compatibility list. There’s also separate lists for Bluetooth mice and keyboards that are known to work with the project.

While it’s somewhat unlikely to be a problem in this particular community, there is an unusual quirk to this project which we think should at least be mentioned. Although Bluepad32 itself is free and open source software (FOSS), it depends on the BTstack library, which in turn uses a more ambiguous licensing scheme. BTstack is “open” in the sense that you can see the source code and implement it in your own projects, but its custom license precludes commercial use. If you want to use BTstack (and by extension, Bluepad32) in a commercial product, you need to contact the developers and discuss terms.

License gotchas aside, Bluepad32 is definitely a project to keep in the back of your mind for the future. You can always build your own controller if you’re looking a challenge, but you’ll have a hell of a time beating the decades of testing and development Sony has put into theirs.

The 2024 Business Card Challenge Starts Now

May 7, 2024 by 11 Comments

If you want to make circuits for a living, what better way to impress a future employer than to hand them a piece of your work to take home? But even if you’re just hacking for fun, you can still turn your calling into your calling card.

We are inviting you to submit your coolest business card hacks for us all to admire, and the top three entries will win a $150 DigiKey shopping spree.  If your work can fit on a business card, create a project page for it over on Hackaday.io and enter it in the 2024 Business Card Contest. Share your tiny hacks!

To enter, create a project for your hacked business card over at Hackaday IO, and then enter it into the 2024 Business Card Challenge by selecting the pulldown on the left. It’s that easy.

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256-Core RISC-V Megacluster

May 7, 2024 by 16 Comments

Supercomputers are always an impressive sight to behold, but also completely unobtainable for the ordinary person. But what if that wasn’t the case? [bitluni] shows us how it’s done with his 256-core RISC-V megacluster.

While the CH32V family of microcontrollers it’s based on aren’t nearly as powerful as what you’d traditionally find in a supercomputer, [bitluni] does use them to demonstrate a property of supercomputers: many, many cores doing the same task in parallel.

To recap our previous coverage, a single “supercluster” is made from 16 CH32V003 microcontrollers connected to each other with an 8-bit bus, with an LED on each and the remaining pins to an I/O expander. The megacluster is in turn made from 16 of these superclusters, which are put in pairs on 8 “blades” with a CH32V203 per square as a bridge between the supercluster and the main 8-bit bus of the megacluster, controlled by one last CH32V203.

[bitluni] goes into detail about designing PCBs that break KiCad, managing an overcrowded bus with 16 participants, culminating in a mesmerizing showcase of blinking LEDs showing that RC oscillators aren’t all that accurate.

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Supercon 2023: MakeItHackin Automates The Tindie Workflow

May 7, 2024 by 2 Comments

Selling your hardware hacks is a great way to multiply your project’s impact, get your creations into others’ hands, and contribute to your hacking-related budget while at it. If you’re good at it, your store begins to grow. From receiving a couple orders a year, to getting one almost every day – if you don’t optimize the process of mailing orders out, it might just start taking a toll on you.

That is not to say that you should worry – it’s merely a matter of optimization, and, now you have a veritable resource to refer to. At Supercon 2023, [MakeItHackin]/[Andrew] has graced us with his extensive experience scaling up your sales and making your shipping process as seamless as it could be. His experience is multifaceted, and he’s working with entire four platforms – Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy and Shopify, which makes his talk all that more valuable.

[MakeItHackin] tells us how he started out selling hardware, how his stores grew, and what pushed him to automate the shipping process to a formidable extent. Not just that – he’s developed a codebase for making the shipping experience as smooth as possible, and he’s sharing it all with us.

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