Hackaday Podcast Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, And 3D Printing Innovation Lives!

This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening.

On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art.

The week’s stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It’s safe to say that the Cartesian 3D printer has matured as a device, but this work proves there’s plenty more in the world of 3D printing to be developed. Then there was a beautiful record cutting lathe project, far more than a toy and capable of producing good quality stereo recordings.

Meanwhile it’s always good to see the price of parts come down, and this time it’s the turn of LIDAR sensors. There’s a Raspberry Pi project capable of astounding resolution, for a price that wouldn’t have been imaginable only recently. Finally we returned to 3D printing, with an entirely printable machine, including the motors and the hot end. It’s a triumph of printed engineering, and though it’s fair to say that you won’t be using it to print anything for yourself, we expect some of the very clever techniques in use to feature in many other projects.

The week’s cant-miss articles came from Maya Posch with a reality check for lovers of physical media, and Dan Maloney with a history of x-ray detection. Listen to it all below, and you’ll find all the links at the bottom of the page.

Still mourning the death of physical media?  Download an MP3 and burn it to CD like it’s 1999!

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Run Xbox 360 Games On Your PC With XenonRecomp

Inspired by the N64: Recompiled project, XenonRecomp does something similar, except for the PowerPC-equipped Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. Based around the triple-core IBM CPU codenamed ‘Xenon‘, the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and generally quite successful over its lifespan despite its Red Ring of Death issues. Although the current Xbox Series X supports running a number of Xbox 360 games, this is done via emulation and only 632 games out of 2,155 are supported.

This is where XenonRecomp not only promises turning the games into native (x86) software, but also allowing for a range of graphical improvements. Best of all, it allows for Xbox 360 games to be preserved instead of linked to an obsolete console. That said, much like with N64Recomp, it’s not a simple matter of running a tool over the PPC binary. You’re expected to have in-depth systems knowledge, with the tools in XenonRecomp assisting with the decompilation (into C++) and the recompilation into x86 binaries, but support for PPC instructions, VMX (vector instructions) and aspects like jump table conversion and (currently missing) MMIO support are likely to present an enterprising developer with hours of fun to implement and debug when issues arise.

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A Red Ring Light Show For Your Xbox 360

The Red Ring of Death (RROD) was the bane of many an Xbox 360 owner. The problem was eventually solved, mostly, but memories of that hellish era lurk in the back of many a gamer’s mind. For a more cheery use of those same status lights, you might appreciate “Lightshow” from [Derf].

The concept is simple enough. It’s a small application that runs on an Xbox 360, and allows you to test the individual LEDs that make up the Ring of Light indicator, along with the main power LED. If you want to test the lights and see each segment correctly lights up as green, yellow and red, you can.

Alternatively, you can have some fun with it. [Derf] also programmed it to flash along to simple four-channel MIDI songs. Naturally, Sandstorm was the perfect song to test it with. It may have been the result of a simple throwaway joke, but [Derf] delivered in amusing fashion nonetheless.

Lightshow is an entry for Xbox Scene Modfest 2024; it’s nice to see the community is still popping off even in this era of heavily-locked-down consoles. We’ve featured some other useful 360 hacks in recent months, too. Video after the break.

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Running Fusion 360 On Linux With Wine

One of the major reasons why using Linux on a desktop system is unsuitable for many is due to the lack of Linux support for many major applications, including Autodesk Fusion 360. Naturally, using Wine this should be easy in an ideal world, but realistically getting something like Fusion 360 set up and ready to log in with Wine will take some serious time. Fortunately [Steve Zabka] created some shell scripts to automate the process. As demonstrated by [Tech Dregs] on YouTube, this seems to indeed work on a Fedora system, with just a few glitches.

Among these glitches are some rendering artefacts like application controls remaining on the desktop after closing the application, in-application line rendering and [Tech Dregs] was unable to switch from the DirectX 9 renderer to the DirectX 11 one. Since Fusion 360 will soon drop DirectX 9 and OpenGL support, this would seem to be rather an important detail. The GitHub project seems to indicate that this should work, but [Tech Dregs] reported only getting a black screen after switching.

Clearly, using applications like Fusion 360 on Linux isn’t quite what you’d want to use for a production workflow in a commercial setting (even ignoring lack of Autodesk support), but it could be useful for students and others who’d like to not switch to Windows or MacOS just to use this kind of software for a course or hobbyist use.

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A Robust Guide To The Xbox 360 Glitch Hack

The Xbox 360 was a difficult console to jailbreak. Microsoft didn’t want anyone running unsigned code, and darn if they didn’t make it difficult to do so. However, some nifty out of the box thinking and tricky techniques cracked it open like a coconut with a crack in it. For the low down, [15432] has a great in-depth article on how it was achieved. The article is in Russian, so you’ll want to be armed with Google Translate for this one.

The article gets right into the juice of how glitch attacks work—in general, and with regards to the Xbox 360. In the specific case of the console, it was all down to the processor’s RESET line. Flicker it quickly enough, and the processor doesn’t actually reset, but nonetheless its behavior changes. If you time the glitch right, you can get the processor to continue running through the bootloader’s instructions even if a hash check instruction failed. Of course, timing it right was hard, so it helps to temporarily slow down the processor.

From there, the article continues to explore the many and varied ways this hack played out against Microsoft’s copy protection across multiple models and revisions of the Xbox 360. The bit with the BGA ball connections is particularly inspired. [15432] also goes even deeper into a look at how the battle around the Xb0x 360’s DVD-ROM drive got heated.

We seldom talk about the Xbox 360 these days, but they used to grace these pages on the regular. Video after the break.

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Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning

Multiple motors or servos are the norm for drones to achieve controllable flight, but a team from MARS LAB HKU was able to a 360° lidar scanning drone with full control on just a single motor and no additional actuators. Video after the break.

The key to controllable flight is the swashplateless propeller design that we’ve seen a few times, but it always required a second propeller to counteract self-rotation. In this case, the team was able to make that self-rotation work so that they could achieve 360° scanning with a single fixed LIDAR sensor. Self-rotation still needs to be slowed, so this was done with four stationary vanes. The single rotor also means better efficiency compared to a multi-rotor with similar propeller disk area.

The LIDAR comprises a full 50% of the drone’s weight and provides a conical FOV out to a range of 450m. All processing happens onboard the drone, with point cloud data being processed by a LIDAR-inertial odometry framework. This allows the drone to track and plan its flight path while also building a 3D map of an unknown environment. This means it would be extremely useful for indoor or underground environments where GPS or other positioning systems are not available.

All the design files and code for the drone are up on GitHub, and most of the electronic components are off-the-shelf. This means you can build your own, and the expensive lidar sensor is not required to get it flying. This seems like a great platform for further experimentation, and getting usable video from a normal camera would be an interesting challenge. Continue reading “Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning”

Mainframe Chip Has 360MB Of On-Chip Cache

It is hard to imagine what a mainframe or supercomputer can do when we all have what amounts to supercomputers on our desks. But if you look at something like IBM’s mainframe Telum chip, you’ll get some ideas. The Telum II has “only” eight cores, but they run at 5.5 GHz. Unimpressed? It also has 360 MB of on-chip cache and I/O and AI accelerators. A mainframe might use 32 of these chips, by the way.

[Clamchowder] explains in the post how the cache has a unique architecture. There are actually ten 36 MB L2 caches on the chip. There are eight caches, one for each core, plus one for the I/O accelerator, and another one that is uncommitted.

A typical CPU will have a shared L3 cache, but with so much L2 cache, IBM went a different direction. As [Clamchowder] explains, the chip reuses the L2 capacity to form a virtual L3 cache. Each cache has a saturation metric and when one cache gets full, some of its data goes to a less saturated cache block.

Remember the uncommitted cache block? It always has the lowest saturation metric so, typically, unless the same data happens to be in another cache, it gets moved to the spare block.

There’s more to it than that — read the original post for more details. You’ll even read speculation about how IBM managed a virtual L4 cache, across CPUs.

Cache has been a security bane lately on desktop CPUs. But done right, it is good for performance.