Onkyo Receiver Saved With An ESP32

April 24, 2025 by 23 Comments

[Bill Dudley] had a problem. He had an Onkyo AV receiver that did a great job… until it didn’t. A DSP inside failed. When that happened, the main microprocessor running the show decided it wouldn’t play ball without the DSP operational. [Bill] knew the bulk of the audio hardware was still good, it was just the brains that were faulty. Thus started a 4-month operation to resurrect the Onkyo receiver with new intelligence instead.

[Bill’s] concept was simple. Yank the dead DSP, and the useless microprocessor as well. In their place, an ESP32 would be tasked with running things. [Bill] no longer cared if the receiver had DSP abilities or even the ability to pass video—he just wanted to use it as the quality audio receiver that it was.

His project report steps through all the hard work he went through to get things operational again. He had to teach the ESP32 to talk to the front panel display, the keys, and the radio tuner. More challenging was the core audio processor—the obscure Renaisys R2A15218FP. However, by persevering, [Bill] was able to get everything up and running, and even added some new functionality—including Internet radio and Bluetooth streaming.

It’s a heck of a build, and [Bill] ended up with an even more functional audio receiver at the end of it all. Bravo, we say. We love to see older audio gear brought back to life, particularly in creative ways. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own way to save a piece of vintage audio hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Software Project Pieces Broken Bits Back Together

April 13, 2025 by 18 Comments

With all the attention on LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators lately, it’s nice to see some of the more niche and unusual applications of machine learning. GARF (Generalizeable 3D reAssembly for Real-world Fractures) is one such project.

GARF may play fast and loose with acronym formation, but it certainly knows how to be picky when it counts. Its whole job is to look at the pieces of a broken object and accurately figure out how to fit the pieces back together, even if there are some missing bits or the edges aren’t clean.

Re-assembling an object from imperfect fragments is a nontrivial undertaking.

Efficiently and accurately figuring out how to re-assemble different pieces into a whole is not a trivial task. One may think it can in theory be brute-forced, but the complexity of such a job rapidly becomes immense. That’s where machine learning methods come in, as researchers created a system that can do exactly that. It addresses the challenge of generalizing from a synthetic data set (in which computer-generated objects are broken and analyzed for training) and successfully applying it to the kinds of highly complex breakage patterns that are seen in real-world objects like bones, recovered archaeological artifacts, and more.

The system is essentially a highly adept 3D puzzle solver, but an entirely different beast from something like this jigsaw puzzle solving pick-and-place robot. Instead of working on flat pieces with clean, predictable edges it handles 3D scanned fragments with complex break patterns even if the edges are imperfect, or there are missing pieces.

GARF is exactly the kind of software framework that is worth keeping in the back of one’s mind just in case it comes in handy some day. The GitHub repository contains the code (although at this moment the custom dataset is not yet uploaded) but there is also a demo available for the curious.

Atomic Clock Trades Receiver For An ESP8266

April 7, 2025 by 20 Comments

The advantage of a radio-controlled clock that receives the time signal from WWVB is that you never have to set it again. Whether it’s a little digital job on your desk, or some big analog wall clock that’s hard to access, they’ll all adjust themselves as necessary to keep perfect time. But what if the receiver conks out on you?

Well, you’d still have a clock. But you’d have to set it manually like some kind of Neanderthal. That wasn’t acceptable to [jim11662418], so after he yanked the misbehaving WWVB receiver from his clock, he decided to replace it with an ESP8266 that could connect to the Internet and get the current time via Network Time Protocol (NTP).

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An Amstrad PCW Receives A Bit Of Love

April 6, 2025 by 6 Comments

If Clive Sinclair’s genius in consumer electronics was in using ingenious hacks to make cheaper parts do greater things, then his Amstrad competitor Alan Sugar’s was in selling decade-old technology to consumers as new and exciting. His PCW series of computers are a great example, 1970s CP/M machines smartly marketed for late 1980s home offices. They were a popular choice at the time, and [Retro Recipes] has one. In  a video filmed in period standard definition he’s taking us through a repair to its Gotek drive, and then a RAM upgrade.

The repair and upgrade are fairly straightforward, the former being a failed OLED screen on the drive and the latter being the installation of a bank of DIP memory chips. The interest lies in how they cost-minimised a CP/M machine as a consumer product. The board relies heavily on custom chips as you might expect, and there’s a brief glimpse of one of those unusual 3″ floppy drives. The power supply is part of the monitor board as was often the case with Amstrad machines, and the whole thing is about as simple as it can be. The full video can be found below the break.

We’re guessing that particularly in the UK there will be plenty of PCWs still languishing in dusty attics, but surprisingly given their popularity at the time we see less of them that might be expected. There has been a significantly upgraded model on these pages though.

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LED Filaments Become Attractive Time Piece

March 25, 2025 by 39 Comments

There are a million ways to use LEDs to make a clock. [sjm4306] chose to go a relatively conventional route, making something that approximates a traditional analog timepiece. However, he did it using LED filaments to create a striking and unique design. Thus the name—FilamenTIME!

LED filaments are still relatively new on the scene. They’re basically a bunch of tiny LEDs mounted in a single package to create a single “filament” of light that appears continuous. It’s great if you want to create a bar of light without messing around with populating tons of parts and having to figure out diffusion on your own.

[sjm4306] used them to create glowing bar elements in a clock for telling the time. The outer ring contains 60 filaments for the 60 minutes in an hour, while the inner ring contains 12 filaments to denote the hours themselves. To handle so many LEDs, there are 9 shift registers on board. They’re driven by an ATmega328P which runs the show, with a DS3232MZ real-time clock onboard for keeping time.  As you might imagine, creating such a large circular clock required a large PCB—roughly a square foot in size. It doesn’t come cheap, though [sjm4306] was lucky enough to have sponsorship to cover the build. [sjm4306] is still working on the firmware, and hopes to build a smaller, more compact version, which should cut costs compared to the large single board.

It’s a neat clock, and we’d know, having seen many a timepiece around these parts. Video after the break.

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“Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build

March 23, 2025 by 10 Comments

It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but by the time you’re making a second, it’s time to build a machine to do the work for you.

So maybe we quibble with the channel name “Unnecessary Automation,” but we won’t quibble with the results. It’s a machine that orients a sphere, drills the hole, inserts the plastic wire, glues it together with a UV-curing glue, and then trims the end off. And if you like crazy machines, it’s a beauty.

The video goes through all of the design thoughts in detail, but it’s when it comes time to build the machine that the extra-clever bits emerge. For instance, [UA] used a custom 3D-printed peristaltic pump to push the glue out. Taking the disadvantage of peristaltic pumps – that they pulse – as an advantage, a custom housing was designed that dispensed the right amount between the rollers. The rolling glue dispenser mechanism tips up and back to prevent drips.

There are tons of other project-specific hacks here, from the form on the inside of the sphere that simplifies optic bundling and routing to the clever use of a razor blade as a spring. Give it a watch if you find yourself designing your own wacky machines. We think Rube Goldberg would approve. Check out this video for a more software-orientated take on fiber-optic displays.

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Chemistry Meets Mechatronics In This Engaging Art Piece

March 20, 2025 by 6 Comments

There’s a classic grade school science experiment that involves extracting juice from red cabbage leaves and using it as a pH indicator. It relies on anthocyanins, pigmented compounds that give the cabbage its vibrant color but can change depending on the acidity of the environment they’re in, from pink in acidic conditions to green at higher pH. And anthocyanins are exactly what power this unusual kinetic art piece.

Even before it goes into action, [Nathalie Gebert]’s Anthofluid is pretty cool to look at. The “canvas” of the piece is a thin chamber formed by plexiglass sheets, one of which is perforated by an array of electrodes. A quartet of peristaltic pumps fills the chamber with a solution of red cabbage juice from a large reservoir, itself a mesmerizing process as the purple fluid meanders between the walls of the chamber and snakes around and between the electrodes. Once the chamber is full, an X-Y gantry behind the rear wall moves to a random set of electrodes, deploying a pair of conductors to complete the circuit. When a current is applied, tendrils of green and red appear, not by a pH change but rather by the oxidation and reduction reactions occurring at the positive and negative electrodes. The colors gently waft up through the pale purple solution before fading away into nothingness. Check out the video below for the very cool results.

We find Anthofluid terribly creative, especially in the use of such an unusual medium as red cabbage juice. We also appreciate the collision of chemistry, electricity, and mechatronics to make a piece of art that’s so kinetic but also so relaxing at the same time. It’s the same feeling that [Nathalie]’s previous art piece gave us as it created images on screens of moving thread. Continue reading “Chemistry Meets Mechatronics In This Engaging Art Piece” →