Debian Officially Adds RISC-V Support

July 25, 2023 by 21 Comments

As time goes on, more and more computer manufacturers are moving towards the ARM architecture and away from the bloated and outdated x86 instruction set. Apple is the most prominent producer to take this step, but plenty others are using ARM for its flexibility and efficiency. The only problem with ARM is that it’s licensed, so if you want to go even further down the open-source path the RISC-V instruction set is the next logical step. Now at least one mainline Linux distribution will officially support this architecture.

While Debian did have some support for RISC-V before this as a Debian port, which was not officially part of Debian. However, the official support will begin with the release of Debian 13, which is currently in the testing phase and hasn’t seen a stable release yet. To that end, the current state of this official version is extremely limited, being described as “almost empty” but with planned support for an initial 90 packages in the coming days. Most users working on a RISC-V platform will most likely to continue to use their Debian ports version.

It might be a little while before the RISC-V version is as full-featured as the ARM or x86 versions of this Linux distribution, but we are happy to see it move in this direction at all. And don’t think that RISC-V is limited to embedded systems or otherwise limited computing platforms, either. We’ve seen full Linux desktops with RISC-V processors since at least 2019.

Car Security System Monitors Tiny Voltage Fluctuations

July 25, 2023 by 43 Comments

As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a lock that can’t be picked. However, it seems like there are plenty of examples of car manufacturers that refuse to add these metaphorical locks to their cars at all — especially when it comes to securing the electronic systems of vehicles. Plenty of modern cars are essentially begging to be attacked as a result of such poor practices as unencrypted CAN busses and easily spoofed wireless keyfobs. But even if your car comes from a manufacturer that takes basic security precautions, you still might want to check out this project from the University of Michigan that is attempting to add another layer of security to cars.

The security system works like many others, by waiting for the user to input a code. The main innovation here is that the code is actually a series of voltage fluctuations that are caused by doing things like turning on the headlights or activating the windshield wipers. This is actually the secondary input method, though; there is also a control pad that can mimic these voltage fluctuations as well without having to perform obvious inputs to the vehicle’s electrical system. But, if the control pad isn’t available then turning on switches and lights to input the code is still available for the driver. The control unit for this device is hidden away, and disables things like the starter motor until it sees these voltage fluctuations.

One of the major selling points for a system like this is the fact that it doesn’t require anything more complicated than access to the vehicle’s 12 volt electrical system to function. While there are some flaws with the design, it’s an innovative approach to car security that, when paired with a common-sense approach to securing modern car technology, could add some valuable peace-of-mind to vehicle ownership in areas prone to car theft. It could even alleviate the problem of cars being stolen via their headlights.

Continue reading “Car Security System Monitors Tiny Voltage Fluctuations” →

Retrotechtacular: The Computer Center Of 1973

July 25, 2023 by 35 Comments

You might expect Bell Labs would have state-of-the-art computers, and they did. But it is jarring to realize just how little that was in 1973, fifty years ago. If you started work at Bell’s Holmdel Computing Center back then, you might have watched one of the orientation videos below. Your first clue about how far things have come might be the reference to the IBM 370/165, which had “3 million bytes of core, 2 million of which are available for programmer use.” Even our laptops today have at least 8 gigabytes of RAM. There were at least two other smaller IBM 370s, too. Plenty of 029 card punches are visible.

If you were trying to run something between 8:00 AM and 5:30 PM, you had to limit your job run time to three minutes, 4,000 lines of output, and no more than 1,000 cards in and 5,000 cards out. Oh, and don’t use more than 384 kB of that core memory, either. If you fell within those limits, you could hand your card deck over at the express counter and get your results in only five or ten minutes. If you were not in the express line but still rated “premium” service, you could expect to wait a half hour.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Computer Center Of 1973” →

Procrastinators Rejoice! 2023 Supercon Call For Participation Extended

July 25, 2023 by 4 Comments

When we closed the official Call for Participation for both workshops and talks last week, a good handful of folks wrote to us and asked if they could slip their presentation application in after the deadline. Who are we to say “no” to potential presenters? We want to see all the ideas!

We’re officially extending the Call for Speakers and the Call for Workshops for another week. Get your outline in before Aug. 1st at 9:00 AM PDT, and it’ll be in the selection for Supercon. (And no, we’re not going to extend it twice!)

The Hackaday Superconference is really and truly our favorite event of the year. It’s small, but not too small. The ideas everyone brings with them, however, are big. It’s like the absolute best of Hackaday live and in person. If you’re looking for a place to give a technical talk, or just to regale us all with the trials and triumphs of hacking, you won’t find a more receptive audience anywhere. Plus, presenters get in free.

Behind the scenes, we’re still working on the badge, but we’ve got many of the details fully hammered down. Expect tickets to go on sale in the second week of August – early bird tickets sell out fast. Keep your eyes on Hackaday for the announcement post when it goes live.

We know that November seems a long way out, but we’re looking forward to seeing you all already. Hooray for Supercon!

Tivoli Teardown Disappoints

July 25, 2023 by 32 Comments

[Fran] has been curious about the innards of Tivoli Audio’s Model One radio, but was reluctant to shell out $200 just to tear it apart. But she found one recently on eBay, won the auction, and proceeded to do a review and teardown. Spoiler alert, she was disappointed.

Physically speaking, the radio looks great and has quite an array of I/O connections. The geared tuning knob looks cool, but is heavily damped which [Fran] isn’t keen about. Turning it on, a few more quirks are discovered. The volume control is out-of-whack — it appears they substituted a linear taper potentiometer where a logarithmic taper was called for.

Another problem, at least in the RF-dense metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, is the FM tuner’s station-lock feature. It is so strong that it can be impossible to tune in weak stations. This is especially ironic since, according to Wikipedia, that was one of audio engineer Henry Kloss’s main goals when founding Tivoli Audio back in 2000:

Their first product was the Model One, a simple to use mid-century modern designed table top radio with a high-performance tuner, receiving FM radio in congested urban locations, while maintaining the ability to pick out distant or low power stations. Kloss had noted that the mid 60’s wave of Japanese radios lacked the ability to receive FM stations in congested locations, and this became a defining goal of his radio designs throughout his career.

Interestingly, many folks in the YouTube comments say their Model One radios have none of these issues. We wonder if [Fran] has obtained a damaged radio, or maybe a newer version produced with less attention to detail. If you have a broken Model One radio, before tossing it, consider the hack we wrote about last year, turning it into an internet radio.

Continue reading “Tivoli Teardown Disappoints” →

PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done

July 25, 2023 by 18 Comments

We’ve started designing a PCIe card last week, an adapter from M.2 E-key to E-key, that adds an extra link to the E-key slot it carries – useful for fully utilizing a few rare but fancy E-key cards. By now, the schematic is done, the component placement has been figured out, and we only need to route the differential pairs – should be simple, right? Buckle up.

Getting Diffpairs Done

PCIe needs TX pairs connected to RX on another end, like UART – and this is non-negotiable. Connectors will use host-side naming, and vice-versa. As the diagram demonstrates, we connect the socket’s TX to chip’s RX and vice-versa; if we ever get confused, the laptop schematic is there to help us make things clear. To sum up, we only need to flip the names on the link coming to the PCIe switch, since the PCIe switch acts as a device on the card; the two links from the switch go to the E-key socket, and for that socket’s purposes, the PCIe switch acts as a host.

While initially routing this board, I absolutely forgot about one more important thing for PCIe – series capacitors on every data pair, on the host TX side of the link. We need three capacitor pairs here – on TX of the PCIe switch uplink, and two pairs on TX side of the switch – again, naming is host-side. I only remembered this after having finished routing all the diffpairs, and, after a bit of deliberation, I decided that this is my chance to try 0201 capacitors. For that, I took the footprints from [Christoph]‘s wonderful project, called “Effect of moon phase on tombstoning” – with such a name, these footprints have got to be good.

We’ve talked about differential pair calculations before in one of the PCIe articles, and there was a demo video too! That said, let’s repeat the calculations on this one – I’ll show how to get from “PCB fab website information” to “proper width and clearance diffpairs”, with a few fun shortcuts. Our setup is, once again, having signals on outer layers, referenced to the ground layer right below them. I, sadly, don’t yet understand how to calculate differential impedance for signal layers sandwiched between two ground planes, which is to say – if there’s any commenters willing to share this knowledge, I’d appreciate your input tremendously! For now, I don’t see that there’d be a tangible benefit to such an arrangement, anyway.

Continue reading “PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done” →

Selectric Typewriter Goes From Trash Can To Linux Terminal

July 25, 2023 by 20 Comments

If there’s only lesson to be learned from [alnwlsn]’s conversion of an IBM Selectric typewriter into a serial terminal for Linux, it’s that we’ve been hanging around the wrong garbage cans. Because that’s where he found the donor machine for this project, and it wasn’t even the first one he’s come across in the trash. The best we’ve ever done is a nasty old microwave.

For being a dumpster find, the Selectric II was actually in pretty decent shape. The first couple of minutes of the video after the break show not only the minimal repairs needed to get the typewriter back on its feet, but also a whirlwind tour of the remarkably complex mechanisms that turn keypresses into characters on the page. As it turns out, knowing how the mechanical linkages work is the secret behind converting the Selectric into a teletype, entirely within the original enclosure and with as few modifications to the existing mechanism as possible.

Keypresses are mimicked with a mere thirteen solenoids — six for the “latch interposers” that interface with the famous whiffletree mechanism that converts binary input to a specific character on the typeball, and six more that control thinks like the cycle bail and control keys. The thirteenth solenoid controls an added bell, because every good teletype needs a bell. For sensing the keypresses — this is to be a duplex terminal, after all — [alnwlsn] pulled a page from the Soviet Cold War fieldcraft manual and used opto-interrupters to monitor the positions of the latch interposers as keys are pressed, plus more for the control keys.

The electronics are pretty straightforward — a bunch of MOSFETs to drive the solenoids, plus an AVR microcontroller. The terminal speaks RS-232, as one would expect, and within the limitations of keyboard and character set differences over the 50-odd years since the Selectric was introduced, it works fantastic as a Linux terminal. The back half of the video is loaded with demos, some of which aptly demonstrate why a lot of Unix commands look the way they do, but also some neat hybrid stuff, like a ChatGPT client.

Hats off to [alnwlsn] for tackling a difficult project while maintaining the integrity of the original hardware.

Continue reading “Selectric Typewriter Goes From Trash Can To Linux Terminal” →