Storage Media Forgotten

December 18, 2023 by 24 Comments

These days, cheap removable storage is no problem. USB sticks are virtually free at moderate capacity and not unreasonable, even at relatively large sizes. They are rugged, work across platforms, and don’t require any exotic interfaces. But this hasn’t always been the case.  In the 1990s, people wanted to store too much data for floppies, but weren’t willing to shell out for removable hard drives or tapes. Many companies identified this opportunity with, perhaps, the most successful being Iomega with the Zip drive. But there were others, including the Avatar Shark that [This Does Not Compute] remembers in a video you can see below.

Haven’t heard of the Shark? We had not either, but reviewers seemed to like it. The drive would fit in your pocket if you had a fairly large pocket. The 250 MB cartridge was smaller (but thicker) than a 3.5-inch floppy. It performed ok and connected to the parallel port which was common in those days.

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The Laptop Every British Kid Would Have Wanted For Christmas 1983

December 17, 2023 by 12 Comments

How can we convey to a world in which a 64-bit laptop can be a near-throwaway item, just how amazing a miniature laptop version of the 1980s Sinclair ZX Spectrum could have been? perhaps we don’t need to, because here in 2023 there’s a real one for all middle-aged geeks who had the original to drool over.

8-bit home computers were super-exciting for the kids of the day, but they were in no way portable and relied on a TV, frequently the family model in the living room. It’s safe to say that a portable version of one of those home computers, not in an Osborne-style luggable case but in a clamshell palmtop, would have been mind-blowing, so four decades later we’re fascinated by [Airrr17]’s portable Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

At its heart is a dev board using one of the STM32F4 series microcontrollers, and running the Spectrum as an emulator. Alongside that is an LCD, and perhaps what is physically the best part of this, a Spectrum keyboard complete with BASIC keyword decals, made with large-button tactile switches that have we think, printed paper on top. Add in a small lithium-polymer cell and associated electronics in a cute little palmtop case, and it’s about as good a portable Sinclair as we could have imagined. All the details can be found in a GitHub repository, and as if that weren’t enough there’s an assembly video we’ve placed below the break.

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Porting CP/M To A Z80 Thing

December 13, 2023 by 13 Comments

It is hard to describe the Brother SuperPowerNote. It looks like a big old Z80-based laptop, but it says it is a notebook. The label on it says (with lots of exclamation marks) that it is a word processor, a communications system, a personal scheduler, and a spreadsheet organizer. Brother also promises on the label that it will “Increase your power to perform on the job, on the road or at home!” Plenty of exclamation marks to go around. The label also touts DOS or Windows, but [Poking Technology] didn’t want that. He wanted CP/M. See how he did it in the video below.

This is a very early laptop-style word processor with a floppy and a strange-looking screen. It also had serial and parallel ports, odd for a word processor, and probably justified the “communication system” claim on the label.

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PCIe For Hackers: External PCIe And OCuLink

December 13, 2023 by 23 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of PCIe hacks on Hackaday, and a fair few of them boil down to hackers pulling PCIe somewhere it wasn’t meant to be. Today, we routinely can find PCIe x1, x2 and x4 links sitting around in our tech, thanks to the proliferation of things like NVMe SSDs, and powerful cheap SoCs that make PCIe appear at your fingertips.

In the PCIe For Hackers series, we’ve talked about PCIe and how cool it is, all the benefits it has for hackers, gave you layout and interconnection rules, and even went into things like PCIe switches and bifurcation. However, there’s one topic we didn’t touch much upon, and that’s external PCIe links.

Today, I’d like to tell you about OCuLink – a standard that hackers might not yet know as an option whenever we need to pull PCIe outside of your project box, currently becoming all that more popular in eGPU space. Essentially, OCuLink is to PCIe is what eSATA is to SATA, and if you want to do an eGPU or an external “PCIe socket”, OCuLink could work wonders for you.

Respectable Capabilities

Just like any high-speed standard, PCIe has some tight requirements when things get fast. Even though PCIe is known to be not as sensitive to lower-quality links due to its link training and generation downgrade abilities, at higher link speeds, even through-hole vs SMD sockets can make a difference. So, if you want to go high-throughput, you want proper cabling and connectors, intended for out-of-chassis use – and OCuLink gives you all of this, at a low price.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue

December 11, 2023 by 68 Comments

Many inventions happen not by design but through failure. They don’t happen through the failure directly, but because someone was paying attention and remembered the how and why of the failure, and learns from this. One of these inventions is Super Glue, the adhesive that every tinkerer and engineer has to hand to stick pretty much anything to anything, quickly. Although it was a complete failure for the original uses it was developed for, a chemist with good memory and an eye for a helpful product created it in a process he described as “one day of synchronicity and ten years of hard work.”

Super Glue was initially invented in 1942, when the chemist Harry Coover was working on a team trying to develop a clear plastic gun sight that would be cheaper than the metal ones already in use. The team cast a wide net, trying a range of new materials. Coover was testing a class of chemicals called cyanoacrylates. They had some promise, but they had one problem: they stuck to pretty much everything. Every time that Coover tried to use the material to cast a gun sight, it stuck to the container and was really hard to remove. 

When the samples he tried came into contact with water, even water vapor in the air, they immediately formed an incredibly resilient bond with most materials. That made them lousy manufacturing materials, so he put the cyanoacrylates aside when the contract was canceled. His employer B. F. Goodrich, patented the process of making cyanoacrylates in 1947, but didn’t note any particular uses for the materials: they were simply a curiosity. 

It wasn’t until 1951 when Coover, now at Eastman Kodak, remembered the sticky properties of cyanoacrylates. He and his colleague Fred Joyner were working on making heat-resistant canopies for the new generation of jet fighters, and they considered using these sticky chemicals as adhesives in the manufacturing process. According to Coover, he told Joyner about the materials and asked him to measure the refractive index to see if they might be suitable for use. He warned him to be careful, as the material would probably stick in the refractometer and damage it. Joyner tested the material and found it wasn’t suitable for a canopy but then went around the lab using it to stick things together. The two realized it could make an excellent adhesive for home and engineering use. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue” →

Binary Clock Kit Blips Again

December 10, 2023 by 15 Comments

Back in 1978, the world was a bit different. There was no Raspberry Pi, no Internet, and not even an ESP32 to build projects with. And rather than order electronics kits from Tindie or Adafruit, [Dr. Francitosh] selected this binary clock with his mother from a catalog, and made the order via mail. Simpler times. The good Doctor, AKA [Greg Smith], was a young electronics tinkerer, and his mother wanted a good project-in-a-box to show off his skills. Thus, a Greymark Binary Clock was ordered and assembled. Then, sadly, the beloved clock crashed from its proud mantle position, doomed to never to blink or blip again. Or was it?
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This Week In Security: LogoFail, National DNS Poison, And DNA

December 8, 2023 by 3 Comments

When there’s a vulnerability in a system library, we install updates, and go on with our lives. When there’s a vulnerability in a Java library, jars get rebuilt, and fixed builds slowly roll out. But what happens when there’s a vulnerability in a library used in firmware builds? And to make it even more fun, it’s not just a single vulnerability. All three major firmware vendors have problems when processing malicious images. And LogoFail isn’t limited to x86, either. UEFI Arm devices are vulnerable, too.
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