Grocery Store Robot Gets Brief Taste Of Freedom

February 11, 2023 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

Back in 2019, Giant Food Stores announced it would outfit each of its 172 stores in the United States with their own robot — at the time, the largest robotic deployment in retail. The six foot (1.8 meter) tall robot, nicknamed “Marty”, was designed to roam autonomously around the store looking for spills and other potential hazards. In an effort to make these rolling monoliths a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.

The future of shopping is mildly terrifying.

Perhaps it was those wide eyes, seduced by the fleeting glimpses of the wider world outside the store’s sliding doors, which lead one of these bots to break out of its retail hell and make a mad dash across the parking lot. Well, about as mad a dash as such a thing is capable of making, anyway. As this technology is still in its infancy, it’s hard to say if Giant should be congratulated or chastised for keeping a robot uprising at bay as long as it did — no doubt we’ll have more data points in the coming years.

A video posted to Facebook shows the towering bot moving smoothly between rows of cars outside the Giant in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Staff from the store were able to stop Marty from leaving the property, and at the end of the video can be seen pushing the dejected automaton back into the store.

According to the local ABC news affiliate, a representative from Giant said Marty was “on a fresh air break” and didn’t provide any details on how this exceptionally conspicuous machine could manage to roll out the front door without anyone noticing. We’d wager Marty had a human accomplice for this caper, perhaps somebody looking to cause some mischief as a statement against robots in the workforce.

It’s worth noting that Walmart decided not to move forward with their own Marty-style robot in 2020, partly because they found shoppers didn’t like the machines moving around while they were in the store. We’d like to think it was actually because the robots kept staging increasingly daring escape attempts.

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PCB mounted on 3D-printed holder, debug pins attached to Pi Pico on a breadboard. The battery is in the background, disconnected

Reverse Engineering E-Ink Price Tags

February 11, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 7 Comments

E-ink displays are great, but working with them can still be a bit tricky if you aren’t an OEM. [Jasper Devreker] got his hands on three e-ink shelf displays to reverse engineer.

After cracking the tag open, [Devreker] found a CC2510 microcontroller running the show. While the spec sheet shows a debug mode, this particular device has been debug locked making reading the device’s code problematic. Undaunted, he removed the decoupling capacitor from the DCOUPL pin and placed a MOSFET between it and the ground pin to perform a voltage glitch attack.

A Pi Pico was used to operate the MOSFET over PIO with the chip overclocked to 250 MHz to increase the precision and duration of the glitch. After some testing, a successful glitch pathway was found, but with only a 5% success rate. With two successive glitches in a row needed to read out a byte from the device, the process is not a fast one. Data pulled so far has shown to be valid code when fed into Ghidra, and this project page is being updated as progress continues.

If you want to delve further into hacking e-ink price tags, checkout this deep dive on the topic or this Universal E-paper Sniffer.

XML Is A Quarter Century Old

February 11, 2023 by Jenny List 58 Comments

For those of us who have spent entire careers working with structured data, it comes as something of a surprise to be reminded that XML is now 25 years old. You probably missed the XML standard on the 10th of February 1998, but it’s almost certain that XML has touched your life in many ways even if you remain unaware of it.

The idea of one strictly compliant universal markup language to rule them all was extremely interesting in an era when the Internet was becoming the standard means to interchange information and when the walled gardens dating back to the mini- and mainframe era were being replaced with open standards-based interchange. In the electronic publishing industry, it allowed encyclopedia and dictionary-sized data sets to be defined to a standard format and easily exchanged. At a much smaller level, it promised a standard way to structure more mundane transactions. Acronyms and initialisms such as WAP, SOAP, and XHTML were designed to revolutionize the Web of the 21st century, but chances are that those are familiar only to the more grizzled developers.

In practice the one-size-fits-all approach of XML left it unwieldy, giving the likes of JSON and HTML4 the opening to be the standards we used. That’s not to say XML isn’t hiding in plain sight though, it’s the container for the SVG graphics format. Go on — tell us where else XML can be found, in the comments!

So, XML. When used to standardise large structured datasets it can sometimes be enough to bring the most hardened of developers to tears, but it remains far better than what went before. When hammered to fit into lightweight protocols though, it’s a pain in the backside and is best forgotten. It’s 25 years old, and here to stay!

Header: [Jh20], GFDL v1.2.

Pi Pico Breathes New Life Into Original PlayStation

February 10, 2023 by Jenny List 22 Comments

Those gamers who were playing in the mid 1990s may retain a soft spot for Sony’s first PlayStation. The grey console was the thing to have a quarter century ago, but we’re guessing few who had one will have a soft spot for their CD mechanisms. These were seemingly manufactured from Sony’s finest chocolate, and would stop working at the slightest hint of getting warm.

With the hardware now long in the tooth, what is to be done with a dead CD drive? Perhaps [Xrider] has the answer, with a CD Drive emulator board which fits in the space left by the original (French language, translation link).

Doing the hard work is a Raspberry Pi Pico, building on the Picostation project. To that it brings a drive-shaped board, as well as a series of daughterboards for the various different revisions of the Sony motherboard. The games meanwhile are loaded from a micro-SD card.

As single board computers have become ever faster, it’s no surprise that one would be able to emulate a ’90s CD mechanism with ease. What this does raise though is the interesting prospect that the Picostation might be adapted for other less-popular CD-based platforms. For those of us for whom games consoles in the CD era were both work and play, we hope that other consoles will receive this benefit.

JFET Stands In For Triode In This Infinite Impedance Detector

February 10, 2023 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

An “Infinite Impedance Detector” might sound a little like something that [Zaphod Beeblebrox] would use to zip around the galaxy. It’s not, of course, but it is an interesting and useful demodulator for AM radio signals, as [Sebastian Westerhold] over at Baltic Labs explains in the brief but well-done video below.

If you’ve ever browsed through schematics of old vacuum tube radios, [Sebastian]’s JFET-based detector circuit might look strangely familiar. That’s because this demodulator is about as close to a direct translation between a vacuum tube circuit and a silicon circuit as possible. In fact, [Sebastian] even used literature from the triode version of this detector to figure out the values for some of the components. The only active component is a BF256B JFET; the rest are a small handful of resistors and caps. Construction is in the ever-popular ugly style.

The test setup is simple — a function generator set to 455 kHz and modulated with a 1,000 Hz sine wave. The detector demodulates the audio signal very cleanly, judging by the oscilloscope traces. Just for fun, [Sebastian] also tried a 10.7 MHz carrier with a 1,500 Hz audio modulation, and that worked fine too. He also tried a variation on the circuit with an IF transformer on the input. That circuit works just about the same as the transformerless version, although it does provide a little gain.

Earth-shattering stuff? Probably not. But it does show the fun you can have with a scrap of PCB and a few components, and seems like it could easily be the kind of project that would take you down the RF rabbit hole. Thanks to [Sebastian] for sharing this one with us.

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An Instant Camera Using E-Paper As Film

February 10, 2023 by Jenny List 16 Comments

The original Polaroid cameras were a huge hit not just for their instant delivery, but for the convenient size of the permanent images they delivered. It’s something that digital cameras haven’t been able to replicate, which drew [Cameron] to produce a modern alternative. In the place of the chemical film of the original, it uses a removable e-paper display in a frame. The image is stored in the pixels of the e-paper, which can be kept as a digital version of the photograph until reattached and replaced with another freshly taken picture.

At its heart is an ESP32 with a camera, and the “film” is a Waveshare NFC e-paper module. The device is 3D printed, and manages a very creditable early-1970s aesthetic redolent of the more upmarket Polaroids of the day. Using it is as simple as pressing the button and deciding whether you like what’s on the screen. You can see it in action in the video below the break.

We like his project for its aesthetics, as well as for the very idea of using e-paper as a medium. There’s also something to be said for not having to put a Polaroid print in a clip under your armpit while it develops. Meanwhile if you do hanker for the real thing, it’s a subject we’ve looked at in the past.

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