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Hackaday Links: January 8, 2023

January 8, 2023 by 12 Comments

Something odd is afoot in the mountains around Salt Lake City, Utah, at least according to local media reports of remote radio installations that have been popping up for at least the past year. The installations consist of a large-ish solar panel, a weatherproof box full of batteries — and presumably other electronics, including radios — and a mast bearing at least one antenna. Local officials aren’t quite sure who these remote setups belong to or what they’re intended to do, but the installations obviously represent a huge investment in resources.

The one featured in the story was located near the summit of Twin Peaks, which is about 11,000 feet (3,300 meters) in elevation, which with that much gear was probably a hell of a hike. Plus, the owner took great pains to make sure the site would withstand the weather, with antenna mast guy wires that must have required lugging a pretty big drill up with them. There aren’t any photos of the radios in the enclosure, but one photo shows a 900-MHz LORA antenna, while another shows what appears to be a panel antenna, perhaps pointing toward another site. So maybe a LORA mesh network? Some comments in the Twitter thread show most people are convinced this is a Helium crypto mining rig, but the Helium Explorer doesn’t show any hotspots listed in that area. Either way, the owners are out of luck, since their gear is being removed if it’s on public land.

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Can AI Replace Your DM?

January 8, 2023 by 18 Comments

The current hotness is anything to do with artificial intelligence, and along with some interesting experiments comes a lot of mindless hype. The question is, what can it do for us! [Jesse] provides a fun answer by asking ChatGPT to perform as a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master.

There are many ways to approach a game of D&D, and while some take the whole thing very seriously indeed we prefer to treat it as a lightly inebriated band of intrepid heroes smacking each other and assorted monsters with imaginary swords and war hammers. Would the AI follow the nerdiest cliches to their pedantic conclusions, or would it sense that the point of a game is to have fun?

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Low-Cost 433 MHz Door Sensors Get Open Firmware

January 8, 2023 by 38 Comments

It’s an unfortunate reality these days that if you see a cheap piece of consumer electronics, there’s a good chance its only cheap because it’s designed to lock you into some ecosystem where you’ll either end up paying a subscription, or worse, have your personal information sold behind your back. One of the best tools we have against these sort of anti-consumer practices is the development of open source firmware replacements that put control of the device into the hands of the community, rather than a corporation.

Now, thanks to the work of [Jonathan Armstrong] we have such a firmware for the 433 MHz magnetic door and window sensors that you can pick up on AliExpress for $4 USD a piece. The new firmware not only ensures you can use these sensors with a wide array of receivers, but adds a number of new features over their stock configuration. Continue reading “Low-Cost 433 MHz Door Sensors Get Open Firmware” →

Forth Cracks RISC-V

January 8, 2023 by 48 Comments

Over the decades there have been many programming languages, some of which have flowered briefly, and others that have stuck around despite newer, better, and faster competition. Few languages embody this last group more than FORTH, over five decades old and still cropping up wherever a simple, elegant, fast, and compact stack-based programming language fits the bill. [Alexander Williams] has now taken it somewhere new, with a FORTH in RISC-V assembly which runs on the GD32 series of microcontrollers that are RISC-V lookalikes of the popular STM32 ARM parts.

We have to admit to last having used FORTH on an 8-bit home computer in the 1980s, aside from a moment’s idle play on discovering that the Open Firmware on Apple computers is a FORTH interpreter. Thus we’re intrigued by this implementation, but not from a position of FORTH expertise. We’d expect such an efficient language to be extremely quick though, so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on for when a suitable dev board comes our way. If it interests you, take a look at the GitHub repository.

The GitHub Silverware Drawer Dilemma, Or: Finding Active Repository Forks

January 8, 2023 by 11 Comments

An fortunate reality of GitHub and similar sites is that projects that are abandoned by the maintainer are often continued by someone else who forked the project. Unfortunately, the ease of forking also means that GitHub projects tend to have a lot of forks, with the popular projects having hundreds of them. Since GitHub has elected to not provide a way to filter or sort these forks, finding the most active fork can be rather harrowing.

In addition, a popular project’s dead repository tends to score higher in search results than replacement forks. For these particular situations a couple of very useful websites and browser add-ons have been developed. The Lovely Forks add-on by [Utkarsh Upadhyay] seeks to insert information on forks that are notable or newer than the repository one is looking at.

Meanwhile, the Active Forks project by [Samar Dhwoj Acharya] provides a sortable list of project forks when provided with a GitHub repository name. This helps enormously when trying to find the freshest forks in a whole list. This is similar to the Useful Forks project that provides a web-based interface in addition to a Chrome extension. Do note that these queries will count towards the GitHub API rate-limits, so you may need to add an access token.

It’s a shame that GitHub doesn’t offer such functionality by default, but thanks to these projects the times of clicking through a hundred forks to find the freshest one is at least over. For now.

Release Less Magic Smoke, With A Bulb Limiter

January 8, 2023 by 29 Comments

As electronics have moved lower in voltage, it’s perhaps less common to work on live-mains equipment. Thus particularly among younger hardware hackers it sometimes seems as though such work is viewed as so dangerous as to be only for the foolhardy. In practice it remains safe, so long as appropriate precautions are taken and a few pieces of useful safety equipment are present. One of those mains bench essentials is something less common in 2022, a mains current limiter using a set of switched incandescent light bulbs. [Donna LaRocco] shares a modern take on the idea, incorporating a digital mains voltmeter.

The idea is that a mains device under test is connected in series with a light bulb of a suitable wattage to let through enough current to run the device in normal operation, but to light up and bring down the voltage if the device draws too much. It’s an extremely simple but effective tool. Traditionally these are built using household electrical fittings on a board, and this one is no exception. The voltmeter comes from the RV market where voltage drop is an issue, no doubt giving European readers a chance to chuckle with their 230 V outlets.

If mains safety needs your attention, it’s a subject we’ve addressed in the past.

Classic Video Chip Drives A Modern TFT

January 7, 2023 by 11 Comments

A lot of us have a soft spot for retrocomputers, and there’s nothing quite like running original hardware. Unfortunately if you’re after the truly original touch then that means carrying along the family TV from 1982, and that’s where life becomes annoying. What if there were a way you could easily drive an LCD panel from a classic video controller? Help is at hand for owners of TI TMS9928A video chips, courtesy of [umaker], with a clever interface board that drives an SPI or parallel TFT.

At its heart is not the FPGA you might expect, but an STM32G4 microcontroller on an STM Nucleo board. This digitizes the R-Y and Y components from the TMS chip which would originally have been destined for an NSC or PAL encoder, does the color conversion through its algorithm, and transfers the result to the screen. This is a task which would back in the day when NTSC or PAL were king have been seen as extremely computationally intensive, so it’s a mark of just how capable an STM can be that a few dollar microcontroller can do it.

We can see this technique proving to be extremely useful across a lot of different retro color graphic applications. We’re not sure whether its lag would be too much for a light gun game, but it would be nice to think that it would result in handheld retro machines.

We encountered this project previously, when as part of its development he needed a sync separator.