Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Music Typewriter

April 20, 2023 by 4 Comments

This edition’s community build comes from the Yes They Could, But Should They Have? file. Well, I ultimately say yes, this is intriguing. Redditor [dj_edit] looked at the venerable Model M and thought, this buckling-spring masterpiece can yet be improved upon. Yeah! Well, to each their own. I must say that it does sound great, especially with the solenoid feedback enabled via rotary encoder. Just check out the typing test.

To be clear, this is essentially a new keyboard that fits inside a Model M case, but that alone is quite a feat, especially if you consider the curvature of the backplate. Because of this hurdle, [dj_edit] went with 1 mm FR4 for the switch PCB, which is a nice compromise of sturdiness and flexibility.

Underneath those stunning reproduction keycaps are Kailh box white switches, which are pretty chonky-sounding on their own. But turn on that sweet solenoid action and you really get noisy.

Those box whites are sitting in hot-swap sockets, a design decision that kind of made things difficult because of the curvature. [dj_edit] ended up using an acrylic plate that gets bent to match the curvature by the switches themselves.

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Read Comic Books On The Commodore 64 With StripStream

April 20, 2023 by 3 Comments

Comic books are traditionally printed on paper, either as regular saddle-bound issues or in hardcover compilations. If you wanted to read them on a low-resolution screen run by an 8-bit computer, you were usually out of luck. Until now! Enter StripStream, the comic book reader for the Commodore 64.

StripStream runs on a stock PAL C64 system, using the Datasette interface. A PC program is used to compose a comic into a suitable format for the C64. It then generates a .TAP file which can either be played in a C64 emulator, or recorded onto an audio tape for loading on real hardware.

According to [janderogee], who created the software, just 34 minutes of tape can store over 300 images and 1200 lines of subtitle text. Cassettes were chosen for the storage method as standard 5 1/2″ C64 disks could only hold 165 kilobytes of data per side, meaning two whole double-sided disks would be needed to store the same amount of data. Plus, the linear nature of tape makes sense for a sequentially-read comic story. Just don’t get any ideas about doing a choose-your-adventure thing here, as StripStream isn’t built for random access.

If you don’t want to read regular comics, you can always use a tool to automatically generate them from existing media. Incidentally, StripStream is a great name, but we would have called it Comicdore 64.

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Soft Robotic System For In Situ 3D Bioprinting And Endoscopic Surgery

April 20, 2023 by 8 Comments

The progress of medical science has meant increasingly more sophisticated ways to inspect and repair the body, with a shift towards ever less invasive and more effective technologies. An exciting new field is that of in situ tissue replacement in a patient, which can be singular cells or even 3D printed tissues. This in vitro approach of culturing replacement tissues comes however with its share of issues, such as the need for a bioreactor. A more straightforward approach is printing the cells in vivo, meaning directly inside the patient’s body, as demonstrated by a team at the University of New South Wales Sydney with a soft robot that can print layers of living cells inside for example a GI tract.

In their paper, the team — led by [Dr Thanh Nho Do] and PhD student [Mai Thanh Thai] — describe the soft robot that is akin to a standard endoscope, but with a special head that has four soft microtubule artificial muscles (SMAM) for three degrees of freedom and fabric bellow actuators (FBA) that provide the motion desired by the remote controller. The system is configured in such a way that the operator inputs the rough intended motions, which are then smoothed by the software before the hydraulics actuate the head.

In a test on a simulated GI tract, the researchers were able to manipulate a prototype, and deposit a range of materials from the installed syringes. They envision that a system like this could be used as with endoscopes and laparoscopy to not only accurately deposit replacement cells inside the patient’s body, but also to perform a range of other surgical interventions, whereby the surgeon is supported by the system’s software, rather than manipulating the instruments directly.

A Look At Sega’s 8-Bit 3D Glasses

April 19, 2023 by 6 Comments

From around 2012 onwards, there was a 3D viewing and VR renaissance in the entertainment industry. That hardware has grown in popularity, even if it’s not yet mainstream. However, 3D tech goes back much further, as [Nicole] shows us with a look at Sega’s ancient 8-bit 3D glasses [via Adafruit].

[Nicole]’s pair of Sega shutter glasses are battered and bruised, but she notes more modern versions are available using the same basic idea. The technology is based on liquid-crystal shutters, one for each eye. By showing the left and right eyes different images, it’s possible to create a 3D-vision effect even with very limited display hardware.

The glasses can be plugged directly into a Japanese Sega Master System, which hails from the mid-1980s. It sends out AC signals to trigger the liquid-crystal shutters via a humble 3.5mm TRS jack. Games like Space Harrier 3D, which were written to use the glasses, effectively run at a half-speed refresh rate. This is because of the 60 Hz NTSC or 50 Hz PAL screen refresh rate is split in half to serve each eye.  Unfortunately, though, the glasses don’t work on modern LCD screens, as their inherent display lag throws off the timing of the pulses the console sends to the glasses.

It’s a neat look at an ancient bit of display tech that had a small resurgence with 3DTVs in the 2010s. By and large, it seems like humans just aren’t that into 3D, at least beneath a full-VR experience. Meanwhile, if you’re wondering what 8-bit 3D looked like, we’ve got a 3D video (!) after the break.

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Water Solves Mazes, Why Not Electrons?

April 19, 2023 by 28 Comments

A few weeks ago, we looked at a video showing water “solving” a maze. [AlphaPhoenix] saw the same video, and it made him think about electrons “finding the path of least resistance.” So can you solve a maze with foil, a laser cutter, a power supply, and some pepper? Apparently, as you can see in the video below.

At first, he duplicated the water maze, but without the effect of gravity. It was hard to see the water flow, so pepper flakes made the motion of the liquid quite obvious. The real fun, though, started when he cut the maze out of foil and started running electrons across it.

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Hacking An Apartment Garage Door With New Remotes

April 19, 2023 by 28 Comments

[Old Alaska] had a problem. He needed a second remote for his apartment garage door, but was quoted a fee in the hundreds of dollars for the trouble of sourcing and programming another unit. Realizing this was a rip-off given the cheap hardware involved, he decided to whip up his own sneaky solution instead.

It’s a simple hack, cheap and functional. An RF-activated relay with two remotes was sourced online for the princely sum of $8. [Old Alaska] then headed down to the equipment cabinet in the garage, opening the lock with the side of his own car key. He then wired the relay in parallel with the existing manual pushbutton for activating the garage door.

Sometimes, a hack doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful. Many of us might have jumped straight to trying to capture and emulate the existing remote’s radio signals. There was really no need. With physical access, [Old Alaska] was able to simply wire in his own remote entry setup himself.

We’ve seen similar hacks before, albeit achieved with SIGINT methods instead. Video after the break.

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A RISC-V Supercluster For Very Low Cost

April 19, 2023 by 22 Comments

As ARM continues to make inroads in the personal computing space thanks to its more modern and streamlined instruction set architecture (ISA) and its reduced power demands especially compared to x86 machines, the main reason it continues to become more widespread is how easy it is to get a license to make chips using this ISA. It’s still not a fully open source instruction set, though, so if you want something even more easily accessible than ARM you’ll need to find something like these chips running the fully open-source RISC-V ISA and possibly put them to work in a custom supercluster.

[bitluni] recently acquired a large number of CH32V003 microcontrollers and managed to configure them all to work together in a cluster. The entire array is only $2 (not including all of the other components attached to the board) so a cluster of arbitrary size is potentially possible. [bitluni] built a four-layer PCB for this project with an 8-bit bus so the microcontrollers can communicate with each other. Each chip has its own ADC and I/O that are wired to a set of GPIO pins on the sides of the board. The build is rounded out with a USB interface for programming and power.

There were a few quirks to get this supercluster up and running, including some issues with the way the reset and debug pins work on these specific microcontrollers. With some bugs like this out of the way, the entire cluster is up and running, and [bitluni] hints that his design could be easily interfaced with even larger RISC-V superclusters. As for a use for this build, sometimes clusters like these are built just to build them, but since the I/O and ADCs are accessible in theory this cluster could do anything a larger microcontroller might be able to do, only at a much lower price.

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