Chinese Chips Are Being Artificially Slowed To Dodge US Export Regulations

November 9, 2022 by 68 Comments

Once upon a time, countries protected their domestic industries with tariffs on imports. This gave the home side a price advantage over companies operating overseas, but the practice has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the past few decades.

These days, governments are altogether more creative, using fancy export controls to protect their interests. To that end, the United States enacted an export restriction on high-powered computing devices. In response, Chinese designers are attempting to artificially slow their hardware to dodge these rules.

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The demo toot screenshot, showing a text-only message sent from the ESP32 using the library.

Moved Off Twitter? Make Your ESP32 Toot

November 9, 2022 by 75 Comments

Since Twitter was officially taken over by Elon Musk a few days ago, there’s been significant staff cuts, a stream of questionable decisions, and uncertainty about the social media platform’s future. So it’s little surprise that a notable number of people, those in the tech and hacker scenes in particular, have decided to move over to (or at least bridge their accounts with) the distributed and open source Mastodon service.

Of course, the hacks would follow closely, and [Toby] shares a simple ESP32-based Mastodon client library for us to start with. Instead of “tweets”, messages on Mastodon instances are called “toots”, in line with the platform’s mammoth-like mascot. The library, called Luyba, is able to send toots and includes a demo firmware. Built using C++ and with support for Platform.IO, it should fit into quite a few projects out there, letting you easily send toots to whichever instance you find your home, as the library-aided demo toot shows.

What could you do with such a library on your MCU? Turns out, quite a few fun things – a home automation interface, a critter trap, an online BBC Basic interpreter, or, given image support, a camera that tweets whatever it’s pointed at. There’s quite a bit of fun hackers can have given a micro-blogging service API access and a bit of code that works with it. That said, for all the good that Twitter brought us over the years, there’s a lot that Mastodon can easily do better, between easily game-able “Trending” sidebar, bias found in auto-cropping algorithms and disarrayed internal security policies.

Clever Control Loop Makes This Spinning Drone Fault-Tolerant

November 9, 2022 by 18 Comments

Most multi-rotor aircraft are about as aerodynamic as a brick. Unless all its motors are turning and the control electronics are doing their thing, most UAVs are quickly destined to become UGVs, and generally in spectacular fashion. But by switching up things a bit, it’s possible to make a multi-rotor drone that keeps on flying even without two-thirds of its motors running.

We’ve been keeping a close eye on [Nick Rehm]’s cool spinning drone project, which basically eschews a rigid airframe for a set of three airfoils joined to a central hub. The collective pitch of the blades can be controlled via a servo in the hub, and the whole thing can be made to rotate and provide lift thanks to the thrust of tip-mounted motors and props. We’ve seen [Nick] manage to get this contraption airborne, and hovering is pretty straightforward. The video below covers the next step: getting pitch, roll, and yaw control over the spinning blades of doom.

The problem isn’t trivial. First off, [Nick] had to decide what the front of a spinning aircraft even means. Through the clever uses of LED strips mounted to the airfoils and some POV magic, he was able to visually indicate a reference axis. From there he was able to come up with a scheme to vary the power to each motor as it moves relative to the reference axis, modulating it in either a sine or cosine function to achieve roll and pitch control. This basically imitates the cyclic pitch control of a classic helicopter — a sort of virtual swashplate.

The results of all this are impressive, if a bit terrifying. [Nick] clearly has control of the aircraft even though it’s spinning at 250 RPM, but even cooler is the bit where he kills first one then two motors. It struggles, but it’s still controllable enough for a bumpy but safe landing.

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Z80 Gets New OS

November 8, 2022 by 19 Comments

If you have a soft spot for a Z80 computer but want a new operating system experience, try Zeal. You can watch a demo of the open-source OS in the video below.

As you might expect, the whole system is written in Z80 assembly language. The features you expect are there: files, directories, device drivers, a clock, and even memory banking to support up to 16M of memory. The work isn’t totally done, nor is the initial target computer — Zeal — but it looks like a great piece of work so far and will be of interest to anyone who has a Z80.

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Three Norths Align, And It’s Not Even Up North

November 8, 2022 by 7 Comments

Sometimes here at Hackaday we bring you stories from slightly outside our world of tech, because they have an interesting angle. Maybe they relate to science or astronomy, or in the case of the UK’s Ordnance Survey explaining how Britain’s three Norths will align, geography.

Some of you may know that the British monarch has two birthdays, but three Norths, what on earth is going on? You’ll guess that two of them are true North, pointing to the North Pole, and magnetic North, pointing to the Earth’s north magnetic field, but how about the third? It’s grid North — the north of the country’s mapping grid system in which the curved surface is projected onto a flat sheet.

It aligns with true North at 2 degrees West of Greenwich, and the news is that for the first time ever due to movement of the magnetic North Pole, the three different Norths will align at a point in the south of England. Magnetic North has been on the move at some pace over the last few decades, from a position somewhere in the Canadian Arctic islands northwards, and it so happens that for Brits its direction is briefly aligned with our view of the Pole. The Ordnance Survey story is of some interest, but for a wealth of information it’s worth consulting NASA. Take a look at the video below the break.

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Photo of the back of a slingbox appliance, with ports shown and arrows going to them describing what each of the ports does.

Slingbox Getting Bricked – You Have Less Than 24 Hours

November 8, 2022 by 41 Comments

The Slingbox devices used to let you catch up with the programming on your TV when you weren’t near it, using your Internet-connected mobile device. As cable TV became less popular, their business model faded away, and in 2020, they scheduled a service shutdown for November 9th, 2022. If you own a Slingbox, it’s getting bricked tomorrow – for those reading this in EU, that’ll be today, even. Do you have a Slingbox? You might still be able to repurpose it, let’s say, for local media streaming – but only if you waste no time.

[Gerry Dubois] has been developing the “Slinger” software for the past few months, a small app you run locally that proxies commands and video for your Slingbox, thanks to reverse-engineering communications with Slingbox servers. However, it needs a “hardware password” alphanumeric string, that you need to get from the Slingbox service web interface – which is to be promptly shut down. If you think you might have a use for what’s essentially a network-connected analog/digital video capture card with decent hardware, the GitHub repo has a lively discussion tab for any questions you might have.

One one hand, Slingbox shouldn’t be bricking the devices in a way that requires you act fast – perhaps, releasing a final update that makes the device hacker-friendly, like O2 did with their Joggler appliance back in the day, publishing the hardware documentation, or at least setting up a service up that lets anyone retrieve their hardware password indefinitely. On the other hand, at least they gave us two years’ notice, something less than usual – the amount of time between bricking and an announcement can even be a negative number. For those of us stuck with no operational device, a hardware exploration might be in order – for instance, we’ve torn down the Sling Adapter and even ran simple custom code on it!

Cheap Scope Troubleshoots Commodore

November 8, 2022 by 17 Comments

[Adrian] had a Commodore computer to fix and decided to see how his latest tiny portable scope would work. He paid $57 for the tiny little test instrument although the current price seems higher. It claims to have 120MHz bandwidth along with 500 megasamples per second. There are several versions with different claimed specs, but we did find a similar device for under $60. You can see the unboxing and how it worked in the video below.

Of course, these kinds of instruments often overstate their specs, and [Adrian] was also suspicious. One odd feature of the device is it can echo its output to an NTSC video output so you can send the screen to an external monitor.

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