An Open Source PowerPC Notebook Edges Closer

December 9, 2022 by 21 Comments

Back in 2020, we reported on the effort to create a brand new open-source laptop platform using the PowerPC architecture. At the time they had big plans and a PCB design, and we’re very pleased to report that in the intervening two years they’ve progressed to the point of now having some real prototypes ready for testing.

Some might question why this should be necessary, after all there are plenty of laptops and more than one commonly available processor platform. But that’s to miss the point of open source hardware, that it’s as much about plurality as functionality. But if you’ve only encountered the PowerPC architecture in slightly older Macs and some game consoles, what’s the chip powering this device? The answer is, not one of those venerable chips, but the NXP T2080, a 1.8 GHz quad-core device that boasts a respectable power for a laptop.

There is of course many a hurdle still to be crossed between prototype and final device, but given the challenge of a functioning laptop it’s impressive for them to have reached this milestone at all. We look forward to seeing further iterations, and maybe, just maybe, a finished device one day. Our original coverage is here.

Ask Hackaday: Will Your 2030 Car Have AM Radio?

December 9, 2022 by 171 Comments

Car makers have been phasing out AM radios in their cars for quite some time. Let’s face it, there isn’t much on AM these days, and electric vehicles have been known to cause interference with AM radios. So why have them? For that matter, many aftermarket head units now don’t even have radios at all. They play digital media or stream Bluetooth from your phone. However, a U.S. Senator, Edward J. Markey, has started a letter-writing campaign to the major car makers urging them to retain the AM radio in their future vehicles.

So does that mean AM lives? Or will the car makers kill it off? The letter requests that the companies answer several questions, including if they plan to discontinue AM or FM radios in the near future and if they support digital broadcast radio.

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Hackaday Podcast 196: Flexing Hard PCBs, Dangers Of White Filament, And The Jetsons’ Kitchen Computer

December 9, 2022 by 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start the Hackaday Podcast by talking about another podcast that’s talking about…Hackaday. Or more accurately, the recent Hackaday Supercon. After confirming the public’s adoration, conversation moves on to designing flexible PCBs with code, adding a rotary dial to your mechanical keyboard, and a simulator that lets you visualize an extinction-level event. We’ll wrap things up by playing the world’s smallest violin for mildly inconvenienced closed source software developers, and wonder how the world might have been different if the lady of the house had learned to read binary back in 1969.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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A toy gamepad controlling Super Mario World emulated on a MacBook

Turning A Toy Gamepad Into A Real One, With Bluetooth

December 9, 2022 by 3 Comments

It’s important to instill healthy habits in your children when they’re still young. Preferences for sports, snacks and dinosaurs are typically formed in early childhood, as is loyalty to a specific gaming platform. [RetrogradeScene] apparently wished to steer his young daughter towards the Nintendo camp, but wasn’t looking forward to having her grubby hands touch his prized controllers. So he built her her own kid-friendly controller out of a Fisher-Price toy.

The toy in question is an imitation game controller that just makes funny sounds when you press the buttons. Converting it into a real, working game controller was a matter of soldering some wires onto the existing PCB and hooking them up to a microcontroller board, in this case a DFRobot FireBeetle. After loading the ESP32-BLE-Gamepad library and assigning the correct pin-button combinations in software [RetrogradeScene] ended up with a big, brightly-coloured gamepad that actually functioned as one.

Unfortunately, the FireBeetle took up space where the original AAA batteries were sitting, so the hacked gamepad needed a new power source. Classic batteries are heavy and inconvenient anyway, so [RetrogradeScene] installed a modern lithium battery plus a USB-C port for charging. Of course, no Bluetooth gadget is complete without an accompanying smartphone app either: [RetrogradeScene] wrote one for his iPhone that enables him to quickly change the button layout between the Nintendo and Xbox styles.

This might be a rare example of someone making a gamepad from, well, a gamepad. We’ve seen a few more unusual things being converted into game controllers, ranging from a handful of LEGO bricks to entire cars.

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This Week In Security: Rackspace Falls Over, Poison Ping, And The WordPress Race

December 9, 2022 by 17 Comments

In what’s being described as a Humpty-Dumpty incident, Rackspace customers have lost access to their hosted Exchange service, and by extension, lots of archived emails. The first official word of trouble came on December 2nd, and it quickly became clear that this was more than the typical intern-tripped-over-the-cable incident. Nearly a week later, Rackspace confirmed what observers were beginning to suspect, it was a ransomware attack. There’s not a lot of other answers yet, and the incident FAQ answers are all variations on a theme.

Our investigation into the incident is ongoing and will take time to complete. To ensure the integrity of the ongoing investigation, we do not have additional details to share at this time.

Knowing the security issues that have plagued Microsoft Exchange over the last couple of months, one has to wonder if Rackspace was breached as a result of the PowerShell problems. What’s staggering is that a week after the incident, Rackspace still has no timeline for service restoration.

Rackspace isn’t the only major ransomware attack this week, as a hospital in Versailles has partially shut down due to another ransomware attack. Operations were canceled, and work has to be done the old fashioned way, without the network to support.

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DC Zia 30-in-ONE Badge for DEF CON 30

Nostalgic 30-in-ONE Electronics Badge For DEF CON 30

December 9, 2022 by 12 Comments

[hamster] and the DC Zia crew offered up a throwback 30-in-ONE Learn Electronics indie badge for DEF CON 30. The badge is inspired by the Radio Shack “100-in-1” style project kits that so many of us cut our teeth on back in the 70s and 80s.

DC Zia is a hacker group loosely associated with New Mexico who have been working together to make an indie badge for DEF CON each year.  If you aren’t familiar with the badgelife community of hardware hackers and programmers who make electronic indie conference badges, check out our BadgeLife Documentary.

The 30-in-ONE badge is provided in the form of a kit, so the learning and fun begins with assembling the badge. From there, an included booklet guides the badge holder through building and experimenting with 30 different circuits.

The included components include resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, switches, transformer, speaker, OLED display, battery box, and a bundle of jumper wires for making any desired circuit connections.  The documented circuits have compelling titles such as the Electric Cat, Light Theremin, Grandfather Clock, and Frequency Counter.

Flashback to what DC Zia, and other groups, were up to five years prior in our expose on The Hardware Badges of DEF CON 25.

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There’s Nothing Square About This Rectangular Guitar

December 9, 2022 by 16 Comments

We kind of already knew this, but it seems that [Uri Tuchman] really can build absolutely anything. This fall, he was asked to compete in the Great Guitar Build-Off competition, which involves a fully-customizable kit guitar sent to each entrant as a starting point. In order to allow for maximum creativity, the wooden parts like the body and the headstock are square. And quite creatively, [Uri] kept them that way. Square, that is.

While yes, the body rising out of the squareness is in fact a Les Paul profile, there are a ton of details that make this a [Uri Tuchman] instead. For starters, everything is square, beginning with the custom brass knobs for the volume and tone potentiometers. We’re not sure if it came with humbuckers, but that sure is a happy accident if so. If only the neck blank had been square, [Uri] could have made a lap steel. Once it was finished, [Uri] took it to a luthier to have it set up, fine-tuned, and assessed for quality. Of course, it passed with flying Vs colors.

There are plenty of other [Uri] hallmarks, like the bird on the neck plate, and another hiding in the hand-drawn and hand-carved pickguard, so be sure to check it out after the break.

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