Supercon 2022: Chris Combs Reveals His Art-World Compatibility Layer

April 4, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 12 Comments

[Chris Combs] is a full time artist who loves using technology to create unique art projects and has been building blinky artwork since about a decade now. In his 2022 Supercon talk “Art-World Compatibility Layer: How to Hang and Sell Your Blinky Goodness as Art” (Slides, PDF), [Chris] takes us behind the scenes and shows us how to turn our blinky doodads in to coveted art works. There is a big difference between a project that just works, and a work of art, and it’s the attention to small details that differentiates the two.

Just like the field of engineering and technology, the art world has its own jargon and requires knowledge of essential skills that make it intimidating to newcomers. It’s not very easy to define what makes an artwork “art” or even “Art”, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish if you are looking at a child’s scrawls or a master’s brushstrokes. But there are a few distinguishing requirements that a piece of artwork, particularly one revolving around the use of technology, must meet.

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An expansion board with two 8-bit ISA slots plugged into a Sharp laptop

New Expansion Module Brings Standard Slots To Ancient Laptop

April 4, 2023 by Robin Kearey 10 Comments

Upgrading and repairing vintage laptops is often a challenge — even if their basic hardware is compatible with ordinary PCs, they often use nonstandard components and connectors due to space constraints. The Sharp PC-4600 series from the late 1980s is a case in point: although it comes with standard serial and parallel ports, the only other external interface is a mysterious connector labelled EXPBUS on the back of the case. [Steven George] has been diving into the details of this port and managed to design a module to turn it into a pair of standard ISA ports.

Apparently, no peripherals were ever released for the EXPBUS port, so reverse-engineering an existing module was out of the question. [Steven] did stumble upon a service manual for the PC-4600 however, and as it turned out, the connector carried all the signals present in an 8-bit ISA bus. Turning it into something useful was simply a matter of designing an adapter board with the EXPBUS connector on one side and regular ISA slots on the other.

The board also has an external power connector, to avoid overloading the laptop’s internal power supply, as well as a couple of buffer capacitors to smooth out the power rails. [Steven] tested the expansion board with a network adapter and a sound card, and it appears to be functioning well. It should be noted that only the +5 V power rail is available by default, so if any cards need +12 V or any negative rail, those should be provided externally.

Gerber files for this project are available on [Steven]’s website, so if you’ve got one of these machines lying around, now might be the time to upgrade it. This isn’t the first expansion for the PC-4600 series that [Steven] developed, either: he also designed an external floppy drive adapter that should ease data transfer with other PCs.

It’s great to see how the hacker community keeps classic portables like this one alive: one day it might also need a broken screen replaced or a dodgy power supply repaired.

The Liquid Trees Of Belgrade: The Facts Behind The Furore

April 4, 2023 by Lewin Day 126 Comments

Historically, nature has used trees to turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen for use by living creatures. The trees play a vital role in the carbon cycle, and have done so for millennia. Recently, humans have thrown things off a bit by getting rid of lots of trees and digging up a lot more carbon.

While great efforts are underway to replenish the world’s tree stocks, Belgrade has gone in a different direction, creating artificial “liquid trees” to capture carbon dioxide instead. This has spawned wild cries of dystopia and that the devices are an affront to nature. Let’s sidestep the hysteria and look at what’s actually going on.

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Screenshot of the demonstration video that shows the desktop being unlocked with face recognition, with a camera feed and a terminal showing how the software works.

Open-Source FaceID With RealSense

April 4, 2023 by Arya Voronova 6 Comments

RealSense cameras have been a fascinating piece of tech from Intel — we’ve seen a number of cool applications in the hacker world, from robots to smart appliances. Unfortunately Intel did discontinue parts of the RealSense lineup at one point, specifically the LiDAR and face tracking-tailored models. Apparently, these haven’t been popular, and we haven’t seen these in hacks either. Until now, that is. [Lina] brings us a real-world application for the RealSense face tracking cameras, a FaceID application for Linux.

The project is as simple as it sounds: if the camera’s built-in face recognition module recognizes you, your lockscreen is unlocked. With the target being Linux, it has to tie into the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) subsystem for authentication, and of course, there’s a PAM module for RealSense to go with it, aptly named pam_sauron. This module is written in Zig, a modern C-like language, so it’s both a good example of how to create your own PAM integrations, and a path towards doing that in a different language for once. As usual, there’s TODOs, like improving the UX and taking advantage of some security features RealSense cameras have, but it’s nevertheless a fun and self-sufficient application for one of the F4XX-series RealSense cameras in case you happen to own one.

Ever since the introduction of RealSense we’ve seen these cameras used in robotics and 3D scanning, thanks at least in part due to their ability to be used in Linux. Thankfully, Intel only discontinued the less popular RealSense cameras, which didn’t affect the main RealSense lineup, and the hacker-beloved depth cameras are still available for all of our projects. Wondering about the tech behind it? Here’s a teardown of a RealSense camera module intended for laptop use.

CP/M 6502-Style

April 4, 2023 by Al Williams 8 Comments

There are projects you create to share with the world, but there are also those you do just because you want something for yourself. Lucky for us, [Dietrich-L]’s 30-year-long project to create CPM-65, a CP/M-like OS for the 6502, has become both.

[Dietrich-L] does admit that the documentation is “sparse” and “for my personal needs.” Still, the OS has most of what you’d expect and runs well on the target system, a heavily-modified Elektor Junior with 57 kB of RAM. The disk structure is compatible with CP/M, although the Transient Program Area (TPA) apparently starts at $200, which is a bit different from a typical CP/M. Apparently, the system uses some low memory which necessitated the relocation. Just in case you were hoping, CPM-65 doesn’t emulate an 8080 system, so you can’t run normal CP/M programs. You just get a similar operating environment and tools.

The 31 commands listed include an assembler, BASIC, Forth, an editor, and some disk tools, along with a debugger. Xmodem is available, too. Everything is written in assembly for the CPM-65 assembler, so bootstrapping could be an issue if you need to make any changes.

Speaking of changes, there is some documentation in the docs sub-directory, including the layout of [Dietrich-L]’s system, which would be handy if you were trying to run this on your own hardware. You’ll also find basic commands for the editor, details of the assembler, and some other documents.

[Dietrich-L] notes that he was unaware when he started the project that there were other similar projects. DOS/65 (which has a port for the Commodore 64), OUP/M (which hasn’t been updated since 1983), and CPM65 (apparently no relation, but very impressive), which appeared in 2022.

If you need a 6502 computer, grab a breadboard, although adding the disk drive is an exercise left to the reader. Or, grab an FPGA but expect more work.

Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip!

a flexible film with a matrix of illuminated color LEDs being stretched

Truly Flexible Circuits Are A Bit Of A Stretch

April 3, 2023 by Michael Shaub 5 Comments

Flexible PCBs have become increasingly common in both commercial devices and DIY projects, but Panasonic’s new stretchable, clear substrate for electrical circuits called Beyolex takes things a step further. The material is superior to existing stretchable films like silicone, TPU, or PDMS due to its high heat tolerance (over 160° C) for the purposes of sintering printable circuit traces.

But, a flexible substrate isn’t very useful for electronics without some conductive traces. Copper and silver inks make for good electrical circuits on stretchable films, and are even solderable, but increase resistance each time they are stretched. Recently, a team out of the University of Coimbra in Portugal has developed a liquid metal ink that can stretch without the resistance issues of existing inks, making it a promising pair with Panasonic’s substrate. There’s also certain environmental benefits of printing circuits in this manner over traditional etching and even milling, as you’re only putting conductive materials where needed.

After the break, check out Panasonic’s earlier videos showing some of their demo circuits that include a stretchable NFC antenna harvesting electricity even while submerged in water and an LED matrix performing while being, bent, rolled, and stretched. We’re excited to see where this technology leads and when we hackers will be able to create our own stretchable projects.

A great many flexible PCB projects have graced Hackaday, from early experiments to sophisticated flexible PCB projects. Heck, we had a whole Flexible PCB Contest with some awesome flexible projects.

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Machine Learning Helps Electron Microscopy

April 3, 2023 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Machine learning is supposed to help us do everything these days, so why not electron microscopy? A team from Ireland has done just that and published their results using machine learning to enhance STEM — scanning transmission electron microscopy. The result is important because it targets a very particular use case — low dose STEM.

The problem is that to get high resolutions, you typically need to use high electron doses. However, bombarding a delicate, often biological, subject with high-energy electrons may change what you are looking at and damage the sample. But using reduced electron dosages results in a poor image due to Poisson noise. The new technique learns how to compensate for the noise and produce a better-quality image even at low dosages.

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