Front and back of a handheld 6502 computer with bubble LED displays

The Pocket265 Is A Pocket-Sized 6502 Single-Board Computer

September 7, 2022 by Robin Kearey 13 Comments

Single-board computers have been around ever since microprocessors became affordable in the 1970s and never went away. Today we have Raspberry Pis and LattePandas, while back in the ’70s and ’80s there were the Ferguson Big Board, the KIM-1 and a whole array of Intel SDK boards. Although functionally similar to their modern counterparts with a CPU, RAM, ROM and some basic peripherals, the old boards were huge compared to today’s tiny platforms and typically required a rather beefy power supply to operate.

It doesn’t have to be that way though, as [Aleksander] shows with the Pocket265: a handheld 6502 single-board computer somewhat reminiscent of the famous KIM-1. Like that classic machine, it’s got a hexadecimal keypad to enter programs using machine code and a row of LED displays to show the programs’ output. Unlike the KIM, the Pocket265 is small enough to hold in one hand and uses bubble LED displays, which make it look more like a programmable calculator from the 1970s. It comes with a lithium battery that makes it truly portable, as well as a sleek 3D printed case to make it more comfortable to hold than a bare circuit board.

The single ROM chip contains a monitor program that runs the basic user interface. It also makes programming a bit less tedious by implementing a number of system calls to handle things like user input and display output. A serial EEPROM enables local data storage, while a UART with a USB interface enables data transfer to other computers. If you’re interested in building and programming such a machine yourself, [Aleksander] helpfully provides code examples as well as full hardware documentation on his GitHub page.

The 6502 remains a firm favorite among hardware hackers: some projects we recently featured with this CPU include one beautifully made machine, this easy-to-build single-board computer and this huge breadboard-based contraption. Looking for something smaller? Try this tidy little board or this 6502 coupled to an FPGA.

This Week In Security: In Mudge We Trust, Don’t Trust That App Browser, And Firefox At Pwn2Own

August 26, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 19 Comments

There’s yet another brouhaha forming over Twitter, but this time around it’s a security researcher making noise instead of an eccentric billionaire. [Peiter Zatko] worked as Twitter’s security chief for just over a year, from November 2020 through January 2022. You may know Zatko better as [Mudge], a renowned security researcher, who literally wrote the book on buffer overflows. He was a member at L0pht Heavy Industries, worked at DARPA and Google, and was brought on at Twitter in response to the July 2020 hack that saw many brand accounts running Bitcoin scans.

Mudge was terminated at Twitter January 2022, and it seems he immediately started putting together a whistleblower complaint. You can access his complaint packet on archive.org, with whistleblower_disclosure.pdf (PDF, and mirror) being the primary document. There are some interesting tidbits in here, like the real answer to how many spam bots are on Twitter: “We don’t really know.” The very public claim that “…<5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts” is a bit of a handwave, as the monetizable Daily Active Users count is essentially defined as active accounts that are not bots. Perhaps Mr. Musk has a more legitimate complaint than was previously thought.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: In Mudge We Trust, Don’t Trust That App Browser, And Firefox At Pwn2Own” →

Did You See A John Deere Tractor Cracked At DEF CON?

August 17, 2022 by Jenny List 6 Comments

The Internet, or at least our corner of it, has been abuzz over the last few days with the news of a DEF CON talk by [Sick.Codes] in which he demonstrated the jailbreaking of the console computer from a John Deere tractor. Sadly we are left to wait the lengthy time until the talk is made public, and for now the most substantive information we have comes from a couple of Tweets. The first comes from [Sick.Codes] himself and shows a game of DOOM with a suitably agricultural theme, while the second is by [Kyle Wiens] and reveals the tractor underpinnings relying on outdated and un-patched operating systems.

You might ask why this is important and more than just another “Will it run DOOM” moment. The answer will probably be clear to long-term readers, and is that Deere have become the poster child for improper use of DRM to lock owners into their servicing and deny farmers the right to repair. Thus any breaches in their armor are of great interest, because they have the potential to free farmers world-wide from this unjust situation. As we’ve reported before the efforts to circumvent this have relied on cracked versions of the programming software, so this potential jailbreak of the tractor itself could represent a new avenue.

As far as we’re aware, this has so far taken place on the console modules in the lab and not in the field on a real tractor. So we’re unsure as to whether the door has been opened into the tractor’s brain, or merely into its interface. But the knowledge of which outdated software can be found on the devices will we hope lead further to what known vulnerabilities may be present, and in turn to greater insights into the machinery.

Were you in the audience at DEF CON for this talk? We’d be curious to know more. Meanwhile the Tweet is embedded below the break, for a little bit of agricultural DOOM action.

Continue reading “Did You See A John Deere Tractor Cracked At DEF CON?” →

Want To Use A Classic Mac Mouse On A Modern Computer? No? Here’s How To Do It Anyway

August 11, 2022 by Donald Papp 23 Comments

Need to hook a classic Mac mouse up to your modern machine with the help of a DIY USB adapter? [John Floren] has you covered. [John]’s solution uses a board with an ATmega32U4 microcontroller on it to connect to the Mac mouse on one end, and emulate a USB HID (Human Interface Device) on the other. A modern machine therefore recognizes it like it would any other USB input device.

Why is this necessary? The connector on the classic Mac mouse may look like a familiar DE-9 connector, but it is not an RS-232 device and wouldn’t work if it were plugged into a 9-pin serial port. The classic Mac mouse uses a different pinout, and doesn’t have much for brains on the inside. It relies on the host computer to read its encoders and button states directly.

This project is actually a bit of an update to a piece of earlier work [John] did in making a vintage Depraz mouse work with modern systems. He suspected that it wouldn’t take much to have it also work with a classic Mac mouse, and he was right — all it took was updating the pin connections and adding some pull-up resistors. The source code and design files are on GitHub.

Even if one does not particularly want to use a classic Mac mouse for daily work, there’s definitely value in this kind of thing for those who deal in vintage hardware: it allows one to function-check old peripherals without having to fire up a vintage machine.

Continue reading “Want To Use A Classic Mac Mouse On A Modern Computer? No? Here’s How To Do It Anyway” →

Embedded Dashboard Definitely Displays Data

July 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Oftentimes, we’ll find ourselves using an PC attached to a project for serial debugging. Other times, we’ll be squinting at a status LED trying to remember the flash code we invented. This embedded dashboard from [hgrodriguez] aims to land somewhere in the middle.

The dashboard features LEDs, several 5×7 matrix displays, and will also mount a small OLED display as well. Everything onboard is driven by an ItsyBitsy board, featuring an Atmega32u4 microcontroller. Data can be fed to the ItsyBitsy via UART, SPI, or eventually, I2C as well.

With the ItsyBitsy handling actually driving the various displays, your project only need send out debug data over one of the listed interfaces. The ItsyBitsy will then display your byte values or word values on the matrix displays, flash the LEDs as required, and so on.

The result is a useful little console that can show you what’s going on in the brain of your microcontroller project. It’s no substitute for a full serial terminal, but it could definitely come in handy when you need to get eyes on a few variables in RAM!

Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More

July 13, 2022 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

The Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest wrapped up last week, and our judges have been hard at work sifting through their favorite projects. And this was no easy task – we had 75 entries and so many of them were cool in their own right that all we can say is go check them all out. Really.

But we had to pick winners, not the least because Digi-Key put up three $150 gift certificates. So without further ado, here are the top three projects and as many honorable mentions as you have fingers and toes – if you don’t count your thumbs.

The Prize Winners

Keybon should be a mainstream commercial product. It’s a macro keypad with an OLED screen per key. It talks to an application on your desktop that detects the program that you currently have focused, and adapts the keypress action and the OLED labels to match. It’s a super-slick 3D-printed design to boot. It’s the dream of the Optimus Maximus, but made both DIY and significantly more reasonable as a macro pad. It’s the coolest thing to have on your desk, and it’s a big winner!

On the ridiculous side of keyboards, meet the Cree-board. [Matt] says he got the idea of using beefy COB LEDs as keycaps from the bad pun in the name, but we love the effect when you press down on the otherwise blinding light – they’re so bright that they use your entire meaty finger as a diffuser. Plus, it really does look like a keypad of sunny-side up eggs. It’s wacky, unique, and what’s not to love about that in a macropad?

Finally, [Josh EJ] turned an exercise bike into a wireless gamepad, obliterating the choice between getting fit and getting high scores by enabling both at the same time. An ESP32-turned-Bluetooth-gamepad is the brains, and he documents in detail how he hooked up a homebrew cadence sensor, used the heart-rate pads as buttons, and even added some extra controls on top. Watching clips of him pedaling his heart out in order to push the virtual pedal to the metal in GRID Autosport, we only wish he were screaming “vroooom”. Continue reading “Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More” →

Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: Chorded Keyset Recreates Engelbart’s Vision

June 26, 2022 by Robin Kearey 7 Comments

Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos” introduced the world to a whole range of technologies we take for granted today, the most prominent being his great invention, the computer mouse. However, the MOAD also showcased things like cut-and-paste text editing, a point-and-click interface, video conferencing, and even online collaboration à la Google Docs. One of the innovations shown that for some reason didn’t stand the test of time was the chorded keyboard: an input device with five keys that can be pressed simultaneously in different combinations, the same way you would play chords on a piano.

While a handful of attempts have been made over the years to bring new life to the “chorder”, it failed to achieve mainstream appeal and remains a curiosity to this day. That makes it a natural fit for the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest, as we can see in [Russ Nelson]’s submission called the Engelbart Keyset, which aims to create a modern 3D printed chorder that works exactly as Engelbart intended it.

It’s important to note that the chorded keyboard was not meant to be just an additional set of five keys. Instead, Engelbart showed the clever interplay between the chorder and the mouse: the five keys under his left hand and the three mouse buttons under his right could be combined to create a full 8-bit input device. [Russ]’s device therefore includes a USB host interface to connect a USB mouse as well as a USB client interface that presents itself as a combination mouse/keyboard device to the PC.

The brains of the device are formed by a Teensy 4.1, which reads out the codes sent by the mouse as well as the five keys on top. If one or more of those keys are pressed together with a mouse button, then a keyboard code is generated corresponding to Engelbart’s original keycode mapping. We’re wondering how practical this whole setup would be in real life; it looks like something you’d have to try hands-on to find out. Fortunately, all the schematics, code and STL files are available on the project page, so with just a bit of work you can have your own MOAD setup on your desk today.

We’ve featured a couple of chorded keyboards on these pages; the Pico Chord, the Chordie and the BAT spring to mind. If you’re looking for a recap of Engelbart’s stunning presentation, check out our piece on the Mother of all Demos, 50 years on.