Remoticon Is On!

November 20, 2021 by Elliot Williams No comments

If you’re reading this post while the bits are still fresh, you’ve got about four hours until day two of Hackaday Remoticon 2021. You can feel the electricity in the air, right? We’ve got an absolutely stellar line-up this year: every talk is gonna be a good talk.

Friday was great fun, and you can still still rewind Friday’s live stream if you hurry. Otherwise, at 11:00 AM PST, we’ll start up day two with a keynote talk by Keith Thorne, who’s going to take us through all of the work, and hacks, that made the LIGO experiment the most sensitive instrument mankind has ever made. Bookending the talks, just before the Hackaday Prize announcement and after-party DJ Jackalope Live Set, Jeremy Fielding is going to be walking through everything about his robotic arm and what you need to know about anything that moves.

Watch some great talks, and then hang out with the presenters afterwards over on our Discord server. What more do you want on a Saturday?

We really don’t want you to miss out on anything, but in case you come late to the talks, you can rewind the live stream to catch up. After it’s all done, we’ll slice and dice up the talks so you can find them later. But if you miss out on the discussions, the chance to ask our speakers questions, and the pervasive Jolly Wrencher ambiance, you’ve just missed out. Join us live if you possibly can! We’d love to see you.

It’s Doom, This Time On A Bluetooth LE Dongle

November 20, 2021 by Jenny List 4 Comments

By now most readers should be used to the phenomenon of taking almost any microcontroller and coaxing it to run a port of the 1990s grand-daddy of all first-person shooters, id Software’s Doom. It’s been done on a wide array of devices, sometimes only having enough power for a demo mode but more often able to offer the full experience. Latest to the slipgate in this festival of pixelated gore is [Nicola Wrachien], who’s achieved the feat using an nRF52840-based USB Bluetooth LE dongle.

Full details can be found on his website, where the process of initial development using an Adafruit CLUE board is detailed. A 16MB FLASH chip is used for WAD storage, and an SPI colour display takes us straight to that cursed base on Phobos. The target board lacks enough I/O brought out for connection to screen and FLASH, so some trickery with 7400 logic is required to free up enough for the task. Controls are implemented via a wireless gamepad using an nRFS1822 board, complete with streamed audio to a PWM output.

The result can be seen in the video below the break, which shows a very playable game of both Doom and Doom 2 that would not have disgraced many machines of the era. This was prototyped on an Adafruit Clue board, and that could be the handheld console you’ve been looking for!

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IPod Mod Puts Pi Zero In New Bod

November 20, 2021 by Michael Shaub 7 Comments

We sure love to see nicely designed products get a new lease on life. Just as the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 was being announced, [production] was stuffing an original RPi Zero into an old iPod’s case.

[production] cites several previous, similar projects that showed how to interface with the click-wheel, a perfectly fitting color display from Waveshare, and open-source software called Rockbox to run on the pi. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Some nice innovations to look for are the Pi Zero’s micro-SD card and a micro-USB charging port aligned to the large slot left from the iPod’s original 40 pin connector. Having access for charging and reflashing the card without opening the case seems quite handy. There’s a nice sized battery too, though we wonder if a smaller battery and a Qi charger could fit in the same space. Check the project’s Hackaday.io for the parts list, and GitHub for the software side of things, and all the reference links you’ll need to build your own. It looks like [production] has plans to turn old iPods into Gameboy clones, you may want to check back for progress on that.

If you just want to rock like it’s 2004, there are options to just upgrade the battery and capacity but keep your vintage iPod too.

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PinePhone Speed Up Takes Soldering

November 19, 2021 by Al Williams 19 Comments

It is no secret that we like a good hack and [Federico Amedeo Izzo] explains a hack for the PinePhone that can double the speed used for the device’s memory chips. Like many good hacks, it all started with a question. [Federico] was reading a review of the PinePhone Pro (the source of the image for this post) and apparently, the eMMC memory in that phone clocks in at about 150 MB/s. The original phone gets about 50-80 MB/s.

Reading some datasheets, it looked like the same chips are in both phones and should support not only DDR52 mode — the mode the original phone uses — but also HS200 and HS400 modes which top out at 200 and 400 MB/s, respectively. But there was one problem.

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Arduino + Ham Radio = Texting

November 19, 2021 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Over on the Spectrum web site, [Dale] — a relatively new ham radio operator — talks about his system for sending text messaging over VHF radios called HamMessenger. Of course, hams send messages all the time using a variety of protocols, but [Dale] wanted a self-contained and portable unit with a keyboard, screen, and a GPS receiver. So he built one. You can find his work on GitHub.

At the heart of the project is MicroAPRS, an Arduino firmware for packet radio. Instead of using a bigger computer, he decided to dedicate another Arduino to do everything but the modem function.

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Run UNIX On Microcontrollers With PDP-11 Emulator

November 19, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 40 Comments

C and C++ are powerful tools, but not everyone has the patience (or enough semicolons) to use them all the time. For a lot of us, the preference is for something a little higher level than C. While Python is arguably more straightforward, sometimes the best choice is to work within a full-fledged operating system, even if it’s on a microcontroller. For that [Chloe Lunn] decided to port Unix to several popular microcontrollers.

This is an implementation of the PDP-11 minicomputer running a Unix-based operating system as an emulator. The PDP-11 was a popular minicomputer platform from the ’70s until the early 90s, which influenced a lot of computer and operating system designs in its time. [Chloe]’s emulator runs on the SAMD51, SAMD21, Teensy 4.1, and any Arduino Mega and is also easily portable to any other microcontrollers. Right now it is able to boot and run Unix but is currently missing support for some interfaces and other hardware.

[Chloe] reports that performance on some of the less-capable microcontrollers is not great, but that it does run perfectly on the Teensy and the SAMD51. This isn’t the first time that someone has felt the need to port Unix to something small; we featured a build before which uses the same PDP-11 implementation on a 32-bit STM32 microcontroller.

An electric mini rat rod made from mostly recycled parts.

Electric Mini Rat Rod Starts ‘Em Young

November 19, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

These days, a lot of people barely even say hello to their neighbors. But not [dewey302]. They’re so tight with the people next door that they built this bad-ass electric mini rat rod for the neighbors’ five-year-old kid. Talk about community!

Nearly every bit of this rod is recycled — the body is a wheelbarrow, the transaxle is from a mobility scooter, and the frame was welded together from scrap tubing including the wheelbarrow itself, and old bike or two, and some broken lawn chairs. The rear wheels are also from the ‘barrow, though the front ones were purchased (one of few new parts. Power comes from a pair of 18 V tool batteries wired in series and running through the Curtis controller from the scooter. Depending on the weight of the driver, this baby will do 10-12 MPH.

We love the look of this little rat rod, and wish we were [dewey302]’s neighbor. When you’re done poring over the pile of build pictures, be sure to watch [dewey302] and [The Kid] tear up the cul-de-sac in the video after the break.

You may have noticed the mailbox grille. Surprisingly, this is not the first mail-themed rat rod we’ve covered. Here’s one that really delivers.

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