Strange Computer Languages: A Hacker’s Field Guide

January 26, 2022 by 50 Comments

Why do we build radios or clocks when you can buy them? Why do we make LEDs blink for no apparent purpose? Why do we try to squeeze one extra frame out of our video cards? We don’t know why, but we do. That might be the same attitude most people would have when learning about esolangs — esoteric programming languages — we don’t know why people create them or use them, but they do.

We aren’t talking about mainstream languages that annoy people like Lisp, Forth, or VBA. We aren’t talking about older languages that seem cryptic today like APL or Prolog. We are talking about languages that are made to be… well… strange.

INTERCAL

We have to start at the beginning. INTERCAL. This was started as a joke in 1972 and the acronym is purportedly for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. There was no actual implementation, though, until around 1990. Now there are two: C-INTERCAL and CLC-INTERCAL.

Since INTERCAL is a parody, it makes some very odd choices. For example, bitwise operators like AND operate with two arguments, but one of the arguments is reversed. That is, the top bit of one operand matches the bottom bit of the second operand. In a nod to social convention, there is a modifier known as PLEASE that you should sometimes use when, for example, reading data as in “PLEASE READ IN.” If you don’t use it often enough, the compile will fail warning you that the program is insufficiently polite. However, if you use it too often, you’ll also get an error that your program is excessively polite.

Originally, the implementation used EBCDIC, so it uses some characters that don’t appear on conventional 7-bit ASCII systems. This forced some character substitutions and now, with Unicode, some versions will allow the old-style characters if you prefer them. The INTERCAL manual renames nearly all the special characters for further confusion. A single quote is a “spark” and the equal sign is a “half-mesh”. Only the ampersand remains unscathed.

Want to know more? Be careful what you wish for.

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Monitor For Bedridden Patients Aims To Improve Care

January 26, 2022 by 11 Comments

One of the joys of being a Maker and Hacker is solving problems and filling needs. When you can do both, well, that’s something special. [rodrigo.mejiasz]’s project surely fits into that special category of solving a problem and filling a dire need with his Bedridden Patient Monitor.

While [Rodrigo]’s project page does not specify his motivation for creating this project, one only needs to look as far as their local hospital ward or senior care facility to understand why this device is so wonderful. Healthcare workers and caregivers are stretched paper thin, and their attention is being constantly interrupted.

This is where the Bedridden Patient Monitor comes in. A healthy person can reposition themselves if they are uncomfortable, but bedridden patients cannot. It’s not just that a bedridden patient is unable to get out of bed, but that they are unable to move themselves without assistance. The result is a great amount of pain. And if left unchecked, pressure sores can be the result. These are not only extremely unpleasant, but an added danger to a patients health.

The Bedridden Patient Monitor steps in and provides not just an egg-timer like alert, but helps caregivers track a patients position in bed across even several working shifts. This ensures a continuity of care that might otherwise be easy to miss.

The beauty of this build is in its application but also its simplicity: it’s just an Arduino Mega, a TFT shield with its Micro SD card, and the touch screen itself. A few LED’s and a buzzer take care of alerts. A thoughtfully configured interface makes the devices use obvious so that staff can make immediate use of the monitor.

Makers have a long history diving into the medical field, such as this stab wound treatment device that won the Dyson award in 2021.

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The SHA2017 Badge Just Keeps On Giving, This Time It’s A Solar Monitor

January 26, 2022 by 2 Comments

Regular readers will know that we have covered the world of electronic badges for many years, and nothing pleases us more than seeing an event badge having a life afterwards rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. Thus we were especially pleased to see [Angus Gratton]’s use of a SHA2017 badge as a solar output monitor, over four years after the event.

The SHA badge used an ESP32 as its processor, and paired it with a touch keypad and an e-ink screen. Its then novel approach of having a firmware that could load MicroPython apps laid the groundwork for the successful open source badge.team firmware project, meaning that it remains versatile and useful to this day.

The solar monitor simply grabs time-series information from the database used by his web graphing system and displays it on the e-ink screen in graph form, but the interest apart from the use of the badge in his treatise on MicroPython coding. He makes the point that many of us probably follow unconsciously, writing for full-fat Python and then fixing the parts which either don’t work or use too many resources on its slimmer cousin. Finally he powers the device from an old phone charger, and shares some tips on controlling its tendency to reboot on power spikes.

It’s almost a year ago that we showed you a SHA badge being used as an environmental sensor.

Thanks [Sebastius] for the tip.

Exercise Bike Hacked As Input For Xbox 360

January 25, 2022 by 12 Comments

If you like playing Grand Theft Auto, you’re pretty familiar with squeezing the triggers for accelerating and braking while driving around. [David Programa] decided this was too easy, and instead developed a system to allow him to pedal his way around the virtual world.

The device relies on a flywheel-based exercise bike, with six magnets placed on the flywheel that triggers a reed switch six times per rotation. The extra magnets give the system better resolution at slow speeds. A Hall Effect sensor would be a more reliable way to build this to survive in the long term, but the reed switch does work. It’s paired with a debounce circuit to keep the output clean. A Raspberry Pi is pressed into service, running a Python program to read a GPIO pin activated by the reed switch, counting pulses to determine the speed of pedalling.

The trigger control used in the Xbox 360 controller is a potentiometer that creates varying voltages depending on its position, allowing it to act as an analog accelerator input. 0 volts corresponds to no input, while the trigger reads 3.3 volts when fully depressed. The Raspberry Pi emulates this with its PWM output, paired with a low-pass filter to create the relevant voltage to inject into the trigger input on a generic Xbox 360 controller.

While it’s a lot less practical than simply using a regular controller, the pedal controls do allow you to get a great workout while playing Grand Theft Auto. Some of the more intense chase missions should be a great way to get your heart rate up, and that’s got to be a good thing.

Ironically, though, the system only works for cars and motorbikes in game. The bicycles in Grand Theft Auto are controlled by mashing the A button instead. Alternatively, you might consider a similar system for playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch. Video after the break.

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Better Car Hinges By 3D Printing

January 25, 2022 by 30 Comments

We often use 3D printing to replicate items we might otherwise make with traditional machining methods. Fraunhofer’s new door hinge for a sports car takes a different tack: it tries to be better than the equivalent machined part. The company claims that the new part is half the cost and weighs 35% less than the normal hinge.

Using tools in their 3D Spark software, the team analyzed different factors that led to manufacturing cost. Some of these were specific to the part while others were specific to the process. For example, orienting the part to minimize support and maximize the quantity that fit on the build surface.

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Reverse Engineering: Trash Printer Gives Up Its Control Panel Secrets

January 25, 2022 by 7 Comments

Many of us hardware-oriented types find it hard to walk past a lonely-looking discarded item of consumer electronics without thinking “If only I could lug that back to the car and take it home to play with” and [phooky] from NYC Resistor is no stranger to this sentiment. An old Epson WF-2540 inkjet printer was disassembled for its important ‘nutrients,’ you know, the good stuff like funky motors, encoders and switches. But what do you do with the control panel? After all, they’re usually very specific to the needs of the device they control, and don’t usually offer up much scope for reuse.

The RP2040 PIO is quite capable of pushing out those LCD pixels

[phooky] doesn’t usually bother with them, but this time decided to have a crack at it for fun. Inside, nothing out of the ordinary, with a large single-sided PCB for the key switches and LEDs, and a small PCB hosting the LCD display. The easy part was to figure out how the keyboard scanning was done, which turned out to be pretty simple, it just uses some 74-series shift register devices to scan the columns and clock out the row lines. A Raspberry Pi Pico module was pressed into service to scan the keyboard and enable a keyboard map to be created, by pure brute-force. No need to trace the circuit.

Things got interesting when [phooky] started looking into the LCD interface, based on the Epson E02A46EA chip (good luck finding a datasheet for that one!) and quickly realised that documentation simply wasn’t available, and it would be necessary to do things the hard way. Poking around the lines from the main CPU (an Epson E01A9CA , whatever that is) the display clock was identified, as well as some control signals, and three lines for the RGB channels. By throwing a Saleae data capture into some ROM exploring software, the display configuration was determined to be a standard 320×120 unit.

The PIO unit of the RP2040 was used to generate the video waveforms and push the pixels out to the LCD controller, allowing the RP2040 board to be wired inside the case permanently, converting the control panel into a USB device ready for action!

Want to know a little more about reverse engineering junk (or not) items and repurposing them to your will? Checkout this hacking piece from a couple of weeks back. For something a little more advanced, you could try your hand at a spot of car ECU hacking.

Thanks [Perry] for the tip!

Building A Lightsaber And Scoring A World Record, Too

January 25, 2022 by 32 Comments

As we all know, the lightsaber is an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. [Alex Burkan] is doing what he can to bring that technology to fruition, and even secured a Guinness World Record in the process.

Melty melty.

The build relies on an electrolyzer, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gas which is stored in a small tank. This gas can then be released and combusted in a burning stream, creating a weapon with a vague resemblance to a movie-spec lightsaber. With the hydrogen torch burning at temperatures of thousands of degrees, it’s hot enough to melt steel just like in the films.

While the concept of operation is simple, actually building such a device in a handheld size is incredibly difficult. [Alex] highlights key features such as the flashback arrestor that stops the gas tank exploding, and the output nozzle that was carefully designed to produce a surprisingly long and stable flame.

The resulting device only burns for 30 seconds, so you’ve only got a short period of time to do what you need to do. However, unlike previous designs we’ve seen, it doesn’t use any external gas bottles and is entirely self-contained, marking an important step forward in this technology. Video after the break.

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