Teardown: VTech Smart Start

July 12, 2021 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Regular readers may be aware that I have a certain affinity for vintage VTech educational toys, especially ones that attempted to visually or even functionally tie in with contemporary computer design. In the late 1980s, when it became obvious the personal computer was here to stay, these devices were seen as an affordable way to give kids and even young teens hands-on time with something that at least somewhat resembled the far more expensive machines their parents were using.

A perfect example is the PreComputer 1000, released in 1988. Featuring a full QWERTY keyboard and the ability to run BASIC programs, it truly blurred the line between toy and computer. In fact from a technical standpoint it wasn’t far removed from early desktop computers, as it was powered by the same Zilog Z80 CPU found in the TRS-80 Model I.

By comparison, the Smart Start has more in common with a desktop electronic calculator. Even though it was released just two years prior to the PreComputer 1000, you can tell at a glance that it’s a far more simplistic device. That’s due at least in part to the fact that it was aimed at a younger audience, but surely the rapid advancement of computer technology at the time also played a part. Somewhat ironically, VTech did still at least attempt to make the Smart Start look like a desktop computer, complete with the faux disk drive on the front panel.

Of course, looks can be deceiving. While the Smart Start looks decidedly juvenile on the outside, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few surprising technical discoveries lurking under its beige plastic exterior. There’s only one way to find out.

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SCADA Security Hack Chat

July 12, 2021 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 14 at noon Pacific for the SCADA Security Hack Chat with Éireann Leverett!

As a society, we’ve learned a lot of hard lessons over the last year and a half or so. But one of the strongest lessons we’ve faced is the true fragility of our infrastructure. The crumbling buildings and bridges and their tragic consequences are one thing, but along with attacks on the food and energy supply chains, it’s clear that our systems are at the most vulnerable as their complexity increases.

And boy are we good at making complex systems. In the United States alone, millions of miles of cables and pipelines stitch the country together from one coast to the other, much of it installed in remote and rugged places. Such far-flung systems require monitoring and control, which is the job of supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems. These networks have grown along with the infrastructure, often in a somewhat ad hoc manner, and given their nature they can be tempting targets for threat actors.

Finding ways to secure such systems is very much on Éireann Leverett’s mind. As a Senior Risk Researcher at the University of Cambridge, he knows about the threats to our infrastructure and works to find ways to mitigate them. His book Solving Cyber Risk lays out a framework for protecting IT infrastructure in general. For this Hack Chat, Éireann will be addressing the special needs of SCADA systems, and how best to protect these networks. Drop by with your questions about infrastructure automation, mitigating cyber risks, and what it takes to protect the endless web of pipes and wires we all need to survive.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 14 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Chip Transplant Brings Timex 2048 Back From Grave

July 12, 2021 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

The 1984 Timex Computer 2048 that [Drygol] recently got his hands on was in pretty poor shape. Not only did it have the mangled exterior that comes from several decades of hard use and furious typing, but the internals appeared to be shot as well, with the machine showing nothing but vertical lines when powered up. Thankfully, this retro computer virtuoso was more than up to the challenge of bringing it back from the brink.

After a good cleaning and the installation of a reproduction front panel, the Timex was already looking much better. Unfortunately [Drygol] says he doesn’t currently have the equipment necessary to touch up the graphics and lettering on the key caps, but the fact that he had to qualify that statement with “currently” has us all sorts of excited to see what he’s planning down the line.

Of course beauty is only skin deep, and this particular TC-2048 was still bad to the bone. [Drygol] had a hunch its Z80 processor was dead, but after swapping it and its socket out, the machine still wouldn’t start. Though he did note that the garbled graphics shown on the screen had changed, which made him think he was on the right track. He then replaced all the RAM on the board, but that didn’t seem to change anything.

There isn’t a whole lot else to go wrong on these old machines, so the final step was to try and replace the ROM. Sure enough, after installing a new Winbond W27C512 chip with the appropriate software burned onto it, the nearly 40 year old computer sprang back to life.

Another classic computer saved from the trash heap, but it’s all in a day’s work for [Drygol]. Over the years we’ve seen him perform meticulous repairs on computer hardware that any reasonable person would have given up on. Even if you’re not into retro hardware, his restorations are always full of fascinating tips and tricks that can be applied when repairing gadgetry from whatever era happens to tickle your fancy.

As Chinese Wheels Touch Martian Soil And Indian Astronauts Walk Towards The Launch Pad, Can We Hope For Another Space Race?

July 12, 2021 by Jenny List 34 Comments

If you were born in the 1960s or early 1970s, the chances are that somewhere in your childhood ambitions lay a desire to be an astronaut or cosmonaut. Once Yuri Gagarin had circled the Earth and Neil Armstrong had walked upon the Moon, millions of kids imagined that they too would one day climb into a space capsule and join that elite band of intrepid explorers. Anything seems possible when you are a five-year-old, but of course the reality remains that only the very fewest of us ever made it to space.

Did You Once Dream Of The Stars?

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Finland in 1961. Arto Jousi, Public domain.

The picture may be a little different for the youth of a few decades later though, did kids in the ’90s dream of the stars? Probably not. So what changed as Shuttle and Mir crews were passing overhead?

The answer is that the Space Race between the USA and Soviet Union which had dominated extra-terrestrial exploration from the 1950s to the ’70s had by then cooled down, and impressive though the building of the International Space Station was, it lacked the ability to electrify the public in the way that Sputnik, Vostok, or Apollo had. It was immensely cool to people like us, but the general public were distracted by other things and their political leaders were no longer ready to approve money-no-object budgets. We’d done space, and aside from the occasional bright spot in the form of space telescopes or rovers trundling across Mars, that was it. The hit TV comedy series The Big Bang Theory even had a storyline that found comedy in one of its characters serving on a mission to the ISS and being completely ignored on his return.

A few years ago a Chinese friend at my then-hackerspace was genuinely surprised that I knew the name of Yang Liwei, the Shenzhou 5 astronaut and the first person launched by his country into space. He’s a national hero in China but not so much on the rainy edge of Europe, where the Chinese space programme for all its progress at the time about a decade after Yang’s mission had yet to make a splash beyond a few space watchers and enthusiasts in hackerspaces. But this might be beginning to change.

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3D-Printed, Hot-Swap Keyboard PCB Generator Is Super Cool

July 12, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

About a month ago, [50an6xy06r6n] shared their hot swap 3D-printed circuit board for keyboard design with the mechanical keyboard subreddit. It’s more of a prototyping tool than a permanent fixture, though nothing is stopping you from using it permanently. Well, now it’s even better, and open source to boot.

[50an6xy06r6n] came up with this to test split ergo layouts faster and not have to solder anything — the switch pins make contact with the row wires and folded diode legs. In fact, prepping all the diodes is probably the thing that takes the longest.

The design can be generated from layout data, or you can convert directly from a KLE JSON file. We love how delightfully clean this keyboard breadboard generator looks, and we wish we had thought of it!

[50an6xy06r6n]’s PCB generator currently supports Cherry MX/clones and Kailh Choc switch footprints. If you want ALPS, somebody’s gonna have to send [50an6xy06r6n] some ALPS to make that happen.

As long as all the contact points are good, you should be able to use this as the final PCB indefinitely. We’ve certainly seen our share of 3D-printed wire guides. Really, you could print the whole thing, including the switches.

The First New Vacuum Tube Computer Design For Well Over Half A Century

July 12, 2021 by Jenny List 48 Comments

In a few museums around the world, there lies the special experience of seeing some of the earliest computers. These room-filling monsters have multiple racks of vacuum tubes that are kept working by the dedication and care of their volunteer maintainers. A visit to the primordial vacuum tube computer, Colossus at Bletchley Park, UK, led [Mike] on the path towards designing an entirely new one. He thinks it’s the first to see the light of day in over five decades. ENA, the Electron tube New Automatic Computer, is the result.

It uses 550 Soviet 6N3P double triodes, and its 8-bit Von Neumann architecture is constructed from the tubes wired up as 5-input NOR gates. ROM is a diode matrix, and RAM comes courtesy of reed relays. The whole thing is assembled as eleven PCBs on a wall-mounted frame, with a console that holds the piece de resistance, a display made from an array of LEDs. A Pong game is in development, meanwhile the machine makes an impressive room heater.

If you’d like to see some more vacuum tube computational goodness, we saw Colossus at the National Museum of Computing, back in 1996.

Making Teeny Clamps With Hand Tools

July 11, 2021 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Sometimes you need a small clamp, and sometimes it’s nice to use tools you’ve made yourself. [Neil] from [Pask Makes] delivers on both counts, with incredibly cute little clamps that he whipped up in his own home shop. You can even make them with hand tools!

The first step is to cut out a section of flat steel bar, and then drill a hole in the middle. The flats that form the key clamping surfaces can then be cut using a hacksaw. From there, it’s a matter of cleaning up the resulting blank with a file to take off sharp edges and neaten up the flats.

Drilling and tapping the main hole through the bottom of the clamp is the next job, and getting the hole straight and true is key to making a good usable clamp. The video shares tips on how to do this with even a simple cordless drill, by using a vice and a wood guide to keep things on track. The swiveling nut is then made out of a piece of round bar, and installed on the end of a bolt to create a nice clamping surface. A cute little brass handle is used to tighten it up.

It’s a useful tool, and the video goes on to show how the clamp can be made more quickly using higher-end facilities. While small clamps can be had cheaply, the video notes that making tools is fun and we think that’s as good a reason as any to make your own.

We’ve seen [Neil]’s work before, particularly in the case of this stunning “bladeless fan” build. Video after the break.

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