8-Bit Computers Crunch Advanced Scientific Computations

December 1, 2024 by 37 Comments

Although largely relegated to retrocomputing enthusiasts and embedded systems or microcontrollers now, there was a time when there were no other computers available other than those with 8-bit processors. The late 70s and early 80s would have seen computers with processors like the Motorola 6800 or Intel 8080 as the top-of-the-line equipment and, while underpowered by modern standards, these machines can do quite a bit of useful work even today. Mathematician [Jean Michel Sellier] wanted to demonstrate this so he set up a Commodore 64 to study some concepts like simulating a quantum computer.

The computer programs he’s written to do this work are in BASIC, a common high-level language of the era designed for ease of use. To simulate the quantum computer he sets up a matrix-vector multiplication but simplifies it using conditional logic. Everything is shown using the LIST command so those with access to older hardware like this can follow along. From there this quantum computer even goes as far as demonstrating a quantum full adder.

There are a number of other videos on other topics available as well. For example, there’s an AmigaBasic program that simulates quantum wave packets and a QBasic program that helps visualize the statistical likelihood of finding an electron at various locations around a hydrogen nucleus. While not likely to displace any supercomputing platforms anytime soon, it’s a good look at how you don’t need a lot of computing power in all situations. And, if you need a refresher on some of these concepts, there’s an overview on how modern quantum computers work here.

A hand holds a small PCB with an edge connector over the exposed, mostly black components of an M4 Mac mini. The bottom cover is hanging by an FFC cable off to the left of the

Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage

December 1, 2024 by 17 Comments

Apple’s in-house chips have some impressive specs, but user serviceability is something Apple left behind for consumer machines around a decade ago. Repair legend [dosdude1] shows us how the new M4 Mac mini can get a sizeable storage upgrade without paying the Apple tax.

The Mac mini is Apple’s least expensive machine, and in the old days you could swap a SATA drive for more storage and not pay the exorbitant prices that OEMs demand. Never one to turn down a walled garden, later Intel machines and now the ARM-based M-series chips soldered storage into the machine leaving an upgrade out of the hands of anyone without a hot air station.

Both the Mac Studio and Mac mini now have proprietary storage cards, and after some tinkering, [dosdude1] has successfully upgraded the storage on the base model M4 mini. While most people don’t casually reball NAND chips while chatting on a video, his previous work with others in the space to make a Mac Studio upgrade kit give us hope we’ll soon see economical storage upgrades that keep the Mac mini affordable.

We’ve previously covered the first time Apple tried to make its own processors, and some of their more recent attempts at repairability.

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Pushing 802.11ah To The Extreme With Drones

December 1, 2024 by 20 Comments

It might come as a surprise to some that IEEE, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, does more than send out mailers asking people to renew their memberships. In fact, they also maintain various electrical standards across a wide range of disciplines, but perhaps the one most of us interact with the most is the 802.11 standard which outlines WiFi. There have been many revisions over the years to improve throughput but the 802.11ah standard actually looks at decreasing throughput in favor of extremely increased range. Just how far you can communicate using this standard seems to depend on how many drones you have.

802.11ah, otherwise known as Wi-Fi HaLow, operates in the sub-gigahertz range which is part of why it has the capability of operating over longer distances. But [Aaron] is extending that distance even further by adding a pair of T-Halow devices, one in client mode and the other in AP (access point) mode, on a drone. The signal then hops from one laptop to a drone, then out to another drone with a similar setup, and then finally down to a second laptop. In theory this “Dragon Bridge” could allow devices to communicate as far as the drone bridge will allow, and indeed [Aaron] has plans for future revisions to include more powerful hardware which will allow even greater distances to be reached.

While there were a few bugs to work out initially, eventually he was able to get almost two kilometers of distance across six devices and two drones. Something like this might be useful for a distributed network of IoT devices that are just outside the range of a normal access point. The Dragon Bridge borrowed its name from DragonOS, a Linux distribution built by [Aaron] with a wide assortment of software-defined radio tools available out of the box. He’s even put in on the Steam Deck to test out long-distance WiFi.

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A brown sphere with a flat top, a nose and circular eyes sits on the ground surrounded by low vegetation. A wooden fence is behind it.

Making A Stool From Clay

November 30, 2024 by 8 Comments

We’ve seen furniture made out of all sorts of interesting materials here, but clay certainly isn’t the first one that comes to mind. [Mia Mueller] is expanding our horizons with this clay stool she made for her garden.

Starting with an out-of-budget inspiration piece, [Mueller] put her own spin on a ceramic stool that looks like a whimsical human head. An experienced potter, she shows us several neat techniques for working with larger pieces throughout the video. Her clay extruder certainly beats making coils by hand like we did in art class growing up! Leaving the coils wrapped in a tarp allows her to batch the process coils and leave them for several days without worrying about them drying out.

Dealing with the space constraints of her small kiln, her design is a departure from the small scale prototype, but seeing how she works through the problems is what really draws us to projects like this in the first place. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be making, would it? The final result is a beautiful addition to her garden and should last a long time since it won’t rot or rust.

If you’re thinking of clay as a medium, we have some other projects you might enjoy like this computer mouse, 3D printing with clay, or a clay battery.

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Arduino VGA, The Old Fashioned Way

November 30, 2024 by 10 Comments

Making a microcontroller speak to a VGA monitor has been a consistent project in our sphere for years, doing the job for which an IBM PC of yore required a plug-in ISA card. Couldn’t a microcontroller talk to a VGA card too? Of course it can, and [0xmarcin] is here to show how it can be done with an Arduino Mega.

The project builds on the work of another similar one which couldn’t be made to work, and the Trident card used couldn’t be driven in 8-bit ISA mode. The web of PC backwards compatibility saves the day though, because many 16-bit ISA cards also supported the original 8-bit slots from the earliest PCs. The Arduino is fast enough to support the ISA bus speed, but the card also needs the PC’s clock line to operate, and it only supports three modes:  80 x 25, 16 colour text, 320 x 200, 256 colour graphics, and 640 x 480, 16 colour graphics.

Looking at this project, it serves as a reminder of the march of technology. Perhaps fifteen years or more ago we’d have been able to lay our hands on any number of ISA cards to try it for ourselves, but now eight years after we called the end of the standard, we’d be hard placed to find one even at our hackerspace. Perhaps your best bet if you want one is a piece of over-the-top emulation.

Stylized silver text with the the word: "arpa-e" over the further text: "Changing What's Possible"

Uncle Sam Wants You To Recover Energy Materials From Wastewater

November 30, 2024 by 22 Comments

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded to support moonshot projects in the realm of energy, with a portfolio that ranges from the edge of current capabilities to some pretty far out stuff. We’re not sure exactly where their newest “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” falls, but they’re looking for critical materials from the wastewater treatment process. [via CleanTechnica]

As a refresher, critical materials are those things that are bottlenecks in a supply chain that you don’t want to be sourcing from unfriendly regions. For the electrification of transportation and industrial processes required to lower carbon emissions, lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth elements are pretty high on the list.

ARPA-E also has an interest in ammonia-based products which is particularly interesting as industrial fertilizers can wreak havoc on natural ecosystems when they become run off instead of making it into the soil. As any farmer knows, inputs cost money, so finding an economical way to recover those products from wastewater would be a win-win. “For all categories, the final recovered products will need to include at least two targeted high energy-value materials, have greater than 90% recovery efficiency, and be commercially viable in the U.S. market.” If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like to try hacking on, consider filling out an Applicant Profile.

If you’re curious about where we’re getting some of these materials from right now, checkout our series on Mining and Refining, including the lithium and cobalt ARPA-E wants more of.

It’s Like LightScribe, But For Floppies!

November 30, 2024 by 18 Comments

Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe drives were a novelty of which most users soon tired, but they’re what’s brought to our mind by [dbalsom]’s project. It’s called PNG2disk, and it does the same job as LightScribe, but for floppies. There’s one snag though; the images are encoded in magnetic flux and thus invisible to the naked eye. Instead, they can be enjoyed through a disk copying program that shows a sector map.

The linked GitHub repository has an example, and goes in depth through the various options it supports, and how to view images in several disk analysis programs. This program creates fully readable disks, and can even leave space for a filesystem. We have to admit to being curious as to whether such an image could be made physically visible using for example ferrofluid, but we’d be the first t admit to not being magnetic flux experts.

PNG2disk is part of the Fluxfox project, a library for working with floppy disk images. Meanwhile LightScribe my have gone the way of the dodo, but if you have one you could try making your own supercaps.