Sprite_TM’s Magic Paintbrush

November 12, 2018 by 27 Comments

When it comes to hackers we love, there’s no better example than Jeroen Domburg, a.k.a. Sprite_TM. Sprite’s now working for Espressif, makers of the fantastic ESP8266 and ESP32, where he created a miniature Game Boy and turned this PocketSprite into a real product. He’s installed Linux on a hard drive, and created a Matrix of virtualized Tamagotchis. In short, if you’re looking for someone who’s building the coolest, most technical thing of sometimes questionable utility, you need look no further than Sprite_tm.

Sprite was back at this year’s Superconference, and again he’s bringing out the big guns with awesome hardware hacks. This time, though, Sprite is tapping into his artistic side. Sprite is very accomplished in making PCB art and DaveCAD drawings, but actual art is something that’s been out of reach. No problem, because you can just buy an inkjet printer and make your own art. Sprite’s doing something different, and he’s turning his inkjet into a Magic Paintbrush.

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Review: LinkSprite Mini CNC

January 16, 2018 by 106 Comments

It’s a great time to be a hobbyist. No matter how you feel about the Arduino/Raspberry Pi effect, the influx of general enthusiasm and demand it has created translates to better availability of components, a broader community, and loads of freely available knowledge. When people have access to knowledge and ideas, great things can happen. Tools that were once restricted to industrial use become open source, and the price of entry-level versions goes into a nosedive.

As we’ve seen over the last several years, the price of cheap 3D printers keeps falling while the bar of quality keeps rising. It’s happening with laser cutters and carving tools, too. Strolling through Microcenter a few weeks ago, I spotted a new toy on the back wall next to the 3D printers. It was LinkSprite’s desktop mini CNC. They didn’t have one out on display, but there were two of them in boxes on the shelf. And boy, those boxes were small. Laughably small. I wondered, could this adorable machine really be any good? To some, the $200 price tag suggests otherwise. To me, the price tag made it justifiable, especially considering that the next price point for a hobby CNC mill is at least twice as much. I took my phone out and stood there frantically looking for reviews, documentation, anything that was available. It seemed that the general, if sparse consensus is that this thing isn’t a total waste of money. Oh, and there’s a wiki.

According to LinkSprite’s wiki, this little machine will engrave wood, plastic, acrylic, PVC, and PCBs. It will specifically not engrave metal (PCB copper notwithstanding). I’m a bit leery of the chemicals used in the PCB etching process, so the idea of engraving them instead was especially tempting. I pulled the trigger.

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Superconference Interview: SpriteTM

August 3, 2017 by 1 Comment

SpriteTM, or [Jeroen Domburg], has a bit of a following around these parts. He’s installed Linux on a hard drive the hard way. He can play Snake on his keyboard. He’s cared for several generations of Tamagotchis. In short, there are very few people who have both the technical ability and sense of humor to pull off what [Sprite] does.

At last year’s Supercon, we pulled Sprite aside to talk about his work and his latest hack, the tiniest Game Boy ever. He talked about his Supercon keynote, and how to hack the crypto challenge in last year’s Superconference badge in an hour without solving any of the puzzles. Now, we’re happy to present that interview today, available below.

While we very much doubt many people could — or would — take four conference badges and rick roll the entire Superconference for the badge hacking session, we’re still looking for eager and capable presenters. The Call for Proposals is now open for the 2017 Hackaday Superconference. If you have a story of hardware heroics, creativity in CPLDs, a passion for prototyping, or an ambition for technological art, we want you to share your story. Even if you don’t, that’s fine, too: tickets are still available for the Superconference in Pasadena, California on November 11th and 12th.

Hack Chat: The Incredible Sprite_tm And The ESP32

February 1, 2017 by 19 Comments

This Friday at 5pm PST, [Sprite_tm] will be leading a Hack Chat talking about the ESP32.

[Sprite_tm] should require no introduction, but we’re going to do it anyway. He’s can install Linux on a hard drive. He can play video games on his keyboard. He built the world’s tiniest Game Boy, and gave the greatest talk I’ve ever seen. Right now, [Sprite] is in China working on the guts of the ESP32, the next great WiFi and Bluetooth uberchip.

[Sprite] recently packed his bags and headed over to Espressif, creators of the ESP32. He’s one of the main devs over there, and he’s up to his neck in the varied and weird peripherals contained in this chip. His job includes porting NES emulators to a WiFi-enabled microcontroller. If you want to learn about the latest and greatest microcontroller, this is the guy you want to talk to, and he’s taking all questions.

Note that we usually do these things earlier in the day but this week we start rolling at 5 PM Pacific Friday to help match up with [Sprite’s] timezone. You can figure out when this event will happen with this handy time and date converter.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Buttons to join the project and enter the Hack Chat
Buttons to join the project and enter the Hack Chat

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Log into hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

And Tindie Too

In addition to [Sprite]’s Hack Chat on Friday, we’re going to have a Tindie Chat in the Tindie Dog Park on Friday at noon, Pacific time. You can figure out when that’ll be in your local time by following this link.

In the Tindie Chat, we’re going to be talking about all the aspects of selling hardware on Tindie. This is a phenomenal community that keeps on growing, and right now there’s some really, really cool hardware being offered up from makers and creators around the world.

Upcoming Hack Chats

We have a few more Hack Chats on the books. On February 10th, we’ll be talking RF with [Jenny List]. Sparkfun will be around for a Hack Chat on February 17th. If stats are your thing, we’ll have a chat on the ins and outs of R in a few weeks.

[Sprite_tm] Gives Near Death VFD A Better Second Life

April 20, 2016 by 16 Comments

[Sprite_tm] picked up some used VFD displays for cheap, and wanted to make his own custom temperature and air-quality display. He did that, of course, but turned it into a colossal experiment in re-design to boot. What started out as a $6 used VFD becomes priceless with the addition of hours of high-powered hacking mojo.

You see, the phosphor screen had burnt-in spots where the old display was left static for too long. A normal person would either live with it or buy new displays. [Sprite_tm] ripped off the old display driver and drives the row and column shift registers using the DMA module on a Raspberry Pi2, coding up his own fast PWM/BCM hybrid scheme that can do greyscale.

He mapped out the individual pixels using a camera and post processing in The Gimp to establish the degradation of burnt-in pixels. He then re-wrote a previous custom driver project to compensate for the pixels’ inherent brightness in firmware. After all that work, he wrapped the whole thing up in a nice wooden frame.

There’s a lot to read, so just go hit up his website. High points include the shift-register-based driver transplant, the bit-angle modulation that was needed to get the necessary bit-depth for the grayscale, and the PHP script that does the photograph-based brightness correction.

Picking a favorite [Sprite_tm] hack is like picking a favorite ice-cream flavor: they’re all good. But his investigation into hard-drive controller chips still makes our head spin just a little bit. If you missed his talks about the Tamagotchi Singularity from the Hackaday SuperCon make sure you drop what you’re doing and watch it now.

[Sprite_TM]’s Keyboard Plays Snake

November 23, 2014 by 22 Comments

Hackaday Prize judge, hacker extraordinaire, and generally awesome dude [Sprite_TM] spends a lot of time at his computer, and that means a lot of time typing on his keyboard. He recently picked up a board with the latest fad in the world of keyboards, a board with individually addressable LEDs. He took this board to work and a colleague jokingly said, ‘You’ve had this keyboard for 24 hours now, and it has a bunch of LEDs and some arrow keys. I’m disappointed you haven’t got Snake running on it yet.” Thus began the quest to put the one game found on all Nokia phones on a keyboard.

The keyboard in question is a Coolermaster Quickfire Rapid-I, a board that’s marketed as having an ARM Cortex CPU. Pulling apart the board, [Sprite] found a bunch of MX Browns, some LEDs, and a 72MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127k of Flash and 32k of RAM. That’s an incredible amount of processing power for a keyboard, and after finding the SWD port, [Sprite] attempted to dump the Flash. The security bit was set. There was another way, however.

Coolermaster is actively working on the firmware, killing bugs, adding lighting modes, and putting all these updates on their website. The firmware updater is distributed as an executable with US and EU versions; the EU version has another key. Figuring the only difference between these versions would be the firmware itself, [Sprite] got his hands on both versions, did a binary diff, and found only one 16k block of data at the end of the file was different. There’s the firmware. It was XOR encrypted, but that’s obvious if you know what to look for.

flashdata The firmware wasn’t complete, though; there were jumps to places outside the code [Sprite] had and a large block looked corrupted. There’s another thing you can do with an executable file: run it. With USBPcap running in the background while executing the firmware updater, [Sprite] could read exactly what was happening when the keyboard was updating. With a small executable that gets around the weirdness of the updater, [Sprite] had a backup copy of the keyboard’s firmware. Even if he bricked the keyboard, he could always bring it back to a stock state. It was time to program Snake.

The first part of writing new firmware was finding a place that had some Flash and RAM to store the new code. This wasn’t hard; there was 64k of Flash free and 28K of unused RAM. The calls to the Snake routine were modified from the variables the original firmware had. If, for example, the original keyboard had a call to change the PWM, [Sprite] could change that to the Snake routine.

Snake is fun, but with a huge, powerful ARM in a device that people will just plug into their keyboard, there’s a lot more you can do with a hacked keyboard. Keyloggers and a BadUSB are extremely possible, especially with firmware that can be updated from a computer. To counter that, [Sprite] added the requirement for a physical condition in order to enter Flash mode. Now, the firmware will only update for about 10 seconds after pressing the fn+f key combination.

There’s more to playing Snake on a keyboard; Sprite has also written a new lighting mode, a fluid simulation thingy that will surely annoy anyone who can’t touch type. You can see the videos of that below.

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Hackaday Munich Speaker: Sprite_TM

October 20, 2014 by 6 Comments

Plans for Hackaday Munich are coming along quite nicely. Today we’re happy to announce that [Sprite_TM] will be speaking at the event. Click that link above and make sure you get your tickets for November 13th. You can do some hands-on hacking at the Embedded Hardware Workshop, hear the talks, find out which of the five finalists will be the grand prize winner, and enjoy The Hackaday Prize Party along with the Hackaday crew.

You may also know [Sprite_TM] as [Jeroen Domburg], one of the judges for The Hackaday Prize. That’s him on the left in the image above (we love a good avatar!). If you follow Hackaday, you should already be thrilled about meeting him and hearing his talk. The last talk we remember reading about was an epic hard drive controller hack. Just last month we saw a well-executed clock radio overhaul from him. While we’re on the topic, his micro-bots were a spectacular project.

[Sprite_TM] has also offered to help out with the reverse engineering workshop. We’re hard at work making sure everything is in place for those afternoon hacking events. As we solidify details we’ll be adding workshop pages (and emailing those already registered for Hackaday Munich) to let everyone know what to expect. We can report that we have shipped [Sprite_TM] a Bus Pirate so that he can be familiar with it. This will be the primary tool provided for this particular workshop.

The entire Hackaday crew is looking forward to it. See you there!