Solar Powered Flower Chases The Light

September 2, 2023 by 2 Comments

Many plants are capable of tracking the sun in order to get the most possible light. [hannu_hell] built a solar powered sculpture that replicates this light sensitivity for the benefit of better charging its own batteries, allowing it to run theoretically indefinitely where suitable light was available.

The 3D-printed flower features six movable petals mounted on an articulated stem. The flower’s leaves themselves bear solar panels that collect energy, analogous to leaves on a plant. A Raspberry Pi Pico is at the heart of the show, which is outfitted with a DS1307 real-time clock and a ST7735 TFT display for displaying date and time information. It’s also responsible for controlling servos that aim the flower’s solar panels towards the brightest light source available. This is achieved by using the Pico to read several photoresistors to determine light levels and adjust the leaves accordingly.

It’s a fun build, and one that could teach useful lessons relevant to even large-scale solar arrays. Video after the break.

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Logic Analyzers: Tapping Into Raspberry Pi Secrets

August 31, 2023 by 45 Comments

Today, I’d like to highlight a tool that brings your hacking skills to a whole new level, and does that without breaking the bank – in fact, given just how much debugging time you can save, how many fun pursuits you can unlock, and the numerous features you can add, this might be one of the cheapest tools you will get. Whether it’s debugging weird problems, optimizing your code, probing around a gadget you’re reverse-engineering, or maybe trying to understand someone’s open-source library, you are likely missing out a lot if you don’t have a logic analyzer on hand!

It’s heartbreaking to me that some hackers still don’t know the value that a logic analyzer brings. Over and over again, tactical application of a logic analyzer has helped me see an entirely different perspective on something I was hacking on, and that’s just the thing I’d like to demonstrate today.

Diving In

A logic analyzer has a number of digital inputs, and it continuously reads the state of these digital inputs, sending them to your computer or showing them on a screen – it’s like a logic-level-only oscilloscope. If you have an I2C bus with one MCU controlling a sensor, connect a logic analyzer to the clock and data pins, wire up the ground, launch the logic analyzer software on your computer, and see what’s actually happening.

For instance, have you ever noticed the ID_SC and ID_SD pins on the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector? Are you wondering what they’re for? Don’t you want to check what actually happens on these pins? Let’s do that right now! Continue reading “Logic Analyzers: Tapping Into Raspberry Pi Secrets” →

Let’s Listen To A Tape — Paper Tape

August 3, 2023 by 9 Comments

These days, data is as likely as not to be “in the cloud.” Otherwise, it’s probably on a USB flash drive or SD card. But in the old days, paper tape was a widespread way to store and retrieve data. A common way to start the day at the office was to toggle in a few dozen bytes of bootloader code, thread a bigger bootloader tape into your TeleType paper tape reader, and then get your coffee while the more capable bootloader clunked its way into memory. Then you could finish your brew while loading the tape with your compiler or whatever you wanted. [Scott Baker] has a Heathkit H8 and decided using a paper tape machine with it and some of his other gear would be fun.

Instead of a TeleType, [Scott] picked up a used paper tape machine from FANUC intended for the CNC industry. They are widely available on the surplus market, although a working machine might run you $500. [Scott] paid $200, so he had some work to do to make the unit operational.

Paper tape had a few varieties. For computer work, you usually had a tape that could hold eight holes across, one for each bit in a byte. However, there are also 6-bit and 5-bit tapes for special purposes or different encodings (old TeleTypes used 5-bit characters in Baudot). The paper choice varied too. You could get plain paper, oiled paper, which maybe didn’t jam as often, and Mylar, which is less likely to shred up when it does jam.

To make things even more difficult, the machines all worked a little differently as well. Sure, punches almost all use solenoids. But the tape transport was sometimes a pinch roller and sometimes a sprocket-style drive. Reading the holes could be done with mechanical contacts or optically. Some punches left little “hanging chads” on the tape, so you didn’t have to empty a confetti box to throw away the chad.

The repair job was interesting. Inside the machine is an 8051 microcontroller. There was no clock, and the circuit used two custom modules. One was simply a crystal, and the other was an oscillator. Removing both allowed a modern can oscillator to replace both modules. The next problem was a fried serial output driver. Replacing that got things working except for random resets due to a faulty brown-out reset circuit. That was easy to fix, too.

Of course, if you are really cheap, it is easy to make a paper tape reader from 8 phototransistors, and pulling tape through by hand isn’t unheard of. It can even talk USB. We’ve even seen a conference badge that can read tapes.

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Hackaday Podcast 218: Open Source AI, The Rescue Of Salyut 7, The Homework Machine

May 12, 2023 by 7 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos have much in the way of Hackaday news — the Op Amp Challenge is about halfway over, and there are roughly three weeks left in the Assistive Tech challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize. Show us what you’ve got on the analog front, and then see what you can do to help people with disabilities to live better lives!

Kristina is still striking out on What’s That Sound, which this week honestly sounded much more horrendous and mechanical than the thing it actually is. Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with the we-told-you-so that even Google believes that open source AI will out-compete both Google’s own AI and the questionably-named OpenAI.

From there we take a look at a light-up breadboard, listen to some magnetite music, and look inside a pair of smart sunglasses. Finally, we talk cars, beginning with the bleeding edge of driver-less. Then we go back in time to discuss in-vehicle record players of the late 1950s.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in  the comments!

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A Miniature MNT For Every Pocket

April 11, 2023 by 35 Comments

Last time Hackaday went hands on with a product from German company MNT, it was the Reform laptop; a full size computer with a full feature set and fully open source design. Now they’re back with the same value proposition and feature set crammed into a much more adorable (and colorful!) package with the MNT Pocket Reform. If you want the big Reform’s open source philosophy in a body fit for a coat pocket, this might be the computing device for you.

To refresh your memory, MNT is a company that specializes in open source hardware and the software to support it. They are probably best known for the Reform, their first laptop. Its marquis feature is a fully open design, from the mechanical components (designed with OSS tools) to the PCBAs (designed with KiCad) to the software (designed with, uh, software). When originally shipped that product packed a DIMM-style System On Module (SOM) with a default configuration containing a quad core NXP i.MX8M Quad and 4GB of RAM, as well as mini PCIe Card and M key m.2 2280 slots on the motherboard for storage and connectivity. That computer was designed to be easily serviceable and included a plethora of full sized ports along with easy to source cylindrical battery cells. The Pocket Reform takes the same intent and channels it into a much smaller package.

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PCIe For Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude

March 14, 2023 by 35 Comments

PCIe, also known as PCI-Express, is a highly powerful interface. So let’s see what it takes to hack on something that powerful. PCIe is be a bit intimidating at first, however it is reasonably simple to start building PCIe stuff, and the interface is quite resilient for hobbyist-level technology. There will come a time when we want to use a PCIe chip in our designs, or perhaps, make use of the PCIe connection available on a certain Compute Module, and it’s good to make sure that we’re ready for that.

PCIe is everywhere now. Every modern computer has a bunch of PCIe devices performing crucial functions, and even iPhones use PCIe internally to connect the CPU with the flash and WiFi chips. You can get all kinds of PCIe devices: Ethernet controllers, high-throughput WiFi cards, graphics, and all the cheap NVMe drives that gladly provide you with heaps of storage when connected over PCIe. If you’re hacking on a laptop or a single-board computer and you’d like to add a PCIe device, you can get some PCIe from one of the PCIe-carrying sockets, or just tap into an existing PCIe link if there’s no socket to connect to. It’s been two decades since we’ve started getting PCIe devices – now, PCIe is on its 5.0 revision, and it’s clear that it’s here to stay.

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Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex

January 27, 2023 by 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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