Hackaday Podcast 201: Faking A Transmission, Making Nuclear Fuel, And A Slidepot With A Twist

January 13, 2023 by 2 Comments

Even for those with paraskevidekatriaphobia, today is your lucky day as Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney sit under ladders with umbrellas while holding black cats to talk about the week in awesome hacks. And what a week it was, with a Scooby Doo code review, mushrooms in your PCBs, and the clickiest automatic transmission that never was. Have you ever flashed the firmware on a $4 wireless sensor? Maybe you should try. Wondering how to make a rotary Hall sensor detect linear motion? We’ll answer that too. Will AI muscle the dungeon master out of your D&D group? That’s a hard no. We’ll talk about a new RISC-V ESP32, making old video new again, nuclear reactor kibble, and your least satisfying repair jobs. And yes, everyone can relax — I’m buying her a new stove.

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3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller

January 11, 2023 by 32 Comments

For anyone with even the slightest bit of engineering interest, wind turbines are hard to resist. Everything about them is just so awesome, in the literal sense of the word — the size of the blades, the height of the towers, the mechanical guts that keep them pointed into the wind. And as if one turbine isn’t enough, consider the engineering implications of planting a couple of hundred of these giants in a field and getting them to operate as a unit. Simply amazing.

Unfortunately, the thing that makes wind turbines so cool — their enormity — can make them difficult to wrap your head around. To fix that, [3DprintedLife] built a working miniature wind turbine that goes a bit beyond most designs of a similar size. The big difference here is variable pitch blades, a feature the big turbines rely on to keep their output maximized over a broad range of wind conditions. The mechanism here is clever — the base of each blade rides in a bearing and has a small cap head screw that rides in a hole in a triangular swash block in the center of the hub. A small gear motor and lead screw move the block back and forth along the hub’s axis, which changes the collective pitch of the blades.

Other details of full-sized wind turbines are replicated here too, like the powered nacelle rotation and the full suite of wind speed and direction sensors. The generator is a NEMA 17 stepper; the output is a bit too anemic to actually power the turbine’s controller, but that could be fixed with gearing changes. Still, all the controls worked as planned, and there’s room for improvement, so we’ll score this a win overall.

Looking for a little more on full-size wind turbines? You’re in luck — our own [Bryan Cockfield] shared his insights into how wind farm engineers deal with ice and cold.

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Wizards Slay The Dragon That Lays The Golden Egg

January 11, 2023 by 77 Comments

Hail, and well met adventurers! There’s rumors of dark dealings, and mysterious machinations from that group of Western mystics, Wizards of the Coast (WotC). If this pernicious plot is allowed to succeed, a wave of darkness will spread over this land of Open Source gaming, the vile legal fog sticking to and tainting everything it touches. Our quest today is to determine the truth of these words, and determine a defense for the world of open gaming, and indeed perhaps the entire free world! Beware, the following adventure will delve into the bleak magic of licensing, contract law, and litigation.

Ah, Dungeons and Dragons. The original creation of Gary Gygax, refined by countless others, this table-top role-playing game has brought entertainment and much more to millions of players for years. In 2000, WotC made a decision that opened the mechanics of that universe to everyone. The 3rd Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released under the Open Gaming License, a very intentional port of Open Source licensing to table-top gaming — obviously inspired by the GNU Public License. Ryan Dancey was one of the drivers behind the new approach, and made this statement about it:

I think there’s a very, very strong business case that can be made for the idea of embracing the ideas at the heart of the Open Source movement and finding a place for them in gaming. […] One of my fundamental arguments is that by pursuing the Open Gaming concept, Wizards can establish a clear policy on what it will, and will not allow people to do with its copyrighted materials. Just that alone should spur a huge surge in independent content creation that will feed into the D&D network.

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You Can Now Fix Your Deere

January 9, 2023 by 29 Comments

Over the last few years we have brought you many stories about John Deere tractors, and how their repair has been locked down such that only manufacturer-authorised technicians can work on them. They’ve become a poster child in the battle for the right to repair, a symbol of the worst practices. Finally now we can bring you some good news of sorts, as the agricultural giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to ensure that their products will henceforth be repairable by people without Deere approval.

We can’t imagine that Deere will have taken this step willingly, and while we’d like to imagine that consumer protests in favour of right-to-repair have hit their mark, we’re guessing that it’s more of an economic pressure at work alongside the threat of legislation outside their native America. If farmers getting caught out waiting for a Deere van to arrive while their crop withers in the field wasn’t enough, when the price of a second-hand tractor without the DRM outstrips that of a newer one with it, eventually the sales of new tractors will also suffer.

So this is good news, and we’re guessing that other agricultural manufacturers doing the same DMCA practices will now follow suit. But it’s not a complete victory. The problem starts not with the DMCA restriction itself, but with the extension of the machine’s computer system into every part, including those many parts which simply don’t need it. It’s not a complete victory if anyone can now use the software to register a new hydraulic valve with the system; instead that hydraulic valve should not have to be authorised in the first place. It’s this creeping unnecessary complexity which is the true enemy of right-to-repair, and we shouldn’t forget that.

Header image: Dwight Sipler, CC BY 2.0.

Morphing Keyboard Gets You Dialed In Just Right

December 21, 2022 by 5 Comments

So you’re tired of rectangular, brick wall-staggered keyboards and want to go split and/or ergo. But how? Which style? What do? Here’s what you do: you build one of these here LHM Morph boards and customize the crap out of it, because that’s what it’s for.

So what is this thing, anyway? Is it a even a keyboard? Well, as long as you can press switches and send key commands to a computer, it certainly smells like a keyboard to us. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what’s going on here is that [LifeHackerMax] has built a highly-customizable version of the LHM, their 26-key split. The LHM Morph can be fine-tuned to nearly any degree imaginable, including the tenting angle. The keys are grouped in modules that can slide back and forth to suit your varying finger lengths. As they are half-round, these modules can also be tilted and rotated until they’re just right.

But the super cool thing about the LHM Morph is the way it goes together — like LEGO. It’s completely modular, and you don’t even have to go split if you’re not ready for that. But all the pieces connect via rods made of copper wire. If you’d like to make one for yourself, the 3D files are up on Thingiverse, and the firmware is on GitHub. Be sure to check out the video after the break.

Does this keyboard remind you of anything? [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox, perhaps?

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After 40 Years, Adobe Releases PostScript Source V0.10 For Posterity

December 13, 2022 by 28 Comments

Celebrating their 40th anniversary, Adobe released the source code of PostScript v0.10 to the Computer History Museum. But before you ask, we tried and it won’t compile with GCC out of the box – it’s missing at least except.h, but we’d bet you can hack around it with a little dedication.

PostScript is the precursor to PDF, and at the time it was revolutionary. Coming out of Xerox’s PARC, the idea was to create device- and resolution-independent documents where all the characters, symbols, and graphics are described by their shapes instead of bitmaps. PostScript’s secret sauce was in how it went back to a pixel-based representation for end use on monitors or printers. It’s no exaggeration to say that this ended up revolutionizing the print industry, and it makes sense in the CHM’s collection.

Still, on the trade-secret front, you shouldn’t get too excited. Apparently the code released here only includes a first-draft version of Adobe’s font hinting algos, as evidenced by the early version number. Nonetheless, you’re free to dig into pretty readable C. For instance, vm.c contains the virtual machine that implements PostScript’s almost Forth-like language.

Of course, if you’d just like to mess around with PostScript, downloading a modern open-source interpreter like GhostScript probably makes a lot more sense. Even so, it’s fun to see the original codebase where it all started.

Nucleo-F429ZI development board with STM32F429 microcontroller

Epic Guide To Bare-Metal STM32 Programming

December 5, 2022 by 31 Comments

[Sergey Lyubka] put together this epic guide for bare-metal microcontroller programming.  While the general concepts should be applicable to most any microcontroller, [Sergey]s examples specifically relate to the Nucleo-F429ZI development board featuring the ARM-based STM32F429 microcontroller.

In the realm of computer systems, bare-metal programming most often refers to programming the processor without an intervening operating system. This generally applies to programming BIOS, hardware drivers, communication drivers, elements of the operating system, and so forth. Even in the world of embedded programming, were things are generally quite low-level (close to the metal), we’ve grown accustomed to a good amount of hardware abstraction. For example, we often start projects already standing on the shoulders of various libraries, boot loaders, and integrated development tools.

When we forego these abstractions and program directly on the microprocessor or microcontroller, we’re working on the bare metal. [Sergey] aptly defines this as programming the microcontroller “using just a compiler and a datasheet, nothing else.” His guide starts at the very foundation by examining the processor’s memory map and registers including locations for memory mapped I/O pins and other peripherals.

The guide walks us through writing up a minimal firmware program from boot vector to blinking an LED connected to an I/O pin. The demonstration continues with setup and use of necessary tools such as the compiler, linker, and flasher. We move on to increasingly advanced topics like timers, interrupts, UART output, debuggers, and even configuring an embedded web server to expose a complete device dashboard.

While initially more time consuming, working close to the metal provides a good deal of additional insight into, and control over, hardware operations.  For even more on the subject, you may like our STM32 Bootcamp series on bare-metal STM32 programming.