How To Cram 945 LEDs Into A Teeny Tiny Vegas-Style Sphere

May 31, 2024 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

[Carl Bugeja] finds the engineering behind the Las Vegas Sphere fascinating, and made a video all about the experience of designing and building a micro-sized desktop version. [Carl]’s version is about the size of a baseball and crams nearly a thousand RGB pixels across the surface.

A four-layer flexible PCB is the key to routing data and power to so many LEDs.

Putting that many addressable LEDs — even tiny 1 mm x 1 mm ones — across a rounded surface isn’t exactly trivial. [Carl]’s favored approach ended up relying on a flexible four-layer PCB and using clever design and math to lay out an unusual panel shape which covers a small 3D printed geodesic dome.

Much easier said that done, by the way. All kinds of things can and do go wrong, from an un-fixable short in the first version to adhesive and durability issues in later prototypes. In the end, however, it’s a success. Powered over USB-C, his mini “sphere” can display a variety of patterns and reactive emojis.

As elegant and impressive as the engineering is in this dense little display, [Carl] has some mixed feelings about the results. 945 individual pixels on such a small object is a lot, but it also ends up being fairly low-resolution in the end. It isn’t very good at displaying sharp lines or borders, so any familiar shapes (like circles or eyes) come out kind of ragged. It’s also expensive. The tiny LEDs may be only about 5 cents each, but when one needs nearly a thousand of them for one prototype that adds up quickly. The whole bill of materials comes out to roughly $250 USD after adding up the components, PCB, controller, and mechanical parts. It’s certainly a wildly different build than its distant cousin, the RGB cube.

Still, it’s an awfully slick little build. [Carl] doubts there’s much value in pursuing the idea further, but there are plenty of great images and clips from the build. Check out the video, embedded below.

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A render of a BiC Cristal ballpoint pen showing the innards.

This Is How A Pen Changed The World

April 29, 2024 by Kristina Panos 80 Comments

Look around you. Chances are, there’s a BiC Cristal ballpoint pen among your odds and ends. Since 1950, it has far outsold the Rubik’s Cube and even the iPhone, and yet, it’s one of the most unsung and overlooked pieces of technology ever invented. And weirdly, it hasn’t had the honor of trademark erosion like Xerox or Kleenex. When you ‘flick a Bic’, you’re using a lighter.

It’s probably hard to imagine writing with a feather and a bottle of ink, but that’s what writing was limited to for hundreds of years. When fountain pens first came along, they were revolutionary, albeit expensive and leaky. In 1900, the world literacy rate stood around 20%, and exorbitantly-priced, unreliable utensils weren’t helping.

In 1888, American inventor John Loud created the first ballpoint pen. It worked well on leather and wood and the like, but absolutely shredded paper, making it almost useless.

One problem was that while the ball worked better than a nib, it had to be an absolutely perfect fit, or ink would either get stuck or leak out everywhere. Then along came László Bíró, who turned instead to the ink to solve the problems of the ballpoint.

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Make 3D Scenes With A Holodeck-Like Voice Interface

April 29, 2024 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

The voice interface for the holodeck in Star Trek had users create objects by saying things like “create a table” and “now make it a metal table” and so forth, all with immediate feedback. This kind of interface may have been pure fantasy at the time of airing, but with the advent of AI and LLMs (large language models) this kind of natural language interface is coming together almost by itself.

A fun demonstration of that is [Dominic Pajak]’s demo project called VoxelAstra. This is a WebXR demo that works both in the Meta Quest 3 VR headset (just go to the demo page in the headset’s web browser) as well as on desktop.

The catch is that since the program uses OpenAI APIs on the back end, one must provide a working OpenAI API key. Otherwise, the demo won’t be able to do anything. Providing one’s API key to someone’s web page isn’t terribly good security practice, but there’s also the option of running the demo locally.

Either way, once the demo is up and running the user simply tells the system what to create. Just keep it simple. It’s a fun and educational demo more than anything and will try to do its work with primitive shapes like spheres, cubes, and cylinders. “Build a snowman” is suggested as a good starting point.

Intrigued by what you see and getting ideas of your own? WebXR can be a great way to give those ideas some life and looking at how someone else did something similar is a fine way to begin. Check out another of [Dominic]’s WebXR projects: a simulated BBC Micro, in VR.

Ultra-Tiny Wii Uses Custom Parts And Looks Amazing

April 19, 2024 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

The Nintendo Wii was never a large console. Indeed, it was smaller than both the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and most consoles of previous generations, too. That’s not to say it couldn’t be smaller, though. [loopj] has built what is perhaps the smallest Wii yet, which measures roughly the same size as a deck of cards. The best bit? The housing is even to scale!

There’s no emulation jiggery-pokery here. This build uses an original Wii motherboard that’s been cut down to the bare basics. Measuring just 62 mm by 62 mm, it features the CPU, GPU, RAM, and flash memory, while most of the extraneous hardware has been eliminated. Power and data is provided to the board from a special Wii Power Strip PCB, while the Periphlex flex PCB handles breaking out controller interfaces. Indeed, the build is nicknamed Short Stack as it’s built from a number of specialist PCBs for builds like this one. It also uses two boards designed by [YveltalGriffin] — the fujiflex for HDMI video output and the nandFlex to handle the Wii’s NAND memory chip.

[loopj] also had to design two further PCBs specifically for this build. One handles power, the micro SD card, HDMI connector, and controller ports. Meanwhile, the second handles the power, reset, and sync buttons along with status LEDs. Another neat hack of [loopj]’s own devising is using TRRS connectors in place of the original bulky GameCube controller ports.

Ultimately, it’s volume is just 7.4% that of an original Nintendo Wii. It’s probably possible to go smaller, too, says [loopj], so don’t expect things to end here. We’ve seen some other great Wii mods before, too, like this excellent handheld design.

The Apple They Should Have Made, But Didn’t

April 2, 2024 by Jenny List 31 Comments

Whenever there is a large manufacturer of a popular product in the tech space, they always attract tales of near-mythical prototypes which would have changed everything on the spot had they just not been cancelled by the bean counters. The Sony-Nintendo PlayStation prototypes for example, or any of a number of machines inexplicably axed by Commodore.

Apple is no exception. They brought the instantly forgettable twentieth anniversary Mac and the pretty but impractical G4 Cube to market, but somehow they rejected the Jonathan, a razor-sharp modular machine from the mid-1980s.

It’s easy after so long associating Apple with the Mac to forget that in the mid-80s it was simply one of their several computer lines, and not the most successful one at that. The 16-bit machine was something of a slimmed-down evolution of the Lisa, and it thus it doesn’t necessarily follow that every other Apple machine of the day also had to be a Mac. Into this would have come the Jonathan, a high-end modular machine bridging the gap between domestic and business computing, with a standard bus allowing processor modules for different operating systems, and upgrades with standard “books”, hardware modules containing peripherals, not all of which would have come from Apple themselves. It would have been Apple’s first 32-bit machine, but sadly it proved too adventurous for their management, who feared that it might tempt Apple users into the world of DOS rather than the other way round.

What strikes us about the Johnathan is how out of place it looks on a 1980s desk, it would be the mid-1990s before we would come close to having machines with these capabilities, and indeed we’ve never seen anything quite as adventurous hardware-wise. It’s certainly not the only might-have been story we’ve seen though.

SatCat5: UART, SPI And I2C Via Ethernet With FPGA-Based Design

April 1, 2024 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Arty A7-based prototype of SatCat5 with custom switch I/O board. (Credit: The Aerospace Corporation)

To the average microcontroller, Ethernet networks are quite a step up from the basic I2C, SPI and UART interfaces, requiring either a built-in Ethernet MAC or SPI-based MAC, with tedious translation between Ethernet and those other interfaces. Yet what if this translation could be done automatically and transparently? This is what the SatCat5 FPGA-based project by [The Aerospace Corporation] aims to provide: a gateway akin to an unmanaged Ethernet switch that also supports those non-Ethernet links. Recently they answered a range of questions about the project on Hacker News.

The project name comes from the primary target audience: smallsat and cubesat developers, which is an area where being able to route more traffic over a common Ethernet-based bus is a major boon. The provided Xilinx Artix-7-based reference design (pictured) gives a good idea of how it can be used: it combines an Arty A7 development board with a custom PCB containing an Ethernet switch IC (SJA1105), TJA1100 transceiver, two RJ45 jacks and four PMOD connectors, here connected to two UARTs for bidirectional communication between them. Ethernet frame encapsulation is provided using the standard Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), with more details covered in the FAQ. At a minimum an FPGA like a Lattice iCE40 is required, with an MCU capable of using the provided C++ libraries, or a custom implementation.

Thanks to [STR-Alorman] for the tip.

Retro Hackintosh Made From Retro Parts

March 25, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

Apple as a company, has staked most of its future around being a “walled garden” where it controls everything from the hardware up through the user experience. In some ways this is good for users; the hardware is generally high quality and vetted by the company creating the software, making for a very uniform experience. This won’t stop some people from trying to get Apple’s operating systems and other software running on unapproved hardware though. These “Hackintosh” computers were much more common in the Intel era but this replica goes even further back to the Macintosh era.

Originally [Kevin] had ordered an authentic Macintosh with the intent of getting it working again, but a broken floppy disk drive and lack of replacement parts turned this project into a different beast. He used the Mac instead as a model for a new 3D-printed case, spending a ton of time sanding, filling, and finishing it to get it to look nearly indistinguishable from the original. The hardware going in this replica is an old Linux-based thin client machine running the Mini vMac operating system, with a modified floppy drive the computer uses to boot. A hidden SD card slot helps interface with modern computers. The display is a modern LCD, though a sheet of acrylic glued to the front panel replicates a bit of the CRT curve.

Click through to read on!

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