ESP32 Serial Interface Modernizes Old Equipment

January 27, 2020 by 25 Comments

There’s still plenty of useful hardware out there that uses an RS-232 interface, like the Behringer Ultradrive loudspeaker systems that [Lasse Lukkari] works with from time to time. Rather than ditch perfectly good gear because modern computers (to say nothing of phones or tablets) don’t have physical serial ports, he decided to come up with a WiFi adapter for these old devices that he calls SerialChiller.

Inside the SerialChiller is an ESP32, a MAX3232 line driver, a LM1117 linear regulator, and a few passives. The professionally manufactured PCB is housed inside of an enclosure that [Lasse] has repurposed from a cheap DB15 breakout adapter. The USB cable is used to power the board and for programming, though it can also be used to turn the SerialChiller into a USB-to-serial cable as well.

The hardware for this project is pretty straightforward, but what we really like is the direction he’s taken with the software. Rather than using the SerialChiller as a simple serial to WiFi bridge, [Lasse] is actually implementing a complete web-based interface directly on the microcontroller. In the video after the break he demonstrates his firmware for controlling the aforementioned Behringer Ultradrive, but that’s just one possible application for the project. Firmware could be spun up for all sorts of classic devices, breathing new life into hardware that might otherwise be in danger of heading to the landfill.

Of course, using the ESP family of chips as serial adapters is hardly anything new. In fact, that’s what they were designed for. But developing modern user interfaces for old hardware thanks to the power of the ESP32 has some fascinating potential.

Continue reading “ESP32 Serial Interface Modernizes Old Equipment” →

CRISPR Could Fry All Cancer Using Newly Found T-Cell

January 27, 2020 by 36 Comments

One of the human body’s greatest features is its natural antivirus protection. If your immune system is working normally, it produces legions of T-cells that go around looking for abnormalities like cancer cells just to gang up and destroy them. They do this by grabbing on to little protein fragments called antigens that live on the surface of the bad cells and tattle on their whereabouts to the immune system. Once the T-cells have a stranglehold on these antigens, they can release toxins that destroy the bad cell, while minimizing collateral damage to healthy cells.

CAR T-cell therapy process via National Cancer Institute

This rather neat human trick doesn’t always work, however. Cancer cells sometimes mask themselves as healthy cells, or they otherwise thwart T-cell attacks by growing so many antigens on their surface that the T-cells have no place to grab onto.

Medical science has come up with a fairly new method of outfoxing these crafty cancer cells called CAR T-cell therapy. Basically, they withdraw blood from the patient, extract the T-cells, and replace the blood. The T-cells are sent off to a CRISPR lab, where they get injected with a modified, inactive virus that introduces a new gene which causes the T-cells to sprout a little hook on their surface.

This hook, which they’ve dubbed the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), allows the T-cell to chemically see through the cancer cells’ various disguises and attack them. The lab multiplies these super soldiers and sends them back to the treatment facility, where they are injected into the patient’s front lines.

Continue reading “CRISPR Could Fry All Cancer Using Newly Found T-Cell” →

Hackaday Belgrade Early Bird Tickets On Sale Right Now

January 27, 2020 by 11 Comments

Tickets for Hackaday Belgrade 2020 just went on sale. If you’re quick you can grab an Early Bird ticket at half the price of general admission!

Hackaday’s premiere European hardware conference returns for the third time on May 9th, 2020, bringing together talks, workshops, hardware hacking, food and drink, entertainment, and of course the best gathering of hardware geeks you’ll find anywhere. It’s awesome, because you’re awesome — and I do mean you. Whether you’re submitting a talk proposal or just grabbing a ticket to make this the first conference you’ve ever been to, we can’t do it without you.

Hackaday’s Home in Serbia

We’ll be at Dom Omladine again this year. The venue has feels like a home for Hackaday with a large space for talks, a workshop area, and a huge open area for lobby-con where you’ll find Belgrade’s finest baristas, a great spread of food, and a beer tap to keep the day rolling. Bring along your hardware projects to hack alongside the conference’s custom hardware badge designed by Voja Antonic as we open up the bar and get the live IDM sets started.

Flooding into Hackaday Belgrade
Breakfast spread as the doors open
What is better than hacking to live music?

It’s still early in our planning (these are Early Bird tickets after all) but it’s very likely we’ll have a meetup the night before the conference. Friends old and new often get together on Sunday to keep the fun going. On Saturday, doors for the conference will open around 9 am and the fun will continue well beyond the 2 am “official” end. We recommend you make travel plans to include the full weekend.

Elliot Williams demos Logic Noise live on stage

Don’t just ask for Friday off of work, bring your friends and co-workers along with you. If you’re most comfortable digging through datasheets while a hot soldering iron idles on your bench and a 3D-printer whirs away in the corner, Hackaday Belgrade is calling you. I encourage those who were at the first two events in 2016 and 2018 to share their stories below.

Don’t miss this one, it only comes around in even-numbered years and tickets will sell out.

Hackaday Belgrade 2020 Posters by Aleksandar Bradic (click for full size download link):

Machine Learning System Uses Images To Teach Itself Morse Code

January 27, 2020 by 19 Comments

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to learn a new language is immersion: just throw someone into a situation where they have no choice, and they’ll learn by context. Militaries use immersion language instruction, as do diplomats and journalists, and apparently computers can now use it to teach themselves Morse code.

The blog entry by the delightfully callsigned [Mauri Niininen (AG1LE)] reads like a scientific paper, with good reason: [Mauri] really seems to know a thing or two about machine learning. His method uses curated training data to build a model, namely Morse snippets and their translations, as is the usual approach with such systems. But things take an unexpected turn right from the start, as [Mauri] uses a Tensorflow handwriting recognition implementation to train his model.

Using a few lines of Python, he converts short, known snippets of Morse to a grayscale image that looks a little like a barcode, with the light areas being the dits and dahs and the dark bars being silence. The first training run only resulted in about 36% accuracy, but a subsequent run with shorter snippets ended up being 99.5% accurate. The model was also able to pull Morse out of a signal with -6 dB signal-to-noise ratio, even though it had been trained with a much cleaner signal.

Other Morse decoders use lookup tables to convert sound to text, but it’s important to note that this one doesn’t. By comparing patterns to labels in the training data, it inferred what the characters mean, and essentially taught itself Morse code in about an hour. We find that fascinating, and wonder what other applications this would be good for.

Thanks to [Gordon Shephard] for the tip.

Review: SanErYiGo SH72 Soldering Iron

January 27, 2020 by 34 Comments

When the Miniware TS100 first emerged from China nearly three years ago, it redefined what we could expect from a soldering iron at an affordable price. The lightweight DC-powered temperature controlled iron brought usable power and advanced features in a diminutive package that was easy in the hand, a combination only previously found in much more expensive soldering stations. All this plus its hackability and accessible hardware made it an immediate hit within our community, and many of us have adopted it as our iron of choice.

A surprise has been that it has attracted no serious competitors of a similar type, with the only iron mentioned in the same breath as the TS100 being Miniware’s own USB-C powered TS80. Perhaps that is about to change though, as before Christmas I noticed a new Chinese iron with a very similar outline to the TS100. Has the favourite finally generated a knock-off product? I bought one to find out. Continue reading “Review: SanErYiGo SH72 Soldering Iron” →

It’s An LED Cube, But Maybe Not Quite What You Were Expecting

January 27, 2020 by 11 Comments

LED cubes are a pleasing ornament and still something of a talking point, but now they have reached the point of being available as inexpensive kits from China. The simpler ones don’t have quite the cachet they used to. It’s still a project that can deliver a few surprises though, as [Moritz v. Sivers] shows us very well with his glass LED cube. Instead of the usual wire frame construction he’s employed a novel technique of applying each layer of WS2812 LEDs to its own glass PCB.

The PCBs are created with self-adhesive copper foil, cut out with a CNC cutter and painstakingly transferred to the glass substrate with the help of a piece of transfer paper. The LEDs are soldered on, and once each board has been tested they are mounted in the manner of a toast rack to laser cut acrylic corner pieces. There are four layers of 16 LEDs each, which might not make for the largest cube, but still makes for a respectable show. The addressable LEDs take it a level above the 3D matrix type of cube with which you might already be familiar, and the extra time required to load each value into them doesn’t seem to slow the display down.

There are a couple of videos we’ve placed below the break, one showing it in action and the other taking us through the build process. This last one should provide plenty of inspiration for anyone with an interest in creating this type of PCB on glass or any other unusual substrate. Continue reading “It’s An LED Cube, But Maybe Not Quite What You Were Expecting” →

All The Games In One Cartridge

January 27, 2020 by 16 Comments

The original Game Boy was a smash success for Nintendo and has an amazing collection of games. You might relive some childhood nostalgia by booting up a Game Boy emulator, but to really get the full experience you’ll need the battery-draining green-tinted original hardware. Thanks to modern technology you can also load all of the games at one time on the original hardware with this STM32 cartridge that fits right in.

The device can load any Game Boy game (and homebrews) and ROMs can be sent to the cartridge via USB. There were are a lot of hurdles to getting this working properly, the largest of which is power management. A normal cartridge has a battery backup for save data, but using a small coin cell to run an STM32 would kill the battery quickly. To get around that, the cartridge writes the states to nonvolatile memory and then shuts itself off, although this has the side effect of crashing the Game Boy.

The creator of this project, [Emeryth], noted that we featured a similar project from [Dhole] a few years ago, also involving an STM32. [Emeryth] decided that it would be fun to build his own project anyway, and it’s certainly an interesting take on GameBoy hacking. He also has the files for this project available on his Git Hub page.