When starting a new electronics project today, one of the first things that we tend to do is pick the integrated circuits that make up the core of the design. This can be anything from a microcontroller and various controller ICs to a sprinkling of MOSFETs, opamps, and possibly some 7400- or 4000-series logic ICs to tie things together. Yet it hasn’t been that long since this level of high integration and miniaturization was firmly in the realm of science-fiction, with even NORBIT modules seeming futuristic.
Starting with the construction of the first point-contact transistor in 1947 and the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948 at Bell Labs, the electronics world would soon see the beginning of its biggest transformation to that point. Yet due to the interesting geopolitical circumstances of the 20th century, this led to a fascinating situation of parallel development, blatant copying of designs, and one of the most fascinating stories in technology history on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Continue reading “TTL And CMOS Logic ICs: The Building Blocks Of A Revolution”→
Following the monumental emissions-cheating scandal at VW, further horrible revelations demonstrate just how corrupt the modern automotive industry has become: many cars make fake engine noise. And we’re not just talking about those darn sneaky Priuses.
Ford, BMWs, Porsche, and yes, Volkswagen are all doing it, to different degrees. Some of the systems, like the one in the BMW M5, play engine sounds at low volumes through the stereo system. As you’d expect from a BMW, it’s an overly-technological solution: they have built essentially a BMW engine-sound synthesizer that responds to the tachometer and gas pedal data from the car’s data bus. They also let you turn off the “acoustic experience”.
For the last three and a half Billion years, evolution has built sensors. The nerves on your fingertips are just as good as any electronic touch sensor, a retina is able to detect a single photon, and the human ear is more finely tuned than the best microphones.
At the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference, Dr. Christal Gordon, educator and engineer, talked about the hardware behind our wetware. While AI researchers are still wondering if they have to define consciousness, there’s still a lot that medicine, psychology, and neuroscience can teach us about building better hardware with simple tools, just like nature has been doing for Billions of years.
If you stand outside on a clear night, can you see the Milky Way? If you live too close to a conurbation the chances are all you’ll see are a few of the brighter stars, the full picture is only seen by those who live in isolated places. The problem is light pollution, scattered light from street lighting and other sources hiding the stars.
The view of the Milky Way is a good analogy for the state of the radio spectrum. If you turn on a radio receiver and tune to a spot between stations, you’ll find a huge amount more noise in areas of human habitation than you will if you do the same thing in the middle of the countryside. The RF noise emitted by a significant amount of cheaper modern electronics is blanketing the airwaves and is in danger of rendering some frequencies unusable.
Can these logos really be trusted? By Moppet65535 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia CommonsIf you have ever designed a piece of electronics to comply with regulations for sale you might now point out that the requirements for RF interference imposed by codes from the FCC, CE mark etc. are very stringent, and therefore this should not be a significant problem. The unfortunate truth is though that a huge amount of equipment is finding its way into the hands of consumers which may bear an FCC logo or a CE mark but which has plainly had its bill-of-materials cost cut to the point at which its compliance with those rules is only notional. Next to the computer on which this is being written for example is a digital TV box from a well-known online retailer which has all the appropriate marks, but blankets tens of megahertz of spectrum with RF when it is in operation. It’s not faulty but badly designed, and if you pause to imagine hundreds or thousands of such devices across your city you may begin to see the scale of the problem.
We hope that quantifying the scale of the RF noise problem will result in some action to reduce its ill-effects. It is also to be hoped though that the response will not be an ever-tighter set of regulations but greater enforcement of those that already exist. It has become too easy to make, import, or sell equipment made with scant regard to RF emissions, and simply making the requirements tougher for those designers who make the effort to comply will not change anything.
This is the first time we’ve raised the problem of the ever-rising radio noise floor here at Hackaday. We have covered a possible solution though, if stray RF is really getting to you perhaps you’d like to move to the National Radio Quiet Zone.
I collect slide rules. You probably know a slide rule is a mechanical calculator of sorts. They usually look like a ruler (hence the name) and have a sliding part (hence the name) and by using logarithms you can multiply and divide easily by doing number line addition and subtraction (among other things).
It is easy to dismiss old technology like that out of hand as being antiquated, but mechanical computing may be making a comeback. It may seem ancient, but mechanical adding machines, cash registers, and even weapon control computers were all mechanical devices a few decades ago and there were some pretty sophisticated techniques developed to make them work. Perhaps the most sophisticated of all was Babbage’s difference engine, even though he didn’t have the technology to make one that actually functioned (the Computer History Museum did though; you should see it operating in person, but this is good too).
As promised earlier, the Near Future Laboratory has published an overview of the Logicport Logic Analyzer. They’re using the Playstation 2 analysis as an example. The Logicport uses “interpreters” to define protocols. It has I2C/TWI, SPI, RS232, and CAN 2.0A/2.0B, but you can build your own interpreter based on these. You can specify bit order and the format you want the data in. Slave interpreters can be used for specific tasks: with the PS2 they were used to just show the fifth byte, which is the actual button press.
“Triggers” are used to signal specific activity. On the PS2, one was attached to the falling signal on the slave select line. This event means the master is about to start sending data.
The final area worth exploring is “measurements”. These can be frequency or arbitrary time intervals between events. The Logicport has multiple ground connections to eliminate noise from the signal and you’ll have to play with sample rate and logic level to get things running smooth. It’s nice to see how-tos written from the perspective of someone just getting started with the tool.
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams sat down to compare notes on their favorite Hackaday posts of the week. You can listen in on this week’s podcast. The guys talked about the latest Hackaday contest and plans for Hackaday Europe. Plus, there’s a what’s that sound to try. Your guess can’t be worse than Al’s, so take a shot. You could win a limited-edition T-shirt.
In technical articles, Elliot spent the week reading about brushless motor design, twin-t oscillators, and a truly wondrous hack to reverse map a Nintendo Switch PCB. Al was more nostalgic, looking at the 555 and an old Radio Shack kit renewed. He also talked about a method to use SQL to retrieve information from Web APIs.
Quick hacks were a decided mix with everything from homemade potentiometers to waterproof 3D printing. Finally, the guys talked about Hackaday originals. Why don’t we teach teens to drive with simulators? And why would you want to run CP/M — the decades-old operating system — under Linux?
Download the file suitable for listening, burning on CDs, or pressing on vinyl.
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