Jac Goudsmit and Ralf Porankiewicz at Supercon 2022

2022 Supercon: Jac And Ralf Explore The Secrets Of The Digital Compact Cassette

March 30, 2023 by Robin Kearey 8 Comments

During the 1990s, music was almost invariably stored on CDs or cassette tapes. When the new millennium came around, physical formats became obsolete as music moved first to MP3 files, and later to network streams. But a few years before that big transition, there were several attempts at replacing the aging cassette and CD formats with something more modern. You might remember the likes of MiniDisc and Super Audio CD, but there were a few other contenders around.

The Digital Compact Cassette, or DCC, was one such format. Released by Philips in 1992 as a replacement for the analog audio cassette, it failed to gain traction in the market and disappeared before most people had even heard of it. Not so for [Jac Goudsmit] and [Ralf Porankiewicz] however, who have spent years researching all aspects of the DCC system and shared some of the results in their 2022 Supercon talk.

[Ralf] is the curator of the DCC Museum in Cathedral City, California, which owns examples of all DCC equipment ever released, as well as several devices that never made it to market. He also aims to document the history of audio recording and DCC’s contribution to it, which goes further than you might think. For example, the audio compression format used in the DCC system, called PASC, was an early version of what would later become MP3 – though most histories of audio compression ignore this fact.

[Jac], for his part, made an extensive study of all the technical features of the DCC format. He has written numerous articles about his findings, first in the DCC FAQ and later by maintaining the relevant Wikipedia articles. He is running several projects aimed at keeping the format alive, often in collaboration with the DCC Museum.

[Jac] and [Ralf] begin their talk with a brief introduction to the system and its media. DCC players were designed to be compatible with analog audio cassettes, so DCC cartridges are the same basic size, though with a different type of tape inside. Playback devices contain a complex set of magnetic heads to read either the analog signals from classic tapes, or the digital data stored on DCCs.

One unique feature of DCC is Interactive Text Transfer Service, or ITTS, which is a separate data area on the tape that can hold additional information like song lyrics or even simple animations. It was intended to be displayed on players that supported it, but no such devices were ever released. Luckily, [Jac] and [Ralf] managed to find a rare ITTS decoder system used in a tape mastering facility, and were able to reveal the contents of this “secret track”, which is present on all prerecorded tapes, for the first time.

User-recorded tapes never had any ITTS data, and differed from prerecorded ones in several other ways, too. The most obvious difference was that professionally-made tapes could be indexed by song title, while home-made ones could only jump to track numbers. [Jac] and [Ralf] are however working to enable all the professional features on home-made tapes as well, through a number of software and hardware projects.

The most basic software needed is an encoder and decoder for the PASC format, which [Jac] developed from existing MP1 sofware. But to explore some of the more obscure hardware features, he had to reverse-engineer several different DCC players. This led him to discover many interesting half-finished features: the ITTS data sector is one example, but he also found out that some players send ready-to-use VU meter data to their front panel, even though they are unable to display that information.

[Jac] was also one of the first people to buy the DCC-175 portable DCC player when it was released in 1995. This was the only DCC player ever sold with a computer interface, allowing direct transfer of digital audio between a computer and a DCC tape. The parallel port interface and its accompanying Windows 9x software are completely obsolete and unusable with modern PCs, so [Jac] is working on directly accessing the data from the DCC-175 through a custom cable. He’s making good progress: he already figured out the electrical interface and wrote some software that enables him to control the tape recorder directly.

We can’t help but be impressed by the amount of effort both [Jac] and [Ralf] have put into understanding and documenting all the intricacies of a long-obsolete audio format. Thanks to their efforts, we can still appreciate the impressive technology behind DCC – even if it never came close to replacing its analog cousin.

Continue reading “2022 Supercon: Jac And Ralf Explore The Secrets Of The Digital Compact Cassette” →

Study Hacker History, And Update It

March 18, 2023 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Looking through past hacks is a great source of inspiration. This week, we saw [Russ Maschmeyer] re-visiting a classic hack by [Jonny Lee] that made use of a Wiimote’s IR camera to fake 3D, or at least provide a compelling parallax effect that’ll fool your brain, without any expensive custom hardware.

[Lee]’s original demo was stunning, and that alone is reason to revisit it. Using the Wiimote as the webcam was inspired back in 2007, because it meant that there was no hard computer vision work to be done in estimating the viewer’s position – the camera only sees IR LEDs anyway. The tradeoff is that you had to wear two IR LEDs on your head, calibrate it just right, and that only the person with the headset on gets the illusion just right.

This is why re-visiting the past can be fruitful. As [Russ] discovered, computing power is so plentiful these days that you could do face/eye position estimation with a normal webcam easier than you could source an old Wiimote. Indeed, he’s getting the positioning so accurate that he’s worried about to which eye he’s projecting the illusion. Clearly, it’s time for a revamp.

So here’s the formula: find a brilliant old hack, and notice if it was hampered by the state of technology back when it was done. Update this using modern conveniences, and voila! You might just find that you can take the idea further, simply because you have more tools in your toolbox. Nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants.

But beware! Time isn’t sitting still for you either. As soon as you make your killer 3D vision hack, VR goggles will become cheap and ubiquitous. So get it done today, before your hack becomes inspiration for the future.

LED Displays May Get Vertical Integration

February 7, 2023 by Al Williams 36 Comments

If you zoom into the screen you are reading this on, you’d see an extremely fine pattern of red, green, and blue emitters, probably LEDs of some kind. This somewhat limits the resolution you can obtain since you have to cram three LEDs into each screen pixel. Engineers at MIT, however, want to do it differently. By growing thin LED films and sandwiching them together, they can produce 4-micron-wide LEDs that produce the full range of color, with each color part of a vertical stack of LEDs.

To put things in perspective, a standard TV LED is at least 200 microns across. Mini LEDs measure upwards of 100 microns, and micro LEDs are the smallest of all. A key factor for displays is the pitch — the distance from the center of one pixel to the center of the next. For example, the 44mm version of the Apple Watch has a pitch of around 77 microns. A Samsung Galaxy 10 is just over 46 microns. This is important because it sets the minimum size for a high-resolution screen, especially if you are building large screens (such as when you build custom video walls (see the video below for more about that).

Continue reading “LED Displays May Get Vertical Integration” →

HUD-Like Clock Is A Transparent Time Display

December 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

While we have all types of displays these days, there’s something special about those that appear to float in the air. This HUD clock from [Kiwi Bushwalker] is one such example.

The build relies on four 8×8 LED matrixes to display the four digits that make up the time, run by the MAX7219 driver chip. However, the LEDs aren’t viewed directly — that would be too simple. Instead, the matrixes shoot their light up at an angle towards a tilted piece of clear acrylic. This creates a “heads-up display” look where the numbers appear to float in the air. The clock gets accurate time from an NTP time server over WiFi, thanks to the ESP32 microcontroller that runs the show.

It’s a straightforward clock build in many ways, but we particularly like the use of the heads-up display technique. It’s almost surprising we don’t see these projects more often, for things like car dashboard displays or targeting womp rats in a T-16 landspeeder. If you’ve been whipping up your own HUD projects, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Continue reading “HUD-Like Clock Is A Transparent Time Display” →

2022 Hackaday Supercon: Joe [Kingpin] Grand Keynote And Workshops Galore

October 25, 2022 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

It’s our great pleasure to announce that Joe [Kingpin] Grand is going to be our keynote speaker at the 2022 Supercon!

If you don’t know Joe, he’s a hacker’s hacker. He’s behind the earliest DEFCON electronic badges, to which we can trace our modern #badgelife creative culture. He was at the l0pht when it became the most publicly visible hackerspace in the USA, at the dawn of what we now think of as cybersecurity. And moreover, he’s a tireless teacher of the art of hardware hacking.

Joe’s talk at DEFCON 22 about reverse engineering PCBs on a hacker budget is on our top-10 must watch playlist, and his JTAGulator debug-port enumeration device has been present at the start of countless hacking sessions. But again, it’s his enthusiasm for creating, his inspiring “what if I poke at this thing this way?” attitude, and overwhelming hacker spirit that make Joe a long-overdue speaker at Supercon! Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Supercon: Joe [Kingpin] Grand Keynote And Workshops Galore” →

Svelte VR Headsets Coming?

August 12, 2022 by Al Williams 20 Comments

According to Standford and NVidia researchers, VR adoption is slowed by the bulky headsets required. They want to offer a slim solution. A SIGGRAPH paper earlier this year lays out their plan or you can watch the video below. There’s also a second video, also below, covers some technical questions and answers.

The traditional headset has a display right in front of your eyes. Special lenses can make them skinnier, but this new method provides displays that can be a few millimeters thick. The technology seems pretty intense and appears to create a hologram at different apparent places using a laser, a geometric phase lens, and a pupil-replicating waveguide.

Continue reading “Svelte VR Headsets Coming?” →

Smart Contact Lenses Put You Up Close To The Screen

May 22, 2022 by Al Williams 45 Comments

Google Glass didn’t take off as expected, but — be honest — do you really want to walk around with that hardware on your head? The BBC recently covered Mojo, a company developing smart contact lenses that not only correct vision but can show a display. You can see a video from CNET on the technology below.

The lenses have microLED displays, smart sensors, and solid-state batteries similar to those found in pacemakers. The company claims to have a “feature-complete prototype” and are going to start testing, according to the BBC article. We imagine you can’t get much of a battery crammed into a contact lens, but presumably, that’s one of the things that makes it so difficult to develop this sort of tech.

The article mentions other smart contacts under development, too, including a University of Surrey lens that can monitor eye health using various sensors integrated into the lens. You have to wonder how this would be in real life. Presumably, the display turns off and you see nothing, but it is annoying enough having your phone beep constantly without getting messages across your field of vision all the time.

It seems like this is a technology that will come, of course. If not this time, then sometime in the future. While we usually think the hacker community should lead the way, we aren’t sure we want to hack on something that touches people’s eyeballs. Not everyone can say that, though. For us, we’ll stick with headsets.

Continue reading “Smart Contact Lenses Put You Up Close To The Screen” →