A Watch Only A Ham Can Use

December 19, 2017 by 17 Comments

We’re not sure what to make of this one. With the variety of smartwatches and fitness trackers out there, we can’t be surprised by what sort of hardware ends up strapped to wrists these days. So a watch with an RPN calculator isn’t too much of a stretch. But adding a hex editor? And a disassembler? Oh, and while you’re at it, a transceiver for the 70cm ham band? Now that’s something you don’t see every day.

The mind boggles at not only the technical prowess needed to pull off what [Travis Goodspeed (KK4VCZ)] calls the GoodWatch, but at the thought process that led to all these features being packed into the case of a Casio calculator watch. But a lot of hacking is more about the “Why not?” than the “Why?”, and when you start looking at the feature set of the CC430F6137 microcontroller [Travis] chose, things start to make sense. The chip has a built-in RF subsystem, intended no doubt to enable wireless sensor designs. The GoodWatch20 puts the transceiver to work in the 430-MHz band, implementing a simple low-power (QRP) beacon. But the real story here is in the hacks [Travis] used to pull this off, like using flecks of Post-It notes to probe the LCD connections, and that he managed to stay within the confines of the original case.

There’s some real skill here, and it makes for an interesting read. And since the GoodWatch is powered by a coin cell, we think it’d be a great entry for our Coin Cell Challenge contest.

[via r/AmateurRadio]

Jerri Nielsen: Surviving The Last Place On Earth

December 19, 2017 by 45 Comments

There may be no place on Earth less visited by humans than the South Pole. Despite a permanent research base with buildings clustered about the pole and active scientific programs, comparatively few people have made the arduous journey there. From October to February, up to 200 people may be stationed at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station for the Antarctic summer, and tourists checking an item off their bucket lists come and go. But by March, when the sun dips below the horizon for the next six months, almost everyone has cleared out, except for a couple of dozen “winter-overs” who settle in to maintain the station, carry on research, and survive the worst weather Mother Nature brews up anywhere on the planet.

To be a winter-over means accepting the fact that whatever happens, once that last plane leaves, you’re on your own for eight months. Such isolation and self-reliance require special people, and Dr. Jerri Nielsen was one who took the challenge. But as she and the other winter-overs watched the last plane leave the Pole in 1998 and prepared for the ritual first-night screening of John Carpenter’s The Thing, she had no way of knowing what she would have to do to survive the cancer that was even then growing inside her.

Continue reading “Jerri Nielsen: Surviving The Last Place On Earth” →

A Gloriously Impractical Electromechanical Display

December 19, 2017 by 28 Comments

For this year’s office holiday party, [Gavan Fantom] wanted to do something really special. Coworkers were messing with LEDs to come up with displays and decorations, but they lack that old-school feel of mechanical displays. He wanted to create something that had retro look of moving elements, but didn’t want to just recreate the traditional flip mechanism we’ve all seen over and over.

The mechanism to drive a single “pixel”.

What [Gavan] came up with is breathtakingly impractical 8×8 display that sounds as cool as it looks. Each “pixel” in the display is a 3D printed screw mechanism rotated by a hobby servo. As the pixel is rotated in its case, it becomes progressively more visible to the observer. The opacity of the pixel can even be adjusted by varying the degree of rotation, allowing for rudimentary display of grayscale images.

Each element in the display is made up of seven 3D printed parts and two nails, which the mechanism slides on to move forward and backward. An 8×8 display needs 64 elements, which means the entire display needs 64 servos, 128 nails, and a whopping 448 3D-printed parts. Even with two printers attacking the production in parallel, the printing alone took over two weeks to complete.

The display is powered by a Raspberry Pi and three “Mini Maestro” controllers which can each handle 24 servos. [Gavan] found some sample code in Python to pass commands to the Maestro servo controllers, which he used as a template when writing his own software. The Python script opens image files, converts them to grayscale, and then maps the value of each pixel to rotation of the corresponding servo. He says the software is a little rough and that there’s still some calibration to be done, but we think the results are phenomenal so far.

Mechanical displays are a favorite of hackers, due in no small part to the awesome noises they make while in operation. While we’ve seen some very creative approaches to this type of display before, what [Gavan] has created here is certainly in a league of its own.

Continue reading “A Gloriously Impractical Electromechanical Display” →

Prepping For Power Outages

December 19, 2017 by 268 Comments

When the mains power goes, we are abruptly brought face-to-face with how many of the devices and services we take for granted rely upon it. Telephones for instance, where once they were attached to the wall by a cable, now they are a cordless device with a mains-powered base station. Your cellphone can fill that gap, but a modern smartphone with a battery life of under a day is hardly a reliable long-term solution. Meanwhile modern heating systems may still burn gas or fuel oil, but rely on an electric pump for circulation. Your kitchen is full of electrically-powered white goods, your food is preserved by an electric refrigerator, even your gas cooker if you have one will probably expect a mains supply.

When the power goes out we might say that we instantaneously travel back a couple of centuries, but the reality is that our ancestors in 1817 wouldn’t have been in the same mess we are, they had appropriate solutions to surviving a wickedly cold winter when electricity was still something of a gleam in [Michael Faraday]’s eye. In short, they were prepared in a way most of us are not. That’s a shame, so let’s take a closer look sensible modern preparedness.

Continue reading “Prepping For Power Outages” →

Stromberg Carlson Charactron Tube

December 19, 2017 by 20 Comments

Flat panel TVs have spoiled us. It used to be that a big display took up a lot of room on your desk or living room because of the depth of the CRT’s electron gun. We wonder what the designers of the charactron would think if they could see our big flat screens today. Never heard of a charactron? Check out [uniservo’s] video of one of these old character display tubes.

You might think the device is just a simple small CRT. However, it is much stranger than that. Inside the tube was a stencil that contained all the characters the device could display. A deflection coil would move an electron beam to light up a particular character. Then another coil would deflect the patterned electron beam to the desired space on the screen. In some cases, the entire set of stencils would get the beam and the first deflection coil would pick which character made it through an aperture. Either way, the tube was not just a display, but a character generator.

Continue reading “Stromberg Carlson Charactron Tube” →

DRM Workarounds Save Arcade Cabinet

December 19, 2017 by 32 Comments

DRM has become a four-letter word of late, with even media companies themselves abandoning the practice because of how ineffective it was. DRM wasn’t invented in the early 2000s for music, though. It’s been a practice on virtually everything where software is involved, including arcade cabinets. This is a problem for people who restore arcade machines, and [mon] has taken a swing at unraveling the DRM for a specific type of Konami cabinet.

The game in question, Reflec Beat, is a rhythm-based game released in 2010, and the security is pretty modern. Since the game comes with a HDD, a replacement drive can be ordered with a security dongle which acts to decrypt some of the contents on the HDD, including the game file and some other information. It’s not over yet, though. [mon] still needs to fuss with Windows DLL files and a few levels of decryption and filename obfuscation before getting the cabinet functional again.

The writeup on this cabinet is very detailed, and if you’re used to restoring older games, it’s a bit of a different animal to deal with than the embedded hardware security that older cabinets typically have. If you’ve ever wanted to own one of these more modern games, or you’re interested in security, be sure to check out the documentation on the project page. If your tastes are more Capcom and less Konami, check out an article on their security system in general, or in de-suiciding boards with failing backup batteries.

Geocache Locator Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving

December 18, 2017 by 5 Comments

Depending on how you look at things, the holidays could be seen as either an excuse to spend money or an excuse to get creative. We imagine many Hackaday readers would rather head to their workbench than the mall when it comes time for gift giving, and [Sean Hodgins] is no different. He came up with the idea of hiding geocaches around his nephew’s neighborhood and building him a locator device to find them. The locator itself is intended to grow with his nephew, allowing him to reprogram it or use its parts for something completely different down the road.

The main components tucked inside of the 3D printed case of the locator are an Adafruit Trinket, a GPS receiver, and a compass module. The Adafruit NeoPixel Ring is of course front and center, serving as the device’s display. To power the device there’s an old battery, a LiPo charger circuit, and a 5V converter.

One of the goals for the project was that it could be constructed out of things [Sean] already had laying around, so some concessions had to be made. The Trinket ended up having too few pins, the compass lacks an accelerometer, and the switches and buttons are a bit clunky for the build. But in the end it comes together well enough to get the job done, and at least he was able to clear some stuff out of his parts bins.

To allow its owner to disassemble and potentially rebuild it into something else later, no soldered joints were used in the construction of the locator. Everything is done with jumper wires, which lead to some interesting problem solving such as using a strip of pin header as a bus bar of sorts. A bit of heat shrink over the bundle holds everything together and prevents shorts.

Location-aware gadgets happen to be an extremely popular gift choice among the hacker crowd. We’ve covered everything from devices cobbled together from trash to hardware which could pass for a commercial product.

Continue reading “Geocache Locator Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving” →