An Ode To The SAO

September 26, 2024 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

There are a lot of fantastic things about Hackaday Supercon, but for me personally, the highlight is always seeing the dizzying array of electronic bits and bobs that folks bring with them. If you’ve never had the chance to join us in Pasadena, it’s a bit like a hardware show-and-tell, where half the people you meet are eager to pull some homemade gadget out of their bag for an impromptu demonstration. But what’s really cool is that they’ve often made enough of said device that they can hand them out to anyone who’s interested. Put simply, it’s very easy to leave Supercon with a whole lot more stuff than when you came in with.

Most people would look at this as a benefit of attending, which of course it is. But in a way, the experience bummed me out for the first couple of years. Sure, I got to take home a literal sack of incredible hardware created by members of our community, and I’ve cherished each piece. But I never had anything to give them in return, and that didn’t quite sit right with me.

So last year I decided to be a bit more proactive and make my own Simple Add-On (SAO) in time for Supercon 2023. With a stack of these in my bag, I’d have a personalized piece of hardware to hand out that attendees could plug right into their badge and enjoy. From previous years I also knew there was something of an underground SAO market at Supercon, and that I’d find plenty of people who would be happy to swap one for their own add-ons for mine.

To say that designing, building, and distributing my first SAO was a rewarding experience would be something of an understatement. It made such an impression on me that it ended up helping to guide our brainstorming sessions for what would become the 2024 Supercon badge and the ongoing SAO Contest. Put simply, making an SAO and swapping it with other attendees adds an exciting new element to a hacker con, and you should absolutely do it.

So while you’ve still got time to get PCBs ordered, let’s take a look at some of the unique aspects of creating your own Simple Add-On.

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Labelled die of the Ramtron FM24C64 FeRAM chip. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

Inside A 1999 Ramtron Ferroelectric RAM Chip

September 26, 2024 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Structure of the Ramtron FeRAM. The image is focus-stacked for clarity. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

Although not as prevalent as Flash memory storage, ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) offers a range of benefits over the former, mostly in terms of endurance and durability, which makes it popular for a range of (niche) applications. Recently [Ken Shirriff] had a look inside a Ramtron FM24C64 FeRAM IC from 1999, to get an idea of how it works. The full die photo can be seen above, and it can store a total of 64 kilobit.

One way to think of FeRAM is as a very small version of magnetic core memory, with lead-zirconate-titanate (PZT) ferroelectric elements making up the individual bits. These PZT elements are used as ferroelectric capacitors, i.e. the ferroelectric material is the dielectric between the two plates, with a positive voltage storing a ‘1’, and vice-versa.

In this particular FeRAM chip, there are two capacitors per bit, which makes it easier to distinguish the polarization state and thus the stored value. Since the distinction between a 0 and a 1 is relatively minor, the sense amplifiers are required to boost the signal. After a read action, the stored value will have been destroyed, necessitating a write-after-read action to restore the value, all of which adds to the required logic to manage the FeRAM. Together with the complexity of integrating these PZT elements into the circuitry this makes these chips relatively hard to produce and scale down.

You can purchase FeRAM off-the-shelf and research is ongoing, but it looks to remain a cool niche technology barring any kind of major breakthrough. That said, the Sega Sonic the Hedgehog 3 cartridges which used an FeRAM chip for save data are probably quite indestructible due to this technology.

Reviving A 15-Year Old Asus EeePC With Modern MX Linux

September 25, 2024 by Maya Posch 64 Comments

It’s often said these days that computers don’t become outdated nearly as quickly as they did in the past, with even a decade-old computer still more than capable of handling daily tasks for the average person. Testing that theory, [Igor Ljubuncic] revisited the Asus eeePC which he purchased back in 2010. Although it’s not specified exactly which model it is, it features an Intel Atom N450 (1 core, 2 threads) running at 1.67 GHz, 1 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 and a 250 GB HDD, all falling into that ultra-portable, 10.1″ Netbook category.

When new, the netbook came with Windows 7 Starter Edition, which [Igor] replaced with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04, which was its own adventure, but the netbook worked well and got dragged around the world on work and leisure assignments. With increasingly bloated updates, Ubuntu got replaced by MX Linux 18, which improved matters, but with the little CPU struggling more and more, [Igor] retired the netbook in 2019. That is, until reviving it recently.

Upon booting, the CMOS battery was of course empty, but the system happily continued booting into MX Linux. The Debian update repositories were of course gone, but changing these to the archive version allowed for some (very old) updates. This raised the question of whether modern Linux would even run on this ancient Atom CPU, the answer of which turned out to be a resounding ‘yes’, as MX Linux still offers 32-bit builds of its most recent releases. A 15 minute upgrade process later, and a 2 minute boot later, the system was running a Linux 6.1 kernel with Xfce desktop.

As for the performance, it’s rather what you expect, with video playback topping out at 480p (on the 1024×600 display) and applications like Firefox lacking the compact density mode, wasting a lot of screen space. Amazingly the original battery seems to still deliver about half the runtime it did when new. All of which is to say that yes, even a ‘low-end’ 2010-era netbook can still be a very usable system in 2024, with a modern OS.

2024 Hackaday Superconference Speakers, Round Two

September 25, 2024 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

It’s honestly amazing the range of fascinating talks we have lined up for this year’s Supercon. From art robots that burp and belch to gliders returning from near-space, from hardcore DSP to DIY PCBs, and sketching with machines, Hackaday’s Supercon is like nothing else out there.

And in case you’re already coming, you don’t have a talk slot reserved, but you’ve still got something that you want to say, please sign yourself up for a Lightning Talk! In the spirit of the Lightning, we’ll be taking submissions up to the absolute last minute, and we will fit in as many short talks as possible, but when it does fill up, we’ll be giving priority to those who got in first.

We’ve got one more speaker announce coming up, and of course our keynote speaker and the badge reveal. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. So without further ado, here is our next round of stellar speakers!

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Tech In Plain Sight: Zipper Bags

September 25, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

You probably think of them as “Ziploc” bags, but, technically, the generic term is zipper bag. Everything from electronic components to coffee beans arrive in them. But they weren’t always everywhere, and it took a while for them to find their niche.

A Dane named Borge Madsen was actually trying to create a new kind of zipper for clothes in the 1950s and had several patents on the technology. The Madsen zipper consisted of two interlocking pieces of plastic and a tab to press them together. Unfortunately, the didn’t work very well for clothing.

A Romanian immigrant named Max Ausnit bought the rights to the patent and formed Flexigrip Inc. He used the zippers on flat vinyl pencil cases and similar items. However, these still had the little plastic tab that operated like a zipper pull. While you occasionally see these in certain applications, they aren’t what you think of when you think of zipper bags.

Zipping

Ausnit’s son, Steven, figured out how to remove the tab. That made the bags more robust, a little handier to use, and it also rendered them less expensive to produce. Even so, cost was a barrier because the way they were made was to heat seal the zipper portion to the bags.

That changed in the 1960s when the Ausnits learned of a Japanese company, Seisan Nippon Sha, that had a process to integrate the bags and zippers in one step which slashed the production cost in half. Flexigrip acquired the rights in the United States and created a new company, Minigrip, to promote this type of bag.

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Learn GPU Programming With Simple Puzzles

September 25, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

Have you wanted to get into GPU programming with CUDA but found the usual textbooks and guides a bit too intense? Well, help is at hand in the form of a series of increasingly difficult programming ‘puzzles’ created by [Sasha Rush]. The first part of the simplification is to utilise the excellent NUMBA python JIT compiler to allow easy-to-understand code to be deployed as GPU machine code. Working on these puzzles is even easier if you use this linked Google Colab as your programming environment, launching you straight into a Jupyter notebook with the puzzles laid out. You can use your own GPU if you have one, but that’s not detailed.

The puzzles start, assuming you know nothing at all about GPU programming, which is totally the case for some of us! What’s really nice is the way the result of the program operation is displayed, showing graphically how data are read and written to the input and output arrays you’re working with. Each essential concept for CUDA programming is identified one at a time with a real programming example, making it a breeze to follow along. Just make sure you don’t watch the video below all the way through the first time, as in it [Sasha] explains all the solutions!

Confused about why you’d want to do this? Then perhaps check out our guide to CUDA first. We know what you’re thinking: how do we use non-nVIDIA hardware? Well, there’s SCALE for that! Finally, once you understand CUDA, why not have a play with WebGPU?

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A Space Walk Through ISS

September 24, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 14 Comments

The International Space Station (ISS) might not be breaking news, but this February, National Geographic released a documentary that dives into the station’s intricate engineering. It’s a solid reminder of what human ingenuity can achieve when you put a team of engineers, scientists, and astronauts together. While the ISS is no longer a new toy in space, for hackers and tinkerers, it’s still one of the coolest and most ambitious projects ever. And if you’re like us—always looking for fresh inspiration—you’ll want to check this one out.

The ISS is a masterpiece, built piece by piece in space, because why make things easy? With 16 pressurized modules, it’s got everything needed to keep humans alive and working in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Add in the $150 billion price tag (yes, billion), and it’s officially the most expensive thing humans have ever built. What makes it especially interesting to us hackers is its life support systems—recycling water, generating oxygen, and running on solar power. That’s the kind of closed-loop system we love to experiment with down here on Earth. Imagine the implications for long-term sustainability!

But it’s not just a survival bunker in space. It’s also a global science lab. The ISS gives researchers the chance to run experiments that could never happen under Earth’s gravity—everything from technology advancements to health experiments. Plus, it’s our testing ground for future missions to Mars. If you’re fascinated by the idea of hacking complex systems, or just appreciate a good build, the ISS is a dream project.

Catch the documentary and dive into the world of space-grade hacking. The ISS may be orbiting out of sight, but for those of us looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible, it’s still full of inspiration.

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