Supercon Add-On Add-Ons in production.

2024 SAO Contest: We’ve Got SAOs For Your SAOs

October 1, 2024 by 9 Comments

So, we heard you like SAOs. How about some SAOs for your SAO? That’s exactly what’s going on here with [davedarko]’s SAOAO — introducing the Supercon Add-On Add-On standard, which is inspired by another minibadge standard by [lukejenkins]. At most, an SAOAO is 19×19 mm and features a 1.27 mm 3-pin header. As [davedarko] says, no pressure to do I²C, just bring the vibes.

All SAOAOs use the Yo Dawg SAO baseplate, which has room for three SAOAOs. Because six pins is often too many to make a few LEDs light up, the SAOAO standard uses a mere three pins. Not only are SAOAOs easier to route, the pins can’t even be mirrored accidentally because VCC is in the middle, and both outside pins are grounds.

Want to get your hands on some of these bad boys? [davedarko] is bringing 100 Yo Dawg SAO baseplates and 200 SAOAOs to Supercon. But if you want to make your own, you are more than welcome to do so.

2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Contest

Supercon 2023: Thea Flowers Renders KiCad Projects On The Web

October 1, 2024 by 8 Comments

Last year’s Supercon, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Thea [Stargirl] Flowers, who told us about her KiCanvas project, with its trials, its tribulations, and its triumphs. KiCanvas brings interactive display of KiCad boards and schematics into your browser, letting you embed your PCB’s information right into your blog post or online documentation.

Give the KiCanvas plugin a URL to your KiCad file, and it will render your file in the browser, fully on the fly. There’s no .jpg to update and re-upload, no jobs to re-run each time you find a mistake and update your board – your files are always up to date, and your audience is always able to check it out without launching KiCad.

Images are an intuitive representation for schematics and PCB files, but they’re letting hackers down massively. Thea’s KiCanvas project is about making our KiCad projects all that more accessible to newcomers, and it’s succeeded – nowadays, you can encounter KiCanvas schematic embeds in the wild on various hackers’ blogs. The Typescript code didn’t write itself, and neither was it easy – she’s brought a fair few war stories to the DesignLab stage.

A hacker’s passion to share can move mountains. Thea’s task was a formidable one, too – KiCad is a monumental project with a decades-long history. There are quite respectable reasons for someone to move this particular mountain – helping you share your projects quickly but extensively, and letting people learn about your projects without breaking a sweat.

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HP WebOS TouchPad Gets With The USB-C Times

October 1, 2024 by 9 Comments

Despite HP shuttering their WebOS project some time ago, the operating system has kept a dedicated following. One device in particular, the HP TouchPad, was released just a month before webOS went under and is still a favorite among hackers — giving the device the kind of love that HP never could. [Alan Morford] from the pivotCE blog shares the kind of hack that helps this device exist in a modern-day world: a USB-C upgrade for charging and data transfer.

The inline micro USB port used is a perfect fit for a USB-C upgrade, with only small amounts of PCB and case cutting required. Just make sure to get a breakout that has the appropriate 5.1 K resistors onboard, and follow [Alan]’s tutorial closely. He shows all the points you need to tap to let your TouchPad charge and transfer data to your computer, whether for firmware flashing or for daily use.

This hack doesn’t preserve the USB-OTG feature, but that’s fixable with a single WUSB3801. Apart from that, this mod is perfect for keeping your webOS tablet alive and kicking in today’s increasingly USB-C dominated world. Once you’ve done it, you might want to take care of your PlayStation 4 controllers and Arduino Uno boards, too.

Java Ring: One Wearable To Rule All Authentications

October 1, 2024 by 30 Comments

Today, you likely often authenticate or pay for things with a tap, either using a chip in your card, or with your phone, or maybe even with your watch or a Yubikey. Now, imagine doing all these things way back in 1998 with a single wearable device that you could shower or swim with. Sound crazy?

These types of transactions and authentications were more than possible then. In fact, the Java ring and its iButton brethren were poised to take over all kinds of informational handshakes, from unlocking doors and computers to paying for things, sharing medical records, making coffee according to preference, and much more. So, what happened?

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The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines

October 1, 2024 by 17 Comments

Drones that charge right on the power lines they inspect is a promising concept, but comes with plenty of challenges. The Drone Infrastructure Inspection and Interaction (Diii) Group of the University of South Denmark is tackling these challenges head-on.

The gripper for these drones may seem fairly straightforward, but it needs to inductively charge, grip, and detach reliably while remaining simple and lightweight. To attach to a power line, the drone pushes against it, triggering a cord to pull the gripper closed. This gripper is held closed electromagnetically using energy harvested from the power line or the drone’s battery if the line is off. Ingeniously, this means that if there’s an electronics failure, the gripper will automatically release, avoiding situations where linemen would need to rescue a stuck drone.Accurately mapping power lines in 3D space for autonomous operation presents another hurdle. The team successfully tested mmWave radar for this purpose, which proves to be a lightweight and cost-efficient alternative to solutions like LiDAR.

We briefly covered this project earlier this year when details were limited. Energy harvesting from power lines isn’t new; we’ve seen similar concepts applied in government-sanctioned spy cameras and border patrol drones. Drones are not only used for inspecting power lines but also for more adventurous tasks like clearing debris off them with fire. Continue reading “The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines” →

Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs

October 1, 2024 by 2 Comments

When it comes to making things that glow, there are two ways to stand out from the crowd. You can make something very big, or something very small. [DIY GUY Chris] has done the latter, producing a tiny LED cube that he says is the world’s smallest.

As is so often the way, the build relies on tiny WS2812B-compatible LEDs in a 1 mm x 1 mm form factor. They’re mounted on a series of teeny interlocking PCBs that come together to build a cube that’s just 8 cubic centimeters in volume. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell that lives inside the cube. Data and power signals flow around the cube via solder connections along the edges of the faces of the cube.  Running the show is an ATmega328P, the same microcontroller you’d find in an Arduino Uno. It’s responsible for sending out commands to the LEDs to create various animations.

We can’t speak to [Chris’s] claim about being the world’s smallest, but it is small. We’ve seen other builds in a similar vein, like this barely-larger D20 with a full 2400 LEDs, though. Video after the break.

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Photo of Ceefax on a CRT television

Ceefax: The Original News On Demand

September 30, 2024 by 21 Comments

Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.

We’ve talked about Ceefax in the past, including in 2022 when we explored a project bringing Ceefax back to life using a Raspberry Pi. Prior to that, we delved into its broader influence on early text-based information systems in a 2021 article.

But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the French Minitel carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen.