Thanks For The Great Comments!

June 22, 2024 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

Every once in a while, there’s a Hackaday article where the comments are hands-down the best part of a post. This happened this week with Al Williams’ Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?. I guess it’s not so surprising that the comments were full of awesome answers – it was an “Ask Hackaday” after all. But you all delivered!

A technique that I had never considered came up a few times: instead of engraving the front of an opaque panel, like one made of aluminum or something, instead if you’re able to make the panel out of acrylic, you can paint the back side, laser or engrave into it, and then paint over with a contrast color. Very clever!

Simply printing the panel out onto paper and laminating it got a number of votes, and for those who are 3D printing the enclosure anyway, simply embossing the letters into the surface had a number of fans. The trick here is in getting some contrast into the letters, and most suggested changing filament. All I know is that I’ve tried to do it by painting the insides of the letters white, and it’s too fiddly for me.

But my absolute favorite enclosure design technique got mentioned a number of times: cardboard-aided design. Certainly for simple or disposable projects, there’s nothing faster than just cutting up some cardboard and taping it into the box of your desires. I’ll often do this to get the sizes and locations of components right – it’s only really a temporary solution. Although some folks have had success with treating the cardboard with a glue wash, paint, or simply wrapping it in packing tape to make it significantly more robust. Myself, if it ends up being a long-term project, I’ll usually transfer the cardboard design to 3DP or cut out thin plywood.

I got sidetracked here, though. What I really wanted to say was “thanks!” to everyone who submitted their awesome comments to Al’s article. We’ve had some truly hateful folks filling the comment section with trash lately, and I’d almost given up hope. But then along comes an article like this and restores my faith. Thanks, Hackaday!

Thumb Nuts For Not A Lot

June 22, 2024 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Sometimes it’s the most straightforward of hacks which are also the most satisfying, and so it is that we’d like to draw your attention to [mikeandmertle]’s PVC thumb nuts. They provide a cheap an easy to make way to create thumb-tightenable nuts for your projects.

Starting with a PVC sheet, a series of discs can be cut from it with a hole saw. The hole in the centre of the disc is chosen such that it’s a bit smaller than the required nut, so that it can be pressed into the space with a bolt and a washer. Then a second PVC disc is glued over one side of the first before being sanded to a regular shape, resulting in a captive nut at the centre of a finger-sized and easily turnable handle.

We like this project, and we think that quite a few of you will too. We wonder how much torque it will take, but we’re guessing that a threaded insert could easily be substituted for the nut in more demanding applications. And of course, for more demanding applications you could always try knurling.

Learning Morse Code With A DIY Trainer

June 22, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Morse code, often referred to as continuous wave (CW) in radio circles, has been gradually falling out of use for a long time now. At least in the United States, ham radio licensees don’t have to learn it anymore, and the US Coast Guard stopped using it even for emergencies in 1999. It does have few niche use cases, though, as it requires an extremely narrow bandwidth and a low amount of power to get a signal out and a human operator can usually distinguish it even if the signal is very close to the noise floor. So if you want to try and learn it, you might want to try something like this Morse trainer from [mircemk].

While learning CW can be quite tedious, as [mircemk] puts it, it’s actually fairly easy for a computer to understand and translate so not a lot of specialized equipment is needed. This build is based around the Arduino Nano which is more than up for the job. It can accept input from any audio source, allowing it to translate radio transmissions in real time, and can also be connected to a paddle or key to be used as a trainer for learning the code. It’s also able to count the words-per-minute rate of whatever it hears and display it on a small LCD at the front of the unit which also handles displaying the translations of the Morse code.

If you need a trainer that’s more compact for on-the-go CW, though, take a look at this wearable Morse code device based on the M5StickC Plus instead.

Continue reading “Learning Morse Code With A DIY Trainer” →

Vintage Hacks For Dot Matrix Printers In China

June 21, 2024 by Al Williams 12 Comments

In an excerpt from his book The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age, [Thomas Mullaney] explains how 1980s computer tech — at least the stuff that was developed in the West — was stubbornly rooted in the Latin alphabet. After all, ASCII was king, and with 60,000 symbols, Chinese was decidedly difficult to shoehorn into 8 bits. Unicode was years in the future so, of course, ingenious hackers did what they do best: hack!

The subject of the post is the dot matrix printer. Early printers had nine pins, which was sufficient to make Latin characters in one pass. To print Chinese, each character required at least two passes of the print head. This was slow, of course, but it was also subject to confusing variations due to ink inconsistency and registration problems. It also made the Chinese characters twice as big as English text.

Initial attempts were made to use finer pins to pack twice as many dots in the same space. But this made the pins too thin and subject to bending and breaking. Instead, some engineers would retain the two passes but move the print head just slightly lower so the second pass left dots in the gaps between the first pass dots. Obviously, the first pass would print even-numbered dots (0, 2, 4,…), and the second pass would catch the odd-numbered dots. This wasn’t faster, of course, but it did produce better-looking characters.

While international languages still sometimes pose challenges, we’ve come a long way, as you can tell from this story. Of course, Chinese isn’t the only non-Latin language computers have to worry about.

Tired With Your Robot? Why Not Eat It?

June 21, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 17 Comments

Have you ever tired of playing with your latest robot invention and wished you could just eat it? Well, that’s exactly what a team of researchers is investigating. There is a fully funded research initiative (not an April Fools’ joke, as far as we know) delving into the possibilities of edible electronics and mechanical systems used in robotics. The team, led by EPFL in Switzerland, combines food process engineering, printed and molecular electronics, and soft robotics to create fully functional and practical robots that can be consumed at the end of their lifespan. While the concept of food-based robots may seem unusual, the potential applications in medicine and reducing waste during food delivery are significant driving factors behind this idea.

The Robofood project (some articles are paywalled!) has clearly made some inroads into the many components needed. Take, for example, batteries. Normally, ingesting a battery would result in a trip to the emergency room, but an edible battery can be made from an anode of riboflavin (found in almonds and egg whites) and a cathode of quercetin, as we covered a while ago. The team proposed another battery using activated charcoal (AC) electrodes on a gelatin substrate. Water is split into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen by applying a voltage to the structure. These gasses adsorb into the AC surface and later recombine back into the water, providing a usable one-volt output for ten minutes with a similar charge time. This simple structure is reusable and, once expired, dissolves harmlessly in (simulated) gastric fluid in twenty minutes. Such a device could potentially power a GI-tract exploratory robot or other sensor devices.

But what use is power without control? (as some car tyre advert once said) Microfluidic control circuits can be created using a stack of edible materials, primarily oleogels, like ethyl cellulose, mixed with an organic oil such as olive oil. A microfluidic NOT gate combines a pressure-controlled switch with a fluid resistor as the ‘pull-up’. The switch has a horizontal flow channel with a blockage that is cleared when a control pressure is applied. As every electronic engineer knows, once you have a controlled switch and a resistor, you can build NOT gates and all the other logic functions, flip-flops, and memories. Although they are very slow, the control components are importantly edible.

Edible electronics don’t feature here often, but we did dig up this simple edible chocolate bunny that screams when you bite it. Who wouldn’t want one of those?

Build Your Own Tape Recorder/Player

June 21, 2024 by Al Williams 14 Comments

If you want to read something from magnetic tape, you need a tape head, right? Or you could do like [Igor Brichkov] and make your own. It looks surprisingly simple. He used a washer with a small slot cut in it and a coil of wire.

The first experiment, in the first video below, is using a commercial tape head connected to a preamp. Music playing “through” the homemade head is readable by the commercial tape reader. This is a prelude to creating an entire tape deck using the head, which you can see in the second video below.

Continue reading “Build Your Own Tape Recorder/Player” →

Tiny Tapeout 4: A PWM Clone Of Covox Speech Thing

June 21, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 4 Comments

Tiny Tapout is an interesting project, leveraging the power of cloud computing and collaborative purchasing to make the mysterious art of IC design more accessible for hardware hackers. [Yeo Kheng Meng] is one such hacker, and they have produced their very first custom IC for use with their retrocomputing efforts. As they lament, they left it a little late for the shuttle run submission deadline, so they came up with a very simple project with the equivalent behaviour of the Covox Speech Thing, which is just a basic R-2R ladder DAC hanging from a PC parallel port.

The computed gate-level routing of the ASIC layout

The plan was to capture an 8-bit input bus and compare it against a free-running counter. If the input value is larger than the counter, the output goes high; otherwise, it goes low. This produces a PWM waveform representing the input value. Following the digital output with an RC low-pass filter will generate an analogue representation. It’s all very simple stuff. A few details to contend with are specific to Tiny Tapout, such as taking note of the enable and global resets. These are passed down from the chip-level wrapper to indicate when your design has control of the physical IOs and is selected for operation. [Yeo] noticed that the GitHub post-synthesis simulation failed due to not taking note of the reset condition and initialising those pesky flip-flops.

After throwing the design down onto a Mimas A7 Artix 7 FPGA board for a quick test, data sent from a parallel port-connected PC popped out as a PWM waveform as expected, and some test audio could be played. Whilst it may be true that you don’t have to prototype on an FPGA, and some would argue that it’s a lot of extra effort for many cases, without a good quality graphical simulation and robust testbench, you’re practically working blind. And that’s not how working chips get made.

If you want to read into Tiny Tapeout some more, then we’ve a quick guide for that. Or, perhaps hear it direct from the team instead?

Continue reading “Tiny Tapeout 4: A PWM Clone Of Covox Speech Thing” →