PCMCIA Flash Card Gives Up Its Secrets Thanks To Retro Gear

July 18, 2023 by 27 Comments

There are two ways to recover data from an obsolete storage medium. One way is to pull out all the tools in the hacker’s kit — with logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and bit-banged software in a desperate attempt to reverse engineer the original protocol. The other way is to have a really, really deep junk bin that just happens to contain exactly the right pieces that would have been used decades ago.

For recovering data from a 25-year-old PCMCIA memory card, [Dave] from Vintage Apparatus chose the latter method. But to be fair, characterizing the stash of gear he had to select from as a “junk bin” is pretty insulting. It’s more like a museum of retro technology, which just so happened to hold  Toshiba Libretto, a subnotebook computer hailing from the late 1990s. The machine sports a pair of PCMCIA slots and was just the thing to read the data from the old 32 MB SanDisk flash card, which once lived in a backpack-mounted GPS system for surveyors.

If this hack sounds as easy as plugging things into an old computer, you’d be right — if you just happen to have a stack of floppies containing the Windows 98 drivers for said things. So [Dave]’s task became a game of finding the right combination of cards that already had the drivers installed and would provide the connectivity needed to get the data off the flash card. Between a suspiciously crunchy-sounding floppy drive and an Ethernet card dongle badly in need of some contact cleaner, cobbling together the right hardware was a bit of a chore. After that, a lot of the hack was [Dave] just remembering how we used to do things back in the day, with the eventual solution being transferring over the files to an FTP server on a Raspberry Pi.

The video below tells the whole saga, but the real treat might just be the Vintage Apparatus collection of gear. Incidentally, we really like [Dave]’s idea for storing associated bits and bobs.

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Crab Shells Massively Improve Zinc-Ion Batteries

July 18, 2023 by 32 Comments

In the fast-moving world of battery research, scientists are constantly on the lookout for innovative materials with the right properties to help improve energy storage. Meanwhile, batteries are in greater demand than ever as production of EVs and renewable energy projects ramp up to new heights.

In the hunt for new and better battery materials, scientists found an unexpected hero: crab shells.Researchers at the University of Maryland have uncovered a remarkable breakthrough by exploring their use in battery production.

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Tesla Door Phone Decoded (Not That Tesla)

July 18, 2023 by 6 Comments

[Danman] has digital door phones manufactured by Tesla — or at least, a Tesla, as they’re not to be confused with the carmaker, though. The problem is if someone comes to the door when no one’s home, there’s no remote indicator. The answer? Reverse engineer the protocol and fix it.

A quick dump on a storage scope showed the data clearly, but it wasn’t obvious what protocol it was using. After a little analysis, it proved the datastream used 4 PWM pulses as symbols with three symbols: one, zero, and stuffing sequence.

Once you can read the bits, it is easy to determine that each frame consists of a 16-bit destination and source address, along with a command byte and a checksum byte. Each station can have an ID from 000 to 999 although you can only dial up to number 323. Some nodes are special, and there are ways to address particular units.

Connecting to the hardware took a transformer for isolation. Honestly, unless you have this exact hardware, this isn’t likely to be something you can directly use. However, it is a great example of how you can figure out a specialized device and bend it to your will.

We love reverse engineering projects. In some cases, it is easier if you have a CT scan.

Do You Have An Old Hitachi Computer? You Might Just Have BeOS Without Realizing It

July 18, 2023 by 43 Comments

There was a moment in the years spanning the move from 16-bit platforms to 32-bit, during which it looked for a moment as though there might be a few new operating system contenders making a mark on the desktop.

A 1990s Hitachi Flora Prius PC, from the Hitachi press release.
Does this PC look familiar to you?

This was the period that gave rise to the “Year of Linux on the desktop” meme as the open source contender just wasn’t ready for the general public, but we all know what happened. The various commercial contenders slipped by the wayside or survived by the skin of their teeth as enthusiast or niche platforms, while Microsoft Windows steamrollered all before it except for the walled garden of Apple users.

One of the players was BeOS, a powerful multimedia OS that might have had a chance if it could have persuaded OEMs to ship it on some PCs, but in that endeavour it had no luck. Or so everyone thought, but [Thom Holwerda] reports on the fascinating tale of a PC that shipped with BeOS, but not in a way anyone could easily use.

It seems that even being seen to talk to the folks from Be was enough to ensure an OEM received a visit from Microsoft goons sales representatives so even though the rival OS was offered for free it received no PC takers. This was the received opinion, but it turns out that the one manufacturer which did include BeOS was Hitachi, in Japan. Their Flora Prius PC was a Pentium II equipped white box typical of late-90s multimedia hardware, and though it booted into Windows it also had a BeOS installation on board that probably very few owners would have even realised existed. It seems Hitachi did the deal with Be but didn’t install the required bootloader to use the Be partition. A Flora Prius owner could run the software if they were prepared to follow some instructions on the Be website and download a floppy image, but it seems very few did so.

All this leads to a fascinating challenge for today’s BeOS enthusiasts, to locate a surviving Flora Prius PC if any can still be found with an intact BeOS partition, and activate the only factory PC BeOS install. We know we have readers in Japan who almost certainly have an eye for an old computer, can any of you help them in this quest?

We’ve touched on BeOS in the past on its own BeBox platform and the elusive Sony eVilla internet appliance.

Practical Inductors In LTSpice

July 18, 2023 by 8 Comments

LTSpice and the underlying Spice engine does a great job of simulating ideal components. But it is also capable — if you know how — of handling models of real-world devices. Inductors, for example, are one of the most imperfect components. Their constituent wire has resistance, and there is parasitic capacitance between the windings. If there is a core, it also will have many imperfections and losses. [Sam Ben-Yaakov] has a lecture about modeling real inductors in LTSpice, and he covers how you can capture some of these imperfections in the video below.

There is a bit of math in the presentation, but we liked that it relates back to datasheets for actual components. Being able to understand what the parameters on a datasheet mean is crucial, and if you ever wondered what some of these entries mean, you’ll get a lot from this video.

The main feature of the model is the flux equation. The tanh (hyperbolic tangent) function is similar to the curve you want for the flux equation, so it plays a major part. Of course, there are other parts of the inductor you may have to model, too, but this is one of the most difficult parts.

You can also model transformers using LTSpice. You can also create custom components.

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Building A MiniPET Is Better With Friends

July 17, 2023 by 4 Comments

[Taylor and Amy] love taking on retro computer projects. This week they’re building a MiniPET from Tynemouth and The Future is 8 Bit.  It’s a pretty awesome kit which sadly isn’t available anymore. Taylor bought one of the last ones as part of a charity sale at the 2023 Vintage Computer Festival Southwest.

If you haven’t seen their YouTube channel yet, check it out! The two have been best friends since 1984. Their channel has just the right mix of education and comedy, with pacing fast enough to keep things interesting. It’s really refreshing to see two people enjoying a project together.

The MiniPET is of course a reproduction of the hardware in the Commodore PET, the machine which predated the VIC-20 and of course the Commodore 64. The kit starts with installing a few discrete parts — resistors,  capacitors, and diodes.  Then come the IC sockets. [Taylor and Amy] ran into a bit of trouble when it came time to install the chips. While installing the 40-pin 65C21 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA), one pin bent under the socket. [Taylor] popped the chip back out, and replaced it — which resulted in 3 bent pins!

Anyone who’s installed new DIP parts has been through this. The pins are always bent out a bit from the factory. The old “Bend it in using a table” method usually works — but if you want perfect pins, try a pin straightener. These versatile tools can even be 3D printed.

Once the pin problems are solved, it’s time to power up the kit and see if it will work.  That’s when we get to see that magic moment when a project first comes to life. Check out the video – you’ll see what we mean.

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This RISC-V CPU Games In Rust From Inside The Game

July 17, 2023 by 13 Comments

[Xander Naumenko] has created something truly impressive — a working RISC-V CPU completely contained in a Terraria world. And then for added fun, he wrote the game of pong, playable in real time, from within the game of Terraria. It’s all based on the in-game wiring system, combined with a bit of a hack that uses the faulty lamp mechanic to create a very odd AND gate. In Terraria, the existing logic gates have timing issues that make them a no-go for complicated projects like this one. The faulty lamp is intended to do randomized outputs, by stacking multiple inputs to get a weighted output when a clock signal is applied. The hack is to simply give this device a single input, turning it into a clocked IF gate. Two of them together in series makes a clocked AND gate, and two in parallel make a clocked OR gate.

Why would [Xander] embark on this legendary endeavor? Apparently after over eight thousand hours clocked in game, one gets a bored of killing slimes and building NPC houses. And playing with the game’s wiring system turned on a metaphorical lightbulb, that the system could be used to build interesting systems. A prototype CPU, with a completely custom instruction set came next, and was powerful enough to compute Fibonacci. But that obviously wasn’t enough. Come back after the break for the rest of the story and the impressive video demonstration.

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