Smoothly Modernized Nixie Display

January 14, 2017 by James Hobson 37 Comments

The renaissance of Nixie tube popularity amid the nostalgia surrounding older tech has made them almost prohibitively expensive for individual projects. Seeing an opportunity to modernize the beloved devices, [Connor Nishijima] has unleashed this new, LED edge-lit display that he has dubbed Lixie.

We featured his prototype a few years ago. That design used dots to make up each character but this upgrade smooths that out with sleek lines and a look one would almost expect from a professional device — or at the very least something you’d see in a cyberpunk near-future. The color-changing Neopixel LEDs — moderated by a cleverly designed filter — allow for customization to your heart’s content, and the laser-cut acrylic panes allow for larger displays to be produced with relative ease.

The image above (and the video below) show two revisions of the most recent Lixie prototypes. There is a huge improvement on the right, as the digits are now outlines instead of single strokes and engraved instead of cut completely through the acrylic. The difference if phenomenal, and in our opinion move the “back to the drawing board” effect to “ready for primetime”. [Connor] and his team are working on just that, with a Tindie preorder in place for the first production-ready digits to roll off their line.

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Vintage IBM Daisywheel Prints Again After Reverse Engineering

January 14, 2017 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Just before the dawn of the PC era, IBM typewriters reached their technical zenith with the Wheelwriter line. A daisy-wheel printer with interchangeable print heads, memory features, and the beginnings of word processing capabilities, the Wheelwriters never got much time to shine before they were eclipsed by PCs. Wheelwriters are available dirt cheap now, and like many IBM products are very hackable, as shown by this simple Arduino interface to make a Wheelwriter into a printer.

[Chris Gregg] likes playing with typewriters – he even got an old Smith Corona to play [Leroy Anderson]’s The Typewriter – and he’s gotten pretty good with these largely obsolete but lovable electromechanical relics. Interfacing a PC to the Wheelwriter could have been as simple as scrounging up an original interface card for the machine, but those are like hen’s teeth, and besides, where’s the sport in that? So [Chris] hooked a logic analyzer to the well-labeled port that would have connected to the interface card and reverse engineered the somewhat odd serial protocol by banging on keys. The interface he came up with for the Wheelwriter is pretty simple – just a Light Blue Bean Plus and a MOSFET to drive the bus high and low for the correct amount of time. The result is what amounts to an alphanumeric printer, but with a little extra code some dot-matrix graphics are possible too.

Having spent a lot of time reverse engineering serial comms, we can appreciate the amount of work this took to accomplish. Looking to do something similar but don’t have the dough for a logic analyzer? Maybe you can free up $22 and get cracking on a similarly impressive hack.

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High-Power LED + 3D Printer = Mega Flashlight

January 14, 2017 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you remember old computer magazines (or browse them today), you’ll see that back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you weren’t always sure what you were going to do with a computer. Games were a staple, but they weren’t very exciting. Visionaries talked about storing recipes, writing Christmas letters (to send via snail mail), and keeping home inventories. You probably don’t do any of those things with your computer today, unless you count e-mailing instead of sending Christmas cards. We think sometimes 3D printers fall into that category today. Sure, you want one. But what are you really going to do with it? Print keychains?

That’s why we always like seeing practical designs for 3D printed items. Like this 100W flashlight. The electronics part of the build is simple enough: a 100W LED module, an off-the-shelf driver board, plus an old PC cooler and some batteries. But the 3D printed parts makes it all come together and it looks great!

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Foldable Dymaxion Globe

January 14, 2017 by Anool Mahidharia 4 Comments

Some time back, we posted about [Gavin]’s laser-cut/3D printed Dymaxion Globe — if you haven’t read about it yet, you should check it out. [noniq] loved the idea, and like a true hacker, built and shared an improved Foldable Dymaxion Globe. It can snap together to form an icosahedron globe, or it can be laid flat to form a map.

Like the original, [noniq]’s version is laser cut and engraved, and uses some 3D printed parts. But it does away with the fasteners (that’s 60 pairs of nuts and bolts), and instead uses neodymium magnets to make all the triangle pieces snap together to form the icosahedron globe. The hinges are simply some pieces of gaffer-tape.

This design improvement creates a cleaner globe and also addresses some of the concerns posted in the comments of the earlier build. The design files are available for download on [noniq]’s blog — you need to 3D print some magnet holders and stopper plates, and laser cut the 20 triangle tiles. The stopper plates help ensure that the angle between tiles when it is put together is limited to 138 degrees, making it easier to assemble the globe.

Check out the video after the break to hear the satisfying “thunk” of neodymium magnets snapping together.

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Shmoocon 2017: On Not Reverse Engineering Through Emulation

January 14, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Right now, I’m at Shmoocon, and it’s living up to all expectations. That’s a tall order — last year, the breakout talk was from [Travis Goodspeed] on his efforts to reverse engineer the firmware for a cheap Chinese radio. Four people in the room for that talk last year bought the radio on Amazon, and now there’s a legitimate open source project dedicated to building firmware and tools to support this radio.

Now that [Travis] has a few compatriots working on firmware for this radio, he has the same challenges as any other team. The project needs unit tests, and this isn’t easy to do when all the code is locked up inside a radio. Instead of setting up an entire development platform based around a cheap radio, [Travis] came up with a toolchain that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Instead of reverse engineering the firmware for this radio, he’s simply emulating the ARM firmware on the desktop. Development is quick and easy, and he has the live demos to prove it.

The heart of the Tytera radio in question is an STM32F405. This is a pretty common part, and thanks to [Travis]’ work last year, he has all the firmware that ships on this radio. This doesn’t mean he has access to all the radio’s capabilities, though; there’s a black box in the code somewhere that translates .wav files to radio packets and back again. Open sourcing this would usually mean reverse engineering, but [Travis] had a better idea.

Instead of reverse engineering the entire radio, [Travis] is using QEMU to emulate an ARM microcontroller on his desktop, run the relevant code, and completely ignore any actual reverse engineering. Since this radio is already jailbroken and the community has a pretty good idea of where all the functions and subroutines are in the firmware, the most difficult part of pulling this trick off is setting up QEMU.

As a proof of concept, [Travis] downloaded raw AMBE packets from the radio to his laptop. These were then sent through the emulated radio, producing raw audio that was then converted into a .wav file. Effectively, a black box in this radio was emulated, which means [Travis] doesn’t need to know how the black box works.

All the code for this weird emulation / unit test, as well as everything the community has released for this radio is available on the GitHub. A lot of work has gone into the jailbreaking, reverse engineering, and emulation efforts here, making this radio somewhat ironically one of the most open radios you can buy.

C64 Keyboard Emulation Over Serial

January 14, 2017 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

There’s a lot of reasons you might want to emulate the keyboard on your Commodore 64. The ravages of time and dust may have put the original keyboard out of order, or perhaps you need to type in a long program and don’t fancy pecking away with the less-than-stellar feedback of the standard keys. [podstawek] has come up with the solution: a Commodore 64 keyboard emulator that works over serial.

It’s a simple concept, but one that works well. A Python script accepts incoming keypresses or pre-typed text, then converts them into a 6-bit binary code, which is sent to an Arduino over the serial connection. The Arduino uses the 6-bit code as addresses for an MT8808 crosspoint switch.

MT8808 Functional Diagram from Datasheet

The MT8808 is essentially an 8×8 matrix of controllable switches, which acts as the perfect tool to interface with the C64’s 8×8 keyboard matrix. Hardware wise, this behaves as if someone were actually pressing the keys on the real keyboard. It’s just replacing the original key switches with an electronic version controlled by the Arduino.

[podstawek] already has the setup working on Mac, and it should work on Linux and Windows too. There’s a little more to do yet – modifying the script to allow complex macros and to enable keys to be held – so check out the Github if you want to poke around in the source. Overall it’s a tidy, useful hack to replace the stock keyboard.

The C64 remains a popular platform for hacking — it’s even had a Twitter client since 2009.

Blob-less Raspberry Pi Linux Is A Step Closer

January 14, 2017 by Jenny List 60 Comments

The Raspberry Pi single board computer has been an astounding success since its launch nearly five years ago, to the extent that as of last autumn it had sold ten million units with no sign of sales abating. It has delivered an extremely affordable and pretty powerful computer into the hands of hobbyists, youngsters, hackers, engineers and thousands of other groups, and its open-source Raspbian operating system has brought a useful Linux environment to places we might once have thought impossible.

The previous paragraph, we have to admit, is almost true. The Pi has sold a lot, it’s really useful and lots of people use it, but is Raspbian open-source? Not strictly. Because the Broadcom silicon that powers the Pi has a significant amount of proprietary tech that the chipmaker has been unwilling to let us peer too closely at, each and every Raspberry Pi operating system has shipped with a precompiled binary blob containing the proprietary Broadcom code, and of course that’s the bit that isn’t open source. It hasn’t been a problem for most Pi users as it’s understood to be part of the trade-off that enabled the board’s creators to bring it to us at an affordable price back in 2012, but for open-source purists it’s been something of a thorn in the side of the little board from Cambridge.

This is not to say that all is lost on the blob-free Pi front. Aided by a partial pulling back of the curtain of secrecy by Broadcom in 2014, work has quietly been progressing, and we now have the announcement from [Kristina Brooks] that a minimal Linux kernel can boot from her latest open firmware efforts. You won’t be booting a blob-free Raspbian any time soon as there are bugs to fix and USB, DMA, and video hardware has still to receive full support, but it’s a significant step. We won’t pretend to be Broadcom firmware gurus as we’re simply reporting the work, but if it’s your specialty you can find the code in its GitHub repository. Meanwhile, we look forward to future progress on this very interesting project.

We reported on the partial Broadcom release back in 2014. At the time, the Raspberry Pi people offered a prize to the first person running a native Quake III game on their hardware, sadly though they note the competition is closed they haven’t linked to the winning entry.