Retro Gadgets: The Real Desktop Computer

July 24, 2023 by 27 Comments

People argue about the first use of the computer desktop metaphor. Apple claims it. Xerox probably started it. Yet, when I think of computer desktops, I think of the NOVAL 760. Not a household name, to be sure, but a big ad spread in a June 1977 Byte magazine was proud to introduce it. At $2995, we doubt many were sold, but the selling point was… well… it was built into a “handsome wood desk, designed to compliment any decor.” The desk folded down when you were not using the computer, and the keyboard recessed into a drawer.

The computer itself was no slouch for 1977, but nothing you couldn’t find elsewhere. An 8080, speed unspecified, had 16 kB of RAM and 3 kB of PROM. There was also a display with a few kB of memory hanging around, too. And just in case you were worried, the bottom of the page entitled “The Ultimate in Home Computers” reads, “The NOVAL 760 COMPUTER. A fully-assembled, fully-tested personal computer … not a kit!” Of course, for us, that’s not really a selling point. If you wonder why the computer was memory limited, this is the time that Extensys bragged in an ad: 64 kB for $1495! If you ordered one, you could have it in 15 to 30 days, too!

There were options for more memory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the I/O devices in the ad were actually included in the advertised price. Some of the devices seemed very specialized, so we are guessing the basic system didn’t include some of them.

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A Vintage Transistor Radio Gets A Repair

July 24, 2023 by 19 Comments

Here in 2023 the field of electronics covers a breathtaking variety of devices and applications, but if we were to go back in time far enough we’d enter an age in which computers were few and far between, and any automated control systems would have been electromechanical at best. Back in the 1950s the semiconductor industry was in relative infancy, and at the consumer end electronics were largely synonymous with radio. [Shango066] brings us a transistor radio from that era, a Jewel TR1 from about 1958, that despite its four-transistor simplicity to our eyes would have been a rare and expensive device when new.

As you’d expect, a transistor radio heading toward its 70th birthday requires a little care to return to its former glory, and while this one is very quiet it does at least work after a fashion. The video below the break is a long one that you might wish to watch at double speed, but it takes us through the now-rare skill of fault-finding and aligning an AM radio receiver. First up are a set of very tired electrolytic capacitors whose replacement restores the volume, and then it’s clear from the lack of stations that the set has a problem at the RF end. We’re treated to the full process of aligning a superhet receiver through the relatively forgiving low-frequency medium of a medium-wave radio. Along the way, he damages one of the IF transformers and has to replace it with a modern equivalent, which we would have concealed under the can from the original.

The video may be long, but it’s worth a look for the vintage parts if not for the quality of radio stations on the air today in California. For many readers, AM broadcast is becoming a thing of the past, so we’re not sure we’ll see this very often.

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DisplayPort: Tapping The Altmode

July 24, 2023 by 11 Comments

Really, the most modern implementation of DisplayPort is the USB-C DisplayPort altmode, synonymous with “video over USB-C”, and we’d miss out if I were to skip it. Incidentally, our last two articles about talking USB-PD have given a few people a cool new toy to play with – people have commented on the articles, reached out to me for debugging help, and I’ve even seen people build the FUSB302B into their projects! Hot on the heels of that achievement, let’s reach further and conquer one more USB-C feature – one that isn’t yet openly available for us to hack on, even though it deserves to be.

For our long-time readers, it’s no surprise to see mundane capabilities denied to hackers. By now, we all know that many laptops and phones let you get a DisplayPort connection out of a USB-C port. Given that the USB-C specifications are openly available, and we’ve previously implemented a PD sink using those specifications, you’d expect that we could do DisplayPort with the same ease. Yet, the DisplayPort altmode specification is behind a VESA membership paywall, with a hefty pricetag – a practice of theirs that has been widely criticized, counter to their purpose as a standards organization and having resulted in some of their standards failing.

Not to worry, however – we can easily find an assortment of PDFs giving a high-level overview and some details of the DisplayPort altmode, and here’s my favorite! I also have a device running MicroPython with a FUSB302 chip connected, and a few DisplayPort altmode devices of mine that I can disassemble. This, turns out, is more than enough for us to reverse-engineer our way into an open-source DisplayPort altmode library!

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Steel For Your Fighting Robot

July 23, 2023 by 8 Comments

The job of processing video after a large event must be a thankless one for whichever volunteer upon whose shoulders it falls, and thus it’s not unusual for talks at larger events to end up online much later than the event itself. Electromagnetic Field 2022 was last year, but they have continued to drop new videos. Among the latest batch is one from [Jennifer Herchenroeder], in which she discusses the steel used in her team’s BattleBot, Hijinx (Edit: her EMF talk was cut short due to time pressures, so she re-recorded it in full after the event and we’ve replaced the link. The EMF video meanwhile is here). The result is a fascinating introduction to the metallurgy of iron and steel, and is well worth a watch.

To fully understand the selection of armor steel it’s necessary to start from first principles with iron, to look at its various allotropes, and understand something of how those allotropes form and mix in the steel making and metalworking processes. We’re treated to a full description of the various tempering and hardening processes, before a panel-by-panel rundown of the various steels used by Hijinx.

For a Hackaday writer with a past in robot combat it’s fascinating to see how the design of robots has evolved over the decades since the British Robot Wars, and it’s particularly nice to see the current generation as part of our community. However, if you’ve tempted yourself, bear in mind that it’s not all plain sailing.

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Hackaday Links: July 23, 2023

July 23, 2023 by 4 Comments

It may be midwinter in Perth, but people still go to the beach there, which led to the surprising discovery earlier this week of what appears to be a large hunk of space debris. Local authorities quickly responded to reports of a barnacle-encrusted 2.5-m by 3-m tank-like object on the beach. The object, which has clearly seen better days, was described as being made of metal and a “wood-like material,” which on casual inspection is clearly a composite material like Kevlar fibers in some sort of resin. Local fire officials teamed up with forensic chemists to analyze the object for contamination; finding none, West Australia police cordoned off the device to keep the curious at bay. In an apparently acute case of not knowing how the Internet works, they also “urge[d] everyone to refrain from drawing conclusions” online, which of course sent the virtual sleuths into overdrive. An r/whatisthisthing thread makes a good case for it being part of the remains of the third stage of an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV); reentry of these boosters is generally targeted at the East Indian Ocean for safe disposal, but wind and weather seem to have brought this artifact back from the depths.

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VanMoof E-Bike Bankruptcy: The Risks Of Cloud-Connected Transport

July 23, 2023 by 66 Comments

When the bankruptcy of VanMoof, the company behind a series of e-bikes, was announced recently, many probably shrugged at this news. After all, what is an e-bike but a regular bicycle that has some electronics and a battery strapped to it to assist with cycling? Unfortunately for owners of a VanMoof e-bike, their fancy wheels come with a Bluetooth-connected smartphone app that somehow involves storing a special encryption key on the VanMoof servers, as detailed by [Gergely Orosz] at the Pragmatic Engineer. Without this key that is connected to your VanMoof account, your VanMoof app cannot communicate with your VanMoof e-bike.

Although basic functionality of the e-bike will be retained, features such as setting the gear modes, changing assistance mode, locking the bicycle and other features not exposed on the bicycle itself will be lost. Essentially this is the equivalent of losing the remote control to a modern-day TV and getting locked out of 90% of the device’s features.

Fortunately, as [Gergely] and others are (urgently) pointing out to VanMoof e-bike owners, this special key can be downloaded with a Key Exporter project on GitHub, as well as obtained and used with an alternative app by Cowboy Bikes, which is a competitor of VanMoof. The unfortunate reality remains, however, that should you lose this special key, you are going to be in a world of pain as your expensive e-bike now is mostly an e-brick.

(Thanks to [Jan Praegert] for the tip)

Amateur Estimates Of Venusian Day Using Arecibo Data

July 23, 2023 by 7 Comments

[Nathaniel Fairfield] aka [thandal] was curious about the actual rotation and axis tilt of Venus. He decided to spin up at GitHub Python repository to study the issue further, as one does. The scientific literature shows a wide range of estimates and variations for the planet’s rotation and axis tilt. He wondered if the real answer might be found in a publicly available set of uncalibrated delay-doppler images of Venus. These data were collected by the former Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico from 1988 through 2020.  [Thanda] observed that the planet’s rotation appears to be speeding up slightly, and furthermore, his estimates of the orbital axis were within 0.01 degrees of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) values. [Note: Venus is a bit confusing — one planetary rotation, 243 Earth days, is longer than its year, 225 Earth days].

Estimations of Venusian Orbital Period, [Thandal] Estimates in Green
Aligning and calibrating the raw data was no trivial task. You have to consider the radar’s (Earth’s) position and time, as well as Venus. Complicating the math even more, some times the radar was operated in a bistatic mode, with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia being the receiver.

There’s a lot of interesting signal processing going on here. The Doppler-delay data consists of images that are 8091×8092 array of complex values, has to be mapped onto the Venus geoid.  Then by using various surface features, one can compare their positions vs time and obtain an estimate of rotational speed and tilt. If these kinds of calculations interest you, be sure to check out [Thandal]’s summary report, and also take note of the poliastro Python astrodynamics library. Why is this important? One reason to better plan future missions.