Card's author typing on the IBM PC110's keyboard, with the Pico W-based card plugged into the PCMCIA slot on the left. PC110's screen shows successful ping 8.8.8.8.8.

Pi Pico W Does PCMCIA, Gets This IBM PC110 Online

September 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 37 Comments

Bringing modern connectivity to retro computers is an endearing field- with the simplicity of last-century hardware and software being a double-edged sword, often, you bring a powerful and tiny computer of modern age to help its great-grandparent interface with networks of today. [yyzkevin] shows us a PCMCIA WiFi card built using a Pi Pico W, talking ~~PCI~~ ISA. This card brings modern-day WiFi connectivity to his IBM PC110, without requiring a separate router set up for outdated standards that the typical PCMCIA WiFi cards are limited by.

The RP2040 is made to talk ~~PCI~~ ISA using, of course, the PIO engine. A CPLD helps with ~~PCI~~ ISA address decoding, some multiplexing, and level shifting between RP2040’s 3.3V and the PCI 5 V levels. The RP2040 software emulates a NE2000 network card, which means driver support is guaranteed on most OSes of old times, and the software integration seems seamless. The card already works for getting the PC110 online, and [yyzkevin] says he’d like to improve on it – shrink the design so that it resembles a typical PCMCIA WiFi card, tie some useful function into the Pico’s USB port, and perhaps integrate his PCMCIA SoundBlaster project into the whole package while at it.

This is a delightful project in how it achieves its goal, and a pleasant surprise for everyone who’s been observing RP2040’s PIO engine conquer interfaces typically unreachable for run-of-the-mill microcontrollers. We’ve seen Ethernet, CAN and DVI, along many others, and there’s undoubtedly more to come.

We thank [Misel] and [Arti] for sharing this with us!

On the left, an image of a COB on the multimeter's PCB. On the right, a QFP IC soldered to the spot where a COB used to be, with pieces of magnet wire making connections from the QFP's pins to the PCB tracks.

Epoxy Blob Excised Out Of Broken Multimeter, Replaced With A QFP

September 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 16 Comments

The black blobs on cheap PCBs haunt those of us with a habit of taking things apart when they fail. There’s no part number to look up, no pinout to probe, and if magic smoke is released from the epoxy-buried silicon, the entire PCB is toast. That’s why it matters that [Throbscottle] shared his journey of repairing a vintage multimeter whose epoxy-covered single-chip-multimeter ICL7106 heart developed an internal reference fault. When a multimeter’s internal voltage reference goes, the meter naturally becomes useless. Cheaper multimeters, we bin, but this one arguably was worth reviving.

[Throbscottle] doesn’t just show what he accomplished, he also demonstrates exactly how he went through the process, in a way that we can learn to repeat it if ever needed. Instructions on removing the epoxy coating, isolating IC pins from shorting to newly uncovered tracks, matching pinouts between the COB (Chip On Board, the epoxy-covered silicon) and the QFP packages, carefully attaching wires to the board from the QFP’s legs, then checking the connections – he went out of his way to make the trick of this repair accessible to us. The Instructables UI doesn’t make it obvious, but there’s a large number of high-quality pictures for each step, too.

The multimeter measures once again and is back in [Throbscottle]’s arsenal. He’s got a prolific history of sharing his methods with hackers – as far back as 2011, we’ve covered his guide on reverse-engineering PCBs, a skillset that no doubt made this repair possible. This hack, in turn proves to us that, even when facing the void of an epoxy blob, we have a shot at repairing the thing. If you wonder why these black blobs plague all the cheap devices, here’s an intro.

We thank [electronoob] for sharing this with us!

Animated LED Arrows Point The Way

September 24, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 11 Comments

Visitors at the Garden D’Lights in Bellevue, Washington had a problem. While touring the holiday lights show, they kept straying off the path. The event organizers tried some simple LED arrows, but they were just more points of light among a sea filled with them. This is when [Eric Gunnerson] was asked to help out. He’s apparently had some experience with LED animations, even cooking up a simple descriptor language for writing animations driven by an ESP32. To make the intended path obvious, he turned to a PVC board with 50 embedded WS2812 pixels –RGB controllable LEDs. The control box was a USB power adapter and an ESP8266, very carefully waterproofed and connected to the string of pixels. The backer board is painted black, to complete the hardware. Stick around after the inevitable break, to get a look at the final

The description of the build process is detailed and contains some great tips, but without a clever LED animation, it’s still of questionable utility. The pattern chosen is great, with the LEDs being blue most of the time, and a flame-like gradient chasing through the arrow every couple seconds. It’s obviously different from the lights of the show, and seems to be a real winner. [Eric] has published his code, with the sheepish caveat that he had to reinvent the wheel once again, and couldn’t reuse any of his previous LED animation work on this one. It’s a simple hack, but a great build log, and an effective solution to a subtle problem. And if addressable LEDs are your thing, check out our other hacks!

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TRS-80 Gains Multiple Monitor Support, And High-Resolution Graphics

September 24, 2022 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

To call [Glen Kleinschmidt] a vintage computing enthusiast would be an understatement. Who else would add the ability to control and address multiple VGA monitors to a rack-mounted TRS-80 Model 1? Multiple 64-color 640×480 monitors might not be considered particularly amazing by today’s standards, but for 70s-era computing, it’s a different story.

Drawing this sin(x)/x ripple surface can be done in only 17 lines of BASIC.

How does a TRS-80 even manage to output anything useful to these monitors? [Glen] wrote his own low-level driver in machine code to handle that. The driver even has useful routines that are callable from within BASIC, meaning that programs written on the TRS-80 are granted powerful drawing abilities. Oh, and did we mention that the VGA graphics cards themselves were designed and made by [Glen]?

Interested in making your own? [Glen] provides all the resources you’ll need to re-create his work, including machine code drivers and demonstration BASIC programs as downloadable audio files, just as they would have been on original cassette tapes.

Watch things in action in the videos embedded below. The first draws a Land Rover, and the second plots a simple Moiré pattern star. Not bad for 70s-era hardware and 74xx logic!

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Nazi Weapons Of The Future

September 23, 2022 by Al Williams 137 Comments

We know. The title sounds like a bad newsreel from 1942. Turns out, though, that the Nazis were really good at pouring money into military research and developing — or trying to develop — what they called “wunderwaffe” — wonder weapons. While we think of rockets and jets today as reasonably commonplace, they were state-of-the-art when Germany deployed them during WWII. While the rockets were reasonably successful, the jets were too few and too late to matter. However, those were just the tip of the iceberg. The German war industry had plenty of plans ranging from giant construction to secret weapons that seem to be out of the pages of a pulp science fiction magazine.

Size Matters

Part of the plans included huge ships including one aircraft carrier displacing 56,500 tons. Many of these were never completed and, in some cases, were never actually started. In contrast, the Essex-class USS Hornet displaces 31,300 tons and the Lexington was 37,000 tons. The H-class battleships would have had as much as 140,000 tons of displacement dwarfing the Yamato class (73,000 tons) and the Iowa class (53,000 tons).

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Hackaday Podcast 186: Weighing Cats, Slamming VU Meters, Slimmer Skimmers, And Clean Air On The Cheap

September 23, 2022 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams took time out from Supercon planning to join Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a look through the hacking week that was. We always try to keep things light, but it’s hard sometimes, especially when we have to talk about wars past and present and the ordnance they leave behind. It’s also not a lot of fun to talk about a continent-wide radio outage thanks to our angry Sun, nor is learning that a wafer-thin card skimmer could be lurking in your ATM machine.

But then again, we did manage to have some fun by weighing cats to make sure they’re properly fed, and making music by pegging VU meters. We also saw how to use PCBs to make a beautiful yet functional circuit sculpture, clean up indoor air on a budget, and move microns with hardware store parts. And we also got to celebrate a ray of international hope by looking back on the year that taught us much of what we know about the Earth.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download here!

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Wireless Water Detector Hooks Up To Home Assistant

September 22, 2022 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Water damage can quickly make even the nicest buildings unliveable. [Andres Leon] suffered a small flood from an air conditioning unit, and wanted to avoid such issues in future. Thus, he built a wireless monitor to solve the problem.

The device is based on the ESP8266, allowing it to wirelessly communicate with Home Assistant. Thus, if it detects water via its rust-proof probes, it can notify Home Assistant via an MQTT message. From there, Home Assistant can advise the home owner remotely via phone and email. Plus, just for completeness, there’s a loud buzzer in the unit that goes off when water is detected, too. Thanks to a 2500 mAh lithium-polymer battery on board, the device can run for up to 5 months between recharges.

Integrating warning systems into one’s smart home system can be particularly useful when one is away for long periods. Things like water leaks tend to do damage over time when we’re not paying attention, so any IoT device that can assist in this regard is helpful. If you want to investigate the cause of a difficult leak, though, this other project may help. Video after the break.

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