Driving WS2811 LEDs With…VGA?

January 4, 2016 by 12 Comments

We thought we’d seen it all. All the ways to drive WS2811/2812 “Neopixel” LEDs, that is. And then [Steve Hardy] comes up with a new one: hacking a computer’s VGA output to drive 500 WS2811s in a string. And it’s quite a hack. You can check out the video (it’s worth enduring the horrible wind noise) below the break.

bits[Steve]’s big realization was that he could send the digital data that the Neopixels needed by carefully selecting a resolution and clock rate for the VGA to match the timings that the WS2811 modules wanted. A resolution of 840×1000 at 28MHz produces 70 pixels per WS2811 bit, or 12 bits per line. This means two VGA lines need to be sent for the RGB triple for each LED, hence the 1000 rows.

There are some further tricks before [Steve] got around to writing a custom OpenGL shader that converts regular graphics to his strange black-and-white bit pattern to drive the LEDs, but you’re going to have to read [Steve’s] blog for all that. If you’re waiting for a full code write-up, [Steve] says that one’s pending.

We’re just stoked to see the computing power that lies within a video card used for other purposes. Once you think of the VGA output as a general-purpose high speed (analog!) output, it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities if you can write the corresponding video software. As [Steve] points out, he’s only using the red channel right now — he could trivially add another 1000 LEDs just by tweaking his video code.

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LiteBSD Brings 4.4BSD To PIC32

January 4, 2016 by 13 Comments

A few years ago [Serge Vakulenko] started the RetroBSD project–a 16-bit port of the old 2.11BSD operating system to the Microchip PIC32 microcontroller. This was impressive, but version 2 of BSD is, to most people, old news and somewhat difficult to use compared to modern BSD and Linux operating systems.

[Serge] has been at it again, however, and now has a port of 4.4BSD–LiteBSD–running on the PIC32MZ. According to [Alexandru Voica] there is about 200K of user space memory in the basic build, and by removing some OS features, you could double or triple that figure.

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This Project Will Be Stolen Again

January 3, 2016 by 63 Comments

The Travelling Hacker Box is the physical implementation of the hackaday.io community. While most of what happens on hackaday.io happens online, sometimes the activities leak out to the real world. One such activity is a box, filled with random electronics stuff, shipped around to different members of the hackaday.io community.

hackerboxIt’s a great idea in theory. In practice, people are bastards. The first Travelling Hacker Box was stolen by a member of the hackaday.io community. After travelling 14,167 miles through Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, New York, Boston again, and the middle of Texas, the first travelling Hacker Box met its fate along the Georgia border, two hours outside of Atlanta. Who is responsible? We’re not going to talk about him. He knows who he is and what he did.

All is not lost, even though hundreds of dollars in electronic doo dads are. There’s a new Travelling Hacker Box already on its way around the US. It’s slowly being filled up with goodies, and has already visited Wyoming and upstate New York, and is currently somewhere around Anchorage, AK. The latest update shows this box is filled with goodies including a mini CRT assembly from an old camcorder, stepper motor drivers, and other weird electronics paraphernalia.

The travels of the current Travelling Hacker Box
The travels of the current Travelling Hacker Box

The current plan for the Travelling Hacker Box is the same as the old box: put 25,000 miles on the odometer while taking advantage of the economics of a USPS flat-rate box. From there, it will go further afield, travelling the circumference of the Earth a second time, hitting stops in Europe, Africa, Asia, India, Australia, and South America. If you’re a subcontractor for Raytheon, part of the NY Air National Guard, or are otherwise able to receive mail in Antarctica, you are encouraged to email me.

Feel like you’re up for adding a few hundred miles to the Travelling Hacker Box? There’s no set process to get on the list; destinations are chosen by distance from the current node, trustworthiness, and distance to the next node, if planned. The best way to get on the list is to click the ‘Request to join this project’ link on the Travelling Hacker Box project. Then, hang out in the Hacker Box chatroom, and you might have a chance at receiving a magical box of random electronics.

3D Printed Computer Case Brings Sexy Back

January 3, 2016 by 21 Comments

We know what you’re thinking – case modding is so 2004. You can forget all the silly paint jobs, windows, and lighted spinning fans that’s you’ve seen in the past. That all seems like child’s play compared to what [Complx] has created over on the overclock.net forum.

Using a mixture of 3D-printed plastic corners and a laser-cut acrylic top, bottom and sides, [Complx] was able to create a very pleasing design. He didn’t have access to a 3D printer large enough that would make the parts, though, so he decided to outsource that task. His first set of parts were printed on a Makerbot Replicator, but came out too coarse and so he set out to find a better printing method. After getting quotes of $2000 or more, he was about to call it quits when he found someone with Stratasys Fotus 250 who was willing to work with him on the price, but still provide a quality print.

The guts of the machine aren’t too shabby either. We know everyone loves a parts list so here you go:  It’s an ASUS Z97I-Plus and a i7-4790K, running a GTX 970 with a 600 Watt power supply, 8GB RAM and a couple of SSD drives.

We have to commend [Complx] on his documentation, photos and videos.  It really makes this build shine. You can watch an 3d animation of the build after the break.

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Hackaday Links: January 3, 2016

January 3, 2016 by 19 Comments

Cx5 is a strange material that’s a favorite of model makers and prop replicators. It’s kind of like a wax, kind of like a clay, and a little bit like a plastic. Now it’s a 3D printer filament. It looks very interesting for sculpted and highly detailed models, something the 3D printing scene hasn’t had yet.

So you want a CNC machine, right? Tormach makes a good one, and here’s what it takes to put a PCNC440 in your garage. This is an incredible amount of work and a great excuse to buy an engine hoist.

[Zemnmez] could find dozens of apps and webpages that would calculate resistor color codes for him automatically. What he couldn’t find is one that would do it in reverse – i.e. type in a resistor value and return the correct color code. He made this.

[aggaz] needed a way to connect multiple MIDI devices to his computer. The MIDI spec provides a neat piece of hardware for just this occasion – the MIDI thru box. The only thing you need to build a single MIDI thru box is an opto-isolator and a buffer. It’s easy enough to build, although the DIN5 jacks used for MIDI devices are pretty expensive nowadays. (FWIW- We get an invalid certificate error when loading this page but you should still be able to load it.)

AliExpress always has some interesting stuff on it, and [Ethan] found something very cool. They’re A8 CPUs found in the latest iPhone. Are they real? Who knows. I bought one, and you’re going to get pictures in another links post in a month or so.

The Game Boy Micro was released by Nintendo in 2005 and quickly became one of the coolest and most desired handheld consoles on the planet. You need only look at the eBay listings for the Micro as evidence of its desirability. [ModPurist] took an old DS Lite and converted it into a Game Boy Micro – same idea, larger package.

32C3: 20 Oscillators In 20 Minutes

January 3, 2016 by 25 Comments

In terms of implausible stand-up comedy, [Darsha]’s “20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes” is pretty far out there. First of all, she’s sitting down, with googly eyes on her multimeter, and five breadboards and a mess of 9V batteries laid out in front of her. “Has anybody built electronics before? Has anybody built electronics in front of this many people before? Yeah, so you’d better f**king be nice.” And she’s off!

twenty_oscillators-shot0012“Square waves are really good for your speakers.” And a few seconds later, a lub-dub beat-frequency oscillator filled the hall. And then there’s the stand-up clichés: “Anyone in the audience from Norway?!” And “Anyone know what chip I’m using here?” (The 555.) A heckler, or participant, shouts up “What are you doing?” She responds “Building this!” and shows a sketch of the basic layout.

She baits the audience — “Do you want to ask me about duty cycles?” — and tells stories: “And then one time the solder fell in my lap and burned through my crappy jeggings. Who knows what jeggings are? Whooo!!” All the while the clicking gets louder and more complicated.

Then there’s the suspense. “11 minutes left? Shit, I dunno if I’m going to make it this time!” She’s visibly panicked. A question: “How do you protect the outputs from overvoltage?” “I don’t. (pause, laughter) I use some filter caps and just, well, hope that you guys have good insurance.”

Nearing the home stretch, there’s this quasi-rhythmic ticking and pulsing slowly building up in the background. She plugs in another capacitor, and the crowd spontaneously applauds. A little bit later, she shouts “Is it loud enough?” over the din and turns it down. At the end, the timing’s getting really tight, and she calls up someone to help from the audience.

We won’t spoil it, naturally. You’ll just have to watch it run to the end. We laughed, we cried. It was better than Schroedinger’s cats.

(We’d use hex inverters.)

Source: Flibble CC-BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acorn-ARM-Evaluation-System.jpg

Reverse Engineering The IPhone’s Ancestor

January 3, 2016 by 59 Comments

By all accounts, the ARM architecture should be a forgotten footnote in the history of computing. What began as a custom coprocessor for a computer developed for the BBC could have easily found the same fate as National Semiconductor’s NS32000 series, HP’s PA-RISC series, or Intel’s iAPX series of microprocessors. Despite these humble beginnings, the first ARM processor has found its way into nearly every cell phone on the planet, as well as tablets, set-top boxes, and routers. What made the first ARM processor special? [Ken Shirriff] potsed a bit on the ancestor to the iPhone.

The first ARM processor was inspired by a few research papers at Berkeley and Stanford on Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC. Unlike the Intel 80386 that came out the same year as the ARM1, the ARM would only have a tenth of the number of transistors, used one-twentieth of the power, and only use a handful of instructions. The idea was using a smaller number of instructions would lead to a faster overall processor.

This doesn’t mean that there still isn’t interesting hardware on the first ARM processor; for that you only need to look at this ARM visualization. In terms of silicon area, the largest parts of the ARM1 are the register file and the barrel shifter, each of which have two very important functions in this CPU.

The first ARM chip makes heavy use of registers – all 25 of them, holding 32 bits each. Each bit in a single register consists of two read transistors, one write transistor, and two inverters. This memory cell is repeated 32 times vertically and 25 times horizontally.

The next-largest component of the ARM1 is the barrel shifter. This is just a device that allows binary arguments to be shifted to the left and right, or rotated any amount, up to 31 bits. This barrel shifter is constructed from a 32 by 32 grid of transistors. The gates of these transistors are connected by diagonal control lines, and by activating the right transistor, any argument can be shifted or rotated.

In modern terms, the ARM1 is a fantastically simple chip. For one reason or another, though, this chip would become the grandparent of billions of devices manufactured this year.