This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Nate Graham about KDE! Why did Nate walk away from Apple, and how did he find Linux and KDE? And what does he see coming next? Watch to find out!
The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts
What could happen when you open-source a hardware project?
No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I’ve seen this make miracles happen, make hackerdom stronger, and nourish our communities. I think we should be publishing all the projects, even if incomplete, as much as your opsec allows. I would make ritual sacrifices if they resulted in more KiCad projects getting published, and some days I even believe that gently bullying people into open-sourcing their projects can be justified. My ideal universe is one where companies are unable to restrict schematics from people getting their hardware, no human should ever hold an electronics black box, by force if necessary.
Why such a strong bias? I’ve seen this world change for the better with each open-source project, and worse with closed-source ones, it’s pretty simple for me. Trust me here – let me tell you a story of how a couple reverse-engineering efforts and a series of open-source PCBs have grown a tree of an ecosystem.
A Chain Of Blackberry Hackers
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A Vintage ‘Scope Comes Back To Life
We’re suckers for a vintage electronic teardown here at Hackaday, and thus it’s pleasing to see [Thomas Scherrer OZ2CPU] with a 1962 AEG oscilloscope on his bench. It’s definitely seen better days, and is a single-trace 10 MHz unit of the type you might have seen in a typical general purpose electronics lab back in the day.
Pulling the cover off, and as expected there’s a row of tubes each side of the centrally mounted CRT. No printed circuits in sight, and no transistors either, though the rectifiers are selenium parts. After a clean-up it’s time to look at the tubes, and they show the metallic deposits characteristic of long operation. We’re more used to that from older televisions than test equipment,
Gently bringing the power up it looks promising, but there’s a purple glow from one of the PCL82 triode-pentodes. Replacing that and a double-triode results in a ‘scope that surprisingly, is working. It was evidently a high quality device in the first place, with components capable of lasting for over six decades.
We’ve seen more from his bench involving tubes, including this device using a magic-eye tube as the heavy lifter.
High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II
With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.
There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.
That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.
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Tune In To “Higher Lower”, The Minimal Handheld Electronic Game
[Tommy] has a great write-up about designing and building a minimalistic handheld electronic game called “Higher Lower”. It’s an audio-driven game in which the unit plays two tones and asks the player to choose whether the second tone was higher in pitch, or lower. The game relies on 3D printed components and minimal electronics, limiting player input to two buttons and output to whatever a speaker stuck to an output pin from an ATtiny85 can generate.
Gameplay may be straightforward, but working with so little raises a number of design challenges. How does one best communicate game state (and things like scoring) with audio tones only? What’s the optimal way to generate a random seed when the best source of meaningful, zero-extra-components entropy (timing of player input) happens after the game has already started? What’s the most efficient way to turn a clear glue stick into a bunch of identical little light pipes? [Tommy] goes into great detail for each of these, and more.
In addition to the hardware and enclosure design, [Tommy] has tried new things on the software end of things. He found that using tools intended to develop for the Arduboy DIY handheld console along with a hardware emulator made for a very tight feedback loop during development. Being able to work on the software side without actually needing the hardware and chip programmer at hand was also flexible and convenient.
We’ve seen [Tommy]’s work before about his synth kits, and as usual his observations and shared insights about bringing an idea from concept to kit-worthy product are absolutely worth a read.
You can find all the design files on the GitHub repository, but Higher Lower is also available as a reasonably-priced kit with great documentation suitable for anyone with an interest. Watch it in action in the video below.
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3D Printing A Modular Guitar Means It Can Look Like Whatever You Want
Got some spare filament and looking to build a guitar you can truly call your own? [The 3D Print Zone] has created a modular 3D printable guitar system that lets you easily mix and match different components for the ultimate in customization.
The build is based around a central core, which combines the pickups, bridge, and neck into one solid unit. This is really the heart of the guitar, containing all the pieces that need to be in precise alignment to get those strings vibrating precisely in tune. The core then mounts to a printed outer body via mating slots and rails, which in the main demo is made to look like a Les Paul-style design. This outer body also hosts the volume, tone, and pickup controls. Output from the pickups travels to the controls in the outer body via a set of metallic contacts.
What’s cool about this build is that the sky really is the limit for your creativity. As the video below demonstrates, the main build looks like a Les Paul. But, armed with the right CAD software, you can really make a guitar that looks like whatever you want, while the 3D printer does all the hard work of making it a reality. The files to print the guitar, along with the pickups and other components, are available as kits—but there’s also nothing stopping you from working up your own printed guitar design from scratch, either.
We’ve seen some other great 3D printed guitars before, too.
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Making A LEGO Vehicle Which Can Cross Large Gaps
Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle which can cross increasingly large gaps.
At the time of writing this video from [Brick Experiment Channel] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like that there is a fairly good chance that many of our readers have already seen this video, but this is the sort of video one could happily watch twice.
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