IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk with a new controller attached

LYFT: Standing Up For Better IKEA BEKANT Control

April 18, 2024 by 6 Comments

The IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk is kind of a lifesaver — even if you don’t personally go between sit and stand much, the adjustability makes sharing the desk a breeze. Sharing was the case in [Matthias]’ house during the pandemic, as he and his wife took turns using the desk. Switching between their two preferred heights quickly became annoying, so [Matthias] engineered LYFT, a replacement controller that stores up to four settings.

In addition, the new SAMD21-based controller allows them to raise and lower the desk without having to hold the button down. And finally, having a digital readout showing the position is just plain cool. As you’ll see in the manual (PDF), LYFT is as easy to set up and use as the average flat-packed product.

In order to make this work, [Matthias] had to figure out how the desk’s motors communicate out of the box, and he did so with the help of a BEKANT controller project by [Greg Cormier]. You won’t find LYFT at the blue and yellow, at least not yet; for now, you’ll have to shop Tindie or build it yourself.

A standard-compliant MXM card installed into a laptop, without heatsink

MXM: Powerful, Misused, Hackable

April 18, 2024 by 27 Comments

Today, we’ll look into yet another standard in the embedded space: MXM. It stands for “Mobile PCI Express Module”, and is basically intended as a GPU interface for laptops with PCIe, but there’s way more to it – it can work for any high-power high-throughput PCIe device, with a fair few DisplayPort links if you need them!

You will see MXM sockets in older generations of laptops, barebones desktop PCs, servers, and even automotive computers – certain generations of Tesla cars used to ship with MXM-socketed Nvidia GPUs! Given that GPUs are in vogue today, it pays to know how you can get one in low-profile form-factor and avoid putting a giant desktop GPU inside your device.

I only had a passing knowledge of the MXM standard until a bit ago, but my friend, [WifiCable], has been playing with it for a fair bit now. On a long Discord call, she guided me through all the cool things we should know about the MXM standard, its history, compatibility woes, and hackability potential. I’ve summed all of it up into this article – let’s take a look!

This article has been written based on info that [WifiCable] has given me, and, it’s also certainly not the last one where I interview a hacker and condense their knowledge into a writeup. If you are interested, let’s chat!

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Unraveling The Secrets Of Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Format

April 18, 2024 by 12 Comments

Apple has developed a proprietary — even mysterious — “fisheye” projection format used for their immersive videos, such as those played back by the Apple Vision Pro. What’s the mystery? The fact that they stream their immersive content in this format but have provided no elaboration, no details, and no method for anyone else to produce or play back this format. It’s a completely undocumented format and Apple’s silence is deafening when it comes to requests for, well, anything to do with it whatsoever.

Probably those details are eventually forthcoming, but [Mike Swanson] isn’t satisfied to wait. He’s done his own digging into the format and while he hasn’t figured it out completely, he has learned quite a bit and written it all up on a blog post. Apple’s immersive videos have a lot in common with VR180 type videos, but under the hood there is more going on. Apple’s stream is DRM-protected, but there’s an unencrypted intro clip with logo that is streamed in the clear, and that’s what [Mike] has been focusing on.

Most “fisheye” formats are mapped onto square frames in a way similar to what’s seen here, but this is not what Apple is doing.

[Mike] has been able to determine that the format definitely differs from existing fisheye formats recorded by immersive cameras. First of all, the content is rotated 45 degrees. This spreads the horizon of the video across the diagonal, maximizing the number of pixels available in that direction (a trick that calls to mind the heads in home video recorders being tilted to increase the area of tape it can “see” beyond the physical width of the tape itself.) Doing this also spreads the center-vertical axis of the content across the other diagonal, with the same effect.

There’s more to it than just a 45-degree rotation, however. The rest most closely resembles radial stretching, a form of disc-to-square mapping. It’s close, but [Mike] can’t quite find a complete match for what exactly Apple is doing. Probably we’ll all learn more soon, but for now Apple isn’t saying much.

Videos like VR180 videos and Apple’s immersive format display stereoscopic video that allow a user to look around naturally in a scene. But to really deliver a deeper sense of presence and depth takes light fields.

Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More

April 18, 2024 by 8 Comments

You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plastic needs to be sacrificed.

Granted, the scope in question, a Fnirsi DSO152, only cost [David Given] from Poking Technology a couple of bucks. And while the little instrument really isn’t that bad inside, it’s limited to a single channel and 200 kHz of bandwidth, so it’s not exactly lab quality. The big attractions for [David] were the CH32F103 microcontroller and the prominent debug port inside, not to mention the large color LCD panel.

[David]’s attack began with the debug port and case mods to allow access, but quickly ground to a halt when he accidentally erased the original firmware. But no matter — tracing out the pins is always an option. [David] made that easier by overlaying large photos of both sides of the board, which let him figure out which buttons went to which pins, and mapping for the display’s parallel interface. He didn’t mess with any of the analog stuff except to create a quick “Hello, oscilloscope!” program to output a square wave to the calibration pin. He did, however, create a display driver and port a game of breakout to the scope — video after the hop.

We’ve been seeing a lot of buzz around the CH32xx MCUs lately; seeing it start to show up in retail products is perhaps a leading indicator of where the cheap RISC chips are headed. We’ve seen a few interesting hacks with them, but we’ve also heard tell they can be hard to come by. Maybe getting one of these scopes to tear apart can fix that, though.

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A red 3D-printed Raspberry Pi-based document scanner

Raspberry Pi Scanner Digitizes On The Cheap

April 17, 2024 by 29 Comments

It’s pretty important in 2024 to be able digitize documents quickly and easily without necessarily having to stop by the local library or buy an all-in-one printer. While there are plenty of commercial solutions out there, [Caelestis Cosplay] has created a simple document scanner that takes documents, as [Caelestis Cosplay] puts it, from papers to pixels.

The build is probably what you’re expecting — it’s essentially a Raspberry Pi (in this case a 4B), a V2 Pi camera, and a handful of custom 3D-printed parts. [Caelestis Cosplay] says they had never designed anything for printing before, and we think it looks great. There’s also a buzzer to indicate that the scan is starting (one beep) or has completed (two beeps), a ‘ready’ indicator, and a ‘working’ indicator.

Everything you’d need to build your own is available over on Instructables, including document scanner and controller scripts. Be sure to check it out in action after the break, and see it quickly scan in a document and put it on a thumb drive.

Looking for a 3D scanner? Check out the OpenScan project.

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Source Code To The 1999 FPS Game Descent 3 Released

April 17, 2024 by 48 Comments

On April 16th of this year, [Kevin Bentley] released the source code to the Sci-Fi FPS game Descent 3. Originally released in 1999 for Windows, the game has you control a flying ship which you have to guide through both in- and outdoor environments, while shooting at robots that have been infected with an alien virus as you try to save the solar system. It was later also ported to Mac OS and Linux, but was considered a commercial flop due to low sales.

As one of the original developers, [Kevin] explains that one of the goals of this code release is to give the game a second life, by cleaning up the C++ code and using new APIs. Original proprietary audio and video libraries from Interplay were removed, which means that some work is required before one can build a fresh copy of the game from this code base. That said, the released code is the latest 1.5 patch level, with the Mac OS and Linux support. Even if the original Descent games weren’t your cup of tea, it’s still great to see games being preserved and updated like this.

Thanks to [Phil Ashby] for the tip.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 779: Errata Prevention Specialist

April 17, 2024 by 1 Comment

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch sit down with Andy Stewart to talk about Andy’s Ham Radio Linux (AHRL)! It’s the Linux distro designed to give hams the tools they need to work with their radios. What’s it like to run a niche Linux distro? How has Andy managed to keep up with this for over a decade? And what’s the big announcement about the project breaking today?

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