This week, Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie talk with Julian Lam about NodeBB! It’s modern forum software that actually has some neat tricks up its proverbial sleeves. From forking of forum threads when conversations differ, to new integration with ActivityPub and Mastodon. It’s forums like you’ve never quite seen them.
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 773: NodeBB — Don’t Do The Math”
It is a fun project to build a simple robot but, often, the hardest part these days is creating the mechanical base. [Concrete Dog] has a new open source design for stoRPer that uses a PC board as the base. The board has a Raspberry Pi Pico and motor drivers. The modular design allows you to add to it easily and use custom wheels. The video below shows some treaded wheels and some mechanum wheels with gears.
There are mounting holes for sensors and also a way to put another deck above to hold other circuits, power, or whatever you like. There’s lots you could do with this as a starting point.
As electric drives sweep their way to dominance in the automotive world, there’s another transport sector in which their is also continuing apace. Electric-assisted bicycles preserve the feeling of riding a bike as you always have, along with an electric motor to effortlessly power the rider over hill and dale. European electric two-wheelers are limited to a legal top speed of about 15 miles per hour and a 250 watt motor, but in a post-Brexit dash for independence the British government are asking whether that power should be increased to 500 watts.
The Westminster politicians think such a move will make electric bikes more attractive to consumers, and along with a move to motorcycle-style throttles rather than pedal-to-go throttles they want it to accelerate the take-up of greener transport in a country with plenty of hills. Meanwhile cycling groups and safety groups are concerned, the former whether the move is needed at all, and the latter over the fire risk from more powerful battery packs.
The Hackaday electric bike stable gives us a bit of experience on the matter, and our take is that with a 15 mile-per-hour limit there’s little point in upping the motor power. There’s a 350 watt European limit for three-wheelers though, which we could see would really benefit from a raise if applied to cargo bikes. We can however see that a readily-available supply of cheap 500 W motors would be worth having.
What do the HP-1000 and the DEC VAX 11/730 have in common with the video games Tempest and Battlezone? More than you might think. All of those machines, along with many others from that time period, used AM2900-family bit slice CPUs.
The bit slice CPU was a very successful product that could only have existed in the 1970s. Today, if you need a computer system, there are many CPUs and even entire systems on a chip to choose from. You can also get many small board-level systems that would probably do anything you want. In the 1960s, you had no choices at all. You built circuit boards with gates on the using transistors, tubes, relays, or — maybe — small-scale IC gates. Then you wired the boards up.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that it would be great to offer people a CPU chip like you can get today. The problem is the semiconductor technology of the day wouldn’t allow it — at least, not with any significant amount of resources. For example, the Motorola MC14500B from 1977 was a one-bit microprocessor, and while that had its uses, it wasn’t for everyone or everything.
The answer was to produce as much of a CPU as possible in a chip and make provisions to use multiple chips together to build the CPU. That’s exactly what AMD did with the AM2900 family. If you think about it, what is a CPU? Sure, there are variations, but at the core, there’s a place to store instructions, a place to store data, some way to pick instructions, and a way to operate on data (like an ALU — arithmetic logic unit). Instructions move data from one place to another and set the state of things like I/O devices, ALU operations, and the like.
The kalimba, or thumb piano, is an easy way to make some music even if you have next to no idea what you’re doing. The only real downside is that they are limited to the twinkly sounds of metal tines being plucked by thumbs.
[Jeremy Cook] broke the sonic possibilities wide open by converting a couple of kalimbas into capacitive-touch MIDI instruments using the Raspberry Pi Pico. He started with a small one that is curiously made of solid wood. Usually these instruments are at least partially hollow to allow air to resonate inside the body.
After soldering up all the 1 MΩ resistors necessary to utilize the capacitive touch capabilities of the Pico, [Jeremy] found it a bit difficult to play individual notes on such a small instrument, so he made version two out of a much larger specimen.
This time, [Jeremy] cooked up a custom PCB which he is calling the Pico Touch 2, which adds the necessary resistors at the SMD level for capacitive touch sensing and in turn cleans up the wiring a bit. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
Okay, so you don’t have an iota of musical talent. You could always build a kalimba that plays itself.
In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it might come as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services still exist in the United States. This persistence is not a mere relic of nostalgia — but a testament to the diverse and uneven nature of internet infrastructure across the country.
Yes, dial-up internet, with those screechy, crackly tones, remains a useful tool in areas where modern, high-speed internet services are either unaffordable or unavailable. Subscriber numbers are tiny, but some plough on and access the Internet by the old ways, not the new.
The Starlink receivers need positioning and precise timing information to function, and currently the best way to get that information is to use a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) such as GPS. Unfortunately, the antenna used for this secondary satellite connection leaves something to be desired. Of course, when it comes to solving Starlink problems, there’s no one best than [Oleg Kutkov], whose duty is to fix and improve upon Starlink terminals used in Ukraine — and when the specific problem is GPS bands getting jammed by the invading military, you better believe that a fix is due.
[Oleg] sets the scene, walking us through the evolution of GPS circuitry on the Starlink terminals. Then he shows us the simplest mods you can do, like soldering an improved passive antenna in place of the chip antenna currently being used. Then, he takes it up a notch, and shows us how you could attach an active antenna by using a bias tee module, a mod that would surely work wonders on more than just this device! Then, he brings out the test result tables — and the differences are impressive, in that the Starlink terminals with active antenna mods were able to get GPS signal in areas with active jamming going on, while the unmodified ones could not.
The post is exceptionally accessible, and a must read for anyone wondering about GPS antenna reception problems in customer-accessible devices. This is not the only Starlink hardware mod we’ve seen [Oleg] make, we’ve just covered his Starlink Ethernet port restoration journey that meticulously fixes Ethernet connectivity oversights in the newer models, and the blog also has an article about powering Starlink terminals without the need for PoE, so, do check it out if you’re looking for more!
