Kid’s Ride Gets Boosted Battery, ESP32 Control

April 6, 2024 by 15 Comments

That irresistible urge to rescue an interesting piece of hardware from the trash is something that pretty much every Hackaday reader will have felt at one time or another. Sometimes it’s something that you could put to work immediately, like an old computer or some scrap piece of material that’s just the right size. But other times, you find something on the side of the road that ends up being the impetus for a whole new project.

For [David Bertet], finding a beat up kid’s Jeep Wrangler on the curb was the first step towards a journey that ends with PowerJeep: an open source project that we wager could end up saving similar vehicles from the landfill. The basic idea is simple enough — strip out the vehicle’s original 12 volt power supply and replace it with 18 V provided by easily swappable tool batteries. But as is often the case, it’s the details and the documentation that sets this project apart.

Continue reading “Kid’s Ride Gets Boosted Battery, ESP32 Control” →

IRC Client On Bare Metal

April 6, 2024 by 14 Comments

In the beginning, there was the BIOS, and it was good. A PC’s BIOS knows how to set up the different hardware devices, grab a fixed part of a hard drive, load it, and run it. That’s all you need. While it might be all you need, it isn’t everything people want, so a consortium developed UEFI, which can do all the things a normal BIOS can’t. Among other things, UEFI can load code for the operating system over the network instead of from the hard drive.

In true hacker fashion, [Phillip Tennen] thought, “Does it have to be an operating system?” The answer, of course, is no. It could be an IRC client. He chose Rust to implement everything. While UEFI does provide a network stack, it isn’t very easy to use, apparently. It also provides support for a mouse. [Phillip] ported his GUI toolkit library over, and then the rest is just building an IRC client.

The client isn’t the easiest to use because, after all, this is a lark. Why would you want to do this? On the other hand, we can think of reasons we might want to take control of a UEFI motherboard and use it for something. If you want to do that, this project is a great template to jump-start your endeavors.

We’ve looked at the UEFI system a few times. Or, you can use it to play DOOM.

Continue reading “IRC Client On Bare Metal” →

Understand Your Tools: Finger Exercises

April 6, 2024 by 12 Comments

A dip meter is basically a coil of wire that, when you excite it, you can use to tell if something inside that coil is resonating along. This lets you measure unknown radio circuits to figure out their resonant frequency, for instance. This week, we featured a clever way to make a dip meter with a nanoVNA, which is an odd hack simply because a dip meter used to be a common spare-parts DIY device, while a vector network analyzer used to cost more than a house.

Times have changed, and for the better. Nowadays, any radio amateur can pick up a VNA for less than the cost of all but the cheesiest of walkie talkies, putting formerly exotic test equipment in the hands of untrained mortals. But what good is a fancy-pants tool if you don’t know how to use it? Our own Jenny List faced exactly this problem when she picked up a nanoVNA, and her first steps are worth following along with if you find yourself in her shoes.

All of this reminded me of an excellent series by Mike Szczys, “Scope Noob”, where he chronicled his forays into learning how to use an oscilloscope by running all of the basic functions by working through a bunch of test measurements that he already knew the answer to.

It strikes me that we could use something like this for nearly every piece of measuring equipment. Something more than just an instruction manual that walks you through what all the dials do. Something that takes you through a bunch of example projects and shows you how to use the tool in question through a handful of projects. Because these days, access to many formerly exotic pieces of measuring gear has enabled many folks to have gear they never would have had before – and all that’s missing is knowing how to drive them.

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Voyager 1 Issue Tracked Down To Defective Memory Chip

April 6, 2024 by 52 Comments

After more than forty-six years all of us are likely to feel the wear of time, and Voyager 1 is no different. Following months of harrowing troubleshooting as the far-flung spacecraft stopped returning sensible data, NASA engineers now feel confident that they have tracked down the cause for the problem: a single defective memory chip. Why this particular chip failed is unknown, but possibilities range from wear and tear to an energetic particle hitting it and disrupting its operation.

We’ve covered the Voyager 1 troubleshooting saga so far, with the initial garbled responses attributed to a range of systems, but narrowed down to the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which prepares data for transmission by the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). Based on a recent ‘poke’ command that returned a memory dump engineers concluded that the approximately 3% of corrupted data fit with this one memory chip, opening the possibility of a workaround.

Recently NASA engineers have also been working on patching up the firmware in both Voyager spacecraft, against the background of the dwindling energy produced by the radioisotope generators that have kept both spacecraft powered and warm, even in the cold, dark depths of Deep Space far beyond the light of our Sun.

Linear Feedback Shift Registers For FPGAs

April 6, 2024 by 28 Comments

If you want to start an argument at a Hackaday meeting, you have only to ask something like “How much does this weigh?” or “What time is it?” But if you really want to start a street brawl, you can always say, “Are these numbers random?” Making random numbers that are actually random is actually a tough nut to crack. Most of what we do is, technically, pseudo-random (but we’ll say random number and assume you know what we mean). One way to generate seemingly random sequences is to use a linear feedback shift register or LFSR. You can use LFSRs in software, but they are also very useful in hardware design and [Adam Taylor] takes us through his use of them on FPGAs in a recent post. Continue reading “Linear Feedback Shift Registers For FPGAs” →

ColecoVision Cart Rises From Ashes

April 5, 2024 by 8 Comments

We felt bad for [Mark] of Mark Fixes Stuff. Apparently, his house burned down and took virtually everything, including his retrocomputer collection. He did manage to pull out a few things from the remains including a ColecoVision cartridge that was — honestly — melted. We probably would have written it off, but [Mark] was determined to recover something.

He was fortunate that the PCB was not burned, but it was covered in soot and possibly other things. However, the case looked like a chocolate bar left on a dashboard for a few summer days in the tropics.

Continue reading “ColecoVision Cart Rises From Ashes” →

The line injector shown characterising the PSRR of an AMS1117 regulator, with a bunch of stuff connected to it through SMA jacks

A Simple Line Injector Shows You The Wonderful World Of PSRR

April 5, 2024 by 8 Comments

[limpkin] writes us to show a line injector they’ve designed. The principle is simple — if you want to measure how much PSU noise any of your electronic devices let through, known as PSRR (Power Supply Rejection Ratio), you can induce PSU noise with this board, and then measure noise on your device’s output. The board is likewise simple. A few connectors, resistors, and caps, and a single N-FET!

You do need a VNA, but once you have that, you get a chance to peek into an entire world of insights. Does that 1117 LDO actually filter out noise better than a buck regulator? Is it enough to use a Pi filter for that STM32’s ADC rail, and do the actual parts you’re using actually help with that task? How much noise does your device actually let through in the real world, after being assembled with the specific components you’ve picked? [limpkin] shows us a whole bunch of examples – putting regulators, filters and amplifiers to the test, and showing us how there’s more than meets the eye.

Everything is open source, with full files available on the blog. And, if you want it pre-assembled, tested and equipped with the CNC-milled case, you can get it on Tindie or Lektronz! Of course, even without a tool like this, you can still get good filter designs done with help of computer-aided modelling.

We thank [alfonso] for sharing this with us!