The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that [TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.
At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.
In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet another demonstration of power that open-source holds, and more importantly, it shows how even a small pet project of yours could cause big moves in the hardware world, provided you publish it – just ask [JoeN], [WoodWorkeR] and [arturo182].
The journey didn’t end there. For all its benefits, Beepy had some flaws to take care of, some board-killing flaws, even. The 5 V boost regulator was never intended for 4.7 V input it gets when charger is connected, and would occasionally cook itself. A charging current resistor was undersized, leading people to either bodge resistors onto their Beepy boards, or have their battery charge for 30 hours until full. A power path diode was undersized, too, and has burned out on more than a few devices. Also, Beepy’s feature package left things to be desired.
Beepy never made it beyond v1. If I had to guess, partially because of BB Q20 keyboard sourcing troubles, but also definitely some sort of loss of interest. Which is a shame, as the plans v1.5 of the hardware were pretty exciting. In the meantime, other players decided to take up the mantle – here’s a tale of three projects.
The Rasberry Pi Zero is a delightful form factor, with its GIPO and USB and HDMI, but it’s stuck using the same old ARM processor all the time. What if you wanted to change it up with some OpenSPARC, RISC V, OpenPOWER, or even your own oddball homebrew ISA and processor? Well, fret not, for [Chengyin Yao]’s IcePi Zero has got you covered with its ECP5 25F FPGA.
As the saying goes, you don’t tell an FPGA what to do, you tell it what to be. And with the ECP5 25F’s 24k LUTs, you can tell it to be quite a few different things. This means more work for the maker than plugging in a fixed processor, sure, but IcePi tries to make that as painless as possible with quality-of-life features like HDMI out (something missing from many FPGA dev boards), an onboard USB-to-JTAG converter (so you can just plug it in, no programmer needed), and even USB-C instead of the Pi’s old microUSB. There’s the expected SD card on one end, and 256 MiB of 166 MHz SDRAM on the other to make up for the FPGA’s paltry 112 KiB of onboard RAM.
Plus it’s a drop-in replacement for the Pi Zero, so if you’ve already got a project that’s got one of those running an emulator, you can fab one of these babies, spool up some Verilog, and enjoy running on bare metal. It seems like this device is just made for retro gaming handhelds, but we’d love to hear in the comments if you have other ideas what to do with this board– remember that an FPGA can be (almost) anything, even a GPU!
Currently, [Chengin Yao] is not selling the board, though they may reconsider due to demand in their Reddit thread. If you want one, you’ll have to call your favourite fabricator or etch your own PCB.
We’ve seen FPGAs before; most recently to create an absurdly fast 8080 processor. We’ve also seen DIY dev boards, like this one for the AMD Zyntac FPGA. Doing something fun with FPGAs? Drop us a tip! We’re happy [Chengin Yao] did, because this is amazing work, especially considering they are only 16 years old. We cannot wait to find out what they get up to next.
As you might imagine, this project got its start with the RP2040-based Pico Mac project by [Matt Evans], which we covered
The collector’s edition will come with a lovely box, but what’s in it is still open source so you can make your own.
before. [Nick] saw that, built it, and was delighted by it enough to think that if the Mac could run on such tiny hardware, how small could build a fully-usable replica Mac? The answer was 63 mm tall– at 5.5:1, that’s technically under the 6:1 scale that Barbie operates on, but if we had such a dollhouse we’d absolutely put one of these in it. (You just know Barbie’s an Apple kind of girl.)
The size was driven by the screen, which is a 2″ TFT panel with 480 x 640 pixel native resolution. Here [Nick] cheats a tiny bit– rather than trying to rewrite the PicoMac to output 640 x 480 and rotate the screen, he keeps the screen in portrait mode and drives it at 480 x 342 px. Sure, it’s not a pixel-perfect output, but no LCD is going to be a perfect stand in for a CRT, and who is going to notice 32 pixels on a 2″ screen? Regardless, that set the height of the computer, which is built around the portrait display. A highly detailed, and to our eyes, accurate replica of the original Macintosh case was printed to fit the LCD, coming in at the aforementioned 63mm tall.
Unfortunately this means the floppy drive could not be used for micro SD access– there is an SD card reader on this unit, but it’s on the back, along with a USB-C port, which is roughly where the mouse and keyboard ports are supposed to be, which is a lovely detail. Also delightful is the choice of a CR2 lithium battery for power, which is a form factor that will look just a bit familiar if you’ve been inside one of these old Macs.
The Commodore 64 may remain the best selling computer of all time, but it has one major flaw. It doesn’t have HDMI! That makes it a total pain to use with modern displays. Thankfully, [Side Projects Lab] has whipped up an HDMI output board to solve this concerning oversight from the original designers.
The project was inspired by work by [Copper Dragon], who whipped up a nifty RGB output board. This device worked by reading the inputs to the C64’s VIC II graphics chip, which it then used to recreate a pixel-perfect video frames to then produce a quality analog video output. [Side Projects Lab] figured the same interception technique would be useful for producing a quality HDMI output.
The result was the HD-64. It sits inside the C64 in place of the original RF modulator. It uses an interleaver socket to capture digital signals going to the VIC II. It then feeds these signals to an emulated VIC II running inside an FPGA, which creates the pixel-perfect screen representation and synthesizes the proper digital HDMI output. Meanwhile, the analog audio output from the SID chip is captured from the RF modulator’s original header, and sent out via the HDMI output as well. The default output is super-sharp, but the device can be configured to allow scanlines and anti-aliasing if that’s more to your tastes.
Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other open source projects without proper attribution brought the debate to a head — ultimately leading Wii Homebrew Channel developer Hector Martin to archive the popular project and use its README as a central point to collect evidence against libogc and its developers.
At the time, most of the claims had to do with code being taken from the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) project. Martin and others in the community had performed their own investigations, and found some striking similarities between the two codebases. A developer familiar with both projects went so far as to say that as much as half the code in libogc was actually lifted from RTEMS and obfuscated so as to appear as original work.
While some of these claims included compelling evidence, they were still nothing more than accusations. For their part, the libogc team denied any wrongdoing. Contributors to the project explained that any resemblance between libogc code and that of either leaked Nintendo libraries or other open source projects was merely superficial, and the unavoidable result of developing for a constrained system such as a game console.
But that all changed on May 6th, when the RTEMS team released an official statement on the subject. It turns out that they had been following the situation for some time, and had conducted their own audit of the libogc code. Their determination was that not only had RTEMS code been used without attribution, but that it appeared at least some code had also been copied verbatim from the Linux kernel — making the license dispute (and its solution) far more complex.
It isn’t too often we post a hack that’s just a pure 3D print with no other components, but for this Giant Molecular Model kit by [3D Printy], we’ll make an exception. After all, even if you print with PLA every day, how often do you get to play with its molecular bonds? (If you want to see that molecule, check out the video after the break.)
There are multiple sizes of bonds to represent bond lengths, and two styles: flexible and firm. Flexible bonds are great for multiple covalent bonds, like carbon-carbon bonds in organic molecules. The bonds clip to caps that screw in to the atoms; alternately a bond-cap can screw the atoms together directly. A plethora of atoms is available, in valence values from one to four. The two-bond atom has 180 and 120-degree variations for greater accuracy. In terms of the chemistry this kit could represent, you’re only limited by your imagination and how long you are willing to spend printing atoms and bonds.
[3D Printy] was kind enough to release the whole lot as CC0 Public Domain, so we might be seeing these at craft fairs, as there’s nothing to keep you from selling the prints. Honestly, we can only hope; from an educational standpoint, this is a much better use of plastic than endless flexy dragons.
