Hackaday Prize 2023: Ending 10 Years On A High Note

November 7, 2023 by 18 Comments

It’s a fact of life — all good things must eventually come to an end. The trick is not to focus so much on the chapter that’s closing, but look ahead to what comes next. This is precisely how the Hackaday Prize ended its incredible ten-year run on Saturday during Supercon.

This final year of the competition saw some of the most impressive entries we’ve ever had, leaving us with five exceptionally promising winners. These projects exemplify the qualities that the Hackaday Prize was designed to seek out and amplify and make a perfect capstone for this grand experiment in philanthropic hacking.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Ending 10 Years On A High Note” →

Flipped Transformer Powers Budget-Friendly Vacuum Tube Amp

November 7, 2023 by 31 Comments

If you’ve ever wondered why something like a radio or a TV could command a hefty fraction of a family’s yearly income back in the day, a likely culprit is the collection of power transformers needed to run all those hungry, hungry tubes. Now fast-forward a half-century or more, and affordable, good-quality power transformers are still a problem, and often where modern retro projects go to die. Luckily, [Terry] at D-Lab Electronics has a few suggestions on budget-friendly transformers, and even shows off a nice three-tube audio amp using them.

The reason transformers were and still are expensive has a lot to do with materials. To build a transformer with enough oomph to run everything takes a lot of iron and copper, the latter of which is notoriously expensive these days. There’s also the problem of market demand; with most modern electronics favoring switched-mode power supplies, there’s just not a huge market for these big lunkers anymore, making for a supply and demand equation that’s not in the hobbyist’s favor.

Rather than shelling out $70 or more for something like a Hammond 269EX, [Terry]’s suggestion is to modify an isolation transformer, specifically the Triad N-68X. The transformer has a primary designed for either 120 or 230 volts, and a secondary that delivers 115 volts. Turn that around, though, and you can get 230 volts out from the typical North American mains supply — good enough for the plate supply on the little amp shown. That leaves the problem of powering the heaters for the tubes, which is usually the job of a second 6- or 12-volt winding on a power transformer. Luckily, the surplus market has a lot of little 6.3-volt transformers available on the cheap, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

We have to say that the amp [Terry] put these transformers to work in sounds pretty amazing — not a hint of hum. Good work, we say, but we hope he has a plan in case the vacuum tube shortage gets any worse.

Continue reading “Flipped Transformer Powers Budget-Friendly Vacuum Tube Amp” →

All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond ‘Bigger Number Better’

November 7, 2023 by 48 Comments

Although it probably feels like forever to many of us since Category 5 Ethernet cabling became prevalent, now that 2.5 and even 5 Gbit Ethernet has trickled into the mainstream, a pertinent question that many probably end up asking, is when you should replace Cat-5e wiring with Cat-6, or even Cat-7. Since most of us are likely to use copper network wiring for the foreseeable future in our domiciles and offices, it is a good question that deserves a good answer. Although swapping a Cat-5e patch cable with a Cat-7 one between a network port and computer is easy enough, replacing all the network cable already pulled through the conduits of a ‘future-proofed’ home is not.

The good news is probably that Category 8 Class II (Cat-8.2) is all you need to run your 40 Gbit Ethernet network with standard twisted pair wiring. The bad news is that you’re limited to runs of only thirty meters before signal degradation begins to kick in. If you take things down a notch to Cat-6A or Cat-7 (ISO/IEC 11801 Class EA and F, respectively), you can do 100 meter runs at 10 Gbit/s just like 100 meters runs at 1 Gbit/s were possible with Cat-5e before. Yet what differentiates these categories exactly?

Continue reading “All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond ‘Bigger Number Better’” →

NEC V20 - Konstantin Lanzet, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Intel V. NEC : The Case Of The V20’s Microcode

November 7, 2023 by 18 Comments

Back in the last century, Intel saw itself faced with a need to have ‘second source’ suppliers of its 8088 and 8086 processors, which saw NEC being roped in to be one of those alternative suppliers to keep Intel’s customers happy with the μPD 8086 and μPD 8088 offerings. Yet rather than using the Intel provided design files, NEC reverse-engineered the Intel CPUs, which led to Intel suing NEC over copying the microcode that forms an integral part of the x86 architecture. In a recent The Chip Letter entry by [Babbage] this case is covered in detail.

Although this lawsuit was cleared up, and NEC licensed the microcode from Intel, this didn’t stop NEC from creating their 8086 and 8088 compatible CPUs in the form of the V30 and V20 respectively. Although these were pin- and ISA-compatible, the internal microcode was distinct from the Intel microcode due to the different internal microarchitecture. In addition the V20 and V30 also had a special 8080 mode, that provided partial compatibility with Z80 software.

Long story short, Intel sued NEC with accusations of copyright infringement of the microcode, which led to years of legal battle, which both set many precedents about what is copyrightable about microcode, and ultimately cleared NEC to keep selling the V20 and V30. Unfortunately by then the 1990s had already arrived, and sales of the NEC chips had not been brisk due to the legal issues while Intel’s new 80386 CPU had taken the market by storm. This left NEC’s x86-compatible CPUs legacy mostly in the form of legal precedents, instead of the technological achievements it had hoped for, and set the tone for the computer market of the 1990s.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Nixie Tube RPN Calculator Project

November 7, 2023 by 12 Comments

If you like Nixie tubes and/or DIY calculators, checkout this interesting talk from the HP Handheld Conference in Orlando last month by [Eric Smith] from Brouhaha and [John Doran] from Time Fracture. For 20-some years, [Eric] and the late [Richard Ottosen] have been incrementally developing various DIY calculators — this paper from the 2005 HHC conference is an excellent overview of the early project. [John] got one of those early DIY calculators and set about modifying it to use Nixie tubes. However, he got distracted by other things and set it aside — until reviving it earlier this year and enlisting [Eric]’s aid.

This presentation goes over the hardware aspects of the design. Unlike the earlier PIC-based DIY calculators, they decided to use a WCH RISC-V processor this time around. The calculator’s architecture is intentionally modular, with the display and keyboard housed in completely separate enclosures communicating by a serial interface. If the bulkiness alone doesn’t exclude it from being pocket-sized, the 170 VDC power supply and 1/2 W per digit power consumption certainly does. This modularity does lend itself to DIYers replacing the display, or the keyboard, with something different. [Eric] wants to build a mechanical flip-digit display for his unit. As for the software, [Eric] reviews the firmware approach and some future upgrades, such as making it programmable and emulating other flavors of HP calculators.

If you’re embarking on a similar project yourself, check out this talk and take notes — there are a lot of interesting tidbits on using Nixie tubes in the 21st century. If [Eric]’s name sounds familiar, you may know him from the Nonpareil calculator software used on many emulators and DIY calculator projects, one of which we covered some years ago. [John] is also a long-time tinkerer, and we wrote about his gorgeous D16/M HCMOS computer system back in 2012. Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for sending in the tip.

Continue reading “Nixie Tube RPN Calculator Project” →

Browsing The WWW On A 1980s IBM PC Using MicroWeb

November 6, 2023 by 12 Comments

Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled ‘WWW’ to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because [Al’s Geek Lab] has you covered with a new video (also embedded below), which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called MicroWeb, created by [jhhoward], that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions.

Of course, you do need to have some kind of way to actually connect to the World Wide Web, which can be an ISA network expansion card, EtherSlip, as well as using a thin client as a network bridge with some Serial Line Interface Protocol (SLIP) action. Of course, some limitations exist, in that graphics and CSS are not rendered, JavaScript is totally off-limits, and for HTTPS-only websites a workaround like retro-proxy has to be used as TLS encryption would be completely unusable on a couple-of-MHz-CPU.

There’s also the FrogFind service, which will helpfully strip down a target website down to its barest HTML essentials, along with the 68K News site that strips down Google News, so that you can enjoy the WWW in its text-based glory as it would have looked in the early 1980s.

(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip)

Continue reading “Browsing The WWW On A 1980s IBM PC Using MicroWeb” →

Tiny Forth Could Be The Smallest

November 6, 2023 by 29 Comments

When you think of a programming language, you probably think of a hefty compiler or interpreter. Maybe its on a bunch of floppies, a CD, or even an EEPROM. But what about a language that fits in a single disk sector? A language like that would — in theory — be used to help bootstrap a computer system and that was the idea behind Sector Forth and, later, Sector Lisp. However, there’s a new game in town: milliForth, which claims to be the smallest ever at 422 380 bytes.

Why would you want such a thing? Well, first of all, why not? Even as a form of code golf, packing a functioning language into a tiny space seems interesting. However, you could also presumably use something like this to boot a small system or on a system with limited storage.

Continue reading “Tiny Forth Could Be The Smallest” →