I’ve Been Printing On The Dragon Railroad…

January 25, 2023 by 28 Comments

We know many people who put much effort into building model train setups. But [Rambros] has an entire set 3D printed, and the files are open source, so you can print your own or modify it to suit you. When we first read “complete open source ecosystem,” we thought it might have been a bit of hyperbole, but it isn’t. The S-scale set includes two locomotives, a tanker, a box car, a hopper car, and a gondola car. There are different sections of track, customizable with Fusion 360. The “Dragon Railway” takes a few mechanical parts and electronics, of course. You can see one of several videos about the system below.

You can control the whole system using Bluetooth and a smartphone. The electronics are pretty simple, consisting of an ESP32 board, some motor drivers, N20 motors, and a few miscellaneous parts. We expect it would be compatible with other off-the-shelf S scale tracks and cars, but we don’t know that for sure.

Although you’ll need Fusion 360 to customize, there are plenty of ready-made STL files if you want to get started quickly. Some of the track items, like the crossing and turnout are not customizable, anyway. One particularly  impressive item is a printed auto-coupler; while a small item, getting that to work reliably with printed parts seems like it may be the most difficult part of the whole thing.

Maybe an OLED display would be the next thing? We’ve seen other printed trains, but this seems like a real labor of love.

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Supercon 2022: Sophy Wong Is Making An Impact With Artistic Wearables

January 25, 2023 by 5 Comments

Prolific designer and maker Sophy Wong is always looking toward the future, and that goes for everything from the costume pieces she makes to the idea of making itself. In her excellent and highly-visual Supercon talk, Sophy explores both, and gives the viewer a window on her evolved-and-evolving design philosophy.

You likely know Sophy as That Maker Who 3D Prints On Fabric, a label she is quick to dismiss, pointing animatedly toward the seminal work of one David Shorey, who also happened to be at Supercon 2022. As Sophy explains, the process begins by modeling disconnected bodies to be printed, then printing the first layer and pausing the print. At this point, a piece of nylon mesh is inserted, and the print is resumed. The result is that the mesh is trapped between the first and second layers, and the bodies are now connected by a common thread. Carefully remove the sandwich from the print bed and you have a highly-flexible, mesmerizing piece of material that almost acts like chain maille.

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DIY Macro Keyboard Wood Be Nice

January 25, 2023 by 13 Comments

Editing video tends to involve a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and while this might be fine for the occasional edit, those who regularly deal with video often reach for a macro pad to streamline their workflow. There are plenty of macro keyboards available specifically meant to meet the needs of those who edit a lot of video, but if you want something tailored for your personal workflow you may want to design your own keyboard like this wooden macro pad from [SS4H].

The keyboard itself is built around an STM32 microcontroller, which gives it plenty of power to drive and read the keyboard matrix. It also handles an encoder that is typically included on macro keyboards for video editing, but rather than using a potentiometer-type encoder this one uses a magnetic rotary encoder for accuracy and reliability. There’s a display built into the keyboard as well with its own on-board microcontroller that needs to be programmed separately, but with everything assembled it looks like a professional offering.

[SS4H] built a prototype using 3D printed parts, but for the final version he created one with a wooden case and laser etched keys to add a bit of uniqueness to the build. He also open-sourced all of the PCB schematics and other files needed to recreate this build so anyone can make it if they’d like. It’s not the only macro keyboard we’ve seen before, either, so if you’re looking for something even more esoteric take a look at this keyboard designed to be operated by foot.

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Open-Sourcing The Lisa, Mac’s Bigger Sister

January 25, 2023 by 23 Comments

Forty years ago, on January 19th of 1983, Apple released the Lisa, which was in many ways a revolutionary system. On January 19th of 2023, to celebrate the system’s 40th birthday, the Computer History Museum released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under the Apple Academic License Agreement. Written in Pascal, the source includes over 1,300 source files, covering the OS itself, the Lisa Toolkit development system and a number of applications. The questions one might ask at this point include what the Apple Lisa even is, and why it was such an important system in computer history.

This especially in light of the terrible flop that the Lisa turned out to be, with only 10,000 units sold over two years. Part of this failure was definitely due to the introductory price, that was set at $9,995 (over $27,000 in 2021 dollars). Although it featured an OS with memory protection, despite the lack of an MMU on the Motorola 68k, among other advanced features that placed it well beyond other desktop computers of the time, it got quickly crushed in the market by Apple’s MacIntosh, even after successive Lisa successor releases that sought to address its shortcomings.

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Laptop connected via Ethernet to Raspberry Pi-based secure radio device with antenna

Secure LoRa Mesh Communication Network

January 25, 2023 by 20 Comments

The Internet has allowed us to communicate more easily than ever before, and thanks to modern cell-phone networks, we don’t even have to be tied down to a hard line anymore. But what if you want something a little more direct? Maybe you’re in an area with no cell-phone coverage, or you don’t want to use public networks for whatever reason. For those cases, you might be interested in this Secure Communication Network project by [Thomas].

By leveraging the plug-and-play qualities of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet, [Thomas] has been able to focus on the software side of this system that really turns these parts into something useful.

Window showing secure text communications
Messages are tagged as “authenticated” when a shared hashing code is included in the message

Rather than a simple point-to-point radio link, a mesh network is built up of any transceivers in range, extending the maximum distance a message can be sent, and building in resilience in case a node goes down. Each node is connected to a PC via Ethernet, and messages are distributed via a “controlled flooding” algorithm that aims to reduce unnecessary network congestion from the blind re-transmission of messages that have already been received.

Security is handled via RSA encryption with 256-byte public/private keys and additional SHA256 hashes for authentication.

The packet-size available through the LoRa device is limited to 256 bytes, of which 80 bytes are reserved for headers. To make matters worse, the remaining 176 bytes must contain encrypted data, which is almost always more lengthy than the raw message it represents. Because of this, longer messages are fragmented by the software, with the fragments sent out individually and re-assembled at the receiving end.

If you’re in need of a decentralized secure radio communications system, then there’s a lot to like about the project that [Thomas] has documented on his Hackaday.io page. He even includes an STL file for a 3D printed case. If you need to send more than text, then this Voice-over-LoRa Mesh Network project may be more your style.

New Commodore VIC-20 Build

January 25, 2023 by 14 Comments

In a recent episode of [The Retro Shack], a new Commodore VIC-20 is built, using a ‘Vicky Twenty’ replacement PCB by [Bob’s Bits] as the base and as many new components as could be found. The occasion for this was that a viewer had sent in a VIC-20 that turned out to be broken, so in order to diagnose it, building a new one with known working parts seemed incredibly useful.

Advantages of the reproduction PCB are a number of board-level fixes that negate the need for certain bodge wires, while also having footprints for a wider range of round DIN connectors. The non-proprietary ICs were obtained along with other standard parts from a retro computing store, while the proprietary Commodore components were scrounged up from your friendly used component selling sites.

The result is what from the outside looks like a genuine VIC-20, and which should prove to be very useful in diagnosing the broken VIC-20 system in the future, as well as presumably to play some games on.

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Sequencing The Vintage Way

January 24, 2023 by 5 Comments

For most of us, an 8-bit microcomputer means one of the home computers which set so many of us on our way back in the 1980s. But this ignores an entire generation of 1970s 8-bit machines which filled the market for affordable office and industrial desktop computing before we were seduced by Pac-Man or Frogger. It’s one of these, an SWTPC 6809, that’s found its way into the hands of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding, he’s used it to control a synthesizer.

As you’d expect from the name, the computer hides a 6809 processor, and comes from the end of the 1970s when that chip had been released in an effort to stave off the market threat from the likes of Zilog and MOS Technologies. It has an SS-50 bus motherboard, and the saga in the video below the break is as much about the production of a custom DAC and trigger port for it to drive the synth as it is about troubleshooting a four-decade-old computer. It’s a credit to SWTPC that the machine is largely working after all this time, however it succumbs to some damage during the development of the interface.

At the end though, there’s a fully functional sequencer on a 1970s computer, playing some pretty good electronic music from an analogue synth. This is EXACTLY the future we were promised, back in 1979!

Long-time readers will know this isn’t the first SWTPC that has graced these pages.

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