Building Up Unicode Characters One Bit At A Time

September 7, 2023 by 33 Comments

The range of characters that can be represented by Unicode is truly bewildering. If there’s a symbol that was ever used to represent a sound or a concept anywhere in the world, chances are pretty good that you can find it somewhere in Unicode. But can many of us recall the proper keyboard calisthenics needed to call forth a particular character at will? Probably not, which is where this Unicode binary input terminal may offer some relief.

“Surely they can’t be suggesting that entering Unicode characters as a sequence of bytes using toggle switches is somehow easier than looking up the numpad shortcut?” we hear you cry. No, but we suspect that’s hardly [Stephen Holdaway]’s intention with this build. Rather, it seems geared specifically at making the process of keying in Unicode harder, but cooler; after all, it was originally his intention to enter this in last year’s Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest. [Stephen] didn’t feel it was quite ready at the time, but now we’ve got a chance to give this project a once-over.

The idea is simple: a bank of eight toggle switches (with LEDs, of course) is used to compose the desired UTF-8 character, which is made up of one to four bytes. Each byte is added to a buffer with a separate “shift/clear” momentary toggle, and eventually sent out over USB with a flick of the “send” toggle. [Stephen] thoughtfully included a tiny LCD screen to keep track of the character being composed, so you know what you’re sending down the line. Behind the handsome brushed aluminum panel, a Pi Pico runs the show, drawing glyphs from an SD card containing 200 MB of True Type Font files.

At the end of the day, it’s tempting to look at this as an attractive but essentially useless project. We beg to differ, though — there’s a lot to learn about Unicode, and [Stephen] certainly knocked that off his bucket list with this build. There’s also something wonderfully tactile about this interface, and we’d imagine that composing each codepoint is pretty illustrative of how UTF-8 is organized. Sounds like an all-around win to us.

Intel’s Chips Light The Way To Faster Processor Arrays

September 7, 2023 by 19 Comments

It’s very likely indeed that whatever you are reading this on will have a multi-core processor. They’re now the norm, but the path to they octa-or-more-core chip in your phone has gone from individual processors with PCB interconnects through many generations of ever faster on-chip ones.

But what if your power needs are so high-end that you need more cores that can be fitted on one chip, but without the slow PCB interconnect to another? If you’re Intel, you develop a multi-core processor with an on-chip photonic interconnect. It talks to the neighboring ones in its cluster at full speed, via light.

The chip in question isn’t one you’ll see in a machine near you, instead it’s inspired by the extremely demanding requirements for DARPA’s HIVE graph analytics program. So this is a machine for supercomputers in huge data centers rather than desktop computers, it will be assembled into multi-die packages with that chip-to-chip optical networking built in. But your computer today is the equal of a supercomputer from not that many years ago, so never say you won’t one day be using its descendant technologies.

Bespoke Implants Are Real—if You Put In The Time

September 6, 2023 by 23 Comments

A subset of hackers have RFID implants, but there is a limited catalog. When [Miana] looked for a device that would open a secure door at her work, she did not find the implant she needed, even though the lock was susceptible to cloned-chip attacks. Since no one made the implant, she set herself to the task. [Miana] is no stranger to implants, with 26 at the time of her talk at DEFCON31, including a couple of custom glowing ones, but this was her first venture into electronic implants. Or electronics at all. The full video after the break describes the important terms.

The PCB antenna in an RFID circuit must be accurately tuned, which is this project’s crux. Simulators exist to design and test virtual antennas, but they are priced for corporations, not individuals. Even with simulators, you have to know the specifics of your chip, and [Miana] could not buy the bare chips or find a datasheet. She bought a pack of iCLASS cards from the manufacturer and dissolved the PVC with acetone to measure the chip’s capacitance. Later, she found the datasheet and confirmed her readings. There are calculators in lieu of a simulator, so there was enough information to design a PCB and place an order.

The first batch of units can only trigger the base station from one position. To make the second version, [Miana] bought a Vector Network Analyzer to see which frequency the chip and antenna resonated. The solution to making adjustments after printing is to add a capacitor to the circuit, and its size will tune the system. The updated design works so a populated board is coated and implanted, and you can see an animated loop of [Miana] opening the lock with her bare hand.

Biohacking can be anything from improving how we read our heart rate to implanting a Raspberry Pi.

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The Computer That Controlled Chernobyl

September 6, 2023 by 8 Comments

When you think of Chernobyl (or Chornobyl, now), you think of the nuclear accident, of course. But have you ever considered that where there is a nuclear reactor, there is a computer control system? What computers were in control of the infamous reactor? [Chornobyl Family] has the answer in a fascinating video documentary you can see below.

The video shows a bit of the history of Soviet-era control computers. The reactor’s V-30M computer descended from some of these earlier computers. With 20K of core memory, we won’t be impressed today, but that was respectable for the day. The SKALA system will look familiar if you are used to looking at 1970s-era computers.

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Quake 2 Ported To Apple Watch

September 6, 2023 by No comments

DOOM always seems to spontaneously appear on any new device the day it’s released. From printers to industrial robots to pregnancy tests, it always makes its way on anything with an integrated circuit and a screen. But that’s not the only 90s video game with a cult following and and ability to run on hardware never intended for gaming. The early Quake games are still remarkably popular, and the second installment of this series was recently brought to the Apple Watch thanks to [ByteOverlord].

Building this classic for the Apple Watch requires using the original Quake files and some work with Xcode to get a package together that will run on the wrist-bound computer. There are a few other minimum system requirements to meet as well, but with all of that out of the way the latest release runs fairly well on this small watch. The controls have been significantly modified to use the Apple’s touch screen and digital crown instead of any peripherals, and as a result it’s not likely you’d win any matches if it was possible to cross-play with PC users with a setup like this, but it’s definitely playable although still missing a few features compared to the PC version.

This actually isn’t the first Quake game to be ported to the Apple Watch, either. The first version of Quake ran on this device thanks to [MyOwnClone]’s efforts a little over a year ago. It’s also not the first time we’ve seen Quake running on unusual Apple hardware, either. Take a look at this project which uses one of the early iPods to play this game, along with the scroll wheel for a one-of-a-kind controller.

Thanks to [Joni] for the tip!

Thin Keyboard Fits In Steam Deck Case

September 6, 2023 by 13 Comments

Although some of the first Android-powered smartphones had them and Blackberries were famous for them, physical keyboards on portable electronics like that quickly became a thing of the past. Presumably the cost to manufacture is too high and the margins too low regardless of consumer demand. Whatever the reason, if you want a small keyboard for your portable devices you’ll likely need to make one yourself like [Kārlis] did for the Steam Deck.

Unlike a more familiar mechanical keyboard build which prioritizes the feel and sound of the keyboard experience, this one sacrifices nearly every other design consideration in order to be thin enough to fit in the Steam Deck case. The PCB is designed to be flexible using copper tape cut to size with a vinyl cutter with all the traces running to a Raspberry Pi Pico which hosts the firmware and plugs into the Steam Deck’s USB port. The files for the PCB are available in KiCad and can be exported as SVG files for cutting.

In the end, [Kārlis] has a functioning keyboard that’s even a little more robust than was initially expected and which does fit alongside the Deck in its case. On the other hand, [Kārlis] describes the typing experience as “awful” due to its extreme thinness, but either way we applaud the amount of effort that went in to building a keyboard with this form factor. The Steam Deck itself is a platform which lends itself to all kinds of modifications as well, from the control sticks to the operating systems, and Valve will even show you how.

A Heathkit H8 in which hides an 8008 instead of the normal 8080

Downgrade Your Heathkit H8 To The World’s First 8-bit Microprocessor

September 6, 2023 by 10 Comments

Typically when you’re replacing parts in an old computer it’s either for repairs or an upgrade. Upgrades like adding a more capable processor to an old computer are the most common, and can help bring an old computer a bit closer to the modern era. [Dr. Scott M. Baker] had a different idea, when he downgraded a Heathkit H8 from an 8080 to an 8008.

Despite the very similar numbers, the 8080 runs at four to nearly sixteen times the speed of its predecessor. In addition to this, the 8008 is far less capable on multiple fronts like address space, I/O ports, the stack and even interrupts. The 8008 does have one thing going for it though: the 8008 is widely known as the world’s first 8-bit microprocessor.

A green circuit board with an 8008 and supporting electronics.
The custom 8008 CPU board for the Heathkit H8.

In the video after the break, [Scott] goes into great detail about the challenges presented in replacing the 8080 with the 8008, starting with the clock. The clock is two-phase, so that what would otherwise be a single oscillator now also has a clock divider and two NAND gates.

Boring clock stuff aside, he does some great hacking using the I/O ports including expanding the I/O port count from 32 to the full 256, bit-banging serial, implementing an interrupt controller and even memory mapping 64 KiB into 16 KiB of address space! With that and a few more special adapter circuits, we think [Scott] has done a great job of downgrading his H8 and the resulting CPU board looks fabulous.

Maybe you’re wondering what happens if you upgrade the computer instead of the CPU? What you get is this credit-card sized 6502 computer.

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