Own More Than One ‘Scope? You’ve Got Nothing On This Guy!

May 24, 2023 by 18 Comments

We’re guessing that quite a few of our readers have a surprising amount of redundant test gear, and we ourselves have to admit that more than one instrument adorns our benches. But we are mere dilettantes, amateurs if you will, compared to [Volke Kloke]. He’s got 350 of them in his average American home, and we have to say, among them are some beauties.

The linked newspaper article is sometimes frustratingly light on the details, but fortunately he has a website all of his own where we can all get immersed in the details. Of particular interest is an instrument which doesn’t even have a CRT, the General Radio 338 string oscillograph used a mirror drum to catch a standing wave in a tungsten wire, but there are plenty more. Is your first ‘scope among them?

As we now live in the age of cheap digital ‘scopes, at any surplus sale you’ll see plenty of CRT-based instruments going for relative pennies. Of those, the more recent and high-end ones are still extremely useful instruments, and it’s not just misty-eyed reminiscing to say that they remain a worthy addition to any bench.

Want to know about early ‘scope tech? We’ve taken a look before.

Linux Fu: Making Progress

May 24, 2023 by 12 Comments

The computer world looks different from behind a TeleType or other hardcopy terminal. Things that tend to annoy people about Unix or Linux these days were perfectly great when you were printing everything the computer said to you. Consider the brevity of most basic commands. When you copy a file, for example, it doesn’t really tell you much other than it returns you to the prompt when it is done. If you are on a modern computer working with normal-sized files locally, not a big deal. But if you are over a slow network or with huge files, it would be nice to have a progress bar. Sure, you could write your own version of copy, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some more generic options?

One Way

The pv program can do some of the things you want. It monitors data through a pipe or, at least through its standard output. Think of it as cat with a meter. Suppose you want to write a diskimage to /dev/sdz:

cat diskz.img >/dev/sdz

But you could also do:

pv diskz.img >/dev/sdz

By default, pv will show a progress bar, an elapsed time, an estimated end time, a rate, and a total number of bytes. You can turn any of that off or add things using command line options. You can also specify things like the size of the terminal if it should count lines instead of bytes, and, in the case where the program doesn’t know what it is reading, the expected size of the transfer.

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New Zealand’s First Microcomputer May Be This 1802

May 24, 2023 by 13 Comments

Hardware hackers of a certain age likely got started with microcontrollers via the RCA 1802 — a relatively easy-to-use processor that was the subject of several excellent articles in Popular Electronics magazine back in the late 1970s. [Al’s Geek Lab] has an interview with [Hugh Anderson], who saw the articles and eventually designed the HUG1802, which may be the first microcontroller kit designed and sold in New Zealand.

The 1802 was very attractive at the time since it was inexpensive, static, didn’t require exotic voltages, and had a DMA system that allowed you to load software without complex ROMs. He initially marketed a kit unsuccessfully until an Australian company convinced him to create a proper PC board — the resulting kit was sold to about 100 customers.

The HUG1802 reminded us somewhat of the Quest Super Elf since it had a keypad, a cassette interface, and even a TV output. The 1802 had a DMA-enabled chip that made crude memory-mapped video output. The computer eventually morphed into the ETI 660, which they talk about at the end of the interview.

A lot of people built 1802 computers back in those days. If you don’t have an 1802, but you have an Arduino… ell, there’s always emulation.

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The Art And Science Of Making Beautiful Transparent Ice

May 24, 2023 by 43 Comments

For most of us, ice isn’t something we’ve thought about in detail since our high school science classes. For most of us, we pour some tap water into the ice trays, slam it in the freezer, and forget about it. Then we lob the frozen misshapen cubes into a beer and enjoy a quite literally ice-cold beverage.

However, there’s so much more fun to be had with ice if you really get into it. If you’ve ever wondered how pretentious cocktail bars make their fancy ice spheres or transparent cubes, read on!

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Hall Sensors Offer Drop-In Replacement For Drifting Game Console Joysticks

May 24, 2023 by 44 Comments

No bananas were harmed in the making of this Hall effect drift-proof joystick replacement. OK, not really — two bananas were turned to mush. But it’s OK, they’re just bananas, after all.

Why bananas, you ask? Because [Marius Heier] uses them to demonstrate what we all intuitively know — that rubbing something over and over again tends to wear it away — but engineers seem to have forgotten. Wear such as this, with resistance material rather than fruits, is what causes the dreaded drift, a problem that the world collectively spends $20 billion a year dealing with, according to [Marius].

While numbers like that seem to be firmly in class-action lawsuit territory, sometimes it’s best to take matters into your own hands and not wait for the courts. The fix [Marius] shows here is to yank the potentiometers off a PS4 joystick and replace them with contactless Hall effect sensors. The end of the shaft for each axis gets a diametral neodymium magnet attached to it, while a 3D printed bracket holds a tiny custom PCB in close proximity. The PCB has an AS5600 Hall sensor, which translates the shaft angle to an analog voltage output. After programming the chip over its I2C bus, the sensor outputs a voltage proportional to the angle of each shaft, just like the original pots, but without all the wear and tear.

While [Marius] is selling these as drop-in replacements for PS4 controllers, he plans to release all the design files so you can build one yourself. He also has his sights set on replacements for PS5 and Xbox controllers, so watch for those. This isn’t his first foray into joystick hacking, having shared his 3D Hall effect and haptic feedback joysticks with us previously.

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Simulated ET To Phone Home From Mars This Afternoon

May 24, 2023 by 31 Comments

In science fiction movies, communicating with aliens is easy. In real life, though, we think it will be tough. Today, you’ll get your chance to see how tough when a SETI project uses the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter to send a simulated alien message to the Earth. The transmission is scheduled to happen at 1900 UTC and, of course, the signal will take about 16 minutes to arrive here on planet Earth. You can see a video about the project, A Sign in Space, below.

You don’t need to receive the message yourself. That will be the job of observatories at the SETI Institute, the Green Bank Observatory, and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. They’ll make the signal available to everyone, and you can join others on Discord or work solo and submit your interpretation of the message.

Drake’s message properly arranged

There are a host of issues involved in alien communication. What communication medium will they use? How will they encode their message? Will the message even make sense? Imagine an engineer from 1910 trying to find, decode, and understand an ad on FM radio station 107.9. First, they’d have to find the signal. Then figure out FM modulation. Then they’d probably wonder what the phrase “smartphone” could possibly mean.

When [Frank Drake] created a test message to send to aliens via the Arecibo dish, almost no one could decode it unless they already knew how it worked. But even looking at the message in the accompanying image, you probably can only puzzle out some of it. Don’t forget; this message was created by another human.

If you want a foreshadowing of how hard this is, you can try decoding the bitstream yourself. Of course, that page assumes you already figured out that the stream of bits is, in fact, a stream of bits and that it should be set in an image pattern. You also have the advantage of knowing what the right answer looks like. It could easily become an extraterrestrial Rorschach test where you find patterns and meaning in every permutation of bits.

Speaking of the Drake message, it saddens us to think that Arecibo is gone. The closest we think we’ve come to intercepting alien messages is the Wow signal.

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Commodore 64 Upgrade In Modern Package

May 23, 2023 by 50 Comments

While the Commodore 64 was an immensely popular computer for its time, and still remains a strong favorite within the retrocomputing community, there’s a reason we’re not using modern Commodore-branded computers today. Intense competition, company mismanagement, and advancing beyond 8-bit computers too late in the game all led to the company’s eventual downfall. But if you’re still a Commodore enthusiast and always wished you were able to get an upgraded C64, you might want to take a look at the Commander X16, a modern take on this classic computer.

We’ve actually seen the Commander X16 before, but this was back in its early days of prototyping and design. This video from [Adrian’s Digital Basement], also linked below the break, takes a look at how it’s come in the four years since [David Murray] started this project. At its core, it’s an 8-bit 6502-based computer like you’d find in the 1980s but built with new components. There are some more modern updates as well such as the ability to use an SD card as well as built-in SNES controller ports, but the real magic here is the VERA module. Built around an FPGA, this module handles graphics, some of the audio, and the storage capabilities and does all of these things much better than the original Commodore, while still being faithful to what made these computer great.

While the inclusion of the FPGA might offend some of the most staunch 8-bit purists, it turns out to be necessary due to the lack of off-the-shelf video chips and really makes this build shine in the end. It’s also capable of running 6502-based software from other machines too, including the original NES. The VERA module makes it possible to run other software too, including a sample of Sonic the Hedgehog from the Sega Genesis which [Adrian] demonstrates in his video. 6502-based computers are quite versatile as the Commander X16 demonstrates, and it’s even possible to build a rudimentary 6502 on a breadboard with just a few parts.

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