Gearing Up With The 2023 Hackaday Prize

July 5, 2023 by 3 Comments

You know how it goes. You’re working on a project, and you need to do some ultra-precise probing, so you end up making a custom PCB probing octopus along the way. Or you find that you spend more time making the jig to hold down a part for machining than you do machining it. Hackers are not merely a tool-using species, we’re a tool-making species – it’s in our nature to want to build the tools that make it easier to get the job done.

The Gearing Up round of the Hackaday Prize celebrates the tool makers. If you’ve got a project that maybe isn’t an end in itself, but rather one of those utility project that can make all the difference, we want to see it here. Maybe it’s obscure measurement gear, maybe it’s a test rig or a bolt sorter, maybe you’ve built your own reflow hot plate. This is the challenge round for you!

The Gearing Up round runs from yesterday, July 4th, until August 8th. As with all of the 2023 Hackaday Prize rounds, ten finalists will receive $500 and get entered for the big prizes to be announced in November. Continue reading “Gearing Up With The 2023 Hackaday Prize” →

A man next to a robot with animatronic eyes and a CRT display showing an audio waveform

Animatronic Alexa Gives Amazon’s Echo A Face

July 5, 2023 by 17 Comments

Today, we’re surrounded by talking computers and clever AI systems that a few decades ago only existed in science fiction. But they definitely looked different back then: instead of a disembodied voice like ChatGPT, classic sci-fi movies typically featured robots that had something resembling a human body, with an actual face you could talk to. [Thomas] over at Workshop Nation thought this human touch was missing from his Amazon Echo, and therefore set out to give Alexa a face in a project he christened Alexatron.

The basic idea was to design a device that would somehow make the Echo’s voice visible and, at the same time, provide a pair of eyes that move in a lifelike manner. For the voice, [Thomas] decided to use the CRT from a small black-and-white TV. By hooking up the Echo’s audio signal to the TV’s vertical deflection circuitry, he turned it into a rudimentary oscilloscope that shows Alexa’s waveform in real time. An acrylic enclosure shields the CRT’s high voltage while keeping everything inside clearly visible.

To complete the face, [Thomas] made a pair of animatronic eyes according to a design by [Will Cogley]. Consisting of just a handful of 3D-printed parts and six servos, it forms a pair of eyes that can move in all directions and blink just like a real person. Thanks to a “person sensor,” which is basically a smart camera that detects faces, the eyes will automatically follow anyone standing in front of the system. The eyes are closed when the system is dormant, but they will open and start looking for faces nearby when the Echo hears its wake word, just like a human or animal responds to its name.

The end result absolutely looks the part: we especially like the eye tracking feature, which gives it that human-like appearance that [Thomas] was aiming for. He isn’t the first person trying to give Alexa a face, though: there are already cute Furbys and creepy bunnies powered by Amazon’s AI, and we’ve even seen Alexa hooked up to an animatronic fish.

Continue reading “Animatronic Alexa Gives Amazon’s Echo A Face” →

Remote Driving Controversial In UK, But It’s Already Here

July 5, 2023 by 46 Comments

The automotive industry is rushing towards autonomous vehicles as a futuristic ideal. They haven’t got the autonomous part sorted just yet. However, as part of this push, the technology to drive vehicles remotely via video link has become mature.

In the United Kingdom, there has been great controversy on whether this should be allowed, particularly for vehicles piloted by individuals outside the country’s borders. That came to a head with a Law Commission repot published earlier this year, but since then, innovative companies have continued to work on remote driving regardless. Let’s dive in to the current state of play.

Continue reading “Remote Driving Controversial In UK, But It’s Already Here” →

A Faulty Keyboard From A Single LED

July 5, 2023 by 19 Comments

When the chance arrived to buy a mechanical keyboard for not a lot, naturally, [Hales] jumped at it. Then it started having odd intermittent problems with some keys appearing stuck, which led to a teardown and some fault finding. The culprit was a white LED — but why this was the case is a fascinating story.

Stripping it down there didn’t seem to be an obvious culprit, but eventually, the trail led to a lack of diodes in the matrix. This keyboard had an extremely clever yet rather cursed design in which it used LEDs as both illumination and as a diode in the keyboard matrix circuit, and the faulty LED had a reverse breakdown condition that could be triggered under certain operational conditions.

More unexpectedly, it would sometimes hold on to its reverse breakdown state even after power off. Just when you think you understand a component’s properties, there’s always room for surprise. And we can safely say we’ve learned something about the design of cheaper keyboards in reading the account. It’s clear that when it comes to ‘boards, it’s best to take no chances.

Cheap Ham Radio Improves The Low End UI If Not The RF

July 5, 2023 by 17 Comments

There was a time when buying a new radio was something many hams could never afford to do. Then came the super cheap — and super controversial — VHF and UHF radios from China. But as they say, you get what you pay for. The often oddly named handhelds like Baofeng and Wouxun are sometimes odd to work with and may have questionable RF outputs. A new radio has a less tongue-twisting English name and many improved features for about $50 — the Talkpod A36Plus and [Josh] shows us how they work in a video that you can see below.

The new features are generally good. For example, the radio can pick up AM in the aircraft band, something most of these cheap radios won’t do. It works on VHF and UHF bands but also picks up FM broadcasts. The USB-C connector is welcome, and the screen is large and colorful. It has 500 channels and IP5 water resistance.

There were a few issues, though. If you want to use it as a scanner, it’s not very fast. The radio comes with a programming cable, but apparently, it uses an odd USB chipset that may give you some driver issues. The biggest problem, though, is that it has, according to the video, excessive spurious emissions. The power isn’t that high, and the antenna probably filters off some of it, too. But creating interference across the band isn’t very polite.

How bad are the harmonics? Well, [Josh] hooks up a spectrum analyzer and also shows how a radio tuned to the second harmonic easily picks up the transmission. Of course, no radio is perfect, but it seems like it does have very strong harmonic emissions. Of course, it may or may not be any worse than similar cheap radios. They are probably all above the legal limits, and it is just a matter of degrees.

These little radios won’t directly work the world — you need an HF radio for that, generally. They will let you connect to local repeaters, though. Some of those cheap radios can lead to interesting projects, too.

Continue reading “Cheap Ham Radio Improves The Low End UI If Not The RF” →

A Dusty Boat Anchor Back From The Brink

July 4, 2023 by 16 Comments

Many of us will have found dusty forgotten pieces of electronics and nursed them back to health, but we were captivated by [Don]’s tale of electronic revival. Instead of perhaps a forgotten computer or television, his barn find was a Heathkit linear amplifier for radio amateurs. In that huge box underneath an impressive layer of grime were a pair of huge tubes, along with all the power supply components to give them the 2 kV they need. It should have been good for a kilowatt when new, can it be made to go on air again?

Perhaps understandably with such an old device, after cleaning away the dust of ages he replaced the power supply circuitry with new parts and PCBs. A linear amplifier is surprisingly simple, but because of the voltages and power concerned there’s a need to treat its power circuits with respect. On first power-up the filaments work and the rails come up, so when given some RF drive it comes alive. Coupled with a case restoration you’d never know how dreadful a state it had been in.

We like to see classic Heathkit devices here at Hackaday, though we’ve followed their more recent reappearance too.

The I960: When Intel Almost Went RISC

July 4, 2023 by 27 Comments
The i960 KA/KB/MC/XA with the main functional blocks labeled. Click this image (or any other) for a larger version. Die image courtesy of Antoine Bercovici. Floorplan from The 80960 microprocessor architecture.
The i960 KA/KB/MC/XA with the main functional blocks labeled. Click this image (or any other) for a larger version. Die image courtesy of Antoine Bercovici. Floorplan from The 80960 microprocessor architecture.

From the consumer space it often would appear as if Intel’s CPU making history is pretty much a straight line from the 4004 to the 8080, 8088 and straight into the era of Pentiums and Cores. Yet this could not be further from the truth, with Intel having churned through many alternate architectures. One of the more successful of these was the Intel i960, which is also the topic of a recent article by [Ken Shirriff].

Remarkably, the i960 as a solid RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture has its roots in Intel’s ill-fated extreme CISC architecture, the iAPX 432. As [Ken] describes in his comparison between the i960 and 432, both architectures are remarkably similar in terms of their instruction set, essentially taking what it could from the 432 project and putting it into a RISC-y shape. This meant that although the i960 could be mistaken as yet another RISC CPU, as was common in the 1980s, but integrated higher-level features as well, such as additional memory protection and inter-process communication. Continue reading “The I960: When Intel Almost Went RISC” →