Adding Smart Watch Features To Vintage Casio

July 3, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

[Matteo] has been a fan of the Casio F-91W wristwatch virtually since its release in 1989. And not without good reason, either. The watch boasts reliable timekeeping and extremely long battery life thanks to a modern quartz crystal and has just about every feature needed in a watch such as an alarm and a timer. And, since it’s been in use since the 80s, it’s also a device built to last. The only thing that’s really missing from it, at least as far as [Matteo] was concerned, was a contactless payment ability.

Contactless systems use near-field communication (NFC) to remotely power a small chip via a radio antenna when in close proximity. All that’s really required for a system like this is to figure out a way to get a chip and an antenna and to place them inside a new device. [Matteo] scavenges the chip from a payment card, but then builds a new antenna by hand in order to ensure that it fits into the smaller watch face. Using a NanoVNA as an antenna analyzer he is able to recreate the performance of the original antenna setup in the smaller form factor and verify everything works before sealing it all up in a 3D-printed enclosure that sandwiches the watch.

There are a few reasons why using a contactless payment system with a watch like this, instead of relying on a smartwatch, might be preferential. For one, [Matteo] hopes to explore the idea that one of the physical buttons on the watch could be used to physically disable the device to reduce pickpocketing risk if needed. It’s also good to not have to buy the latest high-dollar tech gadget just for conveniences like this too, but we’ve seen in the past that it’s not too hard just to get these systems out of their cards in the first place.

The Chess Computer From 1912

July 3, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with computers playing chess.

Don’t confuse this with the infamous Mechanical Turk, which appeared to be a chess computer but was really a guy hiding inside a fake chess computer. The Spanish engineer’s machine really did play a modified end game. The chessboard was vertical, and pegs represented pieces. There were mechanical arms to move the pegs. The device actually dates back to 1912, with a public demonstration in Paris in 1914. Given [Quevedo’s] native language, the machine was called El Ajedrecista.

Continue reading “The Chess Computer From 1912” →

A man in a dark shirt stands at a podium in front of a projector screen with the text "50% OF US CAR TRIPS" in white above yellow text saying "1 HUMAN < 3 MILES". The screen is flanked by decor saying "Supercon" in white on a black background.

Supercon 2022: Bradley Gawthrop Wants You To Join The PEV Revolution

July 3, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 70 Comments

During the 20th Century, much of the western world decided that motor vehicles were the only desirable form of transportation. We built our cities to accommodate cars through parking, stop lights, and any number of other infrastructure investments so that you could go get milk and bread in style. In the US, 50% of automobile trips are less than three miles and have only one occupant. [Bradley Gawthrop] asked if there might be a more efficient way to do all this? Enter the Personal Electric Vehicle (PEV).

What Are PEVs?

PEVs are a nascent part of the transportation mix that fall under the wider umbrella of “micromobility,” including scooters, bikes, skateboards, and the like. The key differentiator here is that they are at least partially electrically-driven. [Gawthrop] walks us through several of the different types during his Supercon 2022 talk, but since they are all small, electric powered devices for transporting one or two people, they can trace their lineage back to the infamous Segway Human Transporter.

Using an electric motor or two connected to a controller and batteries, the overall system complexity for any of these devices is quite low and ripe for the hacking. Given the right tools and safety precautions, anyone should be able to crack a PEV open and repair or tinker with it. As with many things in life, the real story is more complicated.

As [Gawthrop] notes, many a hacker has said, “I wish I’d been able to be involved in X before…” where X equals some technology like home automation and it’s before it got creepy or dystopian in some manner. He exhorts us that the time to be in on the ground floor with PEVs is now. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Bradley Gawthrop Wants You To Join The PEV Revolution” →

3D Printing Food Hack Chat

July 3, 2023 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, July 5 at noon Pacific for the 3D Printing Food Hack Chat with Ellie Weinstein!

In the right hands, food goes beyond mere sustenance and becomes a work of art. We’ve all seen examples — the carefully crafted blends of flavors, the quality ingredients expertly cooked, the artful platings that make a dramatic presentation at the table. But where the artistry really seems to take off is with desserts, which pastry chefs and confectioners can take to the next level with edible sculptures of chocolate and other sweets that can tower dramatically over the table.

That’s all well and good for the haute cuisine set, but what about the rest of us? We can’t all have the talent and drive needed to produce edible art, so perhaps we can leverage technology to help us out. That’s just one of the rationales behind food 3D printing, which is what we’ll be exploring with Ellie Weinstein. She’s the CEO of Cocoa Press, where they’re bringing chocolate 3D printing to the mainstream. It’s not as easy as you might think — there are plenty of nuances and engineering challenges when you’re trying to print chocolate or any other kind of food. Make sure you stop by and check it out; it’s sure to be a treat.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

A Commodore 128 with a video capture device attached

Hacking The Commodore 128 To Capture Almost Real-Time Video

July 3, 2023 by Robin Kearey 10 Comments

Although watching and editing videos may be among the primary tasks of many PCs today, it wasn’t that long ago that working with video required powerful processors and expensive video capture hardware. Even in the 1980s, home computer users were looking for ways to connect video sources to their Commodores and Ataris despite their hardware limitations. [Cameron Kaiser] has a mid-1980s consumer-grade video capture device, which he has managed to turn into an almost real-time video capture system.

A distorted video image on a C128's monitor — Allowing the graphics chip to interrupt the CPU mid-capture results in a severely distorted image

His work revolves around a device called “ComputerEyes”, a 1984-vintage hardware interface that made it possible to connect a composite video source to a home computer. The limitations of mid-1980s CPUs meant that it took around six seconds for the computer to do a quick scan of a single video frame, or a multiple of that if you wanted a higher-quality image. Another limitation, at least on Commodore machines, was that the screen had to be turned off during video capture – otherwise, the video chip would interrupt the CPU halfway through the process, causing it to lose its synchronization with the video source.

[Cameron] however, plugged his ComputerEyes into a Commodore 128. This machine, largely designed by Hackaday contributor [Bil Herd], has an unusual hardware architecture consisting of two different CPUs and, crucially, two separate video chips. The primary 8564 “VIC-II” graphics chip is used to keep compatibility with existing Commodore 64 programs, while the secondary 8563 “VDC” is mainly aimed at newer high-resolution text-based software. The VDC is also much more independent from the main system bus than the VIC-II, allowing it to display an image without disturbing the CPU.

More after the break.

Continue reading “Hacking The Commodore 128 To Capture Almost Real-Time Video” →

Ice Wrenchers, Wrencher Chocolates, And The Vaquform DT2

July 3, 2023 by Jenny List 9 Comments

What do you do when you find some friends have bought a vacuum forming machine? Make novelty chocolates and ice cubes, of course! This was my response when I had the opportunity to play with a Vaquform DT2 all-in-one vacuum forming machine, so what follows is partly a short review of an exciting machine, and partly an account of my adventures in edible merchandise creation.

The vaquform machine, on a neutral white background — The Vaquform machine in all its glory.

Vacuum forming, the practice of drawing a sheet of heat-softened plastic film over a model to make a plastic shell copy of it, is nothing new in our community. It’s most often found in hackerspaces in the form of home made vacuum forming tables, and usually requires quite a bit of experimentation to get good results. The Vaquform machine I was lucky enough to be able to try is an all in one machine that puts the whole process into a compact desktop machine of similar size to a typical 3D printer. It’s a machine of two parts with a moveable carriage between them for the plastic sheet; a vacuum table on its base, and a heater unit suspended above it. The unique selling point is that it’s an all-in-one computer controlled unit that does as much as possible for you, it simply requires the user to place a sheet in the carriage and follow the instructions.

When I first saw the machine I didn’t really have anything to try it with, so of course I resorted to producing a Wrencher or two. Because what it makes are essentially moulds, it made sense to produce something Wrencher-shaped with them, and thus the chocolate and ice plan formed. The first mould was made with laser-cut Wrenchers in 2mm acrylic, stacked on two more layers of uncut acrylic to make a bar with an inset Wrencher on top, while the second one used a 3D-printed array of larger stand-alone Wrenchers with channels between them. Would my first attempt at vacuum forming make usable moulds or not? Only one way to find out. Continue reading “Ice Wrenchers, Wrencher Chocolates, And The Vaquform DT2” →

Four jumper wires with white heatshrink on them, labelled VCC, SCL, SDA and GND

Three Pitfalls In I2C Everyone Wishes Weren’t There

July 3, 2023 by Maya Posch 95 Comments

The best part of I2C is that it is a bus that is available just about anywhere, covering a vast ecosystem of devices that offer it as a hardware-defined interface, while being uncomplicated enough that it can also be implemented purely in software on plain GPIO pins. Despite this popularity, I2C is one of those famous informal standards that feature a couple of popular implementations, while leaving many of the details such as exact timing, bus capacitance and other tedious details to the poor sod doing the product development. Thus it is that we end up with articles such as a recent one on the tongue-twisting [pair of pared pears] blog, covering issues found while implementing an I2C slave.

As with any shared bus, whether multi-master or not, figuring out when the bus is clear is a fun topic, yet one which can cause endless headaches. One issue here comes from a feature that the SMBus version of I2C calls quick read/write. This allows for the rapid transfer of some data. Still, depending on the data returned by the slave, it may appear to the master that nothing is happening yet, since SDA is being held low by the slave until the stop condition, essentially locking the bus.

Where things get even more exciting comes generally in the form of what logic analyzers love to traumatically call a ‘spurious start/stop condition’. This refers to the behavior of SDA and SCL, with SDA going low before SCL indicating an error. This can occur due to a hold time that’s too low, causing other devices on the bus to miss the transition. Here SMBus defines a transition time of 300 ns, while I2C calls for 0 seconds, but it’s now suggested to delay calling a start/stop condition until a delay of 300 ns has passed. Essentially, it would seem that implementing a hold time is the way forward until evidence to the contrary appears.

The third pitfall pertains to the higher-speed modes of I2C, including Fast-Mode (FM) and Fast-Mode Plus (FM+). Backward compatibility with these higher speed versions is absent to spotty. Although FM+ (introduced by NXP in 2007) is supposed to be backward compatible with slower speeds, effectively the timing requirement differences between the FM+ and FM standards are too large to compensate for. At least in the current versions of the standards, but one of the joys of I2C is that there’s always another new set of revisions to look forward to.