Hands On: Bus Pirate 5

February 12, 2024 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

If you’ve been involved with electronics and hardware hacking for awhile, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard of the Bus Pirate. First introduced on the pages of Hackaday back in 2008 by creator Ian Lesnet, the open hardware multi-tool was designed not only as away to easily tap into a wide array of communication protocols, but to provide various functions that would be useful during hardware development or reverse engineering. The Bus Pirate could talk to your I2C and SPI devices, while also being able to measure frequencies, check voltages, program chips, and even function as a logic analyzer or oscilloscope.

The Bus Pirate provided an incredible number of tools at a hobbyist-friendly price, and it wasn’t long before the device became so popular that it achieved a milestone which only a few hardware hacking gadgets can boast: its sales started to get undercut by cheap overseas clones. Of course, as an open hardware device, this wasn’t really a problem. If other companies wanted to crank out cheap Bus Pirates, that’s fine. It freed Ian up to research a next-generation version of the device.

But it turns out that was easier said than done. It’s around this point that the Bus Pirate enters what might be considered its Duke Nukem Forever phase. It took 15 years to release the sequel to 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D because the state-of-the-art in video games kept changing, and the developers didn’t want to be behind the curve. Similarly, Ian and his team spent years developing and redeveloping versions of the Bus Pirate that utilized different hardware platforms, such as the STM32 and ICE40 FPGA. But each time, there would be problems sourcing components, or something newer and more interesting would be released.

But then in 2021 the Raspberry Pi Pico hit the scene, and soon after, the bare RP2040 chip. Not only were the vast I/O capabilities of the new microcontroller a perfect fit for the Bus Pirate, but the chip was cheap and widely available. Finally, after years of false starts, the Bus Pirate 5 was born.

I was able to grab one of the first all-new Bus Pirates off the production line in January, and have been spending the last week or so playing around with it. While there’s definitely room for improvement on the software side of things, the hardware is extremely promising, and I’m very excited to be see how this new chapter in the Bus Pirate story plays out.

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The Cockpit Voice Recorder Controversy

January 31, 2024 by Lewin Day 75 Comments

Every time there’s a plane crash or other aviation safety incident, we often hear talk of the famous “black box”. Of course, anyone these days will tell you that they’re not black, but orange, for visibility’s sake. Plus, there’s often not one black box, but two! There’s a Flight Data Recorder (FDR), charged with recording aircraft telemetry, and a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), designed to record what’s going on in the cabin.

It sounds straightforward enough, but the cockpit voice recorder has actually become the subject of some controversy in recent times. Let’s talk about the basics of these important safety devices, and why they’re the subject of some debate at the present time.

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Could Moon Mining Spoil Its Untouched Grandeur And Science Value?

January 25, 2024 by Lewin Day 89 Comments

It’s 2024. NASA’s Artemis program is in full swing, and we’re hoping to get back to the surface of the Moon real soon. Astronauts haven’t walked on the beloved sky rock since 1972! A human landing was scheduled for 2025, which has now been pushed back to 2026, and we’re all getting a bit antsy about it. Last time we wanted to go, it only took 8 years!

Now, somehow, it’s harder, but NASA also has its sights set higher. It no longer wants to just toddle about the Moon for a bit to wave at the TV cameras. This time, there’s talk of establishing permanent bases on the Moon, and actually doing useful work, like mining. It’s a tantalizing thought, but what does this mean for the sanctity of one of the last pieces of real estate yet to be spoilt by humans? Researchers are already arguing that we need to move to protect this precious, unique environment.

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Bell Labs Is Leaving The Building

January 22, 2024 by Al Williams 18 Comments

If you ever had the occasion to visit Bell Labs at Murray Hill, New Jersey, or any of the nearby satellite sites, but you didn’t work there, you were probably envious. For one thing, some of the most brilliant people in the world worked there. Plus, there is the weight of history — Bell Labs had a hand in ten Nobel prizes, five Turing awards, 22 IEEE Medals of Honor, and over 20,000 patents, including several that have literally changed the world. They developed, among other things, the transistor, Unix, and a host of other high-tech inventions. Of course, Bell Labs hasn’t been Bell for a while — Nokia now owns it. And Nokia has plans to move the headquarters lab from its historic Murray Hill campus to nearby New Brunswick. (That’s New Jersey, not Canada.)

If your friends aren’t impressed by Nobels, it is worth mentioning the lab has also won five Emmy awards, a Grammy, and an Academy award. Not bad for a bunch of engineers and scientists. Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent, who had wound up with Bell Labs after the phone company was split up and AT&T spun off Lucent.

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Ask Hackaday: Why Are Self-Checkouts Failing?

January 16, 2024 by Al Williams 260 Comments

Most people who read Hackaday have positive feelings about automation. (Notice we said most.) How many times have you been behind someone in a grocery store line waiting for them to find a coupon, or a cashier who can’t make change without reading the screen and thought: “There has to be a better way.” The last few years have seen that better way, but now, companies are deciding the grass isn’t greener after all. The BBC reports that self-checkouts have been a “spectacular failure.” That led us to wonder why that should be true.

As a concept, everyone loves it. Stores can hire fewer cashiers. Customers, generally, like having every line open and having a speedy exit from the store. The problem is, it hasn’t really panned out that way. Self-checkout stations frequently need maintenance, often because it can’t figure out that you put something in the bag. Even when they work flawlessly, a customer might have an issue or not understand what to do. Maybe you’ve scanned something twice and need one of them backed off. Then, there are the age-restricted products that require verification. So now you have to hire a crew of not-cashiers to work at the automated not-register. Sure, you can have one person cover many registers, but when one machine is out of change, another won’t print a receipt, and two people are waiting for you to verify their beer purchase, you are back to waiting. Next thing you know, there’s a line.

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Liquid Tin Could Be The Key To Cheap, Plentiful Grid Storage

January 8, 2024 by Lewin Day 143 Comments

Once expensive and difficult to implement, renewable energy solutions like wind and solar are now often the cheapest options available for generating electricity for the grid. However, there are still some issues around the non-continuous supply from these sources, with grid storage becoming a key technology to keep the lights on around the clock.

In the quest for cost-effective grid storage, a new player has entered the arena with a bold claim: a thermal battery technology that’s not only more than 10 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, but also a standout in efficiency compared to traditional thermal battery designs. Fourth Power is making waves with its “sun in a box” energy storage technology, and aims to prove its capabilities with an ambitious 1-MWh prototype.

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Simple heating elements turn electricity into heat, putting it into liquid tin that then heats large graphite blocks. Credit: Fourth Power, Vimeo screenshot

The principle behind Fourth Power’s technology is deceptively simple: when there’s excess renewable energy available, use it to heat something up. The electrical energy is thus converted and stored as heat, with the idea being to convert it back to electricity when needed, such as at night time or when the wind isn’t blowing. This concept isn’t entirely new; other companies have explored doing this with everything from bricks to molten salt. Fourth Power’s approach involves heating large blocks of graphite to extremely high temperatures — as high as 2,500 °C (4,530 °F). Naturally, the hotter you go, the more energy you can store. Where the company’s concept gets interesting is how it plans to recover the heat energy and turn it back into electricity.

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Niklaus Wirth with Personal Computer Lilith that he developed in the 1970ies. (Photo: ETH Zurich)

Remembering Niklaus Wirth: Father Of Pascal And Inspiration To Many

January 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

Although perhaps not as much of a household name as other pioneers of last century’s rapid evolution of computer hardware and the software running on them, Niklaus Wirth’s contributions puts him right along with other giants. Being a very familiar face both in his native Switzerland at the ETH Zurich university – as well as at Stanford and other locations around the world where computer history was written – Niklaus not only gave us Pascal and Modula-2, but also inspired countless other languages as well as their developers.

Sadly, Niklaus Wirth passed away on January 1st, 2024, at the age of 89. Until his death, he continued to work on the Oberon programming language, as well as its associated operating system: Oberon System and the multi-process, SMP-capable A2 (Bluebottle) operating system that runs natively on x86, X86_64 and ARM hardware. Leaving behind a legacy that stretches from the 1960s to today, it’s hard to think of any aspect of modern computing that wasn’t in some way influenced or directly improved by Niklaus.

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