PackProbe Reports Laptop Battery Health

June 26, 2019 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

The 18650 cell has become a ubiquitous standard in the lithium battery world. From power drills to early Tesla vehicles, these compact cells power all manner of portable devices. A particularly common use is in laptop batteries, where they’re often built into a pack using the Smart Battery System. This creates a smart battery that can communicate and report on its own status. PackProbe is a software tool built to communicate with these batteries, and you might just find it comes in handy.

The code runs on the WiFi-enabled Arduino Yún by default, but can be easily modified to suit other Arduino platforms. Communicating over SMBus using the Arduino’s I2C hardware, it’s capable of working with the vast majority of laptop batteries out there which comply with the Smart Battery System. With that standard being minted in 1994, it’s spread far and wide these days.

It’s a great way to harvest not only the specifications and manufacturing details of your laptop battery pack, but also to check on the health of the battery. This can give a clear idea over whether the battery is still usable, as well as whether the cells are worth harvesting for those in the recycling business.

You’re not limited to just the Arduino, though. There’s a similar tool available for the ESP8266, too.

Ink-Dipping Machine Saves Iotas Of Time

June 26, 2019 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

[Uri Tuchman] doesn’t always write with a dip pen. But when he does, he gets tired of re-inking it almost immediately. Now, convenience comes in many forms. He could make the switch to any number of modern writing instruments, sure. But that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[Uri] decided that old-timey problems call for old-timey solutions, and we couldn’t agree more. His machine is an amazingly well-crafted automaton that dips a handmade pen into ink and shakes off the excess with the turn of a crank and the nudging of cams. We love the hand-carved claw, which looks perfectly absurd as it moves about gracefully on custom brass hinges.

We were somewhat surprised that given all this work, [Uri] didn’t grind his own nib or make his own ink. But that would cut down on the time he has to write letters longhand in between waiting for a wet quill. Crank past the break to see [Uri]’s thoroughly entertaining build video for this awe-inspiring machine.

Mesmerized by automatons? This laser-cut water droplet wave should quench your thirst.

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A Rough And Ready Pan & Tilt Mirror

June 25, 2019 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

There’s nothing quite like waking up on a warm and sunny morning, with the sun filtering in through the windows over a magnificent beach view. Of course, in real life, not every bedroom has access to beautiful natural vistas and abundant natural light. [Rue Mohr] decided to try and solve this issue with technology.

The initial write-up may be brief, but the pictures of the resulting project show a proper hacker’s build. A stand for an old office chair appears to serve as the base, and the mirror is mounted on a frame that allows for both pan and tilt to be adjusted. There’s a large gear to enable pan rotation, which meshes with a nifty old-school cage gear built out of what we suspect is plastic and welding rod. An AVR microcontroller is charged with running the show, with it interpolating a series of waypoints to set the mirror’s position throughout the day.

[Rue] reports that the project is nearing completion, and is soon to be fully automated. With the dark bedroom that spawned the project no longer a concern, the mirror will instead be pressed into service to provide sun to a row of bean plants.

If you’re looking for a pan-tilt mechanism, but something a little smaller, this 3D-printed mechanism might be just what you’re after.

Copy Protection In The 80s, Showcased By Classic Game Dungeon Master

June 25, 2019 by Donald Papp 44 Comments

Making a copy of a purchased game used to be as simple as copying a disk. As the game industry grew, so did fear of revenue loss which drove investment in countermeasures. These mainly consisted of preventing the easy duplication of magnetic diskettes, or having users jump through tiresome hoops like entering specific words from the printed manual. These measures rarely posed much of a challenge to the dedicated efforts of crackers, but the copy protection in the classic 80s game Dungeon Master for the Atari ST and Amiga was next-level. It implemented measures that went well beyond its contemporaries, and while it was eventually defeated, it took about a year to happen. In an era where games were cracked within days or even hours of release, that was remarkable.

Dungeon Master was a smash hit at the time, and while the details of its own brand of what we would now call DRM may not be new, this video presentation by [Modern Vintage Gamer] (YouTube link) does a wonderful job of stepping through everything it did, and begins with an informative tour of copy protection efforts of the era for context.

The video is embedded below, but if you’d like to skip directly to the details about Dungeon Master, that all starts just past eight minutes in. What we now call DRM clearly had roots that preceded the digital world of today; an absurd timeline in which even cat litterboxes can have DRM.

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This Tiny TFT Pendant Is Digital Jewelry

June 21, 2019 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Hackers have a multitude of skills, many are well-versed in the ways of all things that blink and flash. These abilities have often be applied to the field of jewelry and human adornment, and many LEDs have been employed in this work. [Deshipu] has been attempting something a touch different however, by constructing a tiny TFT pendant.

The basic idea is not dissimilar from those USB photo keychains of recent history. A SAMD21 Cortex M0+ serves as the brains of the operation, with the tiny microcontroller being soldered to a custom PCB that makes up the body of the pendant. A ST7735S TFT LCD screen is then attached to act as the display. Charging and delivery of images is done over USB, which can be handled natively by the SAMD21.

Currently, the pendant is capable of displaying 16-color BMPs, with the intention to create a converter for animated GIFs in the pipeline. Potential upgrades also involve creating a larger battery pack to sit behind the wearer’s neck, as currently the device has just 8 mAh to work with.

It’s a nicely designed piece, with the pendant appearing barely bigger than the screen itself. It’s not the first time we’ve seen a hacker take on a pendant, and we’re sure it won’t be the last. If you’ve got the goods, be sure to hit up the tip line.

The PewPew Console Is Coming To EuroPython 2019

June 21, 2019 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

EuroPython is a community-run developer conference, which began back in Belgium in 2002. In 2019, it’s happening in Basel, Switzerland from July 8 to 14, and there’s a special surprise in store for attendees this year. Conference attendees with be provided with a PewPew console for their hacking pleasure!

An earlier version of the PewPew handheld. There have been many and varied revisions of the hardware.

We’ve featured the project before on these hallowed pages; the earlier PewPew Featherwing console was a finalist in the 2017 Hackaday Prize Best Product Competition. At EuroPython, attendees will get to tinker with a special conference edition, which is the latest version of a long line of development versions. It runs the same microcontroller – ATSAMD21E18A – as the Adafruit Trinket M0, and is programmable with CircuitPython. The conference edition comes with a large 60 mm x 60 mm LED matrix, as well as an orange PCB with blue buttons to match the color scheme of the event.

We wager that conference attendees will enjoy hacking on the handheld console, and it makes a great platform for anyone who is new to embedded development with the Python language. Similar to badges, it makes a great pack-in for patrons, and the conference should be all the more enjoyable for it!

Steamed Hams Localized Entirely Within A Printed Circuit Board

June 20, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Maybe you’ve heard of a TV show called The Simpsons. Steamed Hams make a one-gag appearance in an unforgettable luncheon where Principal Skinner poker-faces his way out of a disaster with Superintendent Chalmers. Meanwhile, over on imgur, [Agumander] has put a black and white screencap from Steamed Hams in a printed circuit board.

The memory for this chip is an AT28C64, a 64 kilobit or 8 kilobyte steamed RAM. You call it a steamed RAM despite the fact that it is obviously a ROM. There is no microcontroller on this board or really anything resembling programmable logic. Everything is just logic chips. This board displays a 256×256 1 bit per pixel image over composite video. The sync is generated with the help of a 14MHz crystal and some circuitry taken from the original PONG board. Other than that, it’s just a bunch of NANDs and ORs that roll through the address space of the ROM and spit values out over a composite video port.

The build began by breadboarding everything save for a nifty solderless breadboard power adapter. Three ROM chips were programmed with different images — a cat, something to do with vaporwave, and some guy that looks like the poster from Eraserhead. Everything worked on the breadboard — yes, even at 14 MHz — so the build moved on to a printed circuit board.

The result is fantastic, and should work well on anything with a composite video port. We’re awarding bonus points for putting a socket on the ROM, simply so [Agumander] can change the image without whipping out the desoldering braid. If you need a refresher on Steamed Hams, it’s from the 7th season Simpsons episode ’22 Short Films About Springfield’.