The Nibbler: A 4-bit CPU Built With 7400 Logic

September 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

nibbler-schematic

Maybe we shouldn’t say “built” since [Steve Chamberlin] hasn’t actually heated up his iron yet. From the finished schematic above that is puzzling at first, until you realize the scope of the project. His Nibbler implements a 4-bit CPU using 7400 logic chips. Because he’s come up with the architecture himself he’s taking a lot of steps to check all of his work before committing to a PCB.

We linked to his category for the project which is still in progress. Most recently he wrote a program to prove that it’ll run on the hardware. That’s a feat considering this is still just a design idea. It was made possible because he wrote a simulator based on the design. The C++ tool simulates data and control buses and features a full set of debugging tools.

Careful testing of the design before the build is the best possible way to go. The simulator and debugging tools will be useful for software development even after the hardware is built. And testing before wiring is a must as these things get out of control quickly in terms of soldering complexity.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Make Your Treadmill More Entertaining For $0

September 7, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 20 Comments

Treadmills can often be found on the side of the road, after someone gave up on their running regimen and found that the machine was taking up too much space in their basement. This is great for hackers, since they have some useful parts in them.

However, if you’d like to actually use a treadmill for running, some entertainment would certainly help. [KingJackOff] decided to roll his own treadmill entertainment system out of things he had lying around, bringing the total cost to $0.

He took an old laptop and mounted it in a piece of rigid foam using a gratuitous amount of duct tape. With the screen and keyboard mounted, he added speakers and a slot for the DVD drive. Then a printed graphic was taped to the front, with a nice motivational message.

Lots of people have old laptops lying around with mechanical issues. Broken hinges and frames make them unusable, even though the electronics are fine. Some foam and paper could be all you need to bring one back to life.

[via Reddit]

A PC Rig That Belongs On The Wall Of An Art Museum

September 6, 2013 by Michael Ciuffo 63 Comments

When Overclock.net user [Show4Pro] decided to upgrade his “old dusty rig”, he eschewed the conventional PC form factor and instead built an incredibly sexy custom wall-mounted case.

The six sticks of RAM, quad HDD/SSDs, and dual Radeon HD7970s are enough to make all but the most hard core gamer blush, but that was only the beginning here. Using a Dremel tool, Show4Pro cut the frame from a piece of hardboard and coated it with a mock-carbon fiber vinyl sheet. This backdrop acts to both hide the (many) cables and provide structural support to the components. Custom light guides cut from an acrylic sheet are back lit with LEDs and serve as a border for each of the components.

Laying all of the boards flat on the frame required the use of PCIe risers to move the video cards away from the mother board. Long PCIe connectors are very susceptible to EMI though, and Show4Pro ran into a few stability problems that he eventually had to resolve with some high-end shielded risers.

Besides that one minor hiccough, the project went off without a hitch and it looks like his 100+ hours of work have really paid off.

Via Reddit.

Browsing The Web One Step At A Time

August 23, 2013 by Michael Ciuffo 15 Comments

After modifying his new manual treadmill to fit under his standing desk, [Brian Peiris] found a way to let him stroll all over the internet.

After removing the treadmill’s original time/distance display, [Peiris] reverse engineered the speed sensor to send data to an Arduino and his PC. We’ve seen a number of projects that interface treadmills with virtual worlds, but what really makes this project stand out is a simple script using the Throxy Python library which allows the treadmill to throttle his machine’s internet connection.

The end result is a browsing experience that reacts to how fast the user runs. In the demonstration video, you can see Peiris tiptoe through images or jog through YouTube videos. A minimum bandwidth setting keeps the connection live, so if you can’t make it all the way through that HD Netflix movie, taking a breather won’t time out the connection.

It’s certainly a great way to get in shape, or at the very least, it’ll make your ISP’s bandwidth cap feel a lot bigger.

Video after the jump.

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How To Debug A Faulty Memory Board

August 9, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 14 Comments

While this is not exactly a hack or a fail, it definitely is an inspiring example on how to debug a faulty card.

[Quinn] is one of the very few hobbyists out there that designed her own 6502 based computer. For the young readers of Hackaday, the MOS 6502 was introduced in 1975 and has been used in the Aple // line, the Commodore 64, the Vic-20, the Atari computers, the Nintendo Enterntainment System and others.

[Quinn]’s homemade new RAM board had been working for many weeks until it started to show some weaknesses by only sporadically passing the boot RAM test. Assuming the RAM was the problem, she started by making a more advanced memory test, which showed errors at random addresses.

She didn’t have any more of the same memory chips on hand which could be used with a fresh PCB. Determined to power through the issue, she etched a new board with a new memory design. Unfortunately it also gave memory errors at boot. Only one culprit was left, which is shown in the picture above. It’s a small sizing error in the board artwork which was just enough to cause a misalignment on the connector.

The article contains many details about her debugging process, so it definitely is worth the read.

10-drive Microserver Is The Clown Car Of The Computer Case World

July 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

ten-drive-itx-clown-car

[Coke Effekt] wanted to push his server’s storage limits to a higher level by combining ten 3 TB drives. But he’s not interested in transitioning to a larger case in order to facilitate the extra hardware. It only took a bit of hacking to fit all the storage in a mini-ITX case.

His first step was to make a digital model of his custom drive mount. This uses two 3D printed cages which will each hold five drives mounted vertically. To keep things cool the two cages are bolted to a 140mm fan. The connections to the motherboard also present some issues. He uses a two-port SATA card which plays nicely with port multipliers. Those multiplier boards can be seen on the bottom of the image above. The boards are mounted using another 3D printed bracket. Each breaks out one of the SATA ports into five connections for the drives.

[Thanks Pat]

Drive Bay Form Factor Dual Dekatron Readouts For RAM And CPU Usage

July 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

optical-drive-dual-dekatron

The two circular displays seen above are Dekatrons built into an optical drive enclosure. [Matt Sylvester] picked up a couple of different types of these tubes on eBay. He etched his own driver, and was able to control them with an Arduino. After a few months went by he decided to revisit the project to see if it would work as a CPU and RAM usage meter.

These tubes need high voltage to get the neon display glowing brightly. This raised some concerns about having those voltage levels inside of his PC, as well as the noise which may be introduced by the supply. To deal with those issues [Matt] gutted an old optical drive, using its case to physically isolate the circuitry, and some optoisolators to protect the logic connections. His driver board uses an ATmega328 running the Arduino bootloader. It connects to the PC using an FTDI USB to Serial cable. This makes it a snap to push the performance data to the display. It also has the side benefit of allowing him to reprogram the chip without opening the case.

If you can’t find one of these tubes for your own project consider faking it.

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