Virtual Eurorack Based CPU Computes To The Beat Of A Different Drum Module

January 1, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 3 Comments

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1972 story “Dial F for Frankenstein”, the worlds first global network of phone exchanges was created by satellite link, and events happened that caused the characters in the story to wonder if the interconnected mesh of machinery had somehow become sentient. And that’s what we wondered when we saw this latest virtual CPU construction built by GitHub user [katef] and made from a virtual analog synthesizer software called VCV Rack.

Analogous to a Redstone computer in Minecraft, there’s no physical hardware involved. But instead of making crazy synth sounds for a music project, [katef] has built a functioning CPU complete with an Arithmetic Logic Unit, an adder, and other various things you’ll find in a real CPU such as registers and a clock.

While no mention is made of whether the construct is sentient, [katef] fully documented the build on their GitHub page, and so go check that out for animated pictures, links to more information, and more. It’s quite impressive, if not just a little bonkers. But most good hacks are, right?

We love unique CPU builds, and you might get a kick out of this one made from- that’s right- 555 timers. Thanks to [Myself] on the Hackaday Discord server for the tip, and be sure to send in your favorite outrageous projects to the Hackaday tip line!

Picture of a monitor with a fake "ransomware" banner on it, and a PC with the ESP32 VGA devboard mounted into it in the foreground

ESP32 Pretends To Be GPU; Gives You A Ransomware Scare

December 30, 2021 by Arya Voronova 27 Comments

Sometimes a piece of hardware meets a prank idea, and that’s how the fun Hackaday articles are born. [AnotherMaker] shows us some harmless entertainment at the expense of an IT enthusiast in your life – programming an ESP32-powered devboard with a VGA output to show an ever-feared “all your files are encrypted” screen on a monitor connected to it. The ASCII text in its 8-bit glory helps sell this prank, making it look exactly like a BIOS-hijacking piece of malware it claims to be; akin to UIs of the past that skilled hackers would whip up in x86 assembly. The devboard’s integration into a PCI card backplate is a cherry on top, a way to seamlessly integrate this into a PC case, making it look not particularly different from an old graphics card. In such a configuration, we don’t doubt that this would be a head-scratcher to a certain kind of an IT department worker.

If you already have someone in mind as a target for this prank, you’re in luck, since [AnotherMaker] has shared his source code, too, and all you need is a ESP32 with a VGA port set up. You can get the same devboard, or you can even solder it all together with an ESP32 breakout and resistors, if you’re on a time or money budget, since the schematics for the LilyGO devboard are public. Not all devboards gets such a fun application, but it’s always fun to see when someone thinks of one – a perfect prank scenario that calls for a very specific devboard.

Wondering how it’s even possible to output VGA from the ESP32? We’ve covered this in the past – like this R&D project done by [bitluni], who then went ahead and expanded on it by connecting six displays at once. If you’ve connected your ESP32 to a VGA port and ran some test sketches, a UI library will help you upgrade your idea into a ready project in no time.

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Enter The Matrix With This Custom PC Side Panel

December 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

With a new Matrix movie out now, it’s hardly a surprise that we’re starting to see more and more projects centered around the franchise’s iconic “Digital Rain” effect. A few particularly unique examples have floated to the top of this virtual tsunami of green-tinted sushi recipes, such as this very slick RGB LED PC side panel built by [Will Donaldson].

In place of the normal clear window in his PC case, [Will] has mounted a black acrylic sheet that has had all of the “code” characters laser-cut from it. Behind that is an array of WS2812B LED strips, nestled into vertically aligned channels that keep the light from bleeding out horizontally. A sheet of frosted plastic is sandwiched between the two, which helps diffuse the light so the individual LEDs aren’t as visible.

All of the LEDs are connected to a NodeMCU ESP8266 by way of a 74AHCT125 level-shifter, though [Will] notes you could certainly use a different microcontroller with some tweaks to the code. As it stands, the user selects from various lighting patterns using two potentiometers and a button that have been mounted next to the panel. But if you were so inclined, it certainly wouldn’t take much to adapt the firmware so that the lighting effects could be triggered from the PC.

The sticklers will note that this means the characters can’t actually change or move, but as you can see in the video below, it still looks quite impressive when the LEDs get going behind them. If you’re looking to recreate the look on a considerably smaller scale, check out this Arduino library that can make it rain on a TFT display with just a few lines of code.

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A CH341 programmer dongle with a stack of adapters on top (one for 1.8V and one for clip connection), and a test clip to the right of it

BIOS Flashing Journey Writeup Puts Tutorials To Shame

December 26, 2021 by Arya Voronova 18 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, [Doug Brown] bought a Ryzen motherboard, advertised as “non-working” and discounted accordingly. He noticed that the seller didn’t test it with any CPUs old enough to be supported by the board’s stock BIOS revision, and decided to take a gamble with upgrading it.

Not having a supported CPU in hand either, he decided to go the “external programmer” route, which succeeded and gave this board a new life. This is not why we’re writing this up, however. The reason this article caught our eye is because [Doug]’s research leaves no stone unturned, and it’s all there to learn from. Whether through careful observation or thorough research, this article covers all the important points and more, serving as an example to follow for anyone looking to program their BIOS.

For instance, [Doug] correctly points out a design issue with these common programmers resulting in 5 V getting onto the 3.3 V data lines, and fixes it by rewiring the board. Going through all the letters in the ICs part number, something that many of us would dismiss, [Doug] notices that the flash chip is 1.8 V-only and procures a 1.8 V adapter to avoid the possibility of frying his motherboard. After finding out that the 1.8 V adapters don’t work for some people, he reverse-engineers the adapter’s schematics and confirms that it, indeed, ought to work with the specific parts on adapter he received.

Noting another letter in the part number implying the flash chip might be configured for quad-SPI operation, he adds series resistors to make sure there’s no chance of the programmer damaging the BIOS chip with its hardwired pinout. This is just an example of the insights in [Doug]’s article, there’s way more that we can’t mention for brevity, and we encourage you to check it out for yourself.

With this level of care put into the process, it’s no surprise that the modification was successful. The kind of inquisitiveness shared here is worth aspiring to, and writeups like this often surpass general-purpose tutorials in their insights and usefulness. What’s your “successfully making use of something sold as non-working” story?

If you’re looking for other insightful BIOS stories, we’ve covered someone reverse-engineering their BIOS to remove miniPCIe card whitelisting. We’ve typically covered BIOS modification stories in laptops, since there’s more incentives to modify these, but a lot of laptop BIOS articles will apply to desktop motherboards too, such as this supervisor password removal story or this LibreBoot installation journey by our own [Tom Nardi].

Thank you [Sidney] for sharing this with us!

An All In One Cube PC For A 1990s That Never Quite Happened

December 20, 2021 by Jenny List 12 Comments

When a particular device or appliance is evoked, there comes with it a set of expectations over what it might look like. A toaster, a camera, a washing machine, or a PC, will all have their own accepted form factors, and it’s rare that a manufacturer is adventurous enough to venture outside them. In the world of PCs there was a brief flowering of this type of creativity through the 1990s, and it’s that time which [ikeji]’s cube PC squarely fits in. It’s a 3D printed PC with a built-in display, keyboard, and printer, and while some might categorize it as a cyberdeck we’d say it goes further, we could easily imagine a slightly more polished version being an object of desire back when a powerful machine carried an 80486.

Inside it’s no slouch, packing an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro on a Mini-ITX motherboard, and while the display is a mere 7-incher it fits neatly behind the fold-down keyboard. The thermal printer is maybe more of a toy, but it’s good to find that even a bleeding-edge motherboard still has a serial port on it somewhere that it can talk to.

While the build undoubtedly has a few home-built rough edges we like the idea, echoing as it does those all-in-ones from the CRT era. Unless you have a handy Minitel terminal you won’t find much like it.

the SoM module used to power a Dell Mini 1210, in an extended SODIMM form-factor

When Dell Built A Netbook With An X86 System-on-Module

December 18, 2021 by Arya Voronova 33 Comments

Just like with pre-touchscreen cellphones having fancy innovative features that everyone’s forgotten about, there’s areas that laptop manufacturers used to venture in but no longer dare touch. On Twitter, [Kiwa] talks a fascinating attempt by Dell to make laptops with user-replaceable CPU+RAM modules. In 2008, Dell released the Inspiron Mini 1210, with its CPU, chipset and RAM soldered to a separate board in an “extended SODIMM” form-factor – not unlike the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules pre-CM4! Apparently, different versions of such “processor cards” existed for their Inspiron Mini lineup, with varying amounts of RAM and CPU horsepower. With replacement CPU+RAM modules still being sold online, that makes these Dell netbooks to be, to our knowledge, the only x86 netbooks with upgradable CPUs.

You could try and get yourself one of these laptops or replacement CPU modules nowadays, if you like tinkering with old tech – and don’t mind having a subpar experience on even Linux, thanks to the Poulsbo chipset’s notorious lack of openness. Sadly, Dell has thoroughly abandoned the concept of x86 system-on-module cards, and laptops have been getting less modular as we go – we haven’t been getting socketed CPUs since the third generation of mobile Intel boards, and even RAM is soldered to the motherboard more and more often. In theory, the “CPU daughterboard” approach could improve manufacturing yields and costs, making it possible to use a simpler large board for the motherboard and only have the CPU board be high-layer-count. However, we can only guess that this wasn’t profitable enough overall, even with all the theoretical upsides. Or, perhaps, Google-style, someone axed this project internally because of certain metrics unmet.

If you think about it, a laptop motherboard is a single-board computer; however, that’s clearly not enough for our goals of upgradability and repairability. If you’re looking to have your own way and upgrade your laptop regardless of manufacturer’s intentions, here’s an old yet impressive story about replacing the soldered-in CPU on the original Asus EEE, and a more recent story about upgrading soldered-in RAM in a Dell XPS ultrabook. And if you’re looking for retrocomputing goodness, following [Kiwa] on Twitter is a must – last seen liveblogging restoration and renovation of a Kaypro someone threw out on the curb.

A Well Documented BreadBoard Computer Shows Dedication

December 18, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 11 Comments

These pages have not been exactly devoid of home-built computers, with those constructed on solderless breadboard less frequent, but still not rarities. But what is more of a rarity is this ground-up 8-bit 74xx logic-based computer (video, embedded below) with full source, an emulator, assembler and test suite. [JDH] spent a solid couple of weeks working late into the night to build this, and the results show for themselves.

The new JDH-8 is now a figment of reality.

The architecture is a traditional 8-bit load/store microcoded processor with the microcode stored in easily programmable AT28C64 EEPROMs for ease of tweaking. The address bus is 16-bits, which is quite ample for this, and puts it in line with (admittedly more sophisticated) 8-bit micros of old such as the 6502. There is also a hardware stack, and a discrete-logic ALU as well! Finally, since that wasn’t enough work already, he added in his own discrete logic video controller.

Wise people simulate before prototyping something like this

There are sixteen instructions covering memory access, ALU operations and I/O operations. One of the great things about this project is that [JDH] readily admits the mistakes made along the way, and how the architecture didn’t need to be this complex. One example is that hardware stack wasn’t really necessary as it could just have been implemented in software. Also, due to the implementation, memory accesses were so fast compared with the achievable cycle time, that there really was no point to using load/store architecture at all! Still, [JDH] had fun building and programming it!

It was interesting to see the use of LogiSim-Evolution to debug first a high level model of the architecture and then the translation into TTL chips. This scribe wasn’t aware of that tool (the shame!) but is going to try this out real soon.

All code for the software side of things can be found on the project GitHub. Perhaps the hardware design will appear there as well, be at the time of writing we couldn’t seem to find it.

Can’t get enough breadboard computers? (We can’t) check this out from last year. Stuck for a suitable enclosure for your latest bread breadboard computer? How about a bread bin.

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