RF Burns And Exploding PC Speakers: Sophos Looks At The Evidence

June 21, 2021 by Jenny List 24 Comments

Every year in the month of June, someone by the unlikely name of [R.F. Burns] posts a question to the Linux Kernel Mailing List asking whether a Linux kernel module is possible that would blow the PC speaker. It’s fairly obviously a joke, which is why the UK-based anti-virus company Sophos have devoted a light-hearted blog post to it.

The post is an interesting diversion into early PC sounds, when the only hardware guaranteed to be present was a small speaker hooked up to a bit on an output port. The bit could be cycled for square wave beeps, or with a lot of clever manipulation could put out a low-bitrate PWM that delivered almost intelligible sounds including music and voice. They conclude that since the speaker would have been designed to be at the full amplitude of the 5-volt output bit all the time it should be impossible to blow it from software, and we’d be inclined to agree. There’s a remote possibility that some speakers might have a resonant frequency that could be found in software, but we’re not entirely convinced.

Your Hackaday scribe might have spent a while in a university computer lab back in the day trying and failing to write C code that would produce a usable PWM on an XT speaker, but those with long memories might recall the PC speaker driver for Windows 3.1. If you’re a fan of chiptune music there are even entire albums written for this most basic of instruments.

Header image: MKFI, Public domain.

A Mini USB Display For Your PC Desktop

June 20, 2021 by Jenny List 22 Comments

By now it’s likely that most Hackaday readers will be used to USB display adapters, in their most common form channeling DisplayPort over the ubiquitous serial interface. Connecting to projectors and other screens with a laptop becomes a breeze, and gone are the days of “Will my laptop work in the venue” stress for people delivering presentations. [Avra Mitra]’s STM32 tiny monitor may not ascend to these giddy heights, but it does at least live up to the promise of reproducing a desktop onto a small colour LCD hooked up through a USB port.

Not through any DisplayPort wizardry though, instead it relies on a Python script that takes successive screen grabs and streams them through USB to the microcontroller, which in tun puts them on the display. It’s claimed to achieve 6 to 7 frames per second as you can see in the video below, with an admission that there remains a huge scope for improvement.

Notwithstanding its limited utility at the moment, we can see that maybe this idea could have its uses in a very basic display after a few improvements. Meanwhile, more conventional monitors take the established route of pairing a dedicated controller board with an LCD panel.

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Growing Up With Computers

June 19, 2021 by Elliot Williams 78 Comments

My son is growing up with computers. He’s in first grade, and had to list all of the things that he knows how to do with them. The list included things like mousing around, drawing ghosts with the paint program, and — sign of the times — muting and unmuting the microphone when he’s in teleconferences. Oh yeah, and typing emojis. He loves emojis.

When I was just about his age, I was also getting into computers. But home computers back then were in their early years as well. And if I look back, I’ve been getting more sophisticated about computers at just about the same pace that they’ve been getting more sophisticated themselves. I was grade school during the prime of the BASIC computers — the age of the Apple II and the C64. I was in high school for the dawn of the first Macs and the Amiga. By college, the Pentiums’ insane computational abilities just started to match my needs for them to solve numerical differential equations. And in grad school, the rise of the overclockable multi-cores and GPUs powered me right on through a simulation-heavy dissertation.

When I was a kid, they were playthings, and as a grownup, they’re powerful tools. Because of this, computers have never been intimidating. I grew up with computers.

But back to my son. I don’t know if it’s desirable, or even possible, to pretend that computers aren’t immensely complex for the sake of a first grader — he’d see right through the lie anyway. But when is the right age to teach kids about voice recognition and artificial neural networks? It’s a given that we’ll have to teach him some kind of “social media competence” but that’s not really about computers any more than learning how to use Word was about computers back in my day. Consuming versus creating, tweeting versus hacking. Y’know?

Of course every generation has its own path. Hackers older than me were already in high-school or college when it became possible to build your own computer, and they did. Younger hackers grew up with the Internet, which obviously has its advantages. Those older than me made the computers, and those younger have always lived in a world where the computer is mature and taken for granted. But folks about my age, we grew up with computers.

Where Are All The Cheap X86 Single Board PCs?

June 17, 2021 by Jenny List 154 Comments

If we were to think of a retrocomputer, the chances are we might have something from the classic 8-bit days or maybe a game console spring to mind. It’s almost a shock to see mundane desktop PCs of the DOS and Pentium era join them, but those machines now form an important way to play DOS and Windows 95 games which are unsuited to more modern operating systems. For those who wish to play the games on appropriate hardware without a grubby beige mini-tower and a huge CRT monitor, there’s even the option to buy one of these machines new: in the form of a much more svelte Pentium-based PC104 industrial PC.

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Spam Caught, In A Tin Of Spam

June 15, 2021 by Jenny List 19 Comments

We’ve seen many inventive enclosures for single board computers over the years: some are decorative, others utilitarian, and yet more tailored to an application. This one from [Daniel Hepper] manages to be all three: a practical enclosure for an OrangePi Zero LTS running the PiHole web spam filter, enclosed in a seemingly unopened Spam tin.

The inspiration came from an out-of-date tin of Spam, a souvenir that had lain around for a decade. It had a paper label that could be carefully removed, after which a Dremel was used to cut an aperture in the reverse of the tin. The tasty-but-expired luncheon meat could then be scooped out, and a 3D-printed carrier for the OrangePi slid in. The label reattached, it looks for all the world like an unopened tin of Spam with a PoE cable emerging from its behind.

The constant war on spam has seen many creative attempts at a solution from within our community, and it’s certain that PiHole is one of the better ways to deal with its web-borne variants. It is however not unknown for a Hackaday scribe to play a part in delivering it.

3D Print An Entire PC Case

June 12, 2021 by Jenny List 33 Comments

With laptops having become a commodity item and single-board computers having conquered the lower end for our community, building a PC for yourself is no longer the rite of passage that it once was; except perhaps if you are a gamer. But there is still plenty of fun to be had in selecting and assembling PC hardware, especially if as [makerunit] did, you design and 3D-print your own case.

This is no motherboard in an old pizza box, but instead a highly compact and well-designed receptacle for a reasonable-performance gaming machine with an ITX motherboard. The chassis holding all the parts sits inside a slide-on textured sleeve, and particular attention has been paid to air flow and cooling. The GPU card is a little limited by the size of the case and there’s no room at all for a conventional hard drive, so a PCIe SSD board takes that role.

We’d hazard the opinion that were this case cranked out by the likes of Apple it would be hailed as some kind of design masterpiece, such is its quality. It certainly shows that there’s so much more to building your own PC than the normal rectangular tower case.

Over the decades we’ve brought you so many PC cases, a recent-ish one that’s worth a look is this Lego Minecraft one for an Intel NUC motherboard.

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Intel’s ATX12VO Standard: A Study In Increasing Computer Power Supply Efficiency

June 7, 2021 by Maya Posch 99 Comments

The venerable ATX standard was developed in 1995 by Intel, as an attempt to standardize what had until then been a PC ecosystem formed around the IBM AT PC’s legacy. The preceding AT form factor was not so much a standard as it was the copying of the IBM AT’s approximate mainboard and with it all of its flaws.

With the ATX standard also came the ATX power supply (PSU), the standard for which defines the standard voltage rails and the function of each additional feature, such as soft power on (PS_ON). As with all electrical appliances and gadgets during the 1990s and beyond, the ATX PSUs became the subject of power efficiency regulations, which would also lead to the 80+ certification program in 2004.

Starting in 2019, Intel has been promoting the ATX12VO (12 V only) standard for new systems, but what is this new standard about, and will switching everything to 12 V really be worth any power savings? Continue reading “Intel’s ATX12VO Standard: A Study In Increasing Computer Power Supply Efficiency” →