Adapter Salad: Making Your Own Server Cables Because HP Won’t Sell Them To You

August 8, 2024 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

The world is tough and uncaring sometimes, especially if you’re at home tinkering with HP Enterprise equipment. If you’re in the same boat as [Neel Chauhan], you might have found that HPE is less than interested in interacting with small individual customers. Thus, when a cable was needed, [Neel] was out of luck. The simple solution was to assemble a substitute one instead!

[Neel] had a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 server, which was to be used as network-attached storage (NAS). Unfortunately, it was bought as an open box, and lacked an appropriate serial-attached SCSI (SAS) cable. Sadly, HPE support was of no assistance in sourcing one.

SlimSAS LP x8 to dual MiniSAS x4 cables aren’t easy to find from anyone else, it turns out. Thus, [Neel] turned to Amazon for help sourcing a combination of parts to make this work. A SlimSAS LP 8X to 2x MiniSAS SFF-8643 cable was used, along with a pair of Mini SAS SFF-8087 to SAS HD SFF-8643 female adapters. From there, SFF-8087 cables could be used to hook up to the actual SAS devices required. The total cost? $102.15.

The stack of cables and adapters looks a bit silly, but it works—and it got [Neel]’s NAS up and running. It’s frustrating when you have to go to such lengths, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen hackers have to recreate obscure cables or connectors from scratch! What’s the craziest adapter salad you’ve ever made?

Compiling Four Billion If Statements

August 7, 2024 by Matthew Carlson 44 Comments

With modern tools, you have to try very hard to do something stupid, because the tools (rightly) recognize you’re doing something stupid. [Andreas Karlsson] can speak to that first hand as he tried to get four billion if statements to compile.

You may ask what state space requires four billion comparisons to evaluate? The answer is easy: the range of an unsigned 32-bit integer. The whole endeavor started with a simple idea: what if instead of evaluating whether an integer is even or odd with a modulo or bit mask, you just did an if statement for every case? Small ranges like 0-10 are trivial to write out by hand, but you reach for more automated solutions as you pass 8 bits and move towards 16. [Andreas] wrote some Python that outputs a valid C program with all the comparisons. For 16 bits, the source only clocks in at 130k lines with the executable less than 2 MB.

Of course, scaling to 32 bits is a very different problem. The source file balloons to 330 GB, and most compilers barf at that point. Undeterred, [Andreas] modified the Python to output x86_64 assembly instead of C. Of course, the executable format of Windows (PE) only allows executables up to 4 GB, so a helper program mapped the 40 GB generated executable and jumped into it.

What’s incredible about this whole journey is how performant the program is. Even large numbers complete in a few seconds. Considering that it has to thrash 40 GB of an executable through memory, we can’t help but shake our heads at how even terrible solutions can work. We love seeing someone turn a bad idea into an interesting one, like this desoldering setup.

PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

August 4, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 24 Comments

There have been many computers that played a little jingle to greet you upon booting. The NEC PC-9800 is a famous example, though almost all the Macintosh computers played either the soothing “booting” chord or sometimes the Sad Mac “error” chord. And of course, consoles have long played music on startup, with the original PlayStation boot music heralding a whole new era of video games. But modern machines don’t do anything, except maybe a single beep if you’re lucky. So why not pop in this M.2 card (JP) and bring some quirky flair to your PC?

While this particular card is aimed at the Japanese market and specifically evokes the PC-9800, we hope to see some hackers creating projects bringing other custom boot sounds to laptops and PCs around the rest of the world! A simple microcontroller, DAC, speaker and flash storage for the waveform would be all that’s required. It could even be capacitively coupled into the system’s sound output for some extra nerd points. You could pull the ultimate prank and have your friend’s laptop play the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up” upon boot. Or you could have your favourite hacker movie quote play – “I can trace her physical location by looking at the binary!”. Brilliant!

In the meantime, if you want one of these cards, you’ll likely have to use a Japanese mail forwarding service as the cards are only available from Japanese retailer Kadenken — though for only ¥2880, or just under $20 USD, which is a great deal.

[via Techspot]

Steamdeck motherboard standing upright propped onto a USB-C dock it's wired up to, showing just how little you need to make the steamdeck board work.

Steam Deck, Or Single Board Computer?

August 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One such secret was recently discovered by [Ayeitsyaboii] on Reddit – turns out, you can use the Steam Deck mainboard as a standalone CPU board for your device, no other parts required aside from cooling.

All you need is a USB-C dock with charging input and USB/video outputs, and you’re set – it doesn’t even need a battery plugged in. In essence, a Steam Deck motherboard is a small computer module with a Ryzen CPU and a hefty GPU! Add a battery if you want it to work in UPS mode, put an SSD or even an external GPU into the M.2 port, attach WiFi antennas for wireless connectivity – there’s a wide range of projects you can build.

Each such finding brings us closer to the future of purple neon lights, where hackers spend their evenings rearranging off-the-shelf devices into gadgets yet unseen. Of course, there’s companies that explicitly want us to hack their devices in such a manner – it’s a bet that Framework made to gain a strong foothold in the hacker community, for instance. This degree of openness is becoming a welcome trend, and it feels like we’re only starting to explore everything we can build – for now, if your Framework’s or SteamDeck’s screen breaks, you always have the option to build something cool with it.

[Via Dexerto]

Homebrew Relay Computer Features Motorized Clock

August 3, 2024 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Before today, we probably would have said that scratch-built relay computers were the sole domain of only the most wizardly of graybeards. But this impressive build sent in by [Will Dana] shows that not only are there young hardware hackers out there that are still bold enough to leave the transistor behind, but that they can help communicate how core computing concepts can be implemented with a bundle of wires and switches.

Created for his YouTube channel WillsBuilds, every component of this computer was built by [Will] himself. Each of the nine relay-packed protoboards inside the machine took hours to solder, and when that was done, he went out to the garage to start cutting the wood that would become the cabinet they all get mounted in.

Continue reading “Homebrew Relay Computer Features Motorized Clock” →

Printed Portable Computer Inspired By The Classics

July 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

These days, laptop computers are all more or less the same, at least externally. Some are thicker than others, they might come in different colors, or with a 360° hinge that lets you flip the screen around the back and use it as a tablet, but overall they’ve all got the same shape and proportions. The industry, and indeed the users, eventually agreed on the best way to make a computer portable and are now fully committed to it.

But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1980s there were a number of laptops from the likes of Toshiba, Tandy, and even IBM that took a slightly different approach to the clamshell design. These computers featured ultra-wide displays with a hinge located closer to the center of the computer, giving the machine a distinctive “trunk” in the back. It’s these classic machines that clearly inspired [Michael Mayer] to design the Portable Pi 84.

[Michael] says that the 3D printed enclosure was largely designed around the 40% ortholinear keyboard, which itself is based on the Happy-Keyboard from [Luis Alegría]. The rest apparently just fell into place, such as the fact that the 1600 x 600 Waveshare 9.3 inch display happens to be almost the perfect size to cover the keyboard below it.

Compared to many of the other custom computer builds we’ve covered, the rear compartment of the Portable Pi 84 provides ample free space for the various system components. That includes the Raspberry Pi 4 that runs the show, a UPS “hat” that powers the system via a pair of 21700 batteries, and even a set of amplified speakers. It looks like there’s still plenty of room in the back for additional gear, such as an RTL-SDR or perhaps even a cartridge slot.

A particularly nice feature of this build are the inset panels on the rear of the machine, which allow for the various ports and connectors to be reconfigured by the user without having to re-print the entire case — one could imagine a replacement panel that features a connector for an external WiFi antenna, for example. We also like the use of heat-set inserts throughout the case, which will not only make the build sturdier, but means the case can be opened and closed regularly without fear of stripping out the screw holes.

So is this a computer or a cyberdeck? It’s hard to say. We tend to think that a proper deck needs to have a more unique physical layout, and technically this form factor was actually fairly popular at one point. But whatever you want to call builds like this, we’re stoked to see them become more common and better documented. Long live the truly personal computer.

Modern In-Circuit Emulator For The 6809

July 19, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 12 Comments

The Motorola 6809, released in 1978, was the follow-up to their 6800 from four years earlier. It’s a powerful little chip with many 16-bit features, although it’s an 8-bit micro at heart. Despite its great improvements over the 6800, and even technical superiority over the Z80 and 6502 (hardware multiply, for example!), it never reached the same levels of success that those chips did. However, there are still some famous systems, such as the TRS-80 Colour Computer, which utilized the chip and are still being hacked on today. [Ted] is clearly a fan of the 6809, as he used a Teensy 4.1 to create a cycle-exact, drop-in 6809 emulator!

A small interposer board rearranges the Teensy pinout to match the 6809, as well as translating voltage levels from 3.3V to 5V. With careful design, the Teensy matches the cycle diagrams in the Motorola datasheet precisely, and so should be able to run any applications written for the chip! A great test was booting Extended Colour BASIC for the TRS-80 CoCo 2 and running some test BASIC programs. Any issues with opcode decoding or timing would certainly be exposed while running an interpreted language like BASIC. After this successful test, it was time to let the Teensy’s ARM Cortex-M7 rip and see what it could do.

Continue reading “Modern In-Circuit Emulator For The 6809” →