Making A Kid-Friendly Computer As A Present: Or How To Be The Cool Aunt At Christmas

January 13, 2021 by Erin Pinheiro 24 Comments

This article was meant to be finished up before Christmas, so it’ll be a little late whenever you’re reading it to go and prepare this for the holiday. Regardless, if, like me, should you ever be on the lookout for something to give a toddler nephew or relative, it could be worth it to look into your neglected old parts shelves. In my case, what caught my eye was a 9-year-old AMD laptop catching dust that could be better repurposed in the tiny hands of a kid eager to play video games.

The main issues here are finding a decent selection of appropriate games and streamling the whole experience so that it’s easy to use for a not-yet-hacker, all the while keeping the system secure and child-friendly. And doing it all on a budget.

This is a tall order, and requirements will be as individual as children are, of course, but I hope that my experience and considerations will help guide you if you’re in a similar boat.

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NVMe Blurs The Lines Between Memory And Storage

January 13, 2021 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

The history of storage devices is quite literally a race between the medium and the computing power as the bottleneck of preserving billions of ones and zeros stands in the way of computing nirvana. The most recent player is the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), something of a hybrid of what has come before.

The first generations of home computers used floppy disk and compact cassette-based storage, but gradually, larger and faster storage became important as personal computers grew in capabilities. By the 1990s hard drive-based storage had become commonplace, allowing many megabytes and ultimately gigabytes of data to be stored. This would drive up the need for a faster link between storage and the rest of the system, which up to that point had largely used the ATA interface in Programmed Input-Output (PIO) mode.

This led to the use of DMA-based transfers (UDMA interface, also called Ultra ATA and Parallel ATA), along with DMA-based SCSI interfaces over on the Apple and mostly server side of the computer fence. Ultimately Parallel ATA became Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel SCSI became Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), with SATA being used primarily in laptops and desktop systems until the arrival of NVMe along with solid-state storage.

All of these interfaces were designed to keep up with the attached storage devices, yet NVMe is a bit of an odd duck considering the way it is integrated in the system. NVMe is also different for not being bound to a single interface or connector, which can be confusing. Who can keep M.2 and U.2 apart, let alone which protocol the interface speaks, be it SATA or NVMe?

Let’s take an in-depth look at the wonderful and wacky world of NVMe, shall we?

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3D Printed Pi Laptop Honors The Iconic GRiD Compass

January 11, 2021 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

If you’re familiar with vintage portable computers, you know about the GRiD Compass. Even if you’re not into computers of yesteryear, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Compass or two without realizing it. From battling xenomorphs in Aliens to making the trip to orbit aboard the Space Shuttle, the trendsetting clamshell computer seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s. While far too expensive for the average consumer to afford back then, its no-compromise design and sleek looks helped lay the groundwork for today’s ubiquitous laptops.

Getting your hands on a working GRiD Compass in 2021 isn’t a whole lot easier than it was in 1982, so [Mike] decided to do the next best thing and build his own. His GRIZ Sextant certainly isn’t a replica, but the family resemblance is strong enough to get the point across. The Raspberry Pi powered machine has a greatly reduced “trunk” section in the back as you might expect, but the overall layout is very similar. The Commodore 64 inspired color scheme is probably the biggest departure from the source material, but it’s hard to argue with the results.

It’s clear at a glance that a lot of thought was put into the external aesthetics of the Sextant, but a peek under the hood shows the internal details are equally impressive. [Mike] tells us he has a background in product design, and it shows. Rather than approaching this project as a one-off creation, he’s clearly taken great pains to ensure the design is as reproducible as possible.

All of the individual components of the 3D printed frame and enclosure have been carefully designed so they’ll fit within the build volume of the average desktop machine. Electronic components are screwed, not glued, to the internal framework; making future repairs and maintenance much easier. When combined with the ample internal volume available, this modular approach should make adding custom hardware a relatively painless process as well.

So when will you be able to build a GRIZ Sextant of your own? Hopefully, very soon. [Mike] says he still needs to work some kinks out of the power supply and finalize how the speakers will get mounted into the case. Once those last tweaks are locked in, he plans to release all the STL files and a complete Bill of Materials. For those who want to get a sneak peek before they start warming up the extruder, he’s also started documenting the assembly of the Sextant on his YouTube channel. Continue reading “3D Printed Pi Laptop Honors The Iconic GRiD Compass” →

Retro Terminals Bring Some Style To Your Desktop

January 11, 2021 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

It wasn’t so long ago that a desktop computer was just a beige box with another, heavier, beige box sitting next to it or maybe perched on top. They’re a bit more visually exciting these days, with even mass produced PCs now shipping with RGB lighting and clear side panels. But even so, few could really look at a modern desktop computer and call it objectively beautiful.

But [Oriol Ferrer Mesià] wonders if we couldn’t improve on things a bit. Over the last few months, he’s been experimenting with small 3D printed enclosures that reimagine the traditional desktop computer aesthetic. With their distinctively retro-futuristic style, they look like the kind of gadgets science magazines in the 1960s thought would be dotting kitchens, living rooms, and space stations by the year 2000. But unlike those fanciful creations, each one of these beauties is a fully functional computer.

A few of the designs are relatively conservative, and not entirely unlike some of the old “dumb terminals” of the 1970s. With a Raspberry Pi 4 and a tablet-sized screen, these diminutive terminals would be perfectly usable for light desktop work or some retro gaming.

But we particularly like the ultra-widescreen design that [Oriol] has come up with. With a fairly unusual 4:1 aspect ratio LCD, the printed enclosure for this one was so large that it had to be done in two pieces on his Ender 3. To keep the 8″ 1920 x 480 panel well fed, this design uses a Jetson Nano 2GB which has considerably more graphical punch than other Linux SBCs of similar size and price.

As part of the recent cyberdeck craze, we’ve seen plenty of people recreating the look and feel of vintage portable computers with 3D printed cases and modern components. Desktop creations have been far less common, but with gorgeous designs like these to serve as inspiration, that may change.

You Got Something On Your Processor Bus: The Joys Of Hacking ISA And PCI

January 6, 2021 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

Although the ability to expand a home computer with more RAM, storage and other features has been around for as long as home computers exist, it wasn’t until the IBM PC that the concept of a fully open and modular computer system became mainstream. Instead of being limited to a system configuration provided by the manufacturer and a few add-ons that really didn’t integrate well, the concept of expansion cards opened up whole industries as well as a big hobbyist market.

The first IBM PC had five 8-bit expansion slots that were connected directly to the 8088 CPU. With the IBM PC/AT these expansion slots became 16-bit courtesy of the 80286 CPU it was built around. These slots could be used for anything from graphics cards to networking, expanded memory or custom I/O. Though there was no distinct original name for this card edge interface, around the PC/AT era it got referred to as PC bus, as well as AT bus. The name Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus is a retronym created by PC clone makers.

With such openness came the ability to relatively easy and cheaply make your own cards for the ISA bus, and the subsequent and equally open PCI bus. To this day this openness allows for a vibrant ecosystem, whether one wishes to build a custom ISA or PCI soundcard, or add USB support to a 1981 IBM PC system.

But what does it take to get started with ISA or PCI expansion cards today? Continue reading “You Got Something On Your Processor Bus: The Joys Of Hacking ISA And PCI” →

Build An 8-bit CPU To Know “But How Do It Know?”

January 2, 2021 by Anool Mahidharia 14 Comments

Sometime around 2009, [J. Clark Scott] published a book aimed to demystify computers for everyone by walking through construction of an 8-bit CPU from scratch. The book had a catchy, but somewhat confusing title But How Do It Know?. The back story on the title goes something like this: Joe is a very nice fellow, but has always been a little slow. He goes into a store where a salesman is standing on a soapbox in front of a group of people. The salesman is pitching the miracle new invention, the Thermos bottle. He is saying, “It keeps hot food hot, and cold food cold….” Joe thinks about this a minute, amazed by this new invention that is able to make a decision about which of two different things it is supposed to do depending on what kind of food you put in it. He can’t contain his curiosity, he is jumping up and down, waving his arm in the air, saying “but, but, but, but…” Finally he blurts out his burning question “But how do it know?” Joe looked at what this Thermos bottle could do, and decided that it must be capable of sensing something about its contents, and then performing a heating or cooling operation accordingly. Joe’s concept of how the bottle worked was far more complicated than the truth. With that introductory opening, [J. Clark Scott] goes on to cover basic number theory, leading on to logic gates, and finally the 8-bit CPU.

[Patrick LeBoutillier] decided to build a hardware version of the CPU/computer as described in [John Clark Scott]’s book. In order to keep size and cost within reasonable bounds, he choose a hybrid construction using a combination of micro-controllers and SN74HC logic IC’s. When used as a companion project alongside reading the book, he hopes people can get their hands dirty and try it out for themselves. He has published a series of 14 videos covering construction of the CPU and the first Introductory video is embedded after the break below. For the micro-controller part of the project, he is using four Arduino Nanos, the code and install instructions for which are available at his Git repo. The Fritzing schematic, also available at the repo, might look a bit daunting at first look, but when you follow along his video series, it becomes easier. You can preview the first three chapters of the book at the “But How Do It Know?” website.

If FPGA’s are more of a thing for you, or you’d like to dip your feet learning FPGA, then [Patrick] has another series of 17 videos (embedded below) where he goes through the same process using a Digilent BASYS3 FPGA development board. These aren’t your only options — if you just want to understand how it works, without having to build the hardware, then check out the online, browser based implementation of the [Clark Scott] CPU.

If it seems the breadboard build of this 8-bit CPU looks complex, then this
Home Made 8-bit CPU Is A Wiry Blinky Build and a veritable rats nest of jumper wires.

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DIY 8-Bit Computer Knows All The Tricks

December 31, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Some projects are a rite of passage within their respected fields. For computer science, building one’s own computer from scratch is certainly among those projects. Of course, we’re not talking about buying components online and snapping together a modern x86 machine. We mean building something closer to a fully-programmable 8-bit computer from the ground up, like this one from [Federico] based on 74LS logic chips.

The computer was designed and built from scratch which is impressive enough, but [Federico] completed this project in about a month as well. It can be programmed manually through DIP switches or via a USB connection to another computer, and also includes an adjustable clock which can perform steps anywhere from 1 Hz to 32 kHz. Complete with a 1024 byte memory, a capable ALU, four seven-segment LEDs and (in the second version of the computer) a 2×16 LCD disply, this 8-bit computer has it all.

Not only is this a capable machine designed by someone who clearly knows his way around a logic chip, but [Federico] has also made the code and schematics available on his GitHub page. It’s worth a read even without building your own, but if you want to go that route without printing an enormous PCB you can always follow the breadboard route.

Thanks to [killergeek] for the tip!

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