The X-PC, A Stylish Re-Imagining Of An Old Laptop

December 25, 2020 by Jenny List 24 Comments

There’s one certainty wherever schoolchildren come into contact with computers: the hardware will inevitably emerge worse for the encounter. The school laptops managed by [Neil Lambert] certainly suffered, losing keys and power supplies aplenty. Faced with a pile of broken machines, he came up with the X-PC, a stylish all-in-one desktop computer built around the innards of a laptop.

Inside a modern laptop there is surprisingly little in the way of parts, now that removable media drives are largely a thing of the past and once the battery has been removed from the equation. When the keyboard and trackpad are subtracted and replaced with USB equivalents the inner workings are reduced to a relatively compact motherboard and hard drive alongside the screen.

The screen is encased in a lasercut frame that also mounts the motherboard. It includes a lasercut cover that folds over the top in a living hinge to create an A-frame case that also holds the power supply. As an extra bonus the centre of the A provides handy storage for a keyboard.

Most of us will have encountered enough older laptops with broken parts to recognise the value in this build, seeing how it can transform junk into a useful machine. This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone try a similar build.

Extracting A Gate From AMD And Intel

December 1, 2020 by Matthew Carlson 16 Comments

The competition between Intel and AMD has been heating up in the last few years as Intel has released chips fabbed with their 14nm++ process and AMD has been using TMSC’s 7nm process. In the wake of the two semiconductor titans clashing, a debate between the merits of 14nm++ and 7nm has sprung up with some confusion about what those numbers actually measure. Not taking either number at their face value, [der8auer] decided to extract a transistor from both Intel’s and AMD’s latest offerings to try and shed some light.

Much of the confusion comes from the switch to the FinFET process. While older planar transistors could be thought of as largely 2d structures, FinFET’s are three dimensional. This means that the whole vertical fin can act as a gate, greatly reducing leakage. It is this fin or gate that [der8auer] is after. On each chip, a thin sliver from the L1 cache was chosen as caches tend to be fairly homogenous sections with transistors that are fairly indicative of the rest of the chip. Starting with a platinum gas intersecting with a focused ion beam on the surface of the chip, [der8auer] built a small deposit of platinum over several hours. This deposit protects the chip when he later cut it at an angle, forming a small lamella 100 micrometers long. In order for the lamella to be properly imaged by the scanning electron microscope, it needed to be even thinner (about 200 to 300nm).

Eventually, [der8auer] was ultimately able to measure the gate height, width, spacing, and other aspects of these two chips. The sheer amount of engineering and analysis that went into this project is remarkable and we love the deep dive into the actual gates that make up the processors we use. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the guts of a processor but perhaps at a more macro scale, why not learn about a forgotten Intel chip from the 1970s?

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Full 8-Bit Computer On Breadboards

November 23, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Getting into a big electronics project often involves the use of specialized tools, namely the use of some sort of soldering iron or other way to apply solder to often intricate, tiny, and heat-sensitive parts. While it’s best to learn to pick up this skill at some point, it’s not always necessary, even for big, complicated projects like [DerULF1]’s full 8-bit computer that he built entirely on breadboards.

For a fully featured 8-bit computer, this build goes deep into the details of how the computer works. The clock allows programs to be stepped through one cycle at a time, and even the memory can be individually accessed with a set of switches. There are plenty of other interesting features as well, such as using registers to access extra memory. It features an SPI port and PS/2 keyboard controller and also loads programs from an SD card.

The build was inspired by some of [Ben Eater]’s projects which famously focus on using logic gates and TTL chips to perform complex tasks, such as another breadboard computer which plays snake on a small display. It’s certainly a great way to learn about the inner function of computers, and better still that no soldering is required. But you may need a few extra breadboards.

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Adventures In Overclocking: Which Raspberry Pi 4 Flavor Is Fastest?

November 11, 2020 by Elliot Williams 56 Comments

There are three different versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 out on the market right now: the “normal” Pi 4 Model B, the Compute Module 4, and the just-released Raspberry Pi 400 computer-in-a-keyboard. They’re all riffing on the same tune, but there are enough differences among them that you might be richer for the choice.

The Pi 4B is easiest to integrate into projects, the CM4 is easiest to break out all the system’s features if you’re designing your own PCB, and the Pi 400 is seemingly aimed at the consumer market, but it has a dark secret: it’s an overclocking monster capable of running full-out at 2.15 GHz indefinitely in its stock configuration.

In retrospect, there were hints dropped everywhere. The system-on-a-chip that runs the show on the Model B is a Broadcom 2711ZPKFSB06B0T, while the SOC on the CM4 and Pi 400 is a 2711ZPKFSB06C0T. If you squint just right, you can make out the revision change from “B” to “C”. And in the CM4 datasheet, there’s a throwaway sentence about it running more efficiently than the Model B. And when I looked inside the Pi 400, there was this giant aluminum heat spreader attached to the SOC, presumably to keep it from overheating within the tight keyboard case. But there was one more clue: the Pi 400 comes clocked by default at 1.8 GHz, instead of 1.5 GHz for the other two, which are sold without a heat-sink.

Can the CM4 keep up with the Pi 400 with a little added aluminum? Will the newer siblings leave the Pi 4 Model B in the dust? Time to play a little overclocking!

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The Logic Chip RISC-V Project Reboots

November 9, 2020 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The RISC-V architecture is inexorably inching from its theoretical origins towards the mainstream, as what could once only be done on an exotic FPGA can now be seen in a few microcontrollers as well as some much more powerful processors. It’s exciting because it offers us the prospect of fully open-source hardware on which to run our open-source operating systems, but it’s more than that. RISC-V isn’t a particular processor core so much as a specification that can be implemented at any of a number of levels, and in its simplest form can even be made real using 74 logic chips. This was the aim of [Robert Baruch]’s LMARV-1 that caused a stir a year or two ago but then went on something of a hiatus. We’re pleased to note that he’s posted a video announcing a recommencement of the project, along with a significant redesign.

We’ve placed the video below the break, and it’s much more than a simple project announcement. Instead, it’s an in-depth explanation of the design decisions and the physical architecture of the processor. It amounts to a primer on processor design, and though it’s a long watch we’d say you won’t be disappointed if your interests lie in that direction.

We first covered the LMARV-1 back in early 2018, so we’re glad to see it back in progress and we look forward to seeing its continued progress.

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Near-Silent Bellows Uses Water Flow And Magnetic Coupling

November 8, 2020 by Lewin Day 38 Comments

Fan noise is a contentious issue among the computer community. Some don’t notice it, others rage against it as an annoyance and distraction. Some turn to liquid cooling, while others look to passive solutions to eliminate the scourge. [Matt] of [DIY Perks] may have found a far more oddball solution, however.

The build is essentially a giant bellows, but the manner in which it operates is unlike anything we’ve seen previously. To shift the large pusher plate inside back and forth, [Matt] initially experimented with building his own linear motor out of coils and magnets. After that failed, he began to tinker with a system of moving a magnet back and forth through a tube with water pressure from a pump, which would then drive the pusher plate through magnetic coupling. This looked promising, but reversing the flow proved difficult. After building his own set of water valves to change the flow direction, the bellows began to work slowly, but with limited performance. Realizing the valves weren’t up to scratch, [Matt] rebuilt the system with 10 pumps, set up in two banks of 5. With the pumps hooked up in series, they supplied plenty of pressure to force the bellows back and forth. Reed switches were used to reverse the flow at either end to make the bellows run continuously.

In testing, the bellows compared well with a bank of four large case fans, though at 20 times the size. Suffice to say this is not exactly a compact solution. We look forward to seeing [Matt] do more with the bellows, with his intention being to use it as the primary cooling system for a computer. Of course, if this looks too complex, you could always consider a mineral oil setup instead. Video after the break.

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An Old-School Control Panel For Your Computer

November 7, 2020 by Jenny List 12 Comments

For as long as computers have been in the hands of programmers, they have offered frequent mildly tedious tasks that their operators have sought to automate. Who hasn’t written a shell script or a batch file that unites a string of commands into one just to save a bit of typing?

But even that effort can be reduced with a hardware add-on that ties the script to a physical control, and in this endeavor [Tomas] has created a beauty. His control panel project mimics the robust industrial panels of yesteryear with an array of metal buttons and toggle switches in a sturdy metal case sourced from an old KVM switch.

Behind the scenes are a pair of I/O extenders and a NodeMCU board, whose ESP8266 does the talking to the host computer on which a daemon awaits its call. Individual addressable LEDs next to each switch convey the state of operation, and the switches trigger useful operations such as connecting to a VPN. All the code is available in a handy GitHub repository, and you can see it in action in the video we’ve placed below the break.

We rather like the idea of a desktop control panel here at Hackaday, indeed this isn’t the first one we’ve brought you.

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