computer hacks

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computer hacks

Triple Monitor Luggable PC Is An All In One Powerhouse

September 17, 2021 by 11 Comments

[Matt] from [DIY Perks] has made a name for himself building nice custom computing machines, and his latest triple-monitor luggable PC (video after the break) is sure to give most high-performance desktop machines a run for their money.

The large central monitor folding laptop monitors mounted vertically on either size look impressive, but only just scratches the surface of this build. Hidden behind aluminum panels are Ryzen 5950X CPU and RTX 3080 GPU with water cooling, 64 GB of RAM, and two 8 TB SSDs. A set of high-quality speaker drivers, subwoofer, and audio amps is also included. All this hardware pulls about 600 W of power from a large DC-DC converter block, which in turn receives power from either a pair of onboard AC-DC converters or a 16 V – 63 V DC source, like a battery system.

To mount everything to the back of the main monitor, [Matt] created 3D printed adaptor blocks with threaded inserts which slide under existing hooks on the back of the monitor. Aluminum angles screw to these blocks to cover the edges of the display panel, together with a large mounting plate with pre-drilled holes to mount all the components on standoffs. A set of adjustable and removable legs mount to the side of the PC. A hinged door in the back cover allows storage space for a keyboard and mouse during transport. When folded, the laptop monitors don’t fully cover the main monitor, so [Matt] created a leather cover that doubles as a cable and accessory organizer.

Whether its dual screens and an integrated SDR, or a rotating-folding screen, there is no shortage of ways to build a portable powerhouse. Continue reading “Triple Monitor Luggable PC Is An All In One Powerhouse” →

Ask Hackaday: What’s The Best Way To Heat A Tent With A Laptop?

September 16, 2021 by 49 Comments

For Europeans, August is usually a month of blistering heatwaves, day after day of cloudless skies and burning sun that ripens fruit and turns we locals a variety of shades of pink. Hacker camps during this month are lazy days of cool projects and hot nights of lasers, Club-Mate, and techno music, with tents being warm enough under the night sky to dispense with a sleeping bag altogether.

Sometimes though, the whims of the global weather patterns smile less upon us hackers, and our balmy summer break becomes a little more frigid. At BornHack 2021 for example we packed for a heatwave and were met with a Denmark under the grip of the Northern air mass. How’s a hacker to keep warm?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What’s The Best Way To Heat A Tent With A Laptop?” →

School Surplus Laptop BIOS Hacked To Remove Hardware Restrictions

August 23, 2021 by 50 Comments

Why did [Hales] end up hacking the BIOS on a 10 year old laptop left over from an Australian education program? When your BIOS starts telling you you’re not allowed to use a particular type of hardware, you don’t have much of a choice.

Originally [Hales] planned on purchasing a used Lenovo X260 to replace his dying laptop, but his plans were wrecked. A pandemic-induced surge in demand that even the used laptop market caused prices to bloat. The need for a small and affordable laptop with a built in Ethernet port led to the purchase of a Lenovo Thinkpad x131e. Although the laptop was older than he liked, [Hales] was determined to make it work. Little did he know the right-to-repair journey he was about to embark on.

Problems first arose when the Broadcom WiFi adapter stopped working reliably. He replaced it, but the coaxial antenna cable was found to be damaged. Even after replacing the damaged cabling, the WiFi adapter was still operating very poorly. Recalling past problems with fickle Broadcom WiFi adapters, it was decided that an Intel mPCIe WiFi adapter would take its place. When power was re-applied, [Hales] was shocked to find the following message:

Unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card

And this is where things got interesting. With off the shelf SOIC8 clips and a CH340 programmer, [Hales] dumped the BIOS from the laptop’s flash chip to another computer and started hacking away. After countless hours of researching, prodding, hacking, and reverse engineering, the laptop was useful once again with the new Intel WiFi adapter. His site documents in great detail how he was able to reverse engineer the BIOS over the course of several days.

But that’s not all! [Hales] was also able to modify the hardware so that his slightly more modern mPCIe WiFi adapter would come back on after the computer had been put in Hibernation. It’s an elegant hack, and be sure to check [Hales’] site to get the full details. And at the end, there’s a nice Easter egg for anybody who’s ever wanted to make their laptop boot up with their own logo.

We applaud [Hales] for his fine efforts to keep working equipment out of the landfill. We’ve covered many hacks that had similar goals in the past. Do you have a hack you’d like to share? Submit it via the Tips Line.

Take Note: An E-Paper Tablet From Pine64

August 17, 2021 by 20 Comments

Over the years we’ve seen a variety of interesting pieces of hardware emerging from the folks at Pine64, so it’s always worth a second look when they announce a new product. This time it’s the PineNote, a tablet that packs the same Rockchip RK3566 as used in the company’s Quartz64 single board computers behind a 10.1″ 1404 x 1872 16-tone greyscale e-paper screen.

Fitted with 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128 GB eMMC flash storage, it will feature the same Linux support as previous Pine64 products, with the slight snag of the display driver not yet being complete for 5.xx kernels. They are thus at pains to point out that this is not a ready-to-go consumer device and that early adopters will be expected to write code rather than notes on it.

That last sentence sums up Pine64’s offering perfectly, they produce interesting hardware with open-source support, but sometimes the path from hardware release to stable and usable product can be a rocky one. If you’re interested in hardcore hacking of an e-paper tablet, then you may want to be an early adopter. Otherwise, hang back for a while and buy one once some of the bugs have been ironed out. Meanwhile you can see the whole update in the video below; it has a few other things including a nifty keyboard for the PinePhone.

We’ve mentioned Pine64 a few times over the years, it’s worth noting that their products also lie outside the realm of Linux boxen.

Continue reading “Take Note: An E-Paper Tablet From Pine64” →

MULTICS Gets A New Release… 52 Years After Launch

August 7, 2021 by 27 Comments

If you have ever read anything about the history of UNIX, you may remember that its early development was influenced by an older operating system. MULTICS was developed in the 1960s by MIT and General Electric as a commercial operating system, and had been the system which UNIX writers [Thompson] and [Ritchie] had used. It became a Honeywell product, and the source code for its final commercial version was eventually released to the public. Has it become a dusty relic of interest only to historians? Seemingly not, because a new version has been released. It’s intended for us on the dps8m Honeywell mainframe simulator rather than physical hardware, so perhaps while it’s not such a dusty relic it remains something only for the enthusiast.

We won’t pretend to be experts on the architectures of 1960s mainframe operating systems, but it’s interesting to read for a moment about what it was in MULTICS that caused UNIX to be written. For something described by [Ken Thompson] as “Close to unusable”, with a fresh release in its 52nd year it isn’t doing badly.

We’ve traced the UNIX story in the past, without realising that MULTICS never entirely went away. Shame on us for the omission!

[Via Hacker News]

Raspberry Pi Pico Used As A Transputer

August 5, 2021 by 43 Comments

You can’t fake that feeling when a $4 microcontroller dev board can stand in as cutting-edge 1980s technology. Such is the case with the working transputer that [Amen] has built using a Raspberry Pi Pico.

For a thorough overview of the transputer you should check out [Jenny List’s] longer article on the topic but boiled down we’re talking about a chip architecture mostly forgotten in time. Targetting parallel computing, each transputer chip has four serial communication links for connecting to other transputers. [Amen] has wanted to play with the architecture since its inception. It was expensive back then and today, finding multiple transputers is both difficult and costly. However, the RP2040 chip found on the Raspberry Pi Pico struck him as the perfect way to emulate the transputer design.

The RP2040 chip on the Pico board has two programmable input/output blocks (PIOs), each with four state machines in them. That matches up perfectly with the four transputer links (each is bi-directional so you need eight state machines). Furthermore, the link speed is spec’d at 10 MHz which is well within the Pico’s capabilities, and since the RP2040 runs at 133 MHz, it’s conceivable that an emulated core can get close to the 20 MHz top speed of the original transputers.

Bringing up the hardware has been a success. To see what’s actually going on, [Amen] sourced some link adapter chips (IMSC011), interfacing them through an Arduino Mega to a computer to use the keyboard and display. The transputer architecture allows code to be loaded via a ROM, or through the links. The latter is what’s running now. Future plans are to figure out a better system to compile code, as right now the only way is by running the original INMOS compiler on DOS in a VM.

Listen to [Amen] explain the project in the first of a (so far) six video series. You can find the links to the rest of those videos on his YouTube channel.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Pico Used As A Transputer” →

An Epic Tale Of Reset Line Detective Work

July 31, 2021 by 10 Comments

The Pine64 folks have given us so many tasty pieces of hardware over the last few years, but it’s fair to say that their products are for experimenters rather than consumers and can thus be a little rough around the edges at times. Their Clusterboard for example is a Mini-ITX PCB which takes up to seven of their SOPINE A64 compute modules, and networks them for use as a cluster by means of an onboard Gigabit Ethernet switch. It’s a veritable powerhouse, but it has an annoying bug in that it appears reluctant to restart when told. [Eric Draken] embarked upon a quest to fix this problem, and while he got there in the end his progress makes for a long and engrossing read.

We journey through the guts of the board and along the way discover a lot about how reset signals are generated. The eventual culprit is a back-EMF generated through the reset distribution logic itself causing the low-pulled line to never quite descend into logic 0 territory once it has been pulled high, and the solution an extremely simple application of a diode. For anyone who wishes to learn about logic level detective work it’s well worth a look. Meanwhile the board itself with its 28 ARM cores appears to have plenty of potential. It’s even a board we’ve mentioned before, in a personal supercomputer project.