Old Laptop? Mobile X86 Game System!

July 12, 2018 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Between smartphones and tablets, computing is becoming increasingly mobile in nature. It used to be that everyone had a desktop computer, then laptops became the norm, and now many people don’t have anything beyond their mobile device. Unless you’re the kind of person who actually needs the power and versatility offered by a “real” computer, mobile devices are simply a more convenient option to browse the web and consume content.

But what if your needs are somewhere in the middle? You want an x86 computer and full operating system, but you also want something that’s more mobile than a tablet? If you’re like [mnt], you take an old Atom laptop that’s on its last legs and rebuild it as the Hacktop.

[mnt] describes the Hacktop as an “Emergency Gaming/Hacking Station”, and says he uses it everywhere he goes. Inspired by his Nintendo DSi, gaming controls are front-and-center on the Hacktop and he uses the machine to play everything from Half-Life to classic emulators.

But the Hacktop is capable of more than just playing Amiga games. The hand-soldered QWERTZ keyboard can be used with his thumbs, and the D-Pad doubles as the cursor keys. There’s a laptop touch pad on the back of the case, and the ten-inch LCD display is a touch screen as well. Definitely no shortage of input devices on this thing. It’s also packing some interesting special features, such as integrated RTL-SDR and LIRC hardware for mobile exploration and experimentation. [mnt] says the nine-cell battery should keep it alive and kicking for twelve hours or so, but it of course depends on what kind of stuff he gets into while out and about.

Hackers have been building their own mobile devices for a long time, and we’re always struck by the creative approaches individuals take compared to the rather cookie-cutter world of mobile consumer technology.

DDL-4 Is A Visually Pleasing Modular CPU

June 30, 2018 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

Today’s CPUs are so advanced that they might as well be indistinguishable from magic, right? Wrong! Fundamentally, modern CPUs can be understood logically like any other technology, it’s just that they’re very fast, very small, and very complex, which makes it hard to get to grips with their inner workings. We’ve come a long way from the dawn of the home computer in the 80s, but what if there was something even simpler again, built in such a way as to be easily understandable? Enter the DDL-4-CPU, courtesy of [Dave’s Dev Lab].

The DDL-4 is a project to build a modular 4-bit CPU using bitslice methods. This is where computations are broken down into simple operations with two-bit inputs, which are executed with basic logic gates like NOR and XOR. This is great for building a CPU from individual parts, as logic chips are readily available and their operation is readily understood. That’s what’s used here – good old 74-series logic, which you can find just about anywhere!

The build consists of a series of modules, each on its own colourful PCB and labeled on the silkscreen. These modules can then be configured and plugged together with edge connectors to build the CPU. The work builds upon [Dave]’s earlier work on the Mega-One-8-One, a recreation of the 74181 Arithmetic Logic Unit for educational purposes.

If you’re learning about computing in a bare-metal sense, projects like these that create CPUs from the ground up are a great way to get to grips with the basic concepts of computation. Once you’ve tried this, you could always graduate to building a 6502 in Minecraft.

Sunny Custom Keyboard Illuminates The Past

June 28, 2018 by Kristina Panos 35 Comments

Ever wonder why keyboard number pads and telephone dials have reversed layouts? Theories abound, but the most plausible one is that, shrug, it just happened that way. And now we’re stuck with it.

Well, that answer’s not good enough for [Jesse], so he punched up his own keyboard design that combines the golden years of function-rich Sun and IBM keyboards with Ma Bell’s DTMF number arrangement. That’s right, Sundial has 24 function keys total, and the number pad matches Ma Bell’s all the way down to the asterisk/zero/octothorpe pattern on the bottom row. How do we know what the unlabeled ones are, you ask? It’s all mapped out in this layout editor. We love that it has all the key lock indicator lights, because that practice should’ve never faded out in the first place.

Though inspired by this beautiful unicorn of an Arduino keyboard we covered a few months ago, the Sundial uses a Teensy 2.0 to translate [Jesse]’s Cherry MX clone-driven wishes into software commands. It’s also painstakingly hand-wired, so here’s the build log for you to drool over. Just cover up your keyboard first.

ESP8266 Home Computer Hides Unexpected Gems

June 27, 2018 by Kerry Scharfglass 71 Comments

With a BASIC interpreter and free run throughout their hardware, home computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 used to be a pervasive way to light that hacker fire. With the advent of cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, devices purpose built to emulate these classic systems have become fairly commonplace. [uli] built a device in this vein called the BASIC Engine which is driven by a microcontroller and a handful of hardware peripherals. Like other examples it can be attached to a keyboard, programmed in a BASIC, play video and sound, etc. But digging into the BASIC Engine reveals that it’s similarity to other devices is only skin deep.

The current version of the BASIC Engine (“rev2”) lives in a Raspberry Pi 3 case for convenience. It has RCA connectors for NTSC or PAL video output and mono audio, plus a bank of headers to tap into GPIOs, connectors for a keyboard, and more. [uli] wanted to aim for extreme low cost so a relatively beefy board like a Raspberry Pi didn’t fit the bill, and we expect it was an enjoyable challenge. Instead its interpreter runs atop an ESP8266 but with the networking stack removed. [uli] was disheartened by how bloated even a “Hello world” program was and ripped it out, discovering that hidden beneath was a very powerful and disproportionately inexpensive general purpose microcontroller. The video is driven by a VS23S010, sold as a 1 Mbit parallel SRAM with a neat trick; it also includes a composite video controller!

The real treat here is [uli]’s history writeup of how the BASIC Engine came to be. We’d recommend brewing a cup of coffee and sitting down for a full read-through. The first version was inspired by the PlayPower project, which was repurposing clones of Nintendo’s Famicom (NES to Americans) game console to make low cost home computers, complete with keyboard and gamepad input. [uli] started out by building a custom cartridge for a particular Famicom clone that ran a BASIC interpreter but after showing it to disinterested adults the project was left fallow. Years later, [uli] was encouraged to pick up the project again, leading down a twisted rabbit hole to where we are today.

If you want to build a BASIC Engine for yourself, Gerbers and build instructions are available on the pages linked above.

Thanks for the tip [antibyte]!

Wired And IBM Explain Quantum Computing To Students From Grade School To Grad School

June 26, 2018 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Have you ever heard the old axiom that if you want to design a simple system, ask yourself if your grandmother could use it? Maybe that was on Wired’s mind because they asked a quantum computing expert — particularly IBM’s [Dr. Talia Gershon] — to explain what exactly quantum computing is at 5 levels. In the video they shot, which you can see below, [Dr. Gershon] talks to a younger child, a teenager, an undergraduate computer science student, a graduate student, and then a physicist.

We enjoyed some of the analogies of spinning pennies and the way she was able to bring the topic to an appropriate level for each of the participants. Truthfully, the final segment with the physicist ([Dr. Steven Girvin] was more of a conversation than an explanation, but it was interesting to hear his views on fault tolerance and how likely certain things were to occur in the near future.

Continue reading “Wired And IBM Explain Quantum Computing To Students From Grade School To Grad School” →

Is This The World’s Smallest Computer?

June 23, 2018 by Jenny List 34 Comments

How small could you make a computer? In a way, that’s a question that requires that a computer be defined, because you could measure the smallest computer simply in terms of the smallest area of silicon required to create a microprocessor. So perhaps it’s better to talk about a smallest working computer. Recent entries in the race for the smallest machine have defined a computer as a complete computer system which holds onto its program and data upon power-down, but this remains one that is hotly debated. You might for instance debate as to whether that definition would exclude machines such as the crop of 1980s home computers that didn’t store their programs and data, was your Sinclair Spectrum not a computer?

At the University of Michigan they have opted for the simpler definition with their latest entry in the race to be the tiniest. Their latest machine packs an ARM Cortex M0 into a 0.3mm cube, along with photoreceptors and LEDs for programming, data throughput, and power. It is designed to be a temperature sensor and logger for medical implantation, but it stands more as a demonstration of technological prowess than as a usable product.

Pictures of a tiny computer “dwarfed by a grain of rice” make for good mass media consumption but where’s the relevance for us? The interesting part comes from the tantalizing glimpse of its construction: this is a hybrid device upon which we can see the optoelectronic components have been wire-bonded. Unfortunately the paper, catchily titled “A 0.04mm3 16nW Wireless and Batteryless Sensor System with Integrated Cortex-M0+ Processor and Optical Communication for Cellular Temperature Measurement” does not appear to be free-to-view online, so we don’t have any more information. We wish that such feats were possible within our community, but suspect those days are still pretty far away.

Roll Your Own Trackball Mouse

June 23, 2018 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

What do you do when you’re into trackball mice, but nothing out there is affordable or meets all your murine needs? You build one, of course. And if you’re like [Dangerously Explosive], who has a bunch of old optical mice squeaking around the shop, you can mix and match them to build the perfect one.

The mouse, which looks frozen mid-transformation into a rodential assassin, is a customized work of utilitarian art. Despite the excellent results, this project was not without its traps. [Dangerously] got really far into the build before discovering the USB interface chip was dead. Then he tried to sculpt a base out of Plasticine and discovered he’d bought the one kind of clay that can’t be baked. After trying his hand at making homemade salt dough, he painstakingly whittled a base from scrap pine using a drill and a hacksaw.

Every bit of this mouse is made from recycled bits, which, if you pair that with the paint job and the chosen shade of blinkenlights, makes this a green mouse on three levels. One of the two parts of this mouse that isn’t literally green, the cord, is still ecologically sound. [Dangerously] wanted a really long tail, so he scavenged a charger cable built for fruity hardware and threaded it through a hollowed-out piece of purple paracord.

We love the thumb-adjacent scroll wheel and the trackball itself, which is a ping pong ball painted black. The cool part is the guide it rolls around in. [Dangerously] spent a long time hand-whittling the perfect size hole in a particularly wide mouse palm rest. All that plastic shaving paid off, because the action is smooth as Velveeta.

[Dangerously] certainly designed this mouse to fit his preferences, and ergonomics seem a bit secondary. For a truly custom fit, try using whatever passes for Floam these days.