Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages

October 3, 2023 by Tom Nardi 57 Comments

After years of seeing people showing off and trading their badge Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) at Supercon, this year I finally decided to make one myself. Now for a first attempt, it would have been enough to come up with some cool PCB art and stick a few LEDs on it. But naturally I started with a concept that was far more ambitious than necessary, and before long, had convinced myself that the only way to do the thing justice was to have an onboard microcontroller.

My first thought was to go with the venerable ATtiny85, and since I already had a considerable stock of the classic eight-pin DIP MCUs on hand, that’s what I started prototyping with. After I had something working on the breadboard, the plan was to switch over to the SOIC-8 version of the chip which would be far more appropriate for something as small as an SAO.

Unfortunately, that’s where things got tricky. I quickly found that none of the major players actually had the SMD version of the chip in stock. Both DigiKey and Mouser said they didn’t expect to get more in until early 2024, and while Arrow briefly showed around 3,000 on hand, they were all gone by the time I checked back. But that was only half the problem — even if they had them, $1.50 a piece seems a hell of a lot of money for an 8-bit MCU with 8K of flash in 2023.

The whole thing was made all the more frustrating by the pile of DIP8 ATtiny85s sitting on the bench, mocking me. Under normal circumstances, using them in an SAO wouldn’t really be a problem, but eight hand-soldered leads popping through the front artwork would screw up the look I had in mind.

While brooding over the situation my eyes happened to fall on one of the chips I had been fiddling with, it’s legs badly bent from repeated trips through the programmer. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe there was a way to use the parts I already had…

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Why Walking Tanks Never Became A Thing

October 2, 2023 by Lewin Day 67 Comments

The walking tank concept has always captured imaginations. Whether you’re talking about the AT-AT walkers of Star Wars, or the Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40,000, they are often portrayed in fiction as mighty and capable foes on the battlefield. These legged behemoths ideally combine the firepower and defense of traditional tanks with the versatility of a legged walking frame.

Despite their futuristic allure, walking tanks never found a practical military application. Let’s take a look at why tracks still rule, and why walking combat machines are going to remain firmly in the realm of fiction for the foreseeable future.

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A Raspberry Pi 5 Is Better Than Two Pi 4s

September 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 192 Comments

What’s as fast as two Raspberry Pi 4s? The brand-new Raspberry Pi 5, that’s what. And for only a $5 upcharge (with an asterisk), it’s going to the new go-to board from the British House of Fruity Single-Board Computers. But aside from the brute speed, it also has a number of cool features that will make using the board easier for a number of projects, and it’s going to be on sale in October. Raspberry Pi sent us one for review, and if you were just about to pick up a Pi 4 for a project that needs the speed, we’d say that you might wait a couple weeks until the Raspberry Pi 5 goes on sale.

Twice as Nice

On essentially every benchmark, the Raspberry Pi 5 comes in two to three times faster than the Pi 4. This is thanks to the new Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip (SOC) that runs four ARM A76s at 2.4 GHz instead of the Pi 4’s ARM A72s at 1.8 GHz. This gives the CPUs a roughly 2x – 3x advantage over the Pi 4. (Although the Pi 4 was eminently overclockable in the CM4 package.)

The DRAM runs at double the clock speed. The video core is more efficient and pushes pixels about twice as fast. The new WiFi controller in the SOC allows about twice as much throughput to the same radio. Even the SD card interface is capable of running twice as fast, speeding up boot times to easily under 10 sec – maybe closer to 8 sec, but who’s counting?

Heck, while we’re on factors of two, there are now two MIPI camera/display lines, so you can do stereo imaging straight off the board, or run a camera and external display simultaneously. And it’s capable of driving two 4k HDMI displays at 60 Hz.

There are only two exceptions to the overall factor-of-two improvements. First, the Gigabyte Ethernet remains Gigabyte Ethernet, so that’s a one-ex. (We’re not sure who is running up against that constraint, but if it’s you, you’ll want an external network adapter.) But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions, which make it 45x faster at AES, for instance. With TLS almost everywhere, this keeps crypto performance from becoming the bottleneck. Nice.

All in all, most everything performance-related has been doubled or halved appropriately, and completely in line with the only formal benchmarks we’ve seen so far, it feels about twice as fast all around in our informal tests. Compared with a Pi 400 that I use frequently in the basement workshop, the Pi 5 is a lot snappier.

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The Oldest Living Torrent Is 20 Years Old

September 28, 2023 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

Twenty years ago, in a world dominated by dial-up connections and a fledgling World Wide Web, a group of New Zealand friends embarked on a journey. Their mission? To bring to life a Matrix fan film shot on a shoestring budget. The result was The Fanimatrix, a 16-minute amateur film just popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the humble film would unknowingly become a crucial part of torrent history. It now stands as the world’s oldest active torrent, with an uptime now spanning a full 20 years. It has become a symbol of how peer-to-peer technology democratized distribution in a fast-changing world.

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You’ve Got Mail: Faster And Faster We Go

September 27, 2023 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

When we last left the post office, they had implemented OCR to read even the sloppiest of handwriting. And to augment today’s 99% accuracy rate, there’s a center full of humans who can decipher the rest of those messy addresses with speed and aplomb. Before that, we took a look at many of the machines that make up the automated side of the post office’s movements. But what was being done to improve the customer experience during all of this time?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. In this installment, we’ll take a look at the development of vending machines and programs like Speed Mail, Missile Mail, and V-Mail (no, not voicemail!) as they relate to enhanced customer service over the years.

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Do Bounties Hurt FOSS?

September 27, 2023 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

As with many things in life, motivation is everything. This also applies to the development of software, which is a field that has become immensely important over the past decades. Within a commercial context, the motivation to write software is primarily financial, in that a company’s products are developed by individuals who are being financially compensated for their time. This is often different with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, where the motivation to develop the software is in many cases derived more out of passion and sometimes a wildly successful hobby rather than any financial incentives.

Yet what if financial incentives are added by those who have a vested interest in seeing certain features added or changed in a FOSS project? While with a commercial project it’s clear (or should be) that the paying customers are the ones whose needs are to be met, with a volunteer-based FOSS project the addition of financial incentives make for a much more fuzzy system. This is where FOSS projects like the Zig programming language have put down their foot, calling FOSS bounties ‘damaging’.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Microwave Ovens

September 26, 2023 by Al Williams 32 Comments

Our homes are full of technological marvels, and, as a Hackaday reader, we are betting you know the basic ideas behind a microwave oven even if you haven’t torn one apart for transformers and magnetrons. So we aren’t going to explain how the magnetron rotates water molecules to produce uniform dielectric heating. However, when we see our microwave, we think about two things: 1) this thing is one of the most dangerous things in our house and 2) what makes that little turntable flip a different direction every time you run the thing?

First, a Little History

Westinghouse Powercaster which could, among other things, toast bread in six seconds

People think that Raytheon engineer Percy Spenser, the chief of their power tube division, noticed that while working with a magnetron he found his candy bar had melted. This is, apparently, true, but Spenser wasn’t the first to notice. He was, however, the first to investigate it and legend holds that he popped popcorn and blew up an egg on a colleague’s face (this sounds like an urban legend about “egg on your face” to us). The Raytheon patent goes back to 1945.

However, cooking with radio energy was not a new idea. In 1933, Westinghouse demonstrated cooking foods with a 10 kW 60 MHz transmitter (jump to page 394). According to reports, the device could toast bread in six seconds. The same equipment could beam power and — reportedly — exposing yourself to the field caused “artificial fever” and an experience like having a cocktail, including a hangover on overindulgence. In fact, doctors would develop radiothermy to heat parts of the body locally, but we don’t suggest spending an hour in the device.

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