A Modern Take On An Old Language

August 16, 2024 by Al Williams 44 Comments

Some old computer languages are destined to never die. They do, however, evolve. For example, Fortran, among the oldest of computer languages, still has adherents, not to mention a ton of legacy code to maintain. But it doesn’t force you to pretend you are using punched cards anymore. In the 1970s, if you wanted to crunch numbers, Fortran was a good choice. But there was another very peculiar language: APL. Turns out, APL is alive and well and has a thriving community that still uses it.

APL has a lot going for it if you are crunching serious numbers. The main data type is a multidimensional array. In fact, you could argue that a lot of “modern” ideas like a REPL, list types, and even functional programming entered the mainstream through APL. But it did have one strange thing that made it difficult to use and learn.

[Kenneth E. Iverson] was at Harvard in 1957 and started working out a mathematical notation for dealing with arrays. By 1960, he’d moved to IBM and a few years later wrote a book entitled “A Programming Language.” That’s where the name comes from — it is actually an acronym for the book’s title. Being a mathematician, [Iverson] used symbols instead of words. For example, to create an array with the numbers 1 to 5 in it and then print it, you’d write:

⎕←⍳5

Since modern APL has a REPL (read-eval-print loop), you could remove the box and the arrow today.

What Key Was That?

Wait. Where are all those keys on your keyboard? Ah, you’ve discovered the one strange thing. In 1963, CRTs were not very common. While punched cards were king, IBM also had a number of Selectric terminals. These were essentially computer-controlled typewriters that had type balls instead of bars that were easy to replace.

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Australia’s Controlled Loads Are In Hot Water

August 15, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 125 Comments

Australian grids have long run a two-tiered pricing scheme for electricity. In many jurisdictions, regular electricity was charged at a certain rate. Meanwhile, you could get cheaper electricity for certain applications if your home was set up with a “controlled load.” Typically, this involved high energy equipment like pool heaters or hot water heaters.

This scheme has long allowed Australians to save money while keeping their water piping-hot at the same time. However, the electrical grid has changed significantly in the last decade. These controlled loads are starting to look increasingly out of step with what the grid and the consumer needs. What is to be done?

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Laser Cutters: Where’s The Point?

August 14, 2024 by Al Williams 31 Comments

It is funny how when you first start doing something, you have so many misconceptions that you have to discard. When you look back on it, it always seems like you should have known better. That was the case when I first got a low-end laser cutter. When you want to cut or engrave something, it has to be in just the right spot. It is like hanging a picture. You can get really close, but if it is off just a little bit, people will notice.

The big commercial units I’ve been around all had cameras that were in a fixed position and were calibrated. So the software didn’t show you a representation of the bed. It showed you the bed. The real bed plus whatever was on it. Getting things lined up was simply a matter of dragging everything around until it looked right on the screen.

Today, some cheap laser cutters have cameras, and you can probably add one to those that don’t. But you still don’t need it. My Ourtur Laser Master 3 has nothing fancy, and while I didn’t always tackle it the best way, my current method works well enough. In addition, I recently got a chance to try an XTool S1. It isn’t that cheap, but it doesn’t have a camera. Interestingly, though, there are two different ways of laying things out that also work. However, you can still do it the old-fashioned way, too. Continue reading “Laser Cutters: Where’s The Point?” →

The Long, Slow Demise Of DVD-RAM

August 13, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 35 Comments

While CDs were still fighting for market share against cassettes, and gaming consoles were just starting to switch over to CD from cartridge storage, optical media companies were already thinking ahead. Only two years after the introduction of the original PlayStation, the DVD Forum had introduced the DVD-RAM standard: 2.58 GB per side of a disc in a protective caddy. The killer feature? Essentially unlimited re-writeability. In a DVD drive that supports DVD-RAM, they act more like removable hard drive platters. You can even see hard sectors etched into the media at the time of manufacture, giving DVD-RAM its very recognizable pattern.

At the time, floppy drives were still popular, and CD-ROM drives were increasingly available pre-installed in new computers. Having what amounted to a hard drive platter with a total of 5 GB per disc should have been a killer feature for consumers. Magneto-optical drives were still very expensive, and by 1998 were only 1.3 GB in size. DVD-RAM had the same verify-after-write data integrity feature that magneto-optical drives were known for, but with larger capacity, and after the introduction of 4.7 GB size discs, no caddy was required.

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Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options

August 12, 2024 by Arya Voronova 35 Comments

There are a ton of fun Raspberry Pi and Linux projects that require audio output – music players, talking robots, game consoles and arcades, intelligent assistants, mesh network walkie-talkies, and much more! There’s no shortage of Pi-based iPods out there, and my humble opinion is that we still could use more of them.

To help you in figuring out your projects, let’s talk about all the ways you can use to get audio out of a Pi or a similar SBC. Not all of them are immediately obvious and you ought to know the ropes before you implement one of them and get unpleasantly surprised by a problem you didn’t foresee. I can count at least five ways, and they don’t even include a GPIO-connected buzzer!

Let’s rank the different audio output methods, zoning in on things like their power consumption, and sort them by ease of implementation, and we’ll talk a bit about audio input options while we’re at it.

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Raspberry Has A New Pico, Built With The New RP2350

August 8, 2024 by Elliot Williams 130 Comments

Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts of custom real-time shenanigans. And that’s not to discount the impact of the Pi Pico, the $4 dev kit built around it.

Today, they’re announcing a brand-new microcontroller: the RP2350. It will come conveniently packaged in the new Pi Pico 2, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the new chip is better in every way, and that the Pico form factor will stay the same. The bad news? It’s going to cost 25% more, coming in at $5. But in exchange for the extra buck, you get a lot.

For starters, the RP2350 runs a bit faster at 150 MHz, has double the on-board RAM at 520 kB, and twice as much QSPI flash at 4 MB. And those sweet, sweet PIOs? Now it has 12 instead of just 8. (Although we have no word yet if there is more program space per PIO – even with the incredibly compact PIO instruction set, we always wanted more!)

Two flavors on the same chip: Arm and RISC

As before, it’s a dual-core chip, but now the cores are Arm Cortex M33s or RISC-V Hazard3s. Yes, you heard that right, there are two pairs of processors on board. Raspberry Pi says that you’ll be able to select which style of cores runs either by software or by burning one-time fuses. So it’s not a quad core chip, but rather your choice of two different dual cores. Wild!

Raspberry Pi is also making a big deal about the new Arm TrustZone functionality. It has signed boot, 8 kB of OTP key-storage memory, SHA-256 acceleration, a hardware RNG, and “fast glitch detectors”. While this is probably more aimed at industry than at the beginning hacker, we’re absolutely confident that some of you out there will put this data-safe to good use.

There is, as of yet, no wireless built in. We can’t see into the future, but we can see into the past, and we remember that the original Pico was wireless for a few months before they got the WiFi and Bluetooth radio added into the Pico W. Will history repeat itself with the Pico 2?

We’re getting our hands on a Pico 2 in short order, and we’ve already gotten a sneak peek at the extensive software toolchain that’s been built out for it. All the usual suspects are there: Picotool, TinyUSB, and OpenOCD as we write this. We’ll be putting it through its paces and writing up all the details next week.

I2C For Hackers: The Basics

August 7, 2024 by Arya Voronova 51 Comments

You only really need two data wires to transfer a ton of data. Standards like UART, USB2, I2C, SPI, PS/2, CAN, RS232, SWD (an interface to program MCUs), RS485, DMX, and many others, all are a testament to that. In particular, I2C is such a powerful standard, it’s nigh omnipresent – if you were to somehow develop an allergy to I2C, you would die.

Chances are, whatever device you’re using right now, there’s multiple I2C buses actively involved in you reading this article. Your phone’s touchscreen is likely to use I2C, so is your laptop touchpad, most display standards use I2C, and power management chips are connected over I2C more often than not, so you’re covered even if you’re reading this on a Raspberry Pi! Basically everything “smart” has an I2C port, and if it doesn’t, you can likely imitate it with just two GPIOs.

If you’re building a cool board with a MCU, you should likely plan for having an I2C interface exposed. With it, you can add an LCD screen with a respectable resolution or a LED matrix, or a GPS module, a full-sized keyboard or a touchpad, a gesture sensor, or a 9 degree of freedom IMU – Inertial Measurement Unit, like a accelerometer+compass+gyroscope combination. A small I2C chip can help you get more GPIOs for your MCU or CPU, or a multi-channel motor driver, or a thermal camera, or a heap of flash memory; if you’re adding some sort of cool chip onto your board, it likely has an I2C interface to let you fine-tune its fancy bits.

As usual, you might have heard of I2C, and we sure keep talking about it on Hackaday! There’s a good few long-form articles about it too, both general summaries and cool tech highlights; this article is here to fill into some gaps and make implicit knowledge explicit, making sure you’re not missing out on everything that I2C offers and requires you to know!

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