Ask Hackaday: When It Comes To Processors, How Far Back Can You Go?

December 1, 2022 by Jenny List 89 Comments

When it was recently announced that the Linux kernel might drop support for the Intel 486 line of chips, we took a look at the state of the 486 world. You can’t buy them from Intel anymore, but you can buy clones, which are apparently still used in embedded devices. But that made us think: if you can’t buy a genuine 486, what other old CPUs are still in production, and which is the oldest?

Defining A Few Rules

An Intel 4004 microprocessor in ceramic packaging — The daddy of them all, 1972’s Intel 4004 went out of production in 1981. Thomas Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0

There are a few obvious contenders that immediately come to mind, for example both the 6502 from 1975 and the Z80 from 1976 are still readily available. Some other old silicon survives in the form of cores incorporated into other chips, for example the venerable Intel 8051 microcontroller may have shuffled off this mortal coil as a 40-pin DIP years ago, but is happily housekeeping the activities of many far more modern devices today. Still further there’s the fascinating world of specialist obsolete parts manufacturing in which a production run of unobtainable silicon can be created specially for an extremely well-heeled customer. Should Uncle Sam ever need a crate of the Intel 8080 from 1974 for example, Rochester Electronics can oblige.

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JCB Is Exploring Hydrogen Combustion Engines For Construction Machinery

November 30, 2022 by Lewin Day 60 Comments

When we think about greening up the planet, solar panels and electric cars are often at the forefront of our mind. However, there’s a whole bunch of other things out there that are spewing out carbon dioxide that also need to be cleaned up. That includes leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and yes – big equipment for construction and agricultural work!

JCB manufactures diesel engines for big machines, but is now looking to switch things up for a cleaner future. To that end, the company is working on hydrogen-burning engines for its big machines.

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Building Your Own Consensus

November 30, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 3 Comments

With billions of computers talking to each other daily, how do they decide anything? Even in a database or server deployment, how do the different computers that make up the database decide what values have been committed? How do they agree on what time it is? How do they come to a consensus?

But first, what is the concept of consensus in the context of computers? Boiled down, it is for all involved agents to agree on a single value. However, allowances for dissenting, incorrect, or faulting agents are designed into the protocol. Every correct agent must answer, and all proper agents must have the same answer. This is particularly important for data centers or mesh networks. What happens if the network becomes partitioned, some nodes go offline, or the software crashes weirdly, sending strange garbled data? One of the most common consensus algorithms is Raft. Continue reading “Building Your Own Consensus” →

Weird Energy Storage Solutions Could Help The Grid Go Renewable

November 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 122 Comments

We’re all familiar with batteries. Whether we’re talking about disposable AAs in the TV remote, or giant facilities full of rechargeable cells to store power for the grid, they’re a part of our daily lives and well understood.

However, new technologies for storing energy are on the horizon for grid storage purposes, and they’re very different from the regular batteries we’re used to. These technologies are key to making the most out of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power that aren’t available all the time. Let’s take a look at some of these ideas, and how they radically change what we think of as a “battery.”

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VR Sickness: A New, Old Problem

November 29, 2022 by Donald Papp 56 Comments

Have you ever experienced dizziness, vertigo, or nausea while in a virtual reality experience? That’s VR sickness, and it’s a form of motion sickness. It is not a completely solved problem, and it affects people differently, but it all comes from the same root cause, and there are better and worse ways of dealing with it.

If you’ve experienced a sudden onset of VR sickness, it was most likely triggered by flying, sliding, or some other kind of movement in VR that caused a strong and sudden feeling of vertigo or dizziness. Or perhaps it was not sudden, and was more like a vague unease that crept up, leaving you nauseated and unwell.

Just like car sickness or sea sickness, people are differently sensitive. But the reason it happens is not a mystery; it all comes down to how the human body interprets and reacts to a particular kind of sensory mismatch.

Why Does It Happen?

The human body’s vestibular system is responsible for our sense of balance. It is in turn responsible for many boring, but important, tasks such as not falling over. To fulfill this responsibility, the brain interprets a mix of sensory information and uses it to build a sense of the body, its movements, and how it fits in to the world around it.

These sensory inputs come from the inner ear, the body, and the eyes. Usually these inputs are in agreement, or they disagree so politely that the brain can confidently make a ruling and carry on without bothering anyone. But what if there is a nontrivial conflict between those inputs, and the brain cannot make sense of whether it is moving or not? For example, if the eyes say the body is moving, but the joints and muscles and inner ear disagree? The result of that kind of conflict is to feel sick.

Common symptoms are dizziness, nausea, sweating, headache, and vomiting. These messy symptoms are purposeful, for the human body’s response to this particular kind of sensory mismatch is to assume it has ingested something poisonous, and go into a failure mode of “throw up, go lie down”. This is what is happening — to a greater or lesser degree — by those experiencing VR sickness.

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App Detects Parkinsons Disease And COVID-19 Via Audio

November 28, 2022 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

One of the challenges of diagnosing diseases is identifying them early. At this stage, signs may be vague or confusing, or difficult to identify. Early diagnosis is often tied to the best possible treatment outcomes, so there’s plenty of incentives to improve methods in this way.

A new voice-based method of diagnosing disease could prove fruitful in this regard. It relies on machine learning techniques to detect when patients may be suffering from certain conditions.

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Amateur Rocketry Hack Chat

November 28, 2022 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, November 30 at noon Pacific for the Amateur Rocketry Hack Chat with Kip Daugirdas!

This might be going out on a limb, but it seems like most of us probably fooled around with model rockets when we were younger. Those fantastic Estes kits were great fun to put together, and launching them was always a big neighborhood event, and one of the few that could make even the coolest of the cool kids pay attention to the nerds, if only for a little while. Launch day had it all — a slight element of danger, the rotten egg stink of spent propellant, a rocket gently floating back to Earth from a dizzying height of 100 meters, and the inevitable tree-climbing party to retrieve a lost rocket.

But while model rocketry is fun, it doesn’t scale up very well. If you want to reach the edge of space, you’re going to need to make the leap across the border to amateur rocketry. That’s where the big kids play, with real engineering needed to produce and control the forces required to reach altitudes of 100 km or more. Kip Daugirdas has made that leap, building rockets capable of almost getting to the Kármán line. It’s not easy — there was plenty of design work, static engine testing, and loads of test flights leading up to it, and surely more to come. Kip will stop by the Hack Chat to help us understand what’s needed to press the edge of space, and hopefully share his plans for going all the way.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 30 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.