ISS Mimic Brings Space Station Down To Earth

October 6, 2023 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

Built at a cost of more than $150 billion over the last twenty-five years, the International Space Station is arguably one of humanity’s greatest engineering triumphs. Unfortunately, unlike Earthly construction feats such as the Hoover Dam, Burj Khalifa, or the Millau Viaduct, you can’t visit it in person to really appreciate its scale and complexity. Well, not unless you’ve got the $50 million or so to spare to buy a seat on a Dragon capsule.

Which is why the team behind the ISS Mimic project are trying to make the ISS a bit more relatable. The open source project consists of a 3D printable 1:100 model of the Station, which is linked to the telemetry coming down from the real thing. A dozen motors in the model rotate the solar arrays and radiators to match the positions of their full-scale counterparts, while LEDs light up to indicate the status of various onboard systems.

To learn more about the ISS Mimic, team members Bryan Murphy, Sam Treadgold, and Tristan Moody stopped by this week’s Hack Chat to bring us up to speed on the past, present, and future of this fascinating project.

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Hackaday Podcast 239: Overclocking, Oscilloscopes, And Oh No! SMD Out Of Stock!

October 6, 2023 by Al Williams 2 Comments

Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together again to discuss the best of Hackaday for a week, and you’re invited. This week, the guys were into the Raspberry Pi 5, CNC soldering, signal processing, and plasma cutting. There are dangerous power supplies and a custom 11-bit CPU.

Of course, there are a few Halloween projects that would fit in perfectly with the upcoming Halloween contest (the deadline is the end of this month; you still have time). OpenSCAD is about to get a lot faster, and a $20 oscilloscope might not be a toy after all. They wrap up by talking about Tom Nardi’s latest hardware conversion of DIP parts to SMD and how TVs were made behind the Iron Curtain.

Did you miss a story? Check out the links below. As always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Go ahead and download it!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 239: Overclocking, Oscilloscopes, And Oh No! SMD Out Of Stock!” →

Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!

October 5, 2023 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Hackaday Supercon 2023 is almost upon us, and looking over the roster of fantastic talks gets us in the mood already. We hope that it has the same effect on you too.

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll announce the rest of the speakers, the workshops, and give you a peek at the badge over the next couple weeks. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of reveals on Tuesday! Continue reading “Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!” →

LittleFS: The Emphasis Is On Little

October 4, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

It used to be that developing for microcontrollers was relatively relaxing. These days, even a cheap micro like the Raspberry Pi Pico has multiple cores, networking (for the W, at least), and file systems. Just like desktop computers. Sort of. I found out about the “sort of” part a few weeks ago when I decided to embark on a little historical project. I wanted a file system with a large file that emulates a disk drive. The Pico supports LittleFS, and I figured that would be the easy thing to do. Turns out the Little in LittleFS might be more literal than you think. On the plus side, I did manage to get things working, but it took a… well — dare I say hack? — to make it all work.

History

I’m an unabashed fan of the RCA 1802 CPU, which is, of course, distinctly retro. The problem is, I keep losing my old computers to moves, natural disasters, and whatnot. I’ve had several machines over the years, but they seem to be a favorite target of Murphy’s law for me. I do currently have a small piece of hardware called an Elf Membership Card (by [Lee Hart]), but it lacks fancy features like disk drives, and while it could be expanded, there’s something charming about its current small size. So that led me to repurpose a 6502 emulator for the KIM-1 to act like an 1802 instead. This is even less capable than the membership card, so it was sort of a toy. But I always thought I should upgrade the Arduino inside the emulator to a processor with more memory, and that’s what I did.

I started out with a Blackpill STM32F board and called the project 1802Black. The code is a little messy since it started out as [Oscar’s] KimUNO code, and then my updates layered with new updates. Also, for now, I shut off the hardware parts so it won’t use the KimUNO hardware — you only need a Blackpill (or a Pico, see below) and nothing else, although I may reenable the hardware integration later.

It wasn’t that hard to get it running with just more memory. Still, I wanted to run [Mike Riley’s] Elf/OS operating system and I also had a pair of Raspberry Pi Picos mocking me for not using them in a project yet. The chip has excellent Arduino board support. But what sealed the deal was noticing that you can partition the Pico’s flash drive to use some of it for your program and the rest for a file system. You can get other RP2040 dev boards with 16 MB of flash, which would let me have a nearly 15 MB “hard drive,” which would have been huge in the 1802’s day. Sounds simple. If it were, though, we wouldn’t be talking.

Continue reading “LittleFS: The Emphasis Is On Little” →

Hackaday Prize 2023: The Wildcard Finalists Are Here

October 4, 2023 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

We’re in the endgame now — there’s just about a month to go before the final results are announced for the 2023 Hackaday Prize, which means all of our finalists are in a mad rush to put the finishing touches on their respective projects. Today, ten more hackers are about to feel the heat as we announce our final group of finalists from the Save the World Wildcard round.

As finalists, each of these projects has been awarded $500 to help further their development. But perhaps more importantly, they are now officially in the running for one of the final six awards, which includes the Grand Prize of $50,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab.

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Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0

October 3, 2023 by Jenny List 53 Comments

Nearly three years ago at the start of 2020 and before the pandemic hit, we took a look at an up-and-coming player in the world of PCB design. LibrePCB is by no means as old as the more established players, but at the time it was joining the ranks of open-source EDA packages with its first early stable releases. It showed a lot of promise but was still a little rough around the edges back then, but in the years since it’s advanced to the extent that in September they released version 1.0. That’s a significant moment for any open source package, so it’s time to return and take another look. It’s a cross-platform package with builds available for Linux, Windows, MacOS and FreeBSD, of which I needed the Linux version. There are one or two options to choose from, I went for the appImage as probably the least trouble. Very quickly I was in a new EDA package, and I set out to make a simple Schmitt trigger oscillator as a test project. Continue reading “Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0” →

Displays We Love Hacking: The HD44780 Family

October 2, 2023 by Arya Voronova 31 Comments

There are too many different kinds of displays – some of them, you already know. I’d like to help you navigate the hobbyist-accessible display world – let’s take a journey together, technology by technology, get a high-level overview of everything you could want to know about it, and learn all the details you never knew you needed to know. In the end, I’d like you to be able to find the best displays for any project you might have in mind, whatever it could be.

There’s a HD44780 clone IC under this epoxy blob! CC0 1.0

Today, let’s take a look at a well-known LCD technology – the HD44780 displays, a type of display that we hobbyists have been working with since the 1980s. Its name comes from the HD44780 driver chip – a character display driver IC that connects to a raw display panel and provides an easy interface.

HD44780 displays are not known for power efficiency, cutting-edge technology, ultimate flexibility, or small size, for that matter. However, they’re tried and true, easy to drive, require little to no computing power on your MCU, and you will be able to buy them for the foreseeable future. They’re not about to get taken off the market, and they deserve a certain kind of place in our parts boxes, too.

If you work with HD44780 displays for a project or two, you might acquire a new useless superpower – noticing just how many HD44780 displays are still in use in all sorts of user-facing devices, public or private. Going out and about in your day-to-day life, you can encounter a familiar 16 x 2 grid of characters in cash registers, public transport ticket machines, home security panels, industrial and factory equipment, public coffee machines, and other microcontroller-assisted places of all kinds! Continue reading “Displays We Love Hacking: The HD44780 Family” →