This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
This week, Jonathan Bennett, Simon Phipps, and Aaron Newcomb chat about retrocomputing, Open Source AI, and … politics? How did that combination of topics come about? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 813: Turn Off The Internet”
Have you ever considered running your ham radio remotely? It has been feasible for years but not always easy. Recently, I realized that most of the pieces you need to get on the air remotely are commonplace, so I decided to take the plunge. I won’t give step-by-step instructions because your radio, computer setup, and goals are probably different from mine. But I will give you a general outline of what you can do.
I’m fortunate enough to have a sizeable freestanding shop in my backyard. When I had it built, I thought it was huge. Now, not so much. The little space is crammed with test equipment, soldering gear, laser cutters, drill presses, and 3D printers. I’ve been a ham for decades, but I didn’t have room for the radios, nor did I have an antenna up. But a few months ago, I made space, set some radios up, strung out a piece of wire, and got back on the air. I had so much fun I decided it was time to buy a new radio. But I didn’t want to have to go out to the shop (or the lab, as I like to call it) just to relax with some radio time.
Hackaday’s Supercon is still warm in our hearts, and the snow is just now starting to fall, but we’re already looking forward to Spring. Or at least to Hackaday Europe, which will be taking place March 15th and 16th in Berlin, Germany.
Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but we know a way that you can get in for free.
What makes Hackaday Europe special? Well, it’s you! We’re excited to announce that we’re opening up our call for talks right now, and we can’t wait to hear what you have to say. Speakers of course get in free, but the real reason that you want to present is whom you’re presenting to.
The Hackaday audience is interested, inquisitive, and friendly. If you have a tale of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do that would only really go over with a Hackaday crowd, this is your chance. We have slots open for shorter 20-minute talks as well as longer 40-minute ones, so whether you’ve got a quick hack or you want to take a deep dive, we’ve got you covered. We especially love to hear from new voices, so if you’ve never given a talk about your projects before, we’d really encourage you to apply!
Here is last year’s lineup, if you’re wondering what goes on, and if your talk would fit in.
What’s the most important keyboard macro you know? Honestly, it’s probably Ctrl-S. But do you use that one often enough? Chances are, you do not. What you need is a giant, dedicated Save keyboard that looks like a floppy disk.
Just like you’d expect, pressing the floppy icon triggers Ctrl-S when connected over USB-C. Internally, it’s a Seeeduino Xiao, a push button, and some wires.
The floppy disk itself is made of foam board, and everything is encased in a picture frame. If you want to make one for yourself, [Makestreme] has some great instructions over on IO.
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Funny Keyboard”
For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’s running on outdated hardware. So when we learned that part of the San Francisco transit system still runs on 5-1/4″ floppies, we sat up and took notice. The article is a bit stingy with the technical details, but the gist is that the Automatic Train Control System was installed in the Market Street subway station in 1998 and uses three floppy drives to load DOS and the associated custom software. If memory serves, MS-DOS as a standalone OS was pretty much done by about 1995 — Windows 95, right? — so the system was either obsolete before it was even installed, or the 1998 instance was an upgrade of an earlier system. Either way, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) says that the 1998 system due to be replaced originally had a 25-year lifespan, so they’re more or less on schedule. Replacement won’t be cheap, though; Hitachi Rail, the same outfit that builds systems that control things like the bullet train in Japan, is doing the job for the low, low price of $212 million.
’Tis the season for soldering! At least at my house. My son and I made some fairly LED-laden gifts for the immediate relatives last year, and he’s got the blinky bug. We were brainstorming what we could make this year, and his response was “I don’t care, but it needs to have lots of LEDs”.
It’s also the season for reverse engineering, apparently, because we’re using a string of WS2812-alike “fairy lights”. These are actually really neat, they look good and are relatively cheap. It’s a string of RGB LEDs with drivers, each dipped in epoxy, and run on a common three-enameled-wire bus. Unlike WS2812s, which pass the data on to the next unit in the line and then display them with a latching pulse at the end of a sequence, these LED drivers seem to count how many RGB packets have been sent down the wire, and only respond to their own number.
This means that if you cut up a string of 200 LEDs, it behaves like a string of 200 WS2812s. But if you cut say 10 LEDs off the string, where you cut them matters. If you cut it off the front of the string, you only have to send 10 color packets. If you cut them off the other end, you need to send 290 dummy packets before they even start listening. Bizarre, but ’tis the season for bizarre hacks.
And finally, ’tis the season for first steps into “software architecture”. Which is to say that my son is appreciating functions for the first time in his life. Controlling one LED is easy, but making a light show is about two more abstraction layers on top of that. We’ve been having fun making them dim, twinkle, and chase so far. We only have two more weekends, though, and we don’t have a final light show figured out yet, but after all, ’tis the season for last minute present hacking.
On this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi talk about the optical witchcraft behind holograms, the finer points of designing 3D printable threads, and the challenges of switching your local network over to IPv6. They’ll also cover how a clever software patch improves the graphics in a flight simulator from the 1990s, and why spacecraft flying into orbit powered by the SABRE engine is going to remain a dream for now.
From there you’ll hear about a reproduction VW gas gauge that works better than the real thing, custom ball screws, and the latest and greatest in homebrew battery charging. Finally, they’ll cap the episode off by exploring the conundrum that’s heating up London’s Underground, and diving into the (mostly) fictional history of teleportation.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
