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[SrBlonde]’s wonderful micro Spectrum project has only the essential inputs, which makes for an interesting-looking keyboard for sure. Inside you’ll find an Orange Pi Zero 2 board loaded with Batocera so [SrBlonde] can play all their favorite childhood games on the 5″ IPS display.
Something else that’s interesting is that the switches are a mix of blues and blacks — clickies and linears. I can’t figure out how they’re distributed based on the numbers in the components list, but I could see using clickies on the alphas and linears everywhere else (or vice versa). At any rate, it’s a great project, and you can grab the STL files from Thingiverse if you’re so inclined.
The average Hackaday reader hardly needs to be reminded of the incredible potential of the modern microcontroller. While the Arduino was certainly transformative when it hit the scene, those early 8-bit MCUs were nothing compared to what’s on the market now. Multiple cores with clock speeds measured in the hundreds of megahertz, several MB of flash storage, and of course integrated WiFi capability mean today’s chips are much closer to being fully-fledged computers than their predecessors.
It’s not hard to see the impact this has had on the electronics hobby. In the early 2000s, getting your hardware project connected to the Internet was a major accomplishment that probably involved bringing some hacked home router along for the ride. But today, most would consider something like an Internet-connected remote environmental monitor to be a good starter project. Just plug in a couple I2C sensors, write a few lines of Python, and you’ve got live data pouring into a web interface that you can view on your mobile device — all for just a few bucks worth of hardware.
But just because we’re keenly aware of the benefits and capabilities of microcontrollers like the ESP32 or the Pi Pico, doesn’t mean they’ve made the same impact in other tech circles. In his talk Wireless Hacking on a $5 Budget, Alex Lynd goes over some examples of how he’s personally put these devices to work as part of his information security (infosec) research.
This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Isaac Connor about Zoneminder! That’s the project that’s working to store and deliver all the bits from security cameras — but the CCTV world has changed a lot since Zoneminder first started, over 20 years ago. The project is working hard to keep up, with machine learning object detection, WebRTC, and more. Isaac talks a bit about developer burnout, and a case or two over the years where an aggressive contributor seems suspicious in retrospect. And when is the next stable version of Zoneminder coming out, anyway?
Writing for Hackaday can be somewhat hazardous. Sure, we don’t often have to hide from angry spies or corporate thugs. But we do often write about something and then want to buy it. Expensive? Hard to find? Not needed? Doesn’t really matter. My latest experience with this effect was due to a recent article I wrote about the AM2900 bitslice family of chips. Many vintage computers and video games have them inside, and, as I explained before, they are like a building block you use to build a CPU with the capabilities you need. I had read about these back in the 1970s but never had a chance to work with them.
As I was writing, I wondered if there was anything left for sale with these chips. Turns out you can still get the chips — most of them — pretty readily. But I also found an eBay listing for an AM2900 “learning and evaluation kit.” How many people would want such a thing? Apparently enough that I had to bid a fair bit of coin to take possession of it, but I did. The board looked like it was probably never used. It had the warranty card and all the paperwork. It looked in pristine condition. Powering it up, it seemed to work well.
What Is It?
The board hardly looks at least 40 years old.
The board is a bit larger than a letter-sized sheet of paper. Along the top, there are three banks of four LEDs. The bottom edge has three banks of switches. One bank has three switches, and the other two each have four switches. Two more switches control the board’s operation, and two momentary pushbutton switches.
The heart of the device, though, is the AM2901, a 4-bit “slice.” It isn’t quite a CPU but more just the ALU for a CPU. There’s also an AM2909, which controls the microcode memory. In addition, there’s a small amount of memory spread out over several chips.
A real computer would probably have many slices that work together. It would also have a lot more microprogram memory and then more memory to store the actual program. Microcode is a very simple program that knows how to execute instructions for the CPU. Continue reading “Slicing And Dicing The Bits: CPU Design The Old Fashioned Way”→
Do humanoid robots dream of electric retirement? Who knows, but maybe we can ask Boston Dynamics’ Atlas HD, which was officially retired this week. The humanoid robot, notable for its warehouse Parkour and sweet dance moves, never went into production, at least not as far as we know. Atlas always seemed like it was intended to be an R&D platform, to see what was possible for a humanoid robot, and in that way it had a heck of a career. But it’s probably a good thing that fleets of Atlas robots aren’t wandering around shop floors or serving drinks, especially given the number of hydraulic blowouts the robot suffered. That also seems to be one of the lessons Boston Dynamics learned, since Atlas’ younger, nimbler replacement is said to be all-electric. From the thumbnail, the new kid already seems pretty scarred and battered, so here’s hoping we get to see some all-electric robot fails soon.
Last weekend was Hackaday Europe 2024, and it was great. Besides having some time to catch up with everyone, see some fun new badge hacks, and of course all the projects that folks brought along, I also had time to attend most all of the talks. And the talks were split into two distinct sections: long-format talks on Saturday and a two-hour session of seven-minute lightning talks on Sunday.
I don’t know if it’s our short attention spans, or the wide range of topics in a short period of time, but a number of people came up after the fact and said that they really appreciated the short-but-sweet format. One heretic even went so far as to suggest that we only have lightning talks in the future.
But I absolutely appreciate the longer talks too. Sometimes, you just have to give a speaker free rein to dig really deeply into a topic. When the scope of the project warrants it, there’s just no substitute for letting someone tell the whole story. So I see a place for both!
If you were at Hackaday Europe, or any other conference with a lightning talks track, what do you think? Long or short? Or a good mix?
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What were some of the best posts on Hackaday last week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams decided there were too many to choose from, but they did take a sampling of the ones that caught their attention. This week’s picks were an eclectic mix of everything from metal casting and plasma cutters to radio astronomy and space telescope budgets. In between? Some basic circuit design, 3D printing, games, dogs, and software tools. Sound confusing? It won’t be, after you listen to this week’s podcast.
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!
