Thanks For Hacking

November 25, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Hope you’re all having a great Thanksgiving weekend, and are getting your fill of family, food, and maybe even a little bit of fun. Aside from the cranberries, Thanksgiving is probably one of my favorite holidays because of the spirit behind it – thinking about what’s gone well, how you lucked out, and who has done you right over the year.

One of the most poignant expressions of thanks I’ve heard in a while came from Hackaday superfriend [Sprite_tm] in his Supercon talk this year, which he closed by thanking “you all” for pushing him on to keep making crazy projects. “I would never finish these projects without people who would be entertained by seeing all this. This is is effectively art – something that doesn’t make sense. The only way it makes sense is because I want it to exist, and because I know that you all love hearing and reading about stuff like this existing. So thank you very much for that.”

That same sentiment goes for all of us here at Hackaday: Thank you all very much for reading! Without this global community of crazy hackers to write for, we wouldn’t be able to keep doing what we do – it just wouldn’t make sense. And without your hacks, of course, we’d have nothing to write about.

Thanks for sharing, thanks for following along, thanks for inspiring us and for being inspired. Thanks for hacking.

Hackaday Podcast 245: The Silver Swan, ET’s Umbrella Antenna, Model Tanks Vs Space Shuttle Tires

November 24, 2023 by Tom Nardi No comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi link up through the magic of the Internet to go over some of their favorite stories from the last week. After revealing the bone-chilling winners of this year’s Halloween contest, the discussion switches over to old-timey automatons, receiving deep space transmissions with a homebrew antenna that would make E.T. proud, and the treasures that can be found while poking around in a modern car’s CAN bus.

They’ll also go over how NASA saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by hacking a remote controlled WWII tank, CNC controlled microscopes, and a cinema-quality camera you can probably build from what you’ve already got in the parts bin. Finally, they’ll detail an ambitious effort to recreate an old computer’s motherboard with a new feature in KiCad, and muse over all the interesting things that become possible once your test equipment can talk to your computer.

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!

Download and enjoy listening with a cold turkey sandwich.

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Linux Fu: Easy Kernel Debugging

November 22, 2023 by Al Williams 2 Comments

It used to be that building the Linux kernel was not easy. Testing and debugging were even worse. Nowadays, it is reasonably easy to build a custom kernel and test or debug it using virtualization. But if you still find it daunting, try [deepseagirl’s] script to download, configure, build, and debug the kernel.

The Python program takes command line arguments so you can select a kernel version and different operations. The script can download the source, patch the configuration, build the kernel, and then package it into a Debian package you can boot under qemu. From there, you can test and even debug with gdb. No risk of hosing your everyday system and no need to understand how to configure everything to run.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Duplex Typewriter

November 21, 2023 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

The Coleco Adam? A not-so-great home computer that likely contributed to the downfall of the company. The keyboard, however, is a different story, and worth repurposing.

[Nick Bild] has created a USB adapter that uses a Teensy 4.1 and an RJ-12 breakout board. Now this wasn’t just a simple matrix to decode. No, the fine folks at Coleco rolled their own communications protocol called AdamNet.

The keyboard uses an RJ-12 connector and a single data line to communicate over a 62.5 kbit/s, half-duplex serial bus. Inside the keyboard is a Motorola 6801 that caches the key presses and sends them to the computer. So the BOM is limited to what you see above — an RJ-12 breakout and a Teensy 4.1. It’s great to see old keyboards come alive again, especially one with such cool sci-fi keycaps. Want to hear it clack? Of course you do.

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Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

November 20, 2023 by Arya Voronova 30 Comments

You might remember that KiCad 7 came out this February, with a multitude of wonderful features. One of them was particularly exciting to see, and the KiCad newsletter even had an animated GIF to properly demo it – a feature called “Background Bitmaps”, which is the ability to add existing board images into your board editor, both front and back, and switch between them as you design the board. With it, you can draw traces, recreate the outline and place connectors over these images, giving you a way to quickly to reproduce everything on an existing PCB! I’ve seen some friends of mine use this feature, and recently, I’ve had a project come up that’s a perfect excuse for me to try it.

Back in 2020, I managed to get a Sony Vaio P from a flea market, for about 20€. It’s a beloved tiny laptop from 2009, now a collectors item, and we’ve covered a few hacks with it! The price was this wonderful only because it was not fit for regular flea market customers – it was in bad condition, with the original DC jack lost and replaced by some Molex-like power connector, no hard drive, and no battery in sight.

In short, something worth selling to a known tinkerer like me, but not particularly interesting otherwise. Nevertheless, about half a year later, when I fed it the desired 10.5 V from a lab PSU and gave the power button a few chances, it eventually booted up and shown me the BIOS menu on the screen! I’ve disassembled and reassembled it a few times, replaced the DC jack with an original one from a different Vaio ultrabook I happened to have parts from, and decided to try to bring it back to original condition.

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Hackaday Links: November 19, 2023

November 19, 2023 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Two RUDs are better than one, right? That might be the line on Saturday morning’s briefly spectacular second attempt by SpaceX to launch their Starship vehicle atop a Super Heavy booster, which ended with the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of both vehicles. The first attempt, back in April, had trouble from the get-go, including the rapid unscheduled partial disassembly of their Stage Zero launch pad, followed by rapid but completely predictable disassembly of a lot of camera gear and an unfortunate minivan thanks to flying chunks of concrete.

Engineering changes helped keep Stage Zero more or less intact this time, and the Super Heavy booster performed flawlessly — for about three minutes. It was at that point, right after the start of the new “hot staging” process, where Starship’s six engines light before the booster actually drops away, that the problems started. The booster made a rapid flip maneuver to get into the correct attitude for burn-back and landing before disappearing in a massive ball of flame.

Reports are that the flight termination system did the deed, but it’s not yet exactly clear why. Ditto the Starship, which was also snuffed by the FTS after continuing to fly for about another five minutes. Still in all, the SpaceX crew seem to be ecstatic about the results, which is understandable for a company with a “move fast, break things” culture. Nailed it.

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Procrastineering And Simulated Annealing

November 18, 2023 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

The software for the Supercon badge went down to the wire this year, with user-facing features being coded up as late as Thursday morning. This left “plenty of time” to flash the badges on Thursday afternoon, but they were admittedly still warm as the first attendees filed in on Friday morning. While I’ve always noted that the last minute is the best minute, this was a little close, and frankly there was an uncaught bug that we would have noticed if we had a few more hours to just play with it before showtime.

But we were by no means slacking. On the contrary, a few of us were putting in nights and full weekend days for six or eight weeks beforehand. The problem was hard, and the path to a solution was never clear, and changed depending on the immovability of the roadblocks hit along the way. This is, honestly, a pretty normal hacker development pattern.

What was interesting to me was how similar the process was to simulated annealing. This is an optimization method where you explore more of the solution space in the beginning, when the metaphorical “temperature” is hot. Later, as you’re getting closer to a good solution, you want to refine in smaller and smaller steps – it cools down. This rate of “cooling” is a tremendously important parameter in practice.

And this is exactly the way the badge development felt. We were searching in a very big solution space in the beginning, and many aspects of the firmware infrastructure were in flux. As it got closer and closer to a working solution, more and more of the code settled down, and the changes got smaller. In retrospect, this happened naturally, and you can’t always control or plan for the eureka moments, but I wonder if it’s worth thinking of a project this way. Instead of milestones, temperatures? Instead of a deadline, a freeze date.