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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: The Wildcard Finalists Are Here” →

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” →

Modeling Space Hack Chat

October 2, 2023 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, October 4 at noon Pacific for the Modeling Space Hack Chat with Bryan Murphy and Sam Treadgold!

We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that a fair number of Hackaday readers went through a phase of model building growing up. To further push out that branch, we’ll further guess that some of those models included spacecraft, both real and imaginary. And with good reason — you don’t get to space without some interesting engineering, a lot of which is reflected in the design of the vehicles intended to get there. Rockets are cool, satellites are cooler still, and if you can’t actually go to space yourself, or at least be the person building the actual hardware, at least you can build a model and dare to dream.

But while a model on a stand or hanging from the ceiling on fishing line can certainly stimulate the imagination, wouldn’t it be better if a model did something? Bryan Murphy and Sam Treadgold think so, which is why they’ve been working on the “ISS Mimic,” which we recently featured. The 3D-printed 1:100 scale model of the International Space Station is equipped with servos that move the station’s solar panels in real-time based on publically available telemetry. It’s way more engaging than a static model, especially for kids just getting into STEM and related fields.

Bryan and Sam will stop by the Hack Chat to talk not just about the ISS Mimic, but about everything that has to do with modeling space. Who wouldn’t love a desktop version of a Martian or lunar rover keeping pace with its full-scale counterpart? And wouldn’t it be great to be able to visualize just how far away Voyager is right now? If it’s out there, we should be able to bring it home, at least in model form.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 4 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Links: October 1, 2023

October 1, 2023 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

We’ve devoted a fair amount of virtual ink here to casting shade at self-driving vehicles, especially lately with all the robo-taxi fiascos that seem to keep cropping up in cities serving as testbeds. It’s hard not to, especially when an entire fleet of taxis seems to spontaneously congregate at a single point, or all it takes to create gridlock is a couple of traffic cones. We know that these are essentially beta tests whose whole point is to find and fix points of failure before widespread deployment, and that any failure is likely to be very public and very costly. But there’s someone else in the self-driving vehicle business with way, WAY more to lose if something goes wrong but still seems to be nailing it every day. Of course, we’re talking about NASA and the Perseverance rover, which just completed a record drive across Jezero crater on autopilot. The 759-meter jaunt was completely planned by the onboard AutoNav system, which used the rover’s cameras and sensors to pick its way through a boulder-strewn field. Of course, the trip took six sols to complete, which probably would result in negative reviews for a robo-taxi on Earth, and then there’s the whole thing about NASA having a much bigger pot of money to draw from than any start-up could ever dream of. Still, it’d be nice to see some of the tech on Perseverance filtering down to Earth.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: October 1, 2023” →