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Hackaday Links: December 17, 2017

December 17, 2017 by 4 Comments

Where do you go if you want crazy old electronic crap? If you’re thinking a ham swap meet is the best place, think again. [Fran] got the opportunity to clean out the storage closet for the physics department at the University of Pennsylvania. Oh, man is there some cool stuff here. This room was filled to the brim with old databooks and development boards, and a sample kit for the unobtanium Nimo tube.

The Gigatron is a Hackaday Prize entry to build a multi-Megahertz computer with a color display out of TTL logic. Now, all this work is finally paying off. [Marcel] has turned the Gigatron into a kit. Save for the memories, this computer is pretty much entirely 74-series logic implemented on a gigantic board. Someone is writing a chess program for it. It’s huge, awesome, and the kits should cost under $200.

What’s cooler than BattleBots, and also isn’t Junkyard Wars? BattleBots, but in drone form. Drone Clash was originally announced in March, but now they’re moving it up to February to coincide with the TUS Expo. What could be better than flaming piles of lithium?

The Atari Lynx went down in history as the first portable console with a color LCD. There was a problem with the Lynx; the display was absolutely terrible. [RetroManCave] found someone selling an LCD upgrade kit for the Lynx, and the results are extremely impressive. The colors aren’t washed out, and since the backlight isn’t a fluorescent light bulb (yes, really), this Lynx should get a bit more run time for each set of batteries.

Like dead tree carcasses? You need to butcher some dead tree carcasses. The best way to do this is on a proper workbench, and [Paul Sellers] is working on a video series on how to make a workbench. He’s up to episode 3, where the legs are mortised. This is all done with hand tools, and the videos are far more interesting than you would think.

If you need some very small, very blinky wearables, here’s an option. This build is literally three parts — an LED matrix, an ATtiny2313, and a coin cell battery. Seems like this could be an entry for the Coin Cell Challenge we have going on right now.

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Hackaday Links: December 10, 2017

December 10, 2017 by 14 Comments

We have a contest going on right now challenging you to do the most with a coin cell. There are already quite a few interesting entries, and a few Hackaday writers are getting into the action by asking the question, ‘how do you open up a coin cell?’. The first thoughts were to open a lithium coin cell up while submerged in oil, but eBay came to the rescue with the cases for CR2025 cells. Of course that’s a thing.

Also falling into the, ‘of course that’s a thing’ category, there’s a project on Hackaday.io to execute arbitrary code on a calculator. A small group of calculator hackers have discovered an exploit on a line of Casio calculators running the obscure nX-U8/100 architecture. Right now, there’s not much to the project — just an LCD filled with bits of memory. However, this is a project we’re keenly watching, and we can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Hold onto your butts, because the ultimate multimeter is here. [Dave Jones] of the EEVBlog has released the 121GW Multimeter on Kickstarter. What’s cool about this meter? SD card logging, the ability to send data over Bluetooth, a 15V diode test voltage, a burden voltage display, and a whole bunch of hackable features. If you have a Fluke on your Christmas list, you would do well to check out the 121GW.

Also on Kickstarter, a new LattePanda board has been released. What’s a LattePanda? It’s a small single board computer built around a low-voltage Intel processor. This board features an Intel m3-7Y30 processor, comparable to the processor you’d get in a proper laptop that doesn’t have an i3, 8 gigs of DDR3, 64 gigs of eMMC, 802.11ac, BlueTooth 4.2, USB 3.0 with a Type C connector, HDMI, and a whole bunch of GPIOs. Yes, it runs Windows (but why would you?). If you need a somewhat beefy x86 system in a small form factor, there ‘ya go.

We’ve seen 3D printed remote-controlled airplanes, but never one this big. The guys at Flite Test printed a 1.6 meter Spitfire. It’s got flaps, it’s got retracts, and it’s friggin’ huge. The files for the print came from 3DLabPrint, and it flies beautifully, despite being a Spitfire. Want to see the video? Here ya go.

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Hackaday Links: December 3, 2017

December 3, 2017 by 29 Comments

Remember the Psion? Back when PDAs were a thing, the Psion was the best you could get. It was, effectively, a palm-top computer with a real qwerty keyboard. It didn’t have Bluetooth, it couldn’t browse the web, and it didn’t have WiFi, but this was an AA-powered productivity machine that could fit in your pocket. Now there’s a new palmtop from Psion engineers. The Gemini PDA is basically a smartphone with a real keyboard that runs Ubuntu. It’s also has a smaller battery than other devices with this form factor, meaning the TSA thinks it’s a smartphone. This thing is going to be cool.

TechShop, Inc. has reached an agreement to sell the company to TechShop 2.0, LLC. New ownership seeks to re-open, continue running makerspaces. Details coming soon.

Arcade monitors are cool, and vector monitors are even cooler. [Arcade Jason] created a gigantic 36″ vector monitor. It’s thirty-six inches of Gravitar, in all its vector glory.

A few links posts ago, I pointed out someone was selling really awesome, really cheap LED panels on eBay. I got my ten panels, and [Ian Hanschen] bought sixty or some other absurd amount. Now, these panels are going for $300 for a 10-pack instead of $50. Sorry about that. Nevertheless, the reverse engineering adventure is still ongoing, and eventually, someone is going to play Mario on these things.

The ESP32 is finding its way into all sorts of consumer electronics. Check this thing out. It’s an ESP32, four buttons, and a circular display. If you want to make your own Nest thermostat, or anything else that needs an awesome circular display, there you go.

Speaking of circular displays, are there any non-CRT displays that come with a polar coordinate system? Every circular LCD or OLED I’ve ever seen uses a Cartesian system, which doesn’t really make sense when you can’t see 30% of the pixels.

Hold the phone, this is far too clever. [Eduardo] needed to flash an ESP-12 module before soldering it onto a PCB. The usual way of doing this is with an absurd pogo pin jig. You know what’s cheaper than pogo pins? Safety pins. Clever overwhelming.

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Hackaday Links: November 26, 2017

November 26, 2017 by 11 Comments

Hey, it’s sometime between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We’re blowing out everything in the Hackaday Store. There’s some great deals in there. Tindie, our lovable robot dog is also heading up hundreds of Tindie deals for Cyber Monday. If you want some electronic stuff direct from the people who make it, this is the sale to check out.

Looking for some other Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales? Adafruit has compiled a list of retailers so I don’t have to. Thanks, Phil. There are deals from Lulzbot to Makerbot, LittleBits to Sparkfun.

The engineer responsible for Dieselgate has been sentenced to 40 months in prison. There are two takeaways from this: 1) The Nuremberg Defense doesn’t work. 2) Don’t build a business plan around breaking the law, despite what the libertarian hellscape of Hacker News tells you.

The theme for next year’s DEF CON has been announced. It’s, “1983”. What does that mean? Brutalist architecture, first of all. They’re also going for a ‘year before 1984’ thing, where everyone installs always-on, far-field microphones in their house and connects them to the Internet. In other news, Alexas and Google Homes are on sale this Black Friday. Big props for the official DEF CON style guide with typefaces and colors, though.

Over on Hackaday.io, [Frank] has created a very interesting and very cool game for the Vectrex. It’s called Bloxorz, and you can think of it as a cross between Marble Madness and Q*Bert. It’s a puzzle game, and now it’s a project on Kickstarter. Want to check out what this game looks like? Take a look at the video. It’s big into the tradition of early-90s puzzle games (a genre we wish would come back), and if I had a Vectrex, I’d buy one.

I told you SparkleCon tickets are on sale, right?

Here’s an argument you can settle. What is the grit designation of sandpaper? Sandpaper comes in various grits, from 60 (very coarse) to 1500, 2000, and 6000 (for polishing, basically). Here’s a question: how are these numbers derived? I have a vague memory from my youth where someone who probably didn’t know what they were talking about said grit sizes are the number of abrasive particles per some unit of area. A 60-grit sandpaper would have sixty particles of aluminum oxide per square quarter inch, for example. This sounds too stupid to be correct, doesn’t fit with the mesh sizes of different grades of sandpaper, and a cursory Googling does not tell me how sandpaper grit sizes are derived. What say you, Hackaday peanut gallery? Where do the numbers on the back of a sheet of sandpaper actually come from?

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Hackaday Links: November 19, 2017

November 19, 2017 by 26 Comments

[Peter]’s homebuilt ultralight is actually flying now and not in ground effect, much to the chagrin of YouTube commenters. [Peter Sripol] built a Part 103 ultralight (no license required, any moron can jump in one and fly) in his basement out of foam board from Lowes. Now, he’s actually doing flight testing, and he managed to build a good plane. Someone gifted him a ballistic parachute so the GoFundMe for the parachute is unneeded right now, but this gift parachute is a bit too big for the airframe. Not a problem; he’ll just sell it and buy the smaller model.

Last week, rumors circulated of Broadcom acquiring Qualcomm for the sum of One… Hundred… Billion Dollars. It looks like that’s not happening now. Qualcomm rejected a deal for $103B, saying the offer, ‘undervalued the company and would face regulatory hurdles.’ Does this mean the deal is off? No, there are 80s guys out there who put the dollar signs in Busine$$, and there’s politicking going on.

A few links posts ago, I pointed out there were some very fancy LED panels available on eBay for very cheap. The Barco NX-4 LED panels are a 32×36 panels of RGB LEDs, driven very quickly by some FPGA goodness. The reverse engineering of these panels is well underway, and [Ian] and his team almost have everything figured out. Glad I got my ten panels…

TechShop is gone. With a heavy heart, we bid adieu to a business with a whole bunch of tools anyone can use. This leaves a lot of people with TechShop memberships out in the cold, and to ease the pain, Glowforge, Inventables, Formlabs, and littleBits are offering some discounts so you can build a hackerspace in your garage or basement. In other TechShop news, the question on everyone’s mind is, ‘what are they going to do with all the machines?’. Nobody knows, but the smart money is a liquidation/auction. Yes, in a few months, you’ll probably be renting a U-Haul and driving to TechShop one last time.

3D Hubs has come out with a 3D Printing Handbook. There’s a lot in the world of filament-based 3D printing that isn’t written down. It’s all based on experience, passed on from person to person. How much of an overhang can you really get away with? How do you orient a part correctly? God damned stringing. How do you design a friction-fit between two parts? All of these techniques are learned by experience. Is it possible to put this knowledge in a book? I have no idea, so look for that review in a week or two.

Like many of us, I’m sure, [Adam] is a collector of vintage computers. Instead of letting them sit in the attic, he’s taking gorgeous pictures of them. The collection includes most of the big-time Atari and Commodore 8-bitters, your requisite Apples, all of the case designs of the all-in-one Macs, some Pentium-era PCs, and even a few of the post-97 Macs. Is that Bondi Blue? Bonus points: all of these images are free to use with attribution.

Nvidia is blowing out their TX1 development kits. You can grab one for $200. What’s the TX1? It’s a really, really fast ARM computer stuffed into a heat sink that’s about the size of a deck of cards. You can attach it to a MiniITX breakout board that provides you with Ethernet, WiFi, and a bunch of other goodies. It’s a step above the Raspberry Pi for sure and is capable enough to run as a normal desktop computer.

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Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday

November 12, 2017 by 11 Comments

This is not your normal Sunday links post. This is Superconference Sunday, and right now there are dozens of awesome projects floating around our conference in Pasadena. This links post will be mostly the projects from Supercon, but before that there’s some stuff we need to clear out of the queue:

Concerning other conferences, the Sparklecon site is up. Why go to Sparklecon? It’s a blast.

Tindie is worldwide! There were a bunch of Tindie sellers at the Maker Faire Adelaide this weekend. YouTuber MickMake is a friend of Tindie and we’re teaming up to give away a few prizes from Australian Tindie sellers. You can check out the full details here.

There’s an Internet of Things thing from 4D Systems. It’s an ESP8266 and a nice small display.

Well, crap. It might have finally happened. [Maxim Goryachy] and [Mark Ermolov] have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI. What the hell does that mean? It means you can plug something into the USB port of a computer, and run code on the Intel Management Engine (for certain Intel processors, caveats apply, but still…). This is doom. The Intel ME runs below the operating system and has access to everything in your computer. If this is real — right now we only have a screenshot — computer security is screwed, but as far as anyone can tell, me_cleaner fixes the problem. Also, Intel annoyed [Andy Tanenbaum].

With that out of the way, here’s some stuff from this weekend’s Supercon:

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday” →

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Hackaday Links: Remember, Remember

November 5, 2017 by 16 Comments

Buckle up, buttercup because this is the last weekly Hackaday Links post you’re getting for two weeks. Why? We have a thing next weekend. The Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th (and also the 10th, because there’s a pre-game party), and it’s going to be the best hardware con you’ve ever seen. Don’t have a ticket? Too bad! But we’ll have something for our Internet denizens too.

So, you’re not going to the Hackaday Supercon but you’d like to hang out with like-minded people? GOOD NEWS! Barnes & Noble is having their third annual Mini Maker Faire on November 11th and 12th. Which Barnes & Noble? A lot of them. Our reports tell us this tends to be geared more towards the younger kids, but there are some cool people doing demonstrations. Worst case scenario? You can pick up a copy of 2600.

PoC || GTFO 0x16 is out! Pastor Laphroaig Races The Runtime Relinker And Other True Tales Of Cleverness And Craft! This PDF is a Shell Script That Runs a Python Webserver That Serves a Scala-Based JavaScript Compiler With an HTML5 Hex Viewer; or, Reverse Engineer Your Own Damn Polyglot.

In, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be stupid’ news, I received an interesting product announcement this week. It’s a USB C power bank with an integrated hand warmer. Just think: you can recharge your phone on the go, warm your hands in the dead of winter, and hope your random battery pack from China doesn’t explode in your pocket. I’m not linking to this because it’s that dumb.

You can now cross-compile ARM with GCC in Visual Studio.

The iPhone X is out, and that means two things. There are far too many YouTube videos of people waiting in line for a phone (and not the good kind), and iFixit did a teardown. This thing is glorious. There are two batteries and a crazy double-milled PCB stack with strange and weird mezzanine connectors. The main board for the iPhone X is completely unrepairable, but it’s a work of engineering art. No word yet on reusing the mini-Kinect in the iPhone X.

Speaking of irreparable computers, the Commodore 64 is not. [Drygol] recently came across a C64 that was apparently the engine controller for a monster truck found on the bottom of the ocean. This thing was trashed, filled with rust and corrosion, and the power button just fell off. Prior to cleaning, [Drygol] soldered a new power button, bowered it up, and it worked. The crappiest C64 was repairable. A bit of cleaning, painting the case, and the installation of an SD2IEC brought this computer back to life, ready for another thirty years of retrogaming and BASIC.

The Zynq from Xilinx is one of the most interesting parts in recent memory. It’s a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 combined with an FPGA with a little more than a million reconfigurable gates. It’s been turned into a synth, a quadcopter, all of British radio, and it’s a Pynq dev board. Now there’s a new part in the Zynq family, an RFSoC that combines the general ARM/FPGA format with some RF wizardry. It’s designed for 5G wireless and radar (!), and one of those parts we can’t wait to see in use.

Do you keep blowing stuff up when attaching a USB to UART adapter to a board? Never fear, because here’s one with galvanic isolation. This is done with a neat digital isolator from Maxim