Modular Mouse Packs Features

Not only do console gamers complain about the use of a mouse, but PC users themselves often don’t have kind words to say even about some of the higher-end options. Granted, their gripes aren’t about game experience or balance, they’re usually about comfort, features, or longevity of the mice themselves. So far we haven’t seen many people try to solve these problems, but [benw] recently stepped on the scene with a modular mouse that can fit virtually any need.

Called the RX-Modulus, this mouse has been designed from the ground up to be completely open source from hardware to software. Most of the components can be 3D printed to suit an individual’s particular grip style by making adjustments. The electronics can be custom fitted as well. Users can swap out mouse buttons and wheels in any number of positions, and replace them when they wear out. To that end, one of the goals of this project is also to avoid any planned obsolescence that typically goes along with any current consumer-level product.

While [benw] currently only has a few prototypes under his belt, he’s far enough along with the project that he’s willing to show it off to the community. His hopes are that there are others that see a need for this type of mouse and can contribute to the final design. After all, there are all kinds of other custom mice out there that would have been much easier builds with [benw]’s designs at hand.

How To Keep Unique Equipment Running When Parts Run Out

[JGlass] deals with public-facing technology, which he says includes things like theatre equipment, retail displays, and museum displays. Many of these pieces of technology are literally one-of-a-kind devices, even if they were constructed from what was once off-the-shelf, commercially available parts. When these machines need servicing, replacement parts aren’t always available, and reverse engineering comes in handy. He recently began documenting exactly how to approach this process by using the identification and replacement of an obsolete 7-segment industrial display as an example.

The particular part shown is the Lascar EM32-4-LED, which up and died in a unique piece of equipment. The trouble is that the EM32-4-LED is out of production and unobtainable, and the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) that drives the whole thing is a black box that cannot be modified. It’s very good news that a datasheet exists, but that’s often just a starting point. To create a one-off, drop-in solution requires a combination of research, troubleshooting, and design work.

To do this, [JGlass] starts off by walking through datasheet elements and explains that it’s important to build a high level understanding of function first, then drill down into details, and always be ready to verify, challenge, or throw out one’s assumptions. After establishing a high level understanding comes matching physical evidence to things like block and functional diagrams, then cracking open the faulty component to see if anything else can be learned. Only then are multimeters and probes taken out for more active research. All of this sleuthing must always be done with the end goal firmly in mind: creating a new device that acts like the one being replaced. Without focus, one can easily get lost in details and unknowns.

Reverse Engineering is a process, and the more tools, the better. If you missed our earlier post about a hacker’s guide to JTAG, here’s your chance to check it out and be all the more prepared for the next time you need to do some electron detective work of your own.

Altium Has Its 2kicad Moment

Around these parts we tend to be exponents of the KiCad lifestyle; what better way to design a PCBA than with free and open source tools that run anywhere? But there are still capabilities in commercial EDA packages that haven’t found their way into KiCad yet, so it may not always be the best tool for the job. Altium Designer is a popular non-libre option, but at up to tens of thousands of USD per seat it’s not always a good fit for users and businesses without a serious need.

It’s hard to find an exciting photo of a dialog box

What do you do as a KiCad user who encounters a design in Altium you’d like to work with? Well as of April 3rd 2020, [Thomas Pointhuber] has merged the beginnings of a native Altium importer into KiCad which looks to be slated for the 6.0 release. As [Thomas] himself points out in the patch submission, this is hardly the first time a 3rd party Altium importer has been published. His new work is a translation of the Perl plugin altium2kicad by [thesourcerer8]. And back in January another user left a comment with links to four other (non-KiCad) tools to handle Altium files.

If you’d like to try out this nifty new feature for yourself, CNX has a great walkthrough starting at building KiCad from source. As for documents to test against the classic BeagleBone Black sources seen above can be found at on GitHub. Head past the break to check out the very boring, but very exciting video of the importer at work, courtesy of [Thomas] himself. We can’t wait to give this a shot!

Thanks for the tip [Chris Gammell]!

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Three Years Of HardwareX: Where Are They Now?

After three years of online publications, HardwareX may have solidified itself as an academic journal for open-source hardware. We originally wrote about HardwareX back in 2016. At the time, HardwareX hadn’t even published its first issue and only begun soliciting manuscripts. Now after three years of publishing, six issues as of October 2019 (with the seventh scheduled for April 2020), and an impact factor of 4.33, it’s fair to say that Elsevier’s push into open-access publications is on a path to success.

To give you a bit of background, HardwareX aims to promote the reproducibility of scientific work by giving researchers an avenue to publish all the hardware and software hacks that often get buried in traditional manuscripts. The format of HardwareX articles is a bit different than most academic journals. HardwareX articles look more like project pages similar to Hackaday.io. (Maybe we inspired them a bit? Who knows.)

It’s a bold attempt on Elsevier’s part because although open-access is held as an ideal scenario for scientific work, such efforts often come under quite a bit of scrutiny in the academic community. Don’t ask us. We can’t relate.

Either way, we genuinely wish Elsevier all the best and will keep our eyes on HardwareX. Maybe some of our readers should consider publishing their projects in HardwareX.

A Hacker’s Guide To JTAG

If you’re reading Hackaday, you’ve almost certainly heard of JTAG. There’s an excellent chance you’ve even used it once or twice to reflash an unruly piece of hardware. But how well do you actually know JTAG? More specifically, do you know how useful it can be when reverse engineering hardware?

Whether you’re a JTAG veteran or a novice, this phenomenal guide written by [wrongbaud] is sure to teach you a thing or two. Starting with a low-level explanation of how the interface actually works, the guide takes you though discovering JTAG ports on unknown targets, the current state-of-the-art in open source tools to interact with the device, and finally shows a real-world example of pulling and analyzing a gadget’s firmware.

There’s no way to do his write-up justice with a breakdown or a summary, so we won’t even try. Just get comfortable, maybe grab a drink, and dive in. It’s certainly not a short read, but there isn’t a wasted word on the page. Every piece of the puzzle, from how to figure out an unlabeled pinout to determining the instruction length, is explained in exactly the amount of detail you’re looking for. This is a guide for hackers written by a hacker, and it shows.

It will probably come as no surprise to find this isn’t the first time [wrongbaud] has done a deep dive like this. Over the last few months we’ve been covering his series of practical reverse engineering guides, and each one has been an invaluable resource. Perfect study guides for when a global pandemic has you stuck in the house.

BINA-VIEW: A Fascinating Mechanical Interference Display

[Fran Blanche] tears down this fascinating display in a video teardown, embedded below.

These displays can support up to 64 characters of the buyer’s choosing which is controlled by 6 bits, surprisingly only requiring 128 mW per bit to control; pretty power-light for its day and age. Aside from alphanumeric combinations the display also supported “color plates” which we found quite fascinating. The fully decked model would only cost you $1,206 US dollars per unit in today’s money or five rolls of toilet paper at latest street price. And that’s just one digit.

If you dig through the documents linked here, and watch her video you can get an idea of how this display works. There are six solenoids attached to rods at the rear of the device. A lamp shines through a lens onto the back of a plate assembly. Each plate is a strategically perforated grid. When the solenoids activate the selected plates tilt interfering with a stationary grid. This causes the light to be blocked in some regions only.

It seems clear why this never took off. Aligning these seems like a production nightmare compared to things like flip displays and Nixie tubes. Still, the characters have quite a lot of charm to them. We wouldn’t mind seeing a 3D printable/laser cut version of this display type. Get working!

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Magnets Turn Flexible PCB Into Electric Grasshopper

Just because something doesn’t seem to have an apparent purpose, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try making it anyway. As flexible PCBs become cheaper and easier to order from low-scale fab houses, we’re seeing hobbyists experiment with new uses for them such as [Carl Bugeja]’s jumping circuit.

The circuit is based a coil printed on the flexible PCB itself acting as an electromagnet, but unlike other designs which use the same trick, in this one the coil is made to be the static side of an actuator. Attached to the circuit with folding arms is a stack of two permanent magnets, which work as the moving part. Since the magnets make up most of the mass of the circuit, as they’re pushed down and sprung back up, it causes the whole thing to leap around just under one centimeter off the table like a little electric grasshopper.

This is far from [Carl]’s first appearance here on Hackaday, and he’s been clearly busy exploring new uses for flexible PCBs with their properties as electromagnets, from making POV displays with them to small robots that move around through vibration. We’re excited to see what else he can come up with, and you can see this one in action after the break.

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