Building A 6.5 Digit Voltmeter From Scratch

November 5, 2019 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

After initially working to create a modernized replica of a Czechoslovakian 4-digit Metra M1T242 voltmeter, [Jaromir Sukuba] figured that while he was at it, he might as well create a voltmeter that would be slightly more capable. This led to the design and construction of a brand-new, 6.5 digit voltmeter design, which [Jaromir] has documented over at EEVBlog.

Employing an MSP430FR5994 MCU for the digital board, and an Altera/Intel EPM240T100 CPLD plus ADC on the input side, the design has been undergoing validation for a while now. The current revision uses an OPA140 op-amp in an integrating ADC setup in a multi-slope run-up configuration, but [Jaromir] has plans to replace this input board with another op-amp in a more efficient topology in the future.

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How Smart Are AI Chips, Really?

November 4, 2019 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

The best part about the term “Artificial Intelligence” is that nobody can really tell you what it exactly means. The main reason for this stems from the term “intelligence”, with definitions ranging from the ability to practice logical reasoning to the ability to perform cognitive tasks or dream up symphonies. When it comes to human intelligence, properties such as self-awareness, complex cognitive feats, and the ability to plan and motivate oneself are generally considered to be defining features. But frankly, what is and isn’t “intelligence” is open to debate.

What isn’t open to debate is that AI is a marketing goldmine. The vagueness has allowed for marketing departments around the world to go all AI-happy, declaring that their product is AI-enabled and insisting that their speech assistant responds ‘intelligently’ to one’s queries. One might begin to believe that we’re on the cusp of a fantastic future inhabited by androids and strong AIs attending to our every whim.

In this article we’ll be looking at the reality behind these claims and ponder humanity’s progress towards becoming a Type I civilization. But this is Hackaday, so we’re also going to dig into the guts of some AI chips, including the Kendryte K210 and see how the hardware of today fits into our Glorious Future. Continue reading “How Smart Are AI Chips, Really?” →

Ploopy Open Source Trackball Keeps Rolling Along

November 1, 2019 by Al Williams 35 Comments

We’ll be honest. When we first heard about a mouse, we weren’t convinced. The argument was that business people weren’t familiar with computers. That didn’t ring true since every business person in the last century had at least seen a typewriter keyboard, but most of them had never seen a mouse before the 1980s. The mouse has since become totally ubiquitous, so presumably, it was the right choice. However, if you are a serious touch typist, it is annoying to have to move your hands off the keyboard to a different location each time. There are several solutions for that, but the oldest one is probably the trackball. Ploopy is an open-source trackball you can build yourself, and it looks pretty capable.

While we aren’t wild about the name, Ploopy looks pretty good and is one of those projects that would have been very difficult ten years ago. It requires two PC boards. Those used to be hard to get. It also requires some very customized plastic parts. Getting a handful of plastic parts made used to be hard, too. But now you probably have a 3D printer that is just begging for something to do.

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Saintcon Badge Is An Enigma No More

October 31, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 14 Comments

Through the weekend Twitter has been a-titter with news coming out of Saintcon, the annual security conference in Provo, Utah. Now that the weekend is over we can finally get our hands on full hardware and software sources for the curvy, LED-covered badge we’ve been salivating over and a write up by its creators [compukidmike] and [bashNinja]. Let’s dive in and see what’s waiting!

Design

This year’s badge is designed to represent a single tooth on a single rotor of an Enigma machine. The full function of an Enigma machine is quite complex, but an individual device has three rotors with 26 teeth each (one for each letter) as well as a keypad for input and a character display to show each enciphered letter. For reference, the back of the badge has a handy diagram of a badge’s place in the Enigma system.

Reminiscent of the WWII device which the badge design recalls, each unit includes a full QWERTZ keyboard (with labeled keys!) and RGB “lampboard” for individual character output, but unlike the original there’s also a curved 16 x 64 RGB LED display made from those beguiling little ~1mm x 1mm LEDs. All in, the device includes 1051 LEDs! Combined with the unusually non-rectilinear shape of the badge and the Enigma-style Saintcon logo it makes for an attractive, cohesive look.

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Tiny Cube Hosts A Hearty Tube

October 25, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 17 Comments

Tiny PCBAs and glowy VFD tubes are like catnip to a Hackaday writer, so when we saw [hamster]’s TubeCube tube segment driver we had to dig in to learn more. We won’t bury the lede here; let’s enjoy a video of glowing tubes before we go further:

The TubeCube is built to fit the MiniBadge badge addon standard, which is primarily used to host modules on the SAINTCON conference badge. A single TubeCube hosts a VFD tube, hardware to provide a 70 V supply, and a microcontroller for communication and control. Each TubeCube is designed to accept ASCII characters via UART to display on it’s display, but they can also be chained together for even more excitement. We’re not sure how [hamster] would be able to physically wear the beast in the video above, but if he can find a way, they all work together. If you’re interested in seeing the dead simple UART communication scheme take a look at this file.

We think it’s also worth pointing about the high voltage supply. To the software or mechanically minded among us it’s easy to get trapped thinking about switching power supplies as a magical construct which can only be built using all-in-one control ICs. But [hamster]’s supply is a great reminder that a switching supply, even a high voltage one, isn’t as complex as all that. His design (which he says was cribbed from Adafruit’s lovely Ice Tube Clock) is essentially composed of the standard primitives. A big low voltage capacitor C1 to source the burst of energy which will be boosted, the necessary inductor/high voltage cap C2 which ends up at the target voltage, and a smoothing cap C3 to make the output a little nicer. It’s controlled by the microcontroller toggling Q1 to control the current flow through L1. The side effect is that by controlling the PWM frequency [hamster] can vary the brightness of the tubes.

Right now it looks like the repository has a schematic and sources, which should be enough to build a small tube driver of your own. If you can’t get enough TubeCubes, there’s one more video (of a single module) after the break.

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Converting A Tesla To A Pickup Truck

October 19, 2019 by Sharon Lin 38 Comments

The renowned inventor of useless robots [Simone Giertz] has outdone herself this time. She, along with a team of engineers featuring [Rich Rebuilds], [Laura Kampf], and [Marcos Ramirez], recently decided to convert a Tesla into a pickup truck, and make a video along the way, all while salvaging what remains they can of the back of the car and making the final product roadworthy. Yeah, this is a couple weeks old now, and yeah, it’s kind of a commercial, but really: [Simone Giertz] and Co. rock.

In her vlog of the experience, the team starts by gutting out the interior of the car in order to find out the weight distribution and form of the outer frame. Essentially, in order to create the pickup truck, a portion of the back of the car needs to be removed, with additional beams and support welded in depending on the consequent structural integrity. With a sawzall and angle grinder, the top portion of the frame is cut and taken out, but not before a worrying glance brings about the realization that the car needs exterior support during its modifications.

After the cushions, glass, wiring, and all other accessories are removed, they install a truck bed from another sacrificial pickup truck, as well as a roof rack to complete the look. Amidst the deconstruction and reconstruction, there are moments when the car encounters a “Safety restraint system fault” or when the team accidentally lines the inside of the car with fiberglass right before shooting their video. Between complaints of the different clip sizes used and the clear time pressure of the project, it’s a funny and informative look into a pretty unique car mod.

The final commercial they made of their Tesla-pickup hybrid, dubbed Truckla, is available on [Giertz]’s YouTube channel.

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The Smallest Homebrewed TTL CPU In The World

October 16, 2019 by Sharon Lin 16 Comments

This may very well be the smallest homemade TTL CPU we’ve ever seen. Measuring at one square inch, this tiny chip boasts 40 connections, an 8-bit databus, a 16-bit address bus, a 64 kB memory space, reset and clock inputs, and 5 V power lines.

TTL (transistor transistor logic) logic chips are pretty outdated today, but they do have all of the basics necessary for building a computer – logic gates, counters, buffers, and registers. The transistors perform both the logic and amplifying, as compared to resistor-transistor logic (RTL) and diode-transistor logic (DTL). In the 60s, when the technology was still fairly new, TTL ICs were commonly used in computers and industrial controls. Even after the advent of VLSI, TTL ICs were still being used for interfacing more densely integrated chips. Even so, most TTL chips tend to be on the bulkier side, which is what makes [roelh]’s project so unique. The entire PCB is hardly any larger than a coin.

On top of the hardware specs, [roelh] also implemented several useful software features: zero page addressing, load/store/compare instructions, stacks, conditioning branching, subroutine calls, and memory-mapped I/O. The registers are also in RAM, which has been implemented in microprocessors in the past (see TMS9900) for speed considerations, but in this case was implemented for size constraints.

An ALU was also left out of the design in order to constrain its size, leaving only 8 ICs on either side of the 2-layer PCB.

Microprograms are stored in Flash memory and can be programmed with a Raspberry Pi. by saving the Assembly code to a memory card and downloading the assembled binary code. Once the Raspberry Pi is connected to the development board, you can burn the binary code onto the Flash memory of the board using a Python script. An online Javascript editor also exists for assembling the Assembly code for the chip and simulating the CPU.

There is currently a development board made for the CPU, which includes six seven-segment displays and an I/O connector for running a digital clock and other applications. [roelh] has since built a retro TTL computer around the chip, which reintroduces the ALU and includes address registers, 256 KB of RAM, VGA video, PS/2 keyboard port, a sound system, and I/O pins. It’s a really exciting project that’s seriously pushing the constraints of retro computing.