hardware

1772 Articles

How To Deal With A Cheap Spectrum Analyzer

January 25, 2019 by 14 Comments

The Hackaday Superconference is all about showcasing the hardware heroics of the Hackaday community. We also have a peer-reviewed journal with the same goal, and for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference we got a taste of the first paper to make it into our fully Open Access Journal. It comes from Ted Yapo, it is indeed a tale of hardware heroics: what happens when you don’t want to spend sixty thousand dollars on a vector network analyzer?

Ted’s talk begins with a need for a network analyzer. These allow for RF measurements, but if you ever need one, be prepared: you can spend twenty thousand dollars on a used VNA. Around the time Ted’s project began, Rigol released their cheap spectrum analyzer, the DSA815. This thing only cost a thousand dollars. It was their first revision of the hardware, and it was only a scalar network analyzer. Being the first revision of the hardware, there were a few problems; there was leakage that would affect the measurement. The noise floor was higher than it should have been. These problems can be corrected, though, with a little bit of cunning from Ted:

Continue reading “How To Deal With A Cheap Spectrum Analyzer” →

New Part Day: Small, Cheap, And Good LIDAR Modules

January 22, 2019 by 40 Comments

Fully autonomous cars might never pan out, but in the meantime we’re getting some really cool hardware designed for robotic taxicab prototypes. This is the Livox Mid-40 Lidar, a LIDAR module you can put on your car or drone. The best part? It only costs $600 USD.

The Livox Mid-40 and Mid-100 are two modules released by Livox, and the specs are impressive: the Mid-40 is able to scan 100,000 points per second at a detection range of 90 m with objects of 10% reflectivity. The Mid-40 sensor weighs 710 grams and comes in a package that is only 88 mm x 69 mm x 76 mm. The Mid-100 is basically the guts of three Mid-40 sensors stuffed into a larger enclosure, capable of 300,000 points per second, with a FOV of 98.4° by 38.4°.

The use case for these sensors is autonomous cars, (large) drones, search and rescue, and high-precision mapping. These units are a bit too large for a skateboard-sized DIY Robot Car, but a single Livox Mid-40 sensor, pointed downward on a reasonably sized drone could perform aerial mapping

There is one downside to the Livox Mid sensors — while you can buy them direct from the DJI web site, they’re not in production. These sensors are only, ‘Mass-Production ready’. This might be just Livox testing the market before ramping up production, a thinly-veiled press release, or something else entirely. That said, you can now buy a relatively cheap LIDAR module that’s actually really good.

Anatomy Of A Cloned Piece Of Hardware

January 21, 2019 by 58 Comments

What would you think if you saw a bootleg of a product you design, manufacture, and sell pop up on eBay? For those of us who don’t make our livelihood this way, we might secretly hope our blinkenlight project ends up being so awesome that clones on AliExpress or TaoBao end up selling in the thousands . But of course anyone selling electronics as their business is going to be upset and wonder how this happened? It’s easy to fall into the trap of automatically assigning blame; if the legit boards were made in China would you assume that’s where the design was snagged to produce the bootlegs? There’s a saying about assumptions that applies to this tale.

Dave Curran from Tynemouth Software had one of his products cloned, and since he has been good enough to share all the details with us we’ve been able to take a look at the evidence. Dave’s detective work is top notch. What he found was surprising, his overseas manufacturer was blameless, and the bootleg board came from an entirely different source. Continue reading “Anatomy Of A Cloned Piece Of Hardware” →

You’ll Never See The End Of This Project

January 17, 2019 by 26 Comments

…theoretically, anyway. When [Quinn] lucked into a bunch of 5 mm red LEDs and a tube of 74LS164 shift registers, a project sprang to mind: “The Forever Number,” a pseudo-random number generator with a period longer than the age of the universe. Of course, the components used will fail long before the sequence repeats, but who cares, this thing looks awesome!

Check out the gorgeous wire-wrapping job!

The core of the project is a 242-bit linear-feedback shift register (LFSR) constructed from (31) 74LS164’s. An XOR gate and inverter computes the next bit of the sequence by XNOR’ing two feedback bits taken from taps on the register, and this bit is then fed into bit zero. Depending on which feedback taps are chosen, the output sequence will repeat after some number of clock cycles, with special sets of feedback taps giving maximal lengths of 2N – 1, where N is the register length. We’ll just note here that 2242 is a BIG number.

The output of the LFSR is displayed on a 22×11 array of LEDs, with the resulting patterns reminiscent of retro supercomputers both real and fictional, such as the WOPR from the movie “War Games,” or the CM2 from Thinking Machines.

The clock for this massive shift register comes from – wait for it – a 555 timer. A potentiometer allows adjustment of the clock frequency from 0.5 to 20 Hz, and some extra gates from the XOR and inverter ICs serve as clock distribution buffers.

We especially love the construction on this one. Each connection is meticulously wire-wrapped point-to-point on the back of the board, a relic originally intended for an Intel SBC 80/10 system. This type of board comes with integrated DIP sockets on the front and wire-wrap pins on the back, making connections very convenient. That’s right, not a drop of solder was used on the board.

You can see 11 seconds of the pattern in the video after the break. We’re glad [Quinn] didn’t film the entire sequence, which would have taken some 22,410,541,156,499,040,202,730,815,585,272,939,064,275,544, 100,401,052,233,911,798,596 years (assuming a 5 Hz clock and using taps on bits 241 and 171 ).

Continue reading “You’ll Never See The End Of This Project” →

Deep Discounts Yield Deep Reverse Engineering Of Biotech Hardware

January 15, 2019 by 21 Comments

Hitting the electronic surplus shop is probably old hat to most of our readership. Somewhere, everyone’s got that little festering pile of hardware they’re definitely going to use some day. An old fax is one thing, but how would your partner feel if you took home an entire pallet-sized gene sequencing rig? Our friend [kaspar] sent along an interesting note that the folks at Swiss hackerspace Hackteria got their hands on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 last year (see funny “look what we got!” photo at top) and have generated a huge amount of open documentation about whats inside and how to use it.

Okay first off, what the heck is this machine anyway? The HiSeq is designed to automatically perform the sequencing step of Illumina’s proprietary multi step gene sequencing process (see manufacturer’s glossy for more), and to do so with minimal human intervention. That means that the unit contains a microfluidics system to manipulate samples, an extremely high performance optical scan system complete with controllable stage, imager, fluorescence modes, etc, and lots of other things this author isn’t sufficiently trained to guess at.

The folks at Hackteria have done a pretty thorough teardown of the system and produced block diagrams of most of its modules. They’ve also run some of the tools and recorded logs of what they were up to, including the serial commands sent to and from the machine to control certain subsystems. Of course a tool like this was meant to be driven by Illumina’s specific software, but unusually those are available and surprisingly usable which is how the aforementioned logs were captured. Right now it looks like Hackteria has put together tools to use the system as a fluorescent microscope.

Oddly the most interesting thing here might be how available these systems are. It appears that they’re being replaced en masse and have become easily available in the range of thousands of dollars on the secondary market. At that price point they’re almost worth snapping up for the enclosure and parts! But we prefer Hackteria’s goal of enabling the Citizen Scientist to make use of these incredible machines for their intended purpose. Who knows what exciting projects we’ll find when hackers start sequencing their cats!

Thanks for the tip [kaspar]!

A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets Its Maker

January 14, 2019 by 30 Comments

The holidays bring us many things. Family and friends are a given, as is the grand meal in which we invariably overindulge. It’s a chance for decades old songs and movies to somehow manage to bubble back up to the surface, and occasionally a little goodwill even slips in here or there. But perhaps above all, the holidays are a time for every retailer to stock themselves to the rafters with stuff. Do you need it? No. Do they want it? No. But it’s there on display anyway, and you’re almost certainly going to buy it.

Which is precisely how I came to purchase a two pack of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) “trackers” for the princely sum of $10 USD. I didn’t expect much out of them for $5 each, but as this seemed an exceptionally low price for such technology in a brick and mortar store, I couldn’t resist. Plus there was something familiar about the look of the tracker that I couldn’t quite put my finger on while I was still in the store.

That vague feeling of recollection sent me digging through my parts bin as soon as I got home, convinced that I had seen something among the detritus that reminded me of my latest prize. Sure enough, I found a “Cube” Bluetooth tracker which, ironically, I had received as a Christmas gift some years ago. Putting them side by side, it was clear that the design of these “itek” trackers took more than a little inspiration from the better known (and five times as expensive) product.

The Cube was a bit thicker, but otherwise the shape, size, and even button placement on the itek was nearly identical. Reading through their respective manuals, the capabilities also seemed in perfect parity, down to being able to use the button on the device as a remote camera control for your smartphone. Which got me thinking: just how similar would these two devices be internally? Clearly they looked and functioned the same, but would they be built the same as well? They would have to cut costs somewhere.

Determined to find out how a company can put out what for all the world looks like a mirror image of a competitor’s device while undercutting them by such a large margin, I cracked both trackers open to get a bit more familiar with what makes them tick. What I found on closer inspection of these two similar gadgets is perhaps best summarized by that age old cautionary adage: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Continue reading “A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets Its Maker” →

Years Don’t Dim The Shine Of These Curious Gadgets

January 13, 2019 by 4 Comments

[Maarten Tromp] recently took the time to document some of the unusual and creative electronic projects he received as gifts over the years. These gadgets were created in the early 2000’s and still work flawlessly today. Two of our favorites are shown here: Hardware Tetris Unit (shown in the image above) and Heap of Electronic Parts.

The “Heap of Electronic Parts” makes sounds when in sunlight.

Heap of Electronic Parts was a kind of hardware puzzle and certainly lives up to its name. It’s a bunch of parts soldered in a mystifying way to the backs of four old EPROMs — the chips with the little window through which UV is used to erase the contents. Assured that the unit really did have a function, [Maarten] eventually figured out that when placed in sunlight, the device ticks, buzzes, and squeals. [Jeroen] had figured out that the EPROMs could act like tiny solar cells when placed in sunlight, and together the four generate just enough power to drive an oscillator connected to a piezo speaker. It still chirps happily away, even today.

Hardware Tetris plays in a terminal window.

Hardware Tetris Unit was a black box intended to be plugged into a serial port. With a terminal opened using the correct serial port settings, a fully-functional Tetris game using ASCII-art graphics could be played. It was even self-powered from the serial port pins.

Inside Hardware Tetris is an AVR microcontroller with some level shifters, and the source code and schematics are available for download. 14 years later, computers no longer have hardware serial ports but [Maarten] says a USB-to-serial converter worked just fine and the device still functions perfectly.

There are a couple more devices documented on [Maarten]’s gifts page, including a Zork-inspired mini text adventure and a hardware board that does some trippy demos on an old Nokia color LCD.  [Maarten]’s friend [Jeroen Domburg] (aka Sprite_tm) had a hand in creating most of the gadgets, and he’s someone whose brilliant work we have had the good fortune to feature many times in the past.