Close-up of the mod installed into the HDMI switch, tapping the IR receiver

Interfacing A Cheap HDMI Switch With Home Assistant

June 7, 2024 by Arya Voronova 40 Comments

You know the feeling of having just created a perfect setup for your hacker lab? Sometimes, there’s just this missing piece in the puzzle that requires you to do a small hack, and those are the most tempting. [maxime borges] has such a perfect setup that involves a HDMI 4:2 switch, and he brings us a write-up on integrating that HDMI switch into Home Assistant through emulating an infrared receiver’s signals.

The HDMI switch is equipped with an infrared sensor as the only means of controlling it, so naturally, that was the path chosen for interfacing the ESP32 put inside the switch. Fortunately, Home Assistant provides the means to both receive and output IR signals, so after capturing all the codes produced by the IR remote, parsing their meaning, then turning them into a Home Assistant configuration, [maxime] got HDMI input switching to happen from the comfort of his phone.

We get the Home Assistant config snippets right there in the blog post — if you’ve been looking for a HDMI switch for your hacker lair, now you have one model to look out for in particular. Of course, you could roll your own HDMI switch, and if you’re looking for references, we’ve covered a good few hacks doing that as part of building a KVM.

Screenshot of Microsoft Flight Simulator with the Dune expansion, and in the top right corner, the mod's author is shown using their phone with an attached gamepad for controlling a Dune ornithopter.

Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone

June 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 3 Comments

Anyone with more than a passing interest in flight simulators will eventually want to upgrade their experience with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) setup that has buttons and switches for controlling your virtual aircraft’s assorted systems, which are well supported by games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). But a traditional HOTAS system can be a bit of an investment, so you might want to thank [Vaibhav Sharma] for the virtualHOTAS project that brings a configurable HOTAS interface to your phone — just in time to try out that Dune expansion for MSFS.

The phone’s orientation sensors are used as a joystick, and on the screen, there’s both sliders and buttons you can use as in-game controls. On the back-end there’s a Python program on the computer which exposes a webserver that the phone connects to, translating sensor and press data without the need for an app. This works wonderfully in MSFS, as [Vaibhav] shows us in the video below. What’s more, if you get tired of the touchscreen-and-accelerometer controls, you can even connect a generic smartphone-designed game controller platform, to have its commands and movements be translated to your PC too!

All the code is open source, and with the way this project operates, it will likely work as a general-purpose interface for other projects of yours. Whether you might want to build an accessibility controller from its codebase, use it for your robot platform, maybe simply repurpose this project for any other game, [Vaibhav]’s creation is yet another reminder that we’re carrying a sensor-packed platform, and it might just help you build a peripheral you didn’t know you needed.

Don’t have a phone handy? Perhaps an Xbox controller could work with just a few 3D printed upgrades, or you could stock up on buttons and build your own joystick from scratch. Oh, and keeping HOTAS principles in mind can be pretty helpful — you might get to redesign the venerable computer mouse, for instance!

Continue reading “Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone” →

Weird Old Stereo Accessories

May 26, 2024 by Al Williams 25 Comments

Some people trick out their cars. Some, their computers. There are even people who max out their audio systems, although back in 1979, there was more of that going on, probably, than today where you discresionary income is split so many ways. Case in point: [Alan Cross] remembers how excited he was to get the Radio Shack catalog that year. He was working at a grocery store, saved his money, and — over time — picked up a haul ranging from an equalizer to a strobe light.

Who didn’t need a power meter or a “light organ?” These gadgets seem cheap until you realize it was 1979 and [Alan] was a student working at a grocery store. He points out that the $20 power meter is about the same as $80 today.

Continue reading “Weird Old Stereo Accessories” →

Here’s The Norwegian Tape Deck Teardown You’ve Been Waiting For

May 15, 2024 by Lewin Day 37 Comments

“They just don’t build ’em like they used to” is a truer statement every year. Whether your vice is CRTs, film cameras, or tape decks, you’ll know that the very best gear simply isn’t manufactured anymore. Even the day-to-day stuff from 60 years ago is often a cut above a lot of today’s equipment. [Anthony Kouttron] shows us this with his teardown of a Tandberg TCD301 from many decades ago.

The Tandberg unit is beautifully finished in wood and metal, a style of construction that’s fairly rare these days. It’s got big, chunky controls, and a certain level of heft that is out of vogue in modern electronics. Heavy used to mean good — these days, it means old. That’s not to say it’s indestructible, though. It’s full of lots of old plastic pulleys and fasteners that have aged over the decades, so it’s a little fragile inside.

Still, [Anthony] gives us a great look at the aluminium chassis and buttons and the electromechanical parts inside. It’s a rats-nest design with lots of discrete components and wires flying between boards. You couldn’t economically produce this and sell it to anyone today, but this is how it was done so many years ago.

This non-functional unit ended up being little more than a salvage job, but we’re still glad that [Anthony] gave us a look inside. Still, if you long for more cassette-themed teardowns, we’ve got the goodness you’re looking for!

Gather ‘Round This Unique 4-Player Arcade Cabinet

May 11, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

Usually when we see arcade cabinet builds, they’re your standard single-player stand up variety. Even one of them takes up quite a bit of room, so as appealing as it might be to link up two or more cabinets together for the occasional multiplayer session, the space required makes it a non-starter for most of us.

But this cleverly designed 4-player cocktail cabinet from [OgrishGadgeteer] goes a long way towards solving that problem. The circular design of the cabinet gives each player a clear view of their respective display in a much smaller footprint than would otherwise be possible, and the glass top allows the whole thing to double as an actual cocktail table when it’s not game time.

The cabinet was modelled in 3D before construction.

According to a post on r/cade, it took [OgrishGadgeteer] three months to go from paper sketches of the cabinet’s basic shape to the final product. Most of the components were picked up on the second hand market, which brought the total cost of the build to around $350. That wouldn’t have been a surprising price for a traditional full-size cabinet build, so for this, it seems like an absolute steal.

A Dell OptiPlex 7060 small form factor PC provides the power for this build, with the video output passing through a 4-way VGA distribution amplifier into 20 inch monitors. At $75, the four player control kit ended up being the single most expensive component of the build, though you could make do with some parts bin buttons and a Pi Pico if you wanted to really bring this one in on a budget.

Perhaps the most surprising element of the whole build is that, despite the cabinet’s complex design, [OgrishGadgeteer] pulled it off without a CNC to cut the plywood panels. Instead, a vinyl cutter was used to make full-size templates of the cuts and holes that needed to be made, which were attached directly to the wood. After that, it was just a matter of following the lines with a jigsaw. Not the fastest or most convenient solution, but it’s hard to argue with the final results.

We’ve seen other cocktail cabinet builds in the past, but this is the first that managed to cram four players in. Well, unless you count Dungeons & Dragons, anyway.

A diagram from the article, showing the router being used in a car for streaming media to multiple portable devices at once

A Portable DLNA Server Hack Helps You Tame OpenWRT

May 5, 2024 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

A good amount of hacks can be done with off-the-shelf hardware – what’s more, it’s usually available all over the world, which means your hacks are easier to build for others, too. Say, you’ve built something around a commonly available portable router, through the magic of open-source software. How do you make the fruits of your labour easy to install for your friends and blog readers? Well, you might want to learn a thing or two from [Albert], who shows us a portable DLNA server built around a GL-MT300N-V2 pocket router.

[Albert]’s blog post is a tutorial on setting it up, with a pre-compiled binary image you can flash onto your router. Flash it, prepare a flash drive with your media files, connect to the WiFi network created by the router, run the VLC player app, and your media library is with you wherever you go.

Now, a binary image is good, but are you wondering how it was made, and how you could achieve similar levels of user-friendliness in your project? Of course, here’s the GitHub repository with OpenWRT configuration files used to build this image, and build instructions are right there in the README. If you ever needed a reference on how to make commonly available OpenWRT devices do your bidding automagically, this is it.

This is an elegant solution to build an portable DLNA server that’s always with you on long rides, and, think of it, it handily beats a typical commercialized alternative, at a lower cost. Want software upgrades? Minor improvements and fixes? Security patches? Everything is under your control, and thanks to the open-source nature of this project, you have a template to follow. There won’t always be a perfectly suited piece of hardware on the market, of course, as this elegant dual-drive Pi-based NAS build will attest.

Your Smart TV Does 4K, Surround Sound, Denial-of-service…

April 23, 2024 by Jenny List 53 Comments

Any reader who has bought a TV in recent years will know that it’s now almost impossible to buy one that’s just a TV. Instead they are all “smart” TVs, with an on-board computer running a custom OS with a pile of streaming apps installed. It fits an age in which linear broadcast TV is looking increasingly archaic, but it brings with it a host of new challenges.

Normally you’d expect us to launch into a story of privacy invasion from a TV manufacturer at this point, but instead we’ve got [Priscilla]’s experience, in which her HiSense Android TV executed a denial of service on the computers on her network.

The root of the problem appears to be the TV running continuous network discovery attempts using random UUIDs, which when happening every few minutes for a year or more, overloads the key caches on other networked machines. The PC which brought the problem to light was a Windows machine, which leaves us sincerely hoping that our Linux boxen might be immune.

It’s fair to place this story more under the heading of bugs than of malicious intent, but even so it’s something that should never have made it to production. The linked story advises nobody to buy a HiSense TV, but to that we’d have to doubt that other manufactures wouldn’t be similarly affected.

Header: William Hook, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Thanks [Concretedog] for the tip.