Reverse Engineering A Soundsystem’s API

July 31, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

We’ve all been stymied by a smart thermostat, coffee maker, or other device which would work fine on its own but ultimately seems to be worse off for having an Internet connection — so when something actually pulls off this feat it’s quite noteworthy. [James] has a powerful set of connected speakers and while they don’t have all of the functionality he needed built-in, an included web API at least allowed him to build in the features he wanted.

The major problem with these speakers isn’t that they’re incredibly loud (although they are), but rather that the wide range of available volumes for such a loud soundsystem doesn’t leave a lot of fine adjustment in the range where [James] typically uses these speakers. To tackle the problem, he first found the web interface the speakers present and then discovered a somewhat hidden application programming interface (API) within that allows for some manual control. He built a second website which serves as a volume slider within the range he wants, and the web server sends this volume to the speakers via this API which allows much finer control than the built-in user interface.

Having a usable API included with Internet-connected devices is not always the case, although it’s a great model for any company wanting to allow their customers better control of the products they buy. If you need to roll out your own API for connected devices that don’t have one already, take a look at [Sean Boyce]’s guide from 2019.

How To Turn Cheap Speakers Into Something A Little Better

July 5, 2024 by Jenny List 25 Comments

[Adam Francis] bought some cheap speaker drivers from AliExpress. Are they any good? Difficult to tell without a set of enclosures for them, so he made a set of transmission line cabinets. The resulting video proves that a decent sounding set of speakers shouldn’t have to cost the earth, and is quite entertaining to watch.

The design he’s going for is a transmission line, in effect a folded half-wave resonant tube terminated at one end and open at the other, with the speaker close to half way along. There is a lot of nuance to perfecting a speaker cabinet, but this basic recipe doesn’t have to be optimum to give a good result.

So after having some MDF cut to shape and glueing it all together, he ends up with some semi decent speakers for not a lot of money. The video is entertaining, with plenty of Britishisms, but the underlying project is sound. We’d have a pair on our bench.

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Responsive LCD Backlights With A Little Lateral Thinking

July 3, 2024 by Jenny List 23 Comments

LCD televisions are a technological miracle, but if they have an annoying side it’s that some of them are a bit lacklustre when it comes to displaying black. [Mousa] has a solution, involving a small LCD and a bit of lateral thinking.

These screens work by the LCD panel being placed in front of a bright backlight, and only letting light through at bright parts of the picture. Since LCD isn’t a perfect attenuator, some of the light can make its way through, resulting in those less than perfect blacks. More recent screens replace the bright white backlight with an array of LEDs that light up with the image, but the electronics to make that happen are not exactly trivial.

The solution? Find a small LCD panel and feed it from the same HDMI source as a big panel. Then place an array of LDRs on the front of the small LCD, driving an array of white LEDs through transistor drivers to make a new responsive backlight. We’re not sure we’d go to all this trouble, but it certainly looks quite cool as you can see below the break.

This may be the first responsive backlight we’ve brought you, but more than one Ambilight clone has graced these pages.

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Showing the modchip installed into a powered up Xbox, most of the board space taken up by a small Pi Pico board. A wire taps into the motherboard, and a blue LED on the modchip is lit up.

An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene

June 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 45 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a modchip that adds features to your game console, you might have noticed sanded-off IC markings, epoxy blobs, or just obscure chips with unknown source code. It’s ironic – these modchips are a shining example of hacking, and yet they don’t represent hacking culture one bit. Usually, they are more of a black box than the console they’re tapping into. This problem has plagued the original XBOX hacking community, having them rely on inconsistent suppliers of obscure boards that would regularly fall off the radar as each crucial part went to end of life. Now, a group of hackers have come up with a solution, and [Macho Nacho Productions] on YouTube tells us its story – it’s an open-source modchip with an open firmware, ModXO.

Like many modern modchips and adapters, ModXO is based on an RP2040, and it’s got a lot of potential – it already works for feeding a BIOS to your console, it’s quite easy to install, and it’s only going to get better. [Macho Nacho Productions] shows us the modchip install process in the video, tells us about the hackers involved, and gives us a sneak peek at the upcoming features, including, possibly, support for the Prometheos project that equips your Xbox with an entire service menu. Plus, with open-source firmware and hardware, you can add tons more flashy and useful stuff, like small LCD/OLED screens for status display and LED strips of all sorts!

If you’re looking to add a modchip to your OG XBOX, it looks like the proprietary options aren’t much worth considering anymore. XBOX hacking has a strong community behind it for historical reasons and has spawned entire projects like XBMC that outgrew the community. There’s even an amazing book about how its security got hacked. If you would like to read it, it’s free and worth your time. As for open-source modchips, they rule, and it’s not the first one we see [Macho Nacho Productions] tell us about – here’s an open GameCube modchip that shook the scene, also with a RP2040!

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Build Your Own Tape Recorder/Player

June 21, 2024 by Al Williams 14 Comments

If you want to read something from magnetic tape, you need a tape head, right? Or you could do like [Igor Brichkov] and make your own. It looks surprisingly simple. He used a washer with a small slot cut in it and a coil of wire.

The first experiment, in the first video below, is using a commercial tape head connected to a preamp. Music playing “through” the homemade head is readable by the commercial tape reader. This is a prelude to creating an entire tape deck using the head, which you can see in the second video below.

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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!

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