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Hackaday Prize 2023: Meet The Ten Re-Engineering Education Finalists

May 11, 2023 by 31 Comments

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and doubly so when you’re hacking hardware. If you can believe it, we’ve already closed out the first challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, and you know what that means — it’s time to announce the 10 finalists.

As a reminder, each of these projects not only takes home $500 USD, but moves on to the next round of judging. During the recently announced 2023 Supercon, we’ll announce the six projects that were selected by our panel of judges to collect their share of $100,000 in prize money– plus a residency at Supplyframe’s DesignLab and eternal hacker glory for the Grand Prize winner.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Meet The Ten Re-Engineering Education Finalists” →

Retro Gadgets: I Swear Officer, I Was Listening To 45

May 9, 2023 by 15 Comments

Audio in cars has a long history. Car radios in the 1920s were bulky and expensive. In the 1930s, there was the Motorola radio. They were still expensive — a $540 car with a $130 radio — but much more compact and usable.  There were also 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and lately digital audio on storage media or streamed over the phone network. There were also record players. For a brief period between 1955 and 1961, you could get a car with a record player. As you might expect, though, they weren’t just any record players. After all, the first thing to break on a car from that era was the mechanical clock. Record players would need to be rugged to work and continue to work in a moving vehicle. As you might also expect, it didn’t work out very well.

It all started with Peter Goldmark, the head of CBS Laboratories. He knew a lot about record players and had been behind the LP — microgroove records that played for 22 minutes on a side at 33.3 RPM instead of 5 minutes on a side at 78 RPM. He knew that a car record player needed to be smaller and shock-resistant. Of course, in those days, it would have tubes, but that could hardly be helped.

The problem turned into one of size. A standard 10- or 12-inch disk is too big to easily fit in the car. A 45 RPM record would be more manageable, but who wants to change the record every three or four minutes while driving?

Continue reading “Retro Gadgets: I Swear Officer, I Was Listening To 45” →

Share Your Projects: Making Helpful PCBs

May 9, 2023 by 38 Comments

When it comes to things that hackers build, PCBs are a sizeable portion of our creative output. It’s no wonder – PCB design is a powerful way to participate in the hardware world, making your ideas all that more tangible with help of a friendly PCB fab. It’s often even more lovely when the PCB has been designed for you, and all you have to do is press “send” – bonus points if you can make a few changes for your own liking!

A lot of the time, our projects are untrodden ground, however, and a new design needs to be born. We pick out connectors, work through mechanical dimensions, figure out a schematic and check it with others, get the layout done, and look at it a few more times before sending it out for production. For a basic PCB, that is enough – but of course, it’s no fun to stop at ‘basic’, when there’s so many things you can do at hardly any cost.

Let’s step back a bit – you’ve just designed a board, and it’s great! It has all the chips and the connectors you could need, and theoretically, it’s even supposed to work first try. Now, let’s be fair, there’s an undeniable tendency – the more PCBs you design, the better each next one turns out, and you learn to spend less time on each board too. As someone with over two hundred PCBs under her belt, I’d like to show you a bunch of shortcuts that make your PCB more helpful, to yourself and others.

There’s a few ways that you can share your PCB projects in a more powerful way – I’d like to point out a few low-hanging fruits, whether README.md files or markings on the PCB itself. I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with external and embedded documentation of PCBs, as well as PCB sharing methods, got some fun results, and I’d like to share my toolkit through a few punchy examples and simple tricks. I’d also like to hear about yours – let’s chat! Continue reading “Share Your Projects: Making Helpful PCBs” →

A Literate Assembly Language

May 8, 2023 by 80 Comments

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet nearly all of them are hampered by obscurity left over from the days when punched cards had 80 columns and a six-letter symbol was all you could manage in the limited memory space of the computer. For example,  without looking it up, what does the ARM instruction FJCVTZS do? The instruction’s full name is Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed Fixed-point Rounding Towards Zero. Not super helpful.

But it did occur to me that nothing is stopping you from writing a literate assembler that is made to be easier to read. First, most C compilers will accept some sort of asm statement, and you could probably manage that with compile-time string construction and macros. However, I think there is a better possibility.

Reuse, Recycle

Since I sometimes develop new CPU architectures, I have a universal cross assembler that is, honestly, an ugly hack, but it works quite well. I’ve talked about it before, but if you don’t want to read the whole post about it, it uses some simple tricks to convert standard-looking assembly language formats into C code that is then compiled. Executing the resulting program outputs the desired machine language into a desired file format. It is very easy to set up, and in the middle, there’s a nice C program that emits machine code. It is not much more readable than the raw assembly, but you shouldn’t have to see it. But what if we started the process there and made the format readable?

At the heart of the system is a C program that lives in soloasm.c. It handles command line options and output file generation. It calls an external function, genasm with a single integer argument. When that argument is set to 1, it indicates the assembler is in its first pass, and you only need to fill in label values with real numbers. If the pass is a 2, it means actually fill in the array that holds the code.

That array is defined in the __solo_info instruction (soloasm.h). It includes the size of the memory, a pointer to the code, the processor’s word size, the beginning and end addresses, and an error flag. Normally, the system converts your assembly language input into a bunch of function calls it writes inside the genasm function. But in this case, I want to reuse soloasm.c to create a literate assembly language. Continue reading “A Literate Assembly Language” →

Ask Hackaday: Why Do Self Driving Cars Keep Causing Traffic Jams?

May 8, 2023 by 133 Comments

Despite what some people might tell you, self-driving cars aren’t really on the market yet. Instead, there’s a small handful of startups and big tech companies that are rapidly developing prototypes of this technology. These vehicles are furiously testing in various cities around the world.

In fact, depending on where you live, you might have noticed them out and about. Not least because many of them keep causing traffic jams, much to the frustration of their fellow road users. Let’s dive in and look at what’s going wrong.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Why Do Self Driving Cars Keep Causing Traffic Jams?” →

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Hackaday Links: May 7, 2023

May 7, 2023 by 39 Comments

More fallout for SpaceX this week after their Starship launch attempt, but of the legal kind rather than concrete and rebar. A handful of environmental groups filed the suit, alleging that the launch generated “intense heat, noise, and light that adversely affects surrounding habitat areas and communities, which included designated critical habitat for federally protected species as well as National Wildlife Refuge and State Park lands,” in addition to “scatter[ing] debris and ash over a large area.”

Specifics of this energetic launch aside, we always wondered about the choice of Boca Chica for a launch facility. Yes, it has all the obvious advantages, like a large body of water directly to the east and being at a relatively low latitude. But the whole area is a wildlife sanctuary, and from what we understand there are still people living pretty close to the launch facility. Then again, you could pretty much say the same thing about the Cape Canaveral and Cape Kennedy complex, which probably couldn’t be built today. Amazing how a Space Race will grease the wheels of progress.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 7, 2023” →

The New Hotness

May 6, 2023 by 35 Comments

If there’s one good thing to be said about the chip shortage of 2020-2023 (and counting!) it’s that a number of us were forced out of our ruts, and pushed to explore parts that we never would have otherwise. Or maybe it’s just me.

Back in the old times, I used to be a die-hard Atmel AVR fan for small projects, and an STM32 fan for anything larger. And I’ll freely admit, I got stuck in my ways. The incredible abundance of dev boards in the $2 range also helped keep me lazy. I had my thing, and I was fine sticking with it, admittedly due to the low price of those little blue pills.

An IN-12B Nixie tube on a compact driver PCBAnd then came the drought, and like everyone else, my stockpile of microcontrollers started to dwindle. Replacements at $9 just weren’t an option, so I started looking around. And it’s with no small bit of shame that I’ll admit that I hadn’t been keeping up with the changes as much as I should have. Nowadays, it’s all ESP32s and RP2040s over here, and granted there’s a bit of a price bump, but the performance is there in abundance. But I can’t help feeling like I’m a few years back of the cutting edge.

So when I see work like what [CNLohr] and [Bitluni] are doing with the ultra-cheap CH32V003 microcontrollers, it makes me think that I need to start filling in gaps in my comfortable working-set of chips again. But how the heck am I supposed to keep up? And how do you? It took a global pandemic and silicon drought to force me out of my comfort zone last time. Can the simple allure of dirt-cheap chips get me out? We’ll see!

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