Logic Analyzers: Tapping Into Raspberry Pi Secrets

August 31, 2023 by Arya Voronova 45 Comments

Today, I’d like to highlight a tool that brings your hacking skills to a whole new level, and does that without breaking the bank – in fact, given just how much debugging time you can save, how many fun pursuits you can unlock, and the numerous features you can add, this might be one of the cheapest tools you will get. Whether it’s debugging weird problems, optimizing your code, probing around a gadget you’re reverse-engineering, or maybe trying to understand someone’s open-source library, you are likely missing out a lot if you don’t have a logic analyzer on hand!

It’s heartbreaking to me that some hackers still don’t know the value that a logic analyzer brings. Over and over again, tactical application of a logic analyzer has helped me see an entirely different perspective on something I was hacking on, and that’s just the thing I’d like to demonstrate today.

Diving In

A logic analyzer has a number of digital inputs, and it continuously reads the state of these digital inputs, sending them to your computer or showing them on a screen – it’s like a logic-level-only oscilloscope. If you have an I2C bus with one MCU controlling a sensor, connect a logic analyzer to the clock and data pins, wire up the ground, launch the logic analyzer software on your computer, and see what’s actually happening.

For instance, have you ever noticed the ID_SC and ID_SD pins on the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector? Are you wondering what they’re for? Don’t you want to check what actually happens on these pins? Let’s do that right now! Continue reading “Logic Analyzers: Tapping Into Raspberry Pi Secrets” →

Copper Be Gone: The Chemistry Behind PCB Etching

August 31, 2023 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

For a lot of reasons, home etching of PCBs is somewhat of a dying art. The main reason is the rise of quick-turn PCB fabrication services, of course; when you can send your Gerbers off and receive back a box with a dozen or so professionally made PCBs for a couple of bucks, why would you want to mess with etching your own?

Convenience and cost aside, there are a ton of valid reasons to spin up your own boards, ranging from not having to wait for shipping to just wanting to control the process yourself. Whichever camp you’re in, though, it pays to know what’s going on when your plain copper-clad board, adorned with your precious artwork, slips into the etching tank and becomes a printed circuit board. What exactly is going on in there to remove the copper? And how does the etching method affect the final product? Let’s take a look at a few of the more popular etching methods to understand the chemistry behind your boards.

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Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator

August 30, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 97 Comments

Humanity has been harvesting energy from the wind for centuries. The practice goes back at least to 8th century Persia where the first known historical records of windmills came, but likely extends even further back than that. Compared to the vast history of using wind energy directly to do things like mill grain, pump water, saw wood, or produce fabrics, the production of electricity is still relatively new. Despite that, there are some intriguing ways of using wind to produce electricity. Due to the unpredictable nature of wind from moment to moment, using it to turn a large grid-tied generator is not as straightforward as it might seem. Let’s take a look at four types of wind turbine configurations and how each deal with sudden changes in wind speeds. Continue reading “Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator” →

Retro Gadgets: The 1974 Breadboard Project

August 29, 2023 by Al Williams 36 Comments

It is hard to imagine experimenting with electronics without the ubiquitous solderless breadboard. We are sure you have a few within arm’s reach. The little plastic wonders make it easy to throw together a circuit, try it, and then tear it down again. But, surprisingly, breadboards of that type haven’t always been around, and — for a while — they were also an expensive item. Maybe that’s what motivated [R. G. Cooper] to build Slip-n-Clip — his system for quickly building circuits that he published in a 1974 edition of the magazine Elementary Electronics.

The system isn’t really what you would think of as a breadboard today, but it was effective and certainly cheap to build. The biggest problem? It wasn’t something you’d use with DIP ICs. But in the early 1970s, you might not be building very much with ICs, and the ones you used might be in oddball transistor-like packages. Things were strange in the 70s!

A Brief History of Breadboards

In the very old days, people built radios and such on wooden substrates that were actually bread-cutting boards. That’s where the name came from. It was common to draw a diagram with the physical layout you had in mind, glue it to the board, and use it as a guide for building and troubleshooting. Wood was easy to drill and cut. A nail or a thumbtack would make dandy terminals. Probably the last time we saw that done was about a dozen years ago in Make Magazine. Even then, it was only a novelty — few people still build circuits like this, but you can see how [Colin] did it in the video below.

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The 2003 Northeast Blackout And The Harsh Lessons Of Grid Failures

August 29, 2023 by Maya Posch 87 Comments

The grid failure in 2003 which reverted much of the eastern US and Canada back to a pre-electrification era may be rather memorable, yet it was not the first time that a national, or even international power grid failed. Nor is it likely that it will be the last. In August of 2023 we mark the 20th anniversary of this blackout which left many people without electricity for up to three days, while costing dozens of people their lives. This raises the question of what lessons we learned from this event since then.

Although damage to transmission lines and related infrastructure is a big cause of power outages – especially in countries where overhead wiring is the norm – the most serious blackouts involve the large-scale desynchronization of the grid, to the point where generators shutdown to protect themselves. Bringing the grid back from such a complete blackout can take hours to days, as sections of the grid are reconnected after a cascade scenario as seen with the 2003 blackout, or the rather similar 1965 blackout which affected nearly the same region.

With how much more modern society relies today on constant access to electrical power than it did twenty, let alone fifty-eight years ago, exactly how afraid should we be of another, possibly worse blackout?

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Maker Faire Hannover: The Right Way To Do It

August 28, 2023 by Jenny List 16 Comments

On these pages we bring you plenty of reports from events, most of which are from the hacker or hardware communities. These can be great fun to attend, but they’re not the only game in town when looking at things adjacent to our community. At what you might describe as the consumer end of the market there are the Maker Faires, which bring a much more commercial approach to a tech event. While so many of us are in Germany for Chaos Communication Camp there’s a maker faire ideally placed to drop in on the way back. We took the trip to Hannover, a large and rather pleasant city just off the Berlin to Amsterdam motorway roughly central to the top half of the country. It’s got one of the German emissions zones so without the green tax sticker in the car we took a park-and-ride on one of their clean and efficient trams to alight a short walk from the congress centre.

Plenty To See, And It’s Not All For Kids

An array of European electronic conference badges on show

Outside, a working forge

Face it, we all want a clock like this one!

Vintage test equipment

You may know Bitluni from many featured projects here.

A group of Germans who maintain a 1990s TV studio.

Hackaday’s first post, courtesy of the Wayback Machine and Makerspace Minden.

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Review: WAINLUX K8, A Diode Laser That’s Ready To Work

August 28, 2023 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

Rarely a week goes by that some company doesn’t offer to send us their latest and greatest laser. You know the type — couple of aluminum extrusions, Class 4 diode flopping around in the breeze, and no enclosure to speak of unless you count the cardboard box they shipped it in. In other words, an accident waiting to happen. Such gracious invitations get sent to the trash without a second thought.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that the average Hackaday reader would be able to render such a contraption (relatively) safe for use around the shop. Build a box around it, bolt on a powerful enough fan to suck the smoke out through the window, and you’ve turned a liability into a legitimate tool. But the fact remains that we simply can’t put our stamp on something that is designed with such a blatant disregard for basic safety principles.

The earlier WAINLUX JL4 — lucky rabbit foot not included.

That being the case, a recent email from WAINLUX nearly met the same fate as all those other invitations. But even at a glance it was clear that this new machine they wanted to send out, the K8, was very different from others we’d seen. Different even from what the company themselves have put out to this point. This model was fully enclosed, had a built-in ventilation fan, an optional air filter “sidecar”, and yes, it would even turn off the laser if you opened the door while it was in operation. After reading through the promotional material they sent over, I had to admit, I was intrigued.

It seemed like I wasn’t the only one either; it was only a matter of days before the Kickstarter for the WAINLUX K8 rocketed to six figures. At the time of this writing, the total raised stands at just under $230,000 USD. There’s clearly a demand for this sort of desktop laser, the simplicity of using a diode over a laser tube is already appealing, but one that you could actually use in a home with kids or pets would be a game changer for many people.

But would the reality live up to the hype? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks putting a pre-production WAINLUX K8 through its paces, so let’s take a look and see if WAINLUX has a winner on their hands.

Continue reading “Review: WAINLUX K8, A Diode Laser That’s Ready To Work” →