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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The Green Keyboards

February 24, 2025 by 2 Comments

Okay, you have to see the gallery to appreciate it, but this keyboard was designed to resemble a red cedar tree with the green shell and wood bottom and the copper PCB showing through the tree cutouts on the sides.

A lovely green split keyboard with PlayStation buttons.
Image by [WesternRedCdar] via reddit
But you know why I chose this picture — those PS2 buttons. According to [WesternRedCdar] they are just for fun, although they do allow for pressing Ctrl and Alt at the same time with a single thumb.

Oh, and are those Nintendo Switch joysticks above the PS2 buttons? Those are for the mouse and vertical/horizontal scrolling. Honestly, this seems like a great amount of thumb controls. The basics are there (presumably), and there isn’t any thumb-extending excess, like keys on the insides by the mouse.

This bad mama jama runs on an RP2040 and has 50 hand-wired Cherry Brown switches plus the PS2 buttons. In the build guide, you can read all about [WesternRedCdar]’s troubles with integrating those. The Nintendo Switch joysticks weren’t terribly easy, either, since the ribbon connector can’t be soldered directly.

The final issue was one of weight. Since many of the switches stand quite tall, it sort of jostles the keyboard to actuate them. [WesternRedCdar] opined that that the ideal solution would have been to use metal base plates instead of wood, but took care of the issue by adding layers of 1/8″ steel flat bar inside the case.

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The Importance Of Current Balancing With Multi-Wire Power Inputs

February 24, 2025 by 87 Comments

In an ideal world, devoid of pesky details like contact resistance and manufacturing imperfections, you would be able to double the current that can be provided to a device by doubling the number of conductors without altering the device’s circuitry, as each conductor would carry the exact same amount of current as its neighbors. Since we do not actually live inside a simplified physics question’s scenario, multi-wire powering of devices comes with a range of headaches, succinctly summarized in the well-known rule that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.

As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins.

So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

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Hackaday Links: February 23, 2025

February 23, 2025 by 7 Comments

Ho-hum — another week, another high-profile bricking. In a move anyone could see coming, Humane has announced that their pricey AI Pin widgets will cease to work in any meaningful way as of noon on February 28. The company made a splash when it launched its wearable assistant in April of 2024, and from an engineering point of view, it was pretty cool. Meant to be worn on one’s shirt, it had a little bit of a Star Trek: The Next Generation comm badge vibe as the primary UI was accessed through tapping the front of the thing. It also had a display that projected information onto your hand, plus the usual array of sensors and cameras which no doubt provided a rich stream of user data. Somehow, though, Humane wasn’t able to make the numbers work out, and as a result they’ll be shutting down their servers at the end of the month, with refunds offered only to users who bought their AI Pins in the last 90 days.

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Multitasker Or Many Monotaskers?

February 22, 2025 by 21 Comments

In Al Williams’s marvelous rant he points out a number of the problems with speaking to computers. Obvious problems with voice control include things like multiple people talking over each other, discerning commands from background conversations, and so on. Somehow, unlike on the bridge in Star Trek, where the computer seems to understand everyone just fine, Al sometimes can’t even get the darn thing to play his going-to-sleep playlist, which should be well within the device’s capabilities.

In the comments, [rclark] suggests making a single button that plays his playlist, no voice interaction required, and we have to admit that it’s a great solution to this one particular problem. Heck, the “bedtime button” would make fun project in and of itself, and it’s such a limited scope that it could probably only be an weekend’s work for anyone who has touched the internals of their home automation system, like Al certainly has. We love the simplicity of the idea.

But it ignores the biggest potential benefit of a voice control system: that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Imagine how many other use cases Al would need to make a single button device for, and how many coin cell batteries he’d be signing himself up to change out over the course of the year. The trade-off is that the general purpose solution tends not to be as robust as a single-tasker like the button, but also that it can potentially simplify the overall system.

I suffer this in my own home. It’s much more a loosely-coupled web of individual hacks than an overall system, and that has pros and cons. Each individual part is easier to maintain and hack on, but the overall system is less coordinated than it could be. If we change the WiFi password on the home automation router, for instance, I’m going to have to individually log into about eight ESP8266s and change their credentials. Yuck!

It’s probably a matter of preference, but I’ll still take the loose, MQTT-based system that I’ve got now over an all-in-one. Like [rclark], I value individual device simplicity and reliability above the overall system’s simplicity, but because our stereo isn’t even hooked up to the network, I can’t play myself to sleep like Al can. Or at least like he can when the voice recognition is working.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 309: Seeing WiFi, A World Without USB, Linux In NES In Animal Crossing

February 21, 2025 by 4 Comments

This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with updates on the rapidly approaching Hackaday Europe and the saga of everyone’s favorite 3D printed boat.

From there they’ll cover an impressive method of seeing the world via WiFi, Amazon’s latest changes to the Kindle ecosystem, and an alternate reality in which USB didn’t take over the peripheral world. You’ll also hear about a multi-level hack that brings the joys of Linux into the world of Animal Crossing, 3D printed circuit components, and the imminent release of KiCAD 9.

Stick around until the end to learn about a unique hardened glass from East Germany and the disappointing reality of modern voice control systems.

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This Week In Security: OpenSSH, JumbledPath, And RANsacked

February 21, 2025 by 7 Comments

OpenSSH has a newly fixed pair of vulnerabilities, and while neither of them are lighting the Internet on fire, these are each fairly important.

The central observation made by the Qualsys Threat Research Unit (TRU) was that OpenSSH contains a code paradigm that could easily contain a logic bug. It’s similar to Apple’s infamous goto fail; SSL vulnerability. The setup is this: An integer, r, is initialized to a negative value, indicating a generic error code. Multiple functions are called, with r often, but not always, set to the return value of each function. On success, that may set r to 0 to indicate no error. And when one of those functions does fail, it often runs a goto: statement that short-circuits the rest of the checks. At the end of this string of checks would be a return r; statement, using the last value of r as the result of the whole function.

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