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Hackaday Podcast Episode 280: TV Tubes As Amplifiers, Smart Tech In Sportsballs, And Adrian Gives Us The Fingie

July 19, 2024 by 3 Comments

Despite the summer doldrums, it was another big week in the hacking world, and Elliot sat down with Dan for a rundown. Come along for the ride as Dan betrays his total ignorance of soccer/football, much to Elliot’s amusement. But it’s all about keeping the human factor in sports, so we suppose it was worth it. Less controversially, we ogled over a display of PCB repair heroics, analyzed a reverse engineering effort that got really lucky, and took a look at an adorable one-transistor ham transceiver. We also talked about ants doing surgery, picking locks with nitric acid, a damn cute dam, and how to build one of the world’s largest machines from scratch in under a century. Plus, we answered the burning question: can a CRT be used as an audio amplifier? Yes, kind of, but please don’t let the audiophiles know or we’ll never hear the end of it.

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Supercon 2023: Bringing Arcade Classics To New Hardware

July 18, 2024 by 8 Comments

The processing power of modern game consoles is absolutely staggering when compared to the coin-op arcade machines of the early 1980s. Packed with terabytes of internal storage and gigabytes of RAM, there’s hardly a comparison to make with the Z80 cabinets that ran classics like Pac-Man. But despite being designed to pump out lifelike 4K imagery without breaking a virtual sweat, occasionally even these cutting-edge consoles are tasked with running one of those iconic early games like Dig Dug or Pole Position. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug…

As long as there are still demand for these genre-defining games, developers will have to keep figuring out ways to bring them to newer — and vastly more complex — systems. Which is precisely the topic of Bob Hickman’s 2023 Supercon talk, The Bits and Bytes of Bringing Arcade Classics to Game Consoles. Having spent decades as a professional game developer, he’s got plenty of experience with the unique constraints presented by both consoles and handhelds, and what it takes to get old code running on new silicon.

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Secrets Of The Old Digital Design Titans

July 18, 2024 by 46 Comments

Designing combinatorial digital circuits seems like it should be easy. After all, you can do everything you want with just AND, OR, and NOT gates. Bonus points if you have an XOR gate, but you can build everything you need for combinatorial logic with just those three components. If all you want to do is design something to turn on the light when the ignition is on AND door 1 is open OR door 2 is open, you won’t have any problems. However, for more complex scenarios, how we do things has changed several times.

In the old days, you’d just design the tubes or transistor circuits you needed to develop your logic. If you were wiring up everything by hand anyway, you might as well. But then came modules like printed circuit boards. There was a certain economy to having cards that had, say, two NOR gates on a card. Then, you needed to convert all your logic to use NOR gates (or NAND gates, if that’s what you had).

Small-scale ICs changed that. It was easy to put a mix of gates on a card, although there was still some slight advantage to having cards full of the same kind of gate. Then came logic devices, which would eventually become FPGAs. They tend to have many of one kind of “cell” with plenty of logic gates on board, but not necessarily the ones you need. However, by that time, you could just tell a computer program what you wanted, and it would do the heavy lifting. That was a luxury early designers didn’t have. Continue reading “Secrets Of The Old Digital Design Titans” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 792: Rust Coreutils

July 17, 2024 by 9 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie chat with Sylvestre Ledru about the Rust Coreutils! Why would we want to re-implement 50 year old utilities, what’s the benefit of doing them in Rust, and what do the maintainers of the regular coreutils project think about it?

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Hacker Tactic: Single-PCB Panels

July 17, 2024 by 35 Comments

Ordering a PCB? Two of them? Three? Five? For about eight years now, I’ve been regularly ordering large numbers of different PCBs, and, naturally, have developed a toolkit to make things smoother. One trick is PCB panelization, and you should really know about it.

You might’ve encountered PCB panels already. Perhaps, if you order PCBA at a fab, you will get your board returned in a whole new form-factor, with rails on the sides that you have to snap off before your PCB is usable. Those rails are used so that your PCBs are easier to handle during assembly, but that’s far from the only reason why you would make a panel.

If you need multiple pieces of a PCB, your fab may say that building 50 pcs is classified as “large batch” and that takes longer than 30 days, which delays your entire PCB order. I’ve been there, five years ago, running out of time right before Chinese New Year. The fix was simple – I made a 2×2 panel and ordered that in quantity of 10-15. Panelization might be a little more expensive, or maybe even cheaper, but, most importantly, it will be faster.

In a few hours’ time, I sat down, figured out that KiCad has built-in features for panelization, and ordered panels instead of separate PCBs. Thanks to that, I made the Chinese New Year deadline that year and could successfully restock my store, letting me earn a fair bit of money instead of keeping a popular product out-of-stock – ultimately, helping my family stay up on rent that month.

Panelization lets you hack around many PCB ordering and assembly limitations, and I’ve only gotten started – there’s way way more! For now, let’s sort out panelizing multiples of the same PCB. As long as your boards are using KiCad (or KiCad-converted from Eagle/EasyEDA/Altium/gerbers), there’s no better software than KiKit.

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FDM Filament Troubles: Keeping Hygroscopic Materials From Degrading

July 17, 2024 by 18 Comments

Despite the reputation of polymers used with FDM 3D printing like nylon, ABS, and PLA as being generally indestructible, they do come with a whole range of moisture-related issues that can affect both the printing process as well as the final result. While the concept of ‘baking’ such 3D printing filaments prior to printing to remove absorbed moisture is well-established and with many commercial solutions available, the exact extent to which these different polymers are affected, and what these changes look like on a molecular level are generally less well-known.

Another question with such hygroscopic materials is whether the same issues of embrittlement, swelling, and long-term damage inflicted by moisture exposure that affects filaments prior to printing affects these materials post-printing, and how this affects the lifespan of FDM-printed items. In a 2022 paper by Adedotun D. Banjo and colleagues much of what we know today is summarized in addition to an examination of the molecular effects of moisture exposure on polylactic acid (PLA) and nylon 6.

The scientific literature on FDM filaments makes clear that beyond the glossy marketing there is a wonderful world of materials science to explore, one which can teach us a lot about how to get good FDM prints and how durable they will be long-term.

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Show Us Your Minimalist Games, And Win

July 16, 2024 by 16 Comments

Sometimes the tightest constraints inspire the highest creativity. The 2024 Tiny Games Challenge invites you to have the most fun with the most minimal setup. Whether that’s tiny size, tiny parts count, or tiny code, we want you to show us that big fun can come in small packages.

The Tiny Games Challenge starts now and runs through September 10th, with the top three entries receiving a $150 gift certificate courtesy of DigiKey.

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