Hackaday Podcast Episode 269: 3D Printed Flexure Whegs, El Cheapo Bullet Time, And A DIY Cell Phone Sniffer

May 3, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This week, it was Kristina’s turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news — the results are in for the 2024 Home Sweet Home Automation contest! First and second place went to some really gnarly, well-documented hacks, and third went to the cutest pill-dispensing robot you’ll probably see before you hit the retirement home. Which was your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

A collection of multimeter probe extenders from Radio Shack. — Kristina’s lil’ wallet of extender probes, courtesy of Radio Shack.

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound. Kristina failed once again, but you will probably fare differently. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a DIY cell phone sniffer and a pen that changed the world. Then we talk bullet time on a budget, the beautiful marriage of 3D printing and LEGO, and, oh yes, flexure whegs. Finally, we get the lowdown on extender probes, and posit why it’s hard to set up time zones on the Moon, relatively speaking.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download and savor at your leisure.

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Supercon 2023: Jose Angel Torres On Building A Junkyard Secure Phone

May 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose passion into investigating what makes modern devices tick is undeniable, and he tells us all about where his forays have led so far – discovering marvels that a Western hacker might not be aware of.

Six years ago, he has moved to China, having previously been responsible for making sure that their Chinese subcontractors would manufacture things in the right ways. Turns out, doing that while being separated by an ocean set up more than just the timezone barriers – they were communicating between different worlds.

[Jose] tells us of having learned Chinese on the spot, purely from communicating with people around him, and it’s no wonder he’s had the motivation! What he’s experienced is being at the heart of cycle of hardware life, where devices are manufactured, taken apart and rebuilt anew. Here’s how he tapped into that cycle, and where he’s heading now.

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A render of the USB Blaster, showing all the major parts

The Cheapest USB Blaster Ever, Thanks To CH552

April 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

Here’s a CH552G-based USB Blaster project from [nickchen] in case you needed more CH552G in your life, which you absolutely do. It gives you the expected IDC-10 header ready for JTAG, AS, and PS modes. What’s cool, it fits into the plastic shell of a typical USB Blaster, too!

The PCB is flexible enough, and has all the features you’d expect – a fully-featured side-mounted IDC-10 header, two LEDs, a button for CH552 programming mode, and even a UART header inside the case. There’s an option to add level shifter buffers, too – but you don’t have to populate them if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason! The Hackaday.io page outlines all the features you are getting, though you might have to ask your browser to translate from Chinese.

Sadly, there’s no firmware or PCB sources – just schematics, .hex, BOM, and Gerber .zip, so you can’t fix firmware bugs, or add the missing USB-C pulldowns. Nevertheless, it’s a cool project and having the PCB for it is lovely, because you never know when you might want to poke at a FPGA on a short notice. Which is to say, it’s yet another CH552 PCB you ought to put in your PCB fab’s shopping cart! This is not the only CH552G-based programming dongle that we’ve covered – here’s a recent Arduino programmer that does debugWire, and here’s like a dozen more different CH552G boards, programmers and otherwise.

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: The Winners Are In

April 30, 2024 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Home automation is huge right now in consumer electronics, but despite the wide availability of products on the market, hackers and makers are still spinning up their own solutions. It could be because their situations are unique enough that commercial offerings wouldn’t cut it, or perhaps they know how cheaply many automation tasks can be implemented with today’s microcontrollers. Still others go the DIY route because they’re worried about the privacy implications of pushing such a system into the cloud.

Seeing how many of you were out there brewing bespoke automation setups gave us the idea for this year’s Home Sweet Home Automation contest, which just wrapped up last week. We received more than 80 entries for this one, and the competition was fierce. Judging these contests is always exceptionally difficult, as nearly every entry is a standout accomplishment in its own way.

But the judges forged ahead valiantly, and we now have the top three projects which will be receiving $150 in store credit from the folks at DigiKey.

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The board shown in real life, top and bottom, showing the pinout and alternate functions silkscreened.

A CH552G Devboard In Case You Missed It

April 29, 2024 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

We might just never get tired of covering cool small cheap MCUs, and CH552G sure fits this description. Just so you know, here’s a Hackaday.io project you should check out – a CH552G devboard that’s as simple as it sufficient, in case you needed a tangible reminder that this chip exists, has a lively community, and is very much an option for your projects.

The devboard design by [Dylan Turner] is so straightforward, it’s almost inspiring – a square of PCB with the chip in the center and plenty of empty space for your mods. Everything is open-source with KiCad sources stored on GitHub. The most lovely aspect of this board, no doubt, is having the pin mapping written on the bottom, with all the alternate pin functions – you won’t have to constantly glance at the datasheet while wiring this one up. Plus, of course, there’s the microUSB port for programming, and the programming mode button that a few CH552 projects tend to lack.

It’s simple, it’s self-documenting, it’s breadboardable, and it’s definitely worth putting into the shopping cart at your PCB fab of choice. Oh, and there are bringup instructions on GitHub, in case you need them. Whether you want to prototype the cheapest macropad or keyboard ever, or perhaps a reflow hotplate, the CH552 delivers. If these CH552 projects aren’t enough to light your fire, here are a dozen more.

Hackaday Links: April 28, 2024

April 28, 2024 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.

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You Can Run BASIC On An Old HP 4592 Protocol Analyzer

April 28, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

What do you do when you find an ancient piece of test gear and want to have fun? Well, you can always try getting BASIC running on it, and that’s precisely what [David Kuder] did.

The HP4952A Protocol Analyzer actually looks a lot like an old computer, even if it was never meant for general-purpose use. The heart of the machine is a Zilog Z80 CPU, though, so it shares a lot in common with microcomputers of its era.

Among other hacks, [David] worked to get Microsoft Basic-80 running on the machine. Initially, he was only able to get it up and running on the display, with no way to read the keyboard, disk, or access the serial port. Eventually, by diving into the nitty-gritty of the machine, he was able to at least get the keyboard working along with some basic BASIC programs. Usable memory is just 8KB, but you can do a fair bit with that when you’ve only got a 32×16 display for output anyway!

It’s a neat hack and one that was extendable to the HP4957A as well. We’ve seen similar machines on these pages before, too! If you’ve got your own neat retro hacks on the boil, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

[Thanks to Christopher Zell for the tip!]