This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos’ connection to ARM’s SIMD approach? Watch to find out!
Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Jerry Walker] repairs a Tektronix 577 curve tracer.
A curve tracer is a piece of equipment which plots I-V (current vs voltage) curves, among other things. This old bit of Tektronix kit is rocking a CRT, which dates it. According to TekWiki the Tektronix 577 was introduced in 1972.
In this repair video [Jerry] goes to use his Tektronix 577 only to discover that it is nonfunctional. He begins his investigation by popping off the back cover and checking out the voltages across the voltage rails. His investigations suggest a short circuit. He pushes on that which means he has to remove the side panel to follow a lead into the guts of the machine.
ECE 4760/5730 is the Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course at Cornell University taught by [Hunter Adams]. The list of projects for spring this year includes forty write-ups — if you haven’t got time to read the whole lot you can pick a random project between 1 and 40 with: shuf -i 1-40 -n 1 and let the cards fall where they may. Or if you’re made of time you could spend a few days watching the full playlist of 119 projects, embedded below.
We won’t pick favorites from this semester’s list of projects, but having skimmed through the forty reports we can tell you that the creativity and acumen of the students really shines through. If the name [Hunter Adams] looks familiar that might be because we’ve featured his work here on Hackaday before. Earlier this year we saw his Love Letter To Embedded Systems.
While on the subject, [Hunter] also wanted us to know that he has updated his lectures, which are here: Raspberry Pi Pico Lectures 2025. Particularly these have expanded to include a bunch of Pico W content (making Bluetooth servers, connecting to WiFi, UDP communication, etc.), and some fun lower-level stuff (the RP2040 boot sequence, how to write a bootloader), and some interesting algorithms (FFT’s, physics modeling, etc.).
Continue reading “The Latest Projects From Cornell’s ECE 4760/5730”
Movies mirror the time they were made. [ErnieTech] asserts that we can see what people thought about computers back in 1957 by watching the classic Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie “Desk Set.” What’s more, he thinks this might be the first movie appearance of a human-like computer. On a side note, in the UK this movie was known as “The Other Woman.”
The story is about an MIT computer expert computerizing a broadcasting company who, of course, finds romance and, at least towards the end, comedy.
Continue reading “Fictional Computers: EMERAC Was The Chatbot Of 1957”
When the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was put into orbit around Earth, anyone in the path of the satellite could receive the beeps transmitted by the satellite provided they had some simple radio equipment. Of course, there was no two-way communication with this satellite, and it only lasted a few weeks before its batteries died. Here in the future, though, there are many more satellites in orbit and a few are specifically meant for ham radio operators. And, like the ’50s, it doesn’t take too much specialized equipment to communicate with them, although now that communication can be two-way.
The first step in this guide by [W2PAK] is to know where these satellites are in the sky. The simplest way to do that is to use a smartphone app called GoSatWatch and, when configured for a specific location, shows the satellites currently overhead. After that it’s time to break out the radio gear, which can be surprisingly inexpensive. A dual-band handheld is required since satellite uplink and downlink can be on different bands, and the antenna can be made from simple parts as well as [W2PAK] demonstrates in a separate video. Combined, this can easily be done for less than $100. [W2PAK] also goes over the proper format and etiquette for a satellite contact as well, so a new operator can pick it up quickly.
Using satellites as repeaters opens up a lot of capabilities when compared to terrestrial communications. Especially for operators with entry-level licenses who are restricted to mostly VHF and UHF, it adds a challenge as well as significantly increased range compared to ground-based repeaters and line-of-sight communications. There are plenty of activities around satellites that don’t require a license at all, too, like this project which downloads weather imagery from weather satellites.
Continue reading “Communicating With Satellites Like It’s 1957”
Are you interested in the history of beer, food science, or just a fan of gathering “um, actually” details about things? Well you’re in for a treat because FoodCult (exploring Food, Culture, and Identity in early modern Ireland) has a fantastic exhibition showcasing their recreation of beer last brewed in the sixteenth century by putting serious scientific work into it, and learning plenty in the process.
The recipes, equipment and techniques are straight from what was used at Dublin Castle in the late 1500s. This process yielded very interesting insights about what beer back then was really like, how strong it was, and what was involved in the whole process.
Documentation from the era also provides cultural insight. Beer was often used to as payment and provided a significant amount of dietary energy. Dublin Castle, by the way, consumed some 26,000 gallons per year.
In many ways, beer from back then would be pretty familiar today, but there are differences as well. Chief among them are the ingredients.
While the ingredients themselves are unsurprising in nature, it is in fact impossible to 100% recreate the beer from 1574 for a simple reason: these ingredients no longer exist as they did back then. Nevertheless, the team did an inspired job of getting as close as possible to the historical versions of barley, oats, hops, yeast, and even the water. Continue reading “Making Beer Like It’s 1574, For Science And Heritage”
Older hackers will remember that a crystal set radio receiver was often one of the first projects attempted. Times have changed, but there’s still something magical about gathering invisible signals from the air and listening to the radio on a homemade receiver. [mircemk] has brought the idea right up to date by building an FM radio with an OLED display, controlled with a rotary encoder.
The design is fairly straightforward, based as it is on another project that [mircemk] found on another site, but the build looks very slick and would take pride of place on any hacker’s workbench. An Arduino Due forms the heart of the project, controlling a TEA5767 module, an SH1106 128×64 pixel OLED display and a rotary encoder. The sound signal is passed through an LM4811 headphone amplifier for private listening, and a PAM8403 Class D audio amplifier for the built-in loudspeaker. The enclosure is made from PVC panels, and accented with colored adhesive tape for style.
It’s easier than ever before to quickly put together projects like this by connecting pre-built modules and downloading code from the Internet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile way to improve your skills and make some useful devices like this one. There are so many resources available to us these days and standing on the shoulders of giants has always been a great way to see farther.
We’ve shown some other radio projects using Arduinos and the TEA5767 IC in the past, such as this one on a tidy custom PCB, and this one built into an old radio case.
