ESP32 Powers Custom Darkroom Timer

September 24, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

Developing your own film is an unabashedly analog process, which is one of the reasons people still gravitate towards it. After spending all day pushing buttons and looking at digital displays, spending some quiet time in the dark with pieces of paper and chemicals can be a way to decompress. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a bit of modern digital convenience.

Specifically, [John Jones] wanted a timer that offered more features than his old school analog model, so he decided to build one himself. He took the long away around to make sure the end result would be a tool he could rely on, which meant getting a custom PCB made, 3D printing a case to fit in with his existing workspace, and designing a control panel that he could operate in the dark.

The PCB plays host to an ESP32 development board and an I/O expander that connects up to the array of LEDs, switches, and buttons on the front panel. The bottom-half of of the 3D printed enclosure is pretty simple, but the control panel is quite a piece of work.

Borrowing a trick from the flight sim community, [John] switched over to a clear filament after laying down the first few layers of the panel. This essentially created an integrated light diffuser, and with the addition of a few red LEDs, he had very slick backlit labels on his panel with relatively minimal effort.

We’ve covered custom darkroom tools in the past, from this relatively simple enlarger to an automated system that will develop the film for you.

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A Windows Control Panel Retrospective Amidst A Concerning UX Shift

September 3, 2024 by Maya Posch 153 Comments

Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the Control Panel and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based Settings app.

Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.

Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?

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Generator Control Panel Unlocked With Reverse Engineering Heroics

March 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

Scoring an interesting bit of old gear on the second-hand market is always a bit of a thrill — right up to the point where you realize the previous owner set some kind of security code on it. Then it becomes a whole big thing to figure out, to the point of blunting the dopamine hit you got from the original purchase.

Fear not, though, because there’s dopamine aplenty if you can copy what [Buy it Fix it] did to decode the PIN on a used generator control panel. The panel appears to be from a marine generator, and while it powered up fine, the menu used to change the generator’s configuration options is locked by a four-digit PIN. The manufacturer will reset it, but that requires sending it back and paying a fee, probably considerable given the industrial nature of the gear.

Instead of paying up, [Buy it Fix it] decided to look for a memory chip that might store the PIN. He identified a likely suspect, a 24LC08B 8-Kb serial EEPROM, and popped it off to read its contents. Nothing was immediately obvious, but blanking the chip and reinstalling it cleared the PIN, so he at least knew it was stored on the chip. Many rounds of soldering and desoldering the chip followed, blanking out small sections of memory each time until the PIN was located. The video below edits out a lot of the rework, but gives the overall gist of the hack.

To be honest, we’re not sure if the amount of work [Buy it Fix it] put into this was less than taking a couple of hours to punch in PINs and brute-force it. Then again, if he hadn’t done the reverse engineering he wouldn’t have stumbled upon where the generator parameters like running time and power figures were stored. And it’s not really his style, either; we’ve seen him perform similar heroics on everything from tractors to solar inverters, after all.

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Taking Over The Amazing Control Panel Of A Vintage Video Switcher

November 28, 2020 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Where does he get such wonderful toys? [Glenn] snagged parts of a Grass Valley Kalypso 4-M/E video ~~mixer~~ switcher control surface from eBay and since been reverse engineering the button and display modules to bend them to his will. The hardware dates back to the turn of the century and the two modules would have been laid out with up to a few dozen others to complete a video ~~mixing~~ switcher console.

[Glenn’s] previous adventures delved into a strip of ten backlit buttons and gives us a close look at each of the keyswitches and the technique he used to pull together his own pinout and schematic of that strip. But things get a lot hairier this time around. The long strip seen above is a “machine control plane” module and includes a dozen addressible character displays, driven by a combination of microcontrollers and FPGAs. The square panel is a “Crosspoint Switch Matrix” module include eight individual 32 x 32 LCDs drive by three dedicated ICs that can display in red, green, or amber.

[Glen] used an STM8 Nucleo 64 to interface with the panels and wrote a bit of code to help map out what each pin on each machine control plane connector might do. He was able to stream out some packets from the plane that changed as he pressed buttons, and ended up feeding back a brute-force of that packet format to figure out the LED display protocols.

But the LCDs on the crosspoint switch were a more difficult nut to crack. He ended up going back to the original source of the equipment (eBay) to get a working control unit that he could sniff. He laid out a man-in-the-middle board that has a connector on either side with a pin header in the middle for his logic analyzer. As with most LCDs, the secret sauce was the initialization sequence — an almost impossible thing to brute force, yet exceedingly simple to sniff when you have a working system. So far he has them running under USB control, and if you are lucky enough to have some of this gear in your parts box, [Glen] has painstakingly recorded all of the details you need to get them up and running.

An Old-School Control Panel For Your Computer

November 7, 2020 by Jenny List 12 Comments

For as long as computers have been in the hands of programmers, they have offered frequent mildly tedious tasks that their operators have sought to automate. Who hasn’t written a shell script or a batch file that unites a string of commands into one just to save a bit of typing?

But even that effort can be reduced with a hardware add-on that ties the script to a physical control, and in this endeavor [Tomas] has created a beauty. His control panel project mimics the robust industrial panels of yesteryear with an array of metal buttons and toggle switches in a sturdy metal case sourced from an old KVM switch.

Behind the scenes are a pair of I/O extenders and a NodeMCU board, whose ESP8266 does the talking to the host computer on which a daemon awaits its call. Individual addressable LEDs next to each switch convey the state of operation, and the switches trigger useful operations such as connecting to a VPN. All the code is available in a handy GitHub repository, and you can see it in action in the video we’ve placed below the break.

We rather like the idea of a desktop control panel here at Hackaday, indeed this isn’t the first one we’ve brought you.

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Psst – Wanna Buy A Control Panel From A Nuclear Power Station?

May 28, 2020 by Jenny List 73 Comments

Doing the rounds today is an interesting lot in an otherwise unexciting industrial dispersal auction in Lincolnshire, UK. On sale is an “Ex nuclear plant reactor control/monitoring system“, at the time of writing attracting the low low bid of £220 ($270), but we guess it will rise. Everyone who has watched Chernobyl (or maybe The Simpsons) is now gazing awestruck at a crescent of metal consoles covered in screens, buttons, and joysticks just waiting for a staff of white-coated technicians to pore over them.

Chernobyl Unit 3 control room (still active). [Source: IAEA Imagebank on Flickr CC-SA 2.0]

It’s a very cool lot indeed, but it raises more questions than it answers. The auction house has very little information indeed, so we’re left guessing, where did it come from? From this image showing the unit 3 control room at Chernobyl it’s obvious didn’t come from there (/s). Since it is for sale in the UK, and the country has decommissioned the majority of its first-generation reactors by now, so there is no shortage of candidates. But that intriguing possibility raises another question. Is it even a reactor control panel in the first place?

British civilian nuclear plants have tight security but they are hardly a secret, so plenty of photos are online showing their interiors. And in studying those we hit a problem, this panel doesn’t resemble any of the control panel images we can find. The first generation of Magnox (Magnetic Oxide Magnesium Non Oxidising) plants had panels covered in analogue dials and chart recorders so it’s unlikely to be one of those. The second-generation AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor) stations had similarly complex panels, and it’s evidently not one of them.

Looking closely at the photos it becomes apparent that there are a lot of camera controls and monitors, and even what looks like a uMatic video recorder. It’s definitely nuclear-related and the 1980s look of it suggests maybe it could have come from an Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) station, but could it be a little closer to Sector 7G than the centre of the action? Is it a video monitoring console used to keep a physical eye on its operation?

Be careful if you bid, you could end up with a rather cool but absurdly large 1980s CCTV system. Can any of our readers shed any light on the matter?

Thanks [Gregg “Cabe” Bond] for the tip.

Custom Control Panels With Photogrammetry

December 26, 2019 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

One of the best applications for desktop 3D printing is the creation of one-off bespoke components. Most of the time a halfway decent pair of calipers and some patience is all it takes to model up whatever part you’re after, but occasionally things get complex enough that you might need a little help. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, salvation might be just a few marker scribbles away.

As [Mangy_Dog] explains in a recent video, he wanted to model a control panel for a laser cutter he’s been working on, but thought the shapes involved were a bit more than he wanted to figure out manually. So he decided to give photogrammetry a try. For the uninitiated, this process involves taking as many high-resolution images as possible of a given object from multiple angles, and letting the computer stitch that into a three dimensional model. He reasoned that if he had a 3D model of the laser’s existing front panel, it would be easy enough to 3D print some replacement parts for it.

That would be a neat enough trick on its own, but what we especially liked about this video was the tip that [Mangy_Dog] passed along about increasing visual complexity to improve the final results. Basically, the software is looking for identifiable surface details to piece together, so you can make things a bit easier for it by taking a few different colored markers and drawing all over the surface like a toddler. It might look crazy, but all those lines give the software some anchor points that help it sort out the nuances of the shape.

Unfortunately the markers ended up being a little more permanent than [Mangy_Dog] had hoped, and he eventually had to use acetone to get the stains off. Certainly something to keep in mind. But in the end, the 3D model generated was accurate enough that (after a bit of scaling) he was able to design a new panel that pops right on as if it was a factory component.

Hackaday readers may recall that when we last heard from [Mangy_Dog] he was putting the finishing touches on his incredible “Playdog Blackbone” handheld gaming system, which itself is a triumph of mating 3D printed components with existing hardware.

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