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21 Articles

A Nine-Year-Old’s Z80 Drawing Program

March 16, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Full disclosure: [Óscar] isn’t nine now, but he was in 1988 when he wrote LOCS, a drawing program in Z80 assembly modeled after Logo. You can see a demo of the system in the video below. You might wonder why you’d want to study a three-decade-old program written for a CPU by a nine-year-old almost five decades ago. Well, honestly, we aren’t sure either. But it did get us thinking.

Kids today are computer savvy and have hardware that would seem to be alien tech in 1988. How many of them could duplicate this feat? Now, how many could do it in assembly language?

LOCS had a few simple commands and was sort of a stripped-down scripting language. The BORRA command clears the screen. TORTUGA centers the turtle. PT (pone tortuga) moves the turtle to any spot on the screen. Then SM, AM, DM, and IM move the turtle up, down, right, and left. Probably helps if you speak a little Spanish.

The program fits on three pages of handwritten code. When was the last time you wrote code on paper? [Óscar] revisits the program to run it on an MSX. The original program was under 500 bytes but adding the code for MSX balloons it to 589 bytes. Gotta love assembly language.

You could argue that LOCS isn’t a language because it doesn’t have variables, expressions, or looping. [Óscar] retorts that HTML doesn’t have those things either, and yet some call it a language. Honestly, if a 9-year-old can create this, we think they can call it anything they want to!

By 1990, he’d graduated to full-blown games. If turtle graphics are too abstract for you, try a Big Trak.

Continue reading “A Nine-Year-Old’s Z80 Drawing Program” →

Posted in Retrocomputing, Software HacksTagged assembly language, logo, z80
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Hackaday Links: February 25, 2024

February 25, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

When all else fails, blame it on the cloud? It seems like that’s the script for just about every outage that makes the news lately, like the Wyze camera outage this week that kept people from seeing feeds from their cameras for several hours. The outage went so far that some users’ cameras weren’t even showing up in the Wyze app, and there were even reports that some people were seeing thumbnails for cameras they don’t own. That’s troubling, of course, and Wyze seems to have taken action on that quickly by disabling a tab on the app that would potentially have let people tap into camera feeds they had no business seeing. Still, it looks like curiosity got the better of some users, with 1,500 tapping through when notified of motion events and seeing other people walking around inside unknown houses. The problem was resolved quickly, with blame laid on an “AWS partner” even though there were no known AWS issues at the time of the outage. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: security cameras, especially mission-critical ones, have no business being connected with anything but Ethernet or coax, and exposing them to the cloud is a really, really bad idea.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 25, 2024” →

Posted in Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links, SliderTagged airline, Artemis, AWS, camera, cloud, cybertruck, eclipse, flood, fording, hackaday links, iphone, logo, nasa, outage, rice, wiring harness, worm, Wyze

Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of With This Repair Logo

July 7, 2023 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

The only thing better than getting your hands on a repairable piece of hardware is actually finding the thing in the first place, which is why we love this “official” repair logo created by [Yves Parent]. Our predilection for crossed wrenches had (almost) nothing to do with it.

We’ve got a soft spot for logos that work well on dark web pages.

Designed to mimic the ubiquitous “Recycle” logo, [Yves] originally created the icon for Repair Café Roeselare — but realizing that it had wide practical applications, he got the OK to put it up on GitHub for others to use. Whether you’re a hobbyist creating your first PCB or a pro designing a commercial product for a particularly forward-thinking client, slapping this logo on signifies that your creation is destined for better things than the scrap heap.

[Yves] has helpfully provided the logo in both vector format (SVG) and PNG, the latter at several scales for your convenience. We’d love to see it offered in various production and CAD formats as well, so it can be dropped into as many projects as possible. So if you end up creating a DXF or STL version, be sure to submit a pull request.

While getting others onboard with this logo is just a ground roots effort currently, who knows what the future may bring? Today we take it for granted, but the official open source hardware “gear” logo has only been around for about a decade.

Posted in hardware, Repair HacksTagged logo, open source hardware, repair

Marvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer

June 18, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 7 Comments

[Prof. Marvin Minsky] is a very well-known figure in the field of computing, having co-founded the MIT AI lab, published extensively on AI and computational intelligence, and, let’s not forget, inventing the confocal microscope and, of course, the useless machine. But did you know he also was a co-developer of the first Logo “turtle,” and developed a computer intended to run Logo applications in an educational environment? After dredging some PDP-10 tapes owned by the MIT Media Lab, the original schematics for his machine, the Turtle Terminal TT2500 (a reference to the target price of $2500, in 1970 terms), are now available for you to examine.

Continue reading “Marvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer” →

Posted in computer hacksTagged logo, marvin minsky, turtle

The Real World Strikes Back

February 12, 2022 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

My son was into “Secret Coders“, a graphic novel series wherein a pair of kids discover and thwart a plot to take over the world by learning to program in the LOGO computer language. When I told him that these “turtle bots” were originally actually real physical things, he wanted one. So we built one out of some nice geared DC motors I had lying around.

A turtle bot has essentially three jobs: move forward in a straight line a controlled distance, turn a given number of degrees, and raise and lower a pen. If you’re already screaming “use stepper motors!” at your screen, well, you’re probably right. But I had these nice Faulhaber/Micromo geared motors with encoders that were just collecting dust in the closet, so I used ’em. And because of that, the robot stumbles on two of its three goals in life — the servo pen lifter works just fine.

Perfectly matched DC motors don’t exist. Of course I knew this, because I’ve built bots with DC motors before. But they’ve all had complex control mechanisms and/or feedback that made it moot. Not here. This bot needs to drive perfectly straight without any lines to guide it or more interesting navigation algorithms.

We spent a good half hour driving it around in not-quite-but-almost squares, tweaking each side’s PWMs, running the motors backwards for short bursts to brake the wheels, and generally trying to map degrees of rotation to milliseconds of motor drive. And you know what, my son enjoyed it. The concepts were simple enough for a second grader, and guessing the right PWM values was like a game. When we finally got it good enough, there was a small celebration.

Of course I know that what it really needs is encoder feedback. I installed those encoder gearmotors on purpose after all. But dealing with quadrature and probably a PID loop to control and sync the two sides is not for my son, at least not for another couple years. (They do learn closed-loop control theory in fourth grade these days, right?) I’ll have to do that all offline some night while he’s sleeping.

But I hope he’ll remember the lessons learned from stabbing at it the naive way. Abstractions are great, but no two motors are ever perfectly alike. You’d think you could just calibrate it out, but the motors differ in driven and coasting behavior, so you’ve got a lot more calibrating to do than you think at first. The real world is tough, and although it’s important to have theory and ideas and abstractions to guide you, you’re going to have to tweak to make it work when the wheels hit the floor. But also that it’s fun to do so, and super rewarding when it finally draws a wonky square.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!
Posted in Hackaday Columns, Rants, Robots HacksTagged learning, logo, newsletter, Practice, robots, theory
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Hackaday Links: April 12, 2020

April 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Anyone who worked in the tech field and lived through the Y2K bug era will no doubt recall it as a time seasoned with a confusing mix of fear and optimism and tempered with a healthy dose of panic, as companies rushed to validate that systems would pass the rollover of the millennium without crashing, and to remediate systems that would. The era could well have been called “the COBOL programmers full-employment bug,” as the coders who had built these legacy systems were pulled out of retirement to fix them. Twenty years on and a different bug — the one that causes COVID-19 — is having a similarly stimulative effect on the COBOL programmer market. New Jersey is one state seeking COBOL coders, to deal with the crush of unemployment insurance claims, which are killing the 40-year-old mainframe systems the state’s programs run on. Interestingly, Governor Phil Murphy has only put out a call for volunteers, and will apparently not compensate COBOL coders for their time. I mean, I know people are bored at home and all, but good luck with that.

In another throwback to an earlier time, “The Worm” is back. NASA has decided to revive its “worm” logo, the simple block letter logo that replaced the 50s-era “Meatball” logo, the one with the red chevron bracketing a starfield with an orbiting satellite. NASA switched to the worm, named for the sinuous shape of the letters and which honestly looks like a graphic design student’s last-minute homework assignment, in the 1970s, keeping it in service through the early 1990s when the meatball was favored again. Now it looks like both logos will see service as NASA prepares to return Americans to space on their own launch vehicles.

Wait a minute, what happens when we stand this thing upright?

Looking for a little help advancing the state of your pandemic-related project? A lot of manufacturers are trying to help out as best they can, and many are offering freebies to keep you in the game. Aisler, for one, is offering free PCBs and stencils for COVID-19 prototypes. It looks like their rules are pretty liberal; any free and open-source project that can help with the pandemic in any way qualifies. Hats off to Aisler for doing their part.

And finally, history appears to have been made this week in the amateur radio world with the first direct transatlantic contact on the 70-cm band was made. It seems strange to think that it would take 120 years since transatlantic radio became reduced to practice by the likes of Marconi for this accomplishment to occur, but the 70-cm band is usually limited to line of sight, and transatlantic contacts at 430 MHz are usually done using a satellite as a relay. The contact was between stations FG8OJ on Guadaloupe Island in the Caribbean — who was involved in an earlier, similar record on the 2-meter band — and D4VHF on the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, and used the digital mode FT8. The 3,867-km contact was likely due to tropospheric ducting, where layers in the atmosphere form a refractive tunnel that can carry VHF and UHF signals much, much further than they usually go. While we’d love to see that record stretched a little more on each end, to make a truly transcontinental contact, it’s still quite an accomplishment, and we congratulate the hams involved.

Posted in Hackaday Columns, Hackaday linksTagged 70 cm, Aisler, cobol, Covid-19, FT8, hackaday links, logo, meatball, nasa, pcb, retro, stencils, transatlantic, uhf, worm, y2k

Custom Logo Display Pushes Nixie Tube Technology

March 16, 2020 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

No matter what you think about Nixie tubes, you’ve got to admit that having a Nixie custom made for you would be pretty cool. The cost of such a vanity project is probably prohibitive, but our friends at Keysight managed to convince none other than [Dalibor Farný] to immortalize their logo in glass, metal, and neon, and the results are beautiful.

Nixie aficionados and lovers of fine craftsmanship will no doubt be familiar with [Dalibor]’s high-end, hand-built Nixie tubes, the creation of which we’ve covered before. He’s carved out a niche in this limited market by turning the quality far above what you can find on the surplus Nixie market, and his custom tubes grace sleek, distinctive clocks that really make a statement. Bespoke tubes are not a normal offering, but he decided to tackle the build because it gave him a chance to experiment with new methods and materials. Chief among these are the mesh cathodes seen in the video below. Most Nixies have thin cathodes for each character cut from solid sheet metal. The elements of the Keysight logo were skeletonized, with a solid border and a hexagonal mesh infill. We’d have loved to see the process used to create those pieces — laser cutting, perhaps?

The bulk of the video is watching the painstaking assembly process, which centers around the glassblower’s lathe. It’s fascinating to watch, and the finished, somewhat out-sized tube is a work of art, although part of the display seems a little dark. Even though, [Dalibor] needs to be careful — plenty of outfits would love to see their logo Nixie-fied. Wouldn’t a Jolly Wrencher tube look amazing?

Continue reading “Custom Logo Display Pushes Nixie Tube Technology” →

Posted in Misc HacksTagged custom, glassblower, Keysight, lathe, logo, neon, nixie

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