CNC On The Desktop Hack Chat

August 24, 2020 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 26 at noon Pacific for the CNC on the Desktop Hack Chat with Matt Hertel and John Allwine!

Once limited to multi-million dollar machines on the floors of cavernous factories, CNC technology has moved so far downscale in terms of machine size that it’s often easy to lose track of where it pops up. Everything from 3D-printers to laser engravers use computer numeric control to move a tool to some point in three-dimensional space, and do it with unmatched precision and reproducibility.

CNC has gotten so pervasive that chances are pretty good that there’s a CNC machine of some sort pretty close to everyone reading this, with many of those machines being homebrew designs. That’s the backstory of Pocket NC, a company that was literally started in a one-bedroom apartment in 2011 by Matt and Michelle Hertel. After a successful Kickstarter that delivered 100 of their flagship five-axis desktop CNC mills to backers, they geared up for production and now turn out affordable machine tools for the masses. We’ve even seen some very complex parts made on these mills show up in projects we’ve featured.

For this Hack Chat, we’ll be joined by Pocket NC CTO and co-founder Matt Hertel and John Allwine, who recently joined the company as Principal Software Engineer. We’ll discuss not only Pocket NC’s success and future plans, but the desktop CNC landscape in general. Drop by with your questions regarding both the hardware and the software side of CNC, about turning an idea into a business, and where the CNC world and next-generation manufacturing will be heading in the future.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 26 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

ESP32 Altair Emulator Gets Split Personality

August 20, 2020 by Al Williams 36 Comments

If you wanted me to demo CP/M running on an emulated Altair 8800, I’d pull out a tiny board from my pocket. You might wonder how I wound up with an Altair 8800 that runs CP/M (even WordStar), that fits in your pocket and cost less than $10. Turns out it’s a story that goes back to 1975.

When the Altair 8800 arrived back in 1975, I wanted one. Badly. I’d been reading about computers but had no hands-on experience. But back then, as far as I was concerned, the $400 price tag might as well have been a million bucks. I was working for no real pay in my family’s store, though in all fairness, adjusted into today’s money that was about $2,000.

I’d love to buy one now, but a real Altair costs even more today than it did back then. They also take up a lot of desk space. Sure, there are replicas and I’ve had a few. I even helped work the kinks out of Vince Briel’s clone which I’ve enjoyed. However, the Briel computer has two problems. First, it takes a little work to drive a serial port (it uses a VGA and a PS/2 keyboard). Second, while it’s smaller than a real Altair, it is still pretty large — a byproduct of its beautiful front panel.

So to quickly show off CP/M to someone, you need to haul out a big box and find a VGA monitor and PS/2 keyboard — both of which are becoming vanishing commodities. I made some modifications to get the serial port working, but it is still a lot to cart around. You could go the software route with a simulator like SIMH or Z80pack, but now instead of finding a VGA monitor and a PS/2 keyboard, you need to find a computer where you can install the software. What I really wanted was a simple and portable device that could boot CP/M.

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Open And Sustainable Engineering Hack Chat

August 17, 2020 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 19 at noon Pacific for the Open and Sustainable Engineering Hack Chat with Joshua Pearce!

Since the first of our hominid ancestors learned to pick up a rock and make it into a tool, we humans have been using our engineering skills to change the world. For most of the 2 million or so years since that first technological leap, natural materials like stone and wood were the focus of our engineering projects, and except for a few tantalizing remnants, most of what was built has returned to the Earth whence it came.

Then we discovered other materials; we learned to free metals from rocks and how to harvest the fossilized hydrocarbon remains of ancient plants. Iron, aluminum, plastic, and silicon became our stock in trade, and the planet is now layered so thick with these materials and the byproducts of harvesting them that a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene Epoch, has been proposed to cover this time of human activity and its impact on the geological record.

But if we humans are clever enough to make such an impact, we should be clever enough to think our way out of the mess, and wise enough to see the need. That’s where the efforts of Dr. Pearce’s research at the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) lab are focused. Dr. Pearce envisions a sustainable future powered by pervasive solar photovoltaic systems and using open-source technologies like 3D printing to drive new models for manufacturing. We’ve recently seen interesting work from his lab, like this grinder that makes custom compression screws for plastic recycling. The MOST page on Hackaday.io is filled with other great examples of the technology that supports their mission, from low-cost environmental testing instruments to 3D-printable microfluidics.

Dr. Pearce will join us on the Hack Chat to talk about open and sustainable engineering. Be sure to stop by with your questions and to find out what you can do to engineer a brighter future, starting right in your own shop.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 19 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

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Degrees Of Freedom: Booting ARM Processors

August 12, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 97 Comments

Any modern computer with an x86 processor, whether it’s Intel or AMD, is a lost cause for software freedom and privacy. We harp on this a lot, but it’s worth repeating that it’s nearly impossible to get free, open-source firmware to run on them thanks to the Intel Management Engine (IME) and the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP). Without libre firmware there’s no way to trust anything else, even if your operating system is completely open-source.

The IME or PSP have access to memory, storage, and the network stack even if the computer is shut down, and even after the computer boots they run at such a low level that the operating system can’t be aware of what they’re really doing. Luckily, there’s a dark horse in the race in the personal computing world that gives us some hope that one day there will be an x86 competitor that allows their users to have a free firmware that they can trust. ARM processors, which have been steadily increasing their user share for years but are seeing a surge of interest since the recent announcement by Apple, are poised to take over the personal computing world and hopefully allow us some relevant, modern options for those concerned with freedom and privacy. But in the real world of ARM processors the road ahead will decidedly long, windy, and forked.

Even ignoring tedious nitpicks that the distinction between RISC vs CISC is more blurred now than it was “back in the day”, RISC machines like ARM have a natural leg up on the x86 CISC machines built by Intel and AMD. These RISC machines use fewer instructions and perform with much more thermal efficiency than their x86 competitors. They can often be passively cooled, avoiding need to be actively cooled, unlike many AMD/Intel machines that often have noisy or bulky fans. But for me, the most interesting advantage is the ability to run ARM machines without the proprietary firmware present with x86 chips.

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Popcorn Pocket P. C. Open Sourced

August 11, 2020 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you miss the days you could get an organizer that would — sort of — run Linux, you might be interested in Popcorn computer’s Pocket P. C., which was recently open-sourced on GitHub. Before you jump over to build one, though, there are a few things you should know.

First, the files are untested since the first unit hasn’t shipped yet. In addition, while the schematic looks pretty complete, there’s no actual bill of materials and the PCB layers in the PDF file might not be very easy to replicate, since they are just a series of images, one for each layer. You can see an overview video of the device, below.

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OAK Vision Modules Help You See The Forest And The Trees

August 9, 2020 by Roger Cheng 13 Comments

OpenCV is an open source library of computer vision algorithms, its power and flexibility made many machine vision projects possible. But even with code highly optimized for maximum performance, we always wish for more. Which is why our ears perk up whenever we hear about a hardware accelerated vision module, and the latest buzz is coming out of the OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) Kickstarter campaign.

There are two vision modules launched with this campaign. The OAK-1 with a single color camera for two dimensional vision applications, and the OAK-D which adds stereo cameras for that third dimension. The onboard brain is a Movidius Myriad X processor which, according to team members who have dug through its datasheet, have been massively underutilized in other products. They believe OAK modules will help the chip fulfill its potential for vision applications, delivering high performance while consuming low power in a small form factor. Reading over the spec sheet, we think it’s fair to call these “Ultimate Myriad X Dev Boards” but we must concede “OpenCV AI Kit” sounds better. It does not provide hardware acceleration for the entire OpenCV library (likely an impossible task) but it does cover the highly demanding subset suitable for Myriad X acceleration.

Since the campaign launched a few weeks ago, some additional information have been released to help assure backers that this project has real substance. It turns out OAK is an evolution of a project we’ve covered almost exactly one year ago that became a real product DepthAI, so at least this is not their first rodeo. It is also encouraging that their invitation to the open hardware community has already borne fruit. Check out this thread discussing OAK for robot vision, where a question was met with an honest “we don’t have expertise there” from the OAK team, but then ArduCam pitched in with their camera module experience to help.

We wish them success for their planned December 2020 delivery. They have already far surpassed their funding goals, they’ve shipped hardware before, and we see a good start to a development community. We look forward to the OAK-1 and OAK-D joining the ranks of other hacking friendly vision modules like OpenMV, JeVois, StereoPi, and AIY Vision.

Ask Hackaday: Why Did GitHub Ship All Our Software Off To The Arctic?

July 29, 2020 by Ben James 95 Comments

If you’ve logged onto GitHub recently and you’re an active user, you might have noticed a new badge on your profile: “Arctic Code Vault Contributor”. Sounds pretty awesome right? But whose code got archived in this vault, how is it being stored, and what’s the point?

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