Hackaday Links: October 3, 2021

October 3, 2021 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

It’s one thing to speculate about what’s happening with the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, but it’s another to get an insider’s view on recent flight problems. As we previously reported, Ingenuity is starting to face a significant challenge, as a seasonal atmospheric pressure drop on Mars threatens to make the already rarefied air too thin to generate useful lift. Mission controllers tested the chopper at higher rotor speeds, and while that worked, later attempts to fly using that higher speed resulted in an abort. The article, written by one of the NASA/JPL engineers, is a deep dive into the problem, which occurred when Ingenuity sensed excessive wiggle in two of the servos controlling the rotor swashplate. The thought is that accumulated wear in the servos and linkages might be causing the problem; after all, Ingenuity has made thirteen flights so far, greatly exceeding the five flights originally programmed for it. Here’s hoping they can adapt and keep the helicopter flying, but whatever they do, it’ll have to wait a few weeks until Mars completes its conjunction and pops back out from behind the Sun.

With all the attention understandably paid to the recent 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, it’s easy to forget that barely a month after that day, a series of what appeared to be follow-on attacks started: the Anthrax Attacks. Members of Congress and media outlets were targeted via the mail with highly refined anthrax spores, leading to the deaths of five people, with dozens more injured and exposed to anthrax. IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article that goes into some of the technology that was rapidly deployed in an attempt to sanitize the mail, including electron beam and X-ray irradiation to kill any spores. The article also points out how this wasn’t the first time people were afraid of the mail; outbreaks of yellow fever in 1899 led to fumigation of the mail with sulfur, after perforating it with a wicked-looking paddle.

Attention PCB-design newbies — now’s your chance to learn the entire PCB design process from the ground up, with the guidance of industry professionals. TeachMePCB is back again this year, offering to teach you everything you need to know about properly laying out a PCB design in pretty much any EDA software you want. The course requires a two- to five-hour commitment every week for two months, after which you’ll have designed a PCB for a macropad using a Raspberry Pi Pico. The course facilitator is Mark Hughes from Royal Circuits, who did a great Hack Chat with us last year on PCB finishes. This seems like a great way to get up to speed on PCB design, so if you’re interested, act soon — 460 people are already signed up, and the deadline is October 10.

Some of us really love factory tours, no matter what the factory is making. All the better when the factory makes cool electronics stuff, and better still when it’s our friends at Adafruit showing us around their New York City digs. True, it’s a virtual tour, but it has pretty much become a virtual world over the last couple of years, and it’s still a great look inside the Adafruit factory. Hackaday got an in-person tour back in 2015, but we didn’t know their building used to be a Westinghouse radio factory. In fact, the whole area was once part of the famed “Radio Row” that every major city seemed to have from the 1920s to the 1960s. It’s good to get a look inside a real manufacturing operation, especially one that’s right in the heart of a city.

And finally, those with a fear of heights might want to avoid watching this fascinating film on the change-out of a TV transmitter antenna. The tower is over 1,500′ (450 m) tall, lofting an aging antenna over the flat Florida terrain. Most of the footage comes from body-mounted cameras on the riggers working the job, including the one very brave soul who climbed up the partially unbolted antenna to connect it to the Sikorsky S64 Skycrane helicopter. It’s a strange combination of a carefully planned and slowly executed ballet, punctuated by moments of frenetic activity and sheer terror. The mishap when releasing the load line after the new antenna was placed could easily have swept the whole rigging crew off the antenna, but luckily nobody was injured.

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Living The Dream: New PCB For A Dirt-Cheap Calculator Watch

August 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

Well, this hack has us tickled pink. We love the idea of buying some really cheap piece of technology and doing something amazing with it, and this is a textbook example of that. [davedarko] found the cutest little calculator watch on Ali Express and is working on making a new PCB for it. The plan is to use an ARM processor and Arduino and add a few extras like 24-hour mode and a pink (or potentially RGB) backlight. The new brain will be an ATSAML22G18A, which has an on-board LCD controller and exactly one I/O pin to spare without charlieplexing the buttons.

One of [davedarko]’s primary goals is to keep the LCD and figure out how to talk to it. The first order of business was reverse engineering the watch’s LCD controller by sussing out the secrets from beneath the black blob of epoxy. This was an eye-opening experience as [davedarko] had never worked directly with LCDs before. A strange reading made him bust out the oscilloscope. Long-ish and informative story short, [davedarko] found out that it uses a bias of 1/2 for generating the wave necessary to multiplex the segments and keep the signal alternating. This is definitely one to watch!

We love timepieces around here and have seen all kinds of hacks, especially on Casio watches. Want dark mode? Done. Enable the hidden countdown timer? We’ve got that, too. And have you ever wondered just how water-resistant the F91W is?

Design An Electronic Catan Board In A Day

May 23, 2021 by Rich Hawkes 5 Comments

One of the things that makers sometimes skip over is the design of the project that they’re creating. Some of us don’t do any design at all, we just pants it. The design part of making something can take quite a while – there is sketching to do, as well as 3d-modelling and PCB creation. [Sam March] wanted to try and create something interesting where he did the design in a single day. The result is, or will be, a 3D printed, electronic, Settlers of Catan game board.

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Wires Vs Words — PCB Routing In Python

March 30, 2021 by Chris Lott 30 Comments

Preferring to spend hours typing code instead of graphically pushing traces around in a PCB layout tool, [James Bowman] over at ExCamera Labs has developed CuFlow, a method for routing PCBs in Python. Whether or not you’re on-board with the concept, you have to admit the results look pretty good.

Key to this project is a concept [James] calls rivers — the Dazzler board shown above contains only eight of them. Connections get to their destination by taking one or more of these rivers which can be split, joined, and merged along the way as needed in a very Pythonic manner. River navigation is performed using Turtle graphics-like commands such as left(90) and the appropriately named shimmy(d)that aligns two displaced rivers. He also makes extensive use of pin / gate swapping to make the routing smoother, and there’s a nifty shuffler feature which arbitrarily reorders signals in a crossbar manner. Routing to complex packages, like the BGA shown, is made easier by embedding signal escapes for each part’s library definition.

We completely agree with [James]’s frustration with so many schematics these days being nothing more than a visual net lists, not representing the logical flow and function of the design at all. However, CuFlow further obfuscates the interconnections by burying them deep inside the wire connection details. Perhaps, if CuFlow were melded with something like the SKiDL Python schematic description language, the concept would gain more traction?

That said, we like the concept and routing methodologies he has implemented in CuFlow. Check it out yourself by visiting the GitHub repository, where he writes in more detail about his motivation and various techniques. You may remember [James] two of his embedded systems development tools that we covered back in 2018 — the SPI Driver and the I2C driver.

30-Year-Old Macintosh SE/30 Gets A Brand New Logic Board

March 24, 2021 by Zach Zeman 36 Comments

Some time ago, [Bolle] got the idea to redraw the Macintosh SE/30 schematics in Eagle. Progress was initially slow, but over the past month (and with some prodding and assistance from fellow forum frequenter [GeekDot]), he’s taken things a step further by creating a fully functional replacement Macintosh SE/30 logic board PCB.

By using the available schematics, the project didn’t even require much reverse engineering. Though he plans for more modernization in later iterations, this design is largely faithful to the original components and layout, ensuring that it is at least basically functional. He did update the real time clock battery to a CR2032 and, as a benefit of redrawing all the traces, he was able to use a 4-layer PCB in place of the costly 6-layer from Apple’s design.

The board came back from fabrication looking beautiful in blue; and, once he had it soldered up and plugged in, the old Mac booted on the very first try! A copy-paste mistake with the SCSI footprints led to some jumper wire bodging in order to get the hard drive working, but that problem has already been fixed in the next revision. And, otherwise, he’s seen no differences from the original after a few hours of runtime.

Recreating old Macintosh logic boards almost seems like its own hobby these days. With the design and fabrication capabilities now accessible to hobbyists, even projects that were once considered professional work are in reach. If you’re interested in making your own PCB designs, there are many resources available to help you get started. Alternatively, we have seen other ways to modernize your classic Macs.

[Thanks to techknight for the tip!]

A Battery To Add A Tingling Sensation To Your Tweets

September 27, 2020 by Sven Gregori 28 Comments

Internet-connected sex toys are a great way to surprise your partner from work (even the home office) or for spicing up long-distance relationships. For some extra excitement, they also add that thrill of potentially having all your very sensitive private data exposed to the public — but hey, it’s not our place to kink-shame. However, their vulnerability issues are indeed common enough to make them regular guests in security conferences, so what better way to fight fire with fire than simply inviting the whole of Twitter in on your ride? Well, [Space Buck] built just the right device for that: the Double-Oh Battery, an open source LiPo-cell-powered ESP32 board in AA battery form factor as drop-in replacement to control a device’s supply voltage via WiFi.

Battery and PCB visualization — Double-Oh Battery with all the components involved

In their simplest and cheapest form, vibrating toys are nothing more than a battery-powered motor with an on-off switch, and even the more sophisticated ones with different intensity levels and patterns are usually limited to the same ten or so varieties that may eventually leave something to be desired. To improve on that without actually taking the devices apart, [Space Buck] initially built the Slot-in Manipulator of Output Levels, a tiny board that squeezed directly onto the battery to have a pre-programmed pattern enabling and disabling the supply voltage — or have it turned into an alarm clock. But understandably, re-programming patterns can get annoying in the long run, so adding WiFi and a web server seemed the logical next step. Of course, more functionality requires more space, so to keep the AA battery form factor, the Double-Oh Battery’s PCB piggybacks now on a smaller 10440 LiPo cell.

But then, where’s the point of having a WiFi-enabled vibrator with a web server — that also happens to serve a guestbook — if you don’t open it up to the internet? So in some daring experiments, [Space Buck] showcased the project’s potential by hooking it up to his Twitter account and have the announcement tweet’s likes and retweets take over the control, adding a welcoming element of surprise, no doubt. Taking this further towards Instagram for example might be a nice vanity reward-system improvement as well, or otherwise make a great gift to send a message to all those attention-seeking people in your circle.

All fun aside, it’s an interesting project to remote control a device’s power supply, even though its application area might be rather limited due to the whole battery nature, but the usual Sonoff switches may seem a bit unfitting here. If this sparked your interest in lithium-based batteries, check out [Lewin Day]’s beginner guide and [Bob Baddeley]’s deeper dive into their chemistry.

Designing 3D Printed Enclosures For KiCad PCBs

July 7, 2020 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

If you’ve used KiCad before, you’re certainly familiar with the handy 3D view that shows you a rendered view of what your assembled board would look like. But as [Vadim Panov] explains, you can take this capability a step further. With a few extra tools and a little bit of know-how, you can leverage KiCad’s PCB renderings to make custom 3D printable enclosures.

The first step is to design the PCB as you normally would in KiCad. This could be an original PCB of your own invention, or a digital representation of an off-the-shelf model you want to build an enclosure for. If the latter, then the PCB doesn’t need to be 100% accurate; the goal is really just to get the big components into roughly the right areas so you can get the clearances right. Though obviously you’ll want to make sure the board’s outer dimensions and mounting hole locations are recreated as accurately as possible.

From there, [Vadim] recommends a tool called StepUp. This will take your PCB KiCad PCB files and create either a STEP or STL file of the assembled board which can be imported into your CAD package of choice. For the purposes of this demonstration he’s sticking with FreeCAD, as he likes the idea of it being a completely FOSS toolchain from start to finish.

Now that you have a model of the PCB in your CAD software, the rest is up to you. Naturally, there are existing enclosure models you can use such as the ones produced by the “Ultimate Box Maker” that we covered previously, but you could just as easily start building a new enclosure around the digital PCB.

Looking for a bit more guidance? As it so happens, our very own [Anool Mahidharia] will be presenting a class on how you can develop a KiCad + FreeCAD workflow as part of our recently launched HackadayU initiative.