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397 Articles

Nixie Display Module Is Addressable Via SPI

December 3, 2022 by 5 Comments

There are plenty of SPI interface screens on the market, but few of them have the charm of the good old Nixie tube. [Tony] decided to whip up a simple three-Nixie module that could be addressed via SPI. 

The stacked construction keeps things compact.

The module relies on a PIC16F15344 microcontroller to run the show, using its built-in SPI interface. It’s built with four stacked-up PCBs for ease of assembly and testing. It uses an internal buck converter to create the 170 volts required for the Nixie tubes from a 6 to 12 volt input. The high-voltage lines are routed towards the inside of the stack to minimize any nasty shocks when handling, though caution would still be advisable.

Driving the display is as simple as sending 16-bit words over the SPI interface, with the device operating in SPI client mode 1. If you’re looking for a simple way to have projects write output to a nice Nixie display, this module could be just what you’re looking for. Alternatively, if you can’t lay your hands on the tubes, there are other pretty solutions out there, too. Video after the break.

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Electronic Dice Is Introduction To Microcontroller Programming

May 27, 2022 by 10 Comments

By now most of us are familiar with the Arduino platform. It’s an inexpensive and fairly easy way into the world of microcontrollers. For plenty of projects, there’s no need to go beyond that unless you have a desire to learn more of the inner workings of microcontrollers in general. [Cristiano] was interested in expanding some of his knowledge, so he decided to build this electronic dice using a PIC microcontroller instead of the Arduino platform he was more familiar with.

As a result, this project is set up as a how-to for others looking to dive further into the world of microcontrollers that don’t have the same hand-holding setup as the Arduino. To take care of the need for a random number for the dice, the PIC’s random number generator is used but with the added randomness of a seed from an internal timer. The timer is started when a mercury tilt switch signals the device that it has been rolled over, and after some computation a single digit number is displayed on a seven-segment display.

While it might seem simple on the surface, the project comes with an in-depth guide on programming the PIC family of microcontrollers, and has a polish not normally seen on beginner projects, including the use of the mercury tilt switch which gives it a retro vibe. For some other tips on how to build projects like this, take a look at this guide on how to build power supplies for your projects as well.

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Sound Generation Board Makes The Tunes

May 20, 2022 by 4 Comments

[Mcjack123] has been getting into chiptunes lately and realized that his original interest started in 2018 when he used an Arduino to turn a TI-84 calculator into a sound machine. His latest iteration is a custom-designed soundboard and he takes us through the design and construction of it in a recent post.

The work models classic sound generators like the 2A03 or the Commodore 64 SID. You have a bunch of simple waveform generators along with filters and modulators to make various effects. These boards eventually gave way to FM synthesis devices like the Yamaha OPL2 and OPL3 chips. All of these cards accepted commands and generated audio on their own. More modern boards are more likely to simply convert digital data from the computer into audio.

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An image showing a water cooler PCB on the desk, with probes and jumper wires connected to it.

Taking Water Cooler UX Into Your Own Hands With Ghidra

January 2, 2022 by 12 Comments

Readers not aware of what Ghidra is might imagine some kind of aftermarket water cooler firmware or mainboard – a usual hacker practice with reflow ovens. What [Robbe Derks] did is no less impressive and inspiring:  A water cooler firmware mod that adds hands-free water dispensing, without requiring any hardware mods or writing an alternative firmware from scratch.

Having disassembled the cooler, [Robbe] found a PIC18F6527 on the mainboard, and surprisingly, it didn’t have firmware readback protection. Even lack of a PICkit didn’t stop him – he just used an Arduino to dump the firmware, with the dumper code shared for us to reuse, and the resulting dumps available in the same repository.

From there, he involved Ghidra to disassemble the code, while documenting the process in a way we can all learn from, and showing off the nifty tricks Ghidra has up its sleeves. Careful planning had to be done to decide which functions to hook and when, where to locate all the extra logic so that there’s no undesirable interference between it and the main firmware, and an extra step taken to decompile the freshly-patched binary to verify that it looks workable before actually flashing the cooler with it.

The end result is a water cooler that works exactly as it ought to have worked, perhaps, if the people defining its user interaction principles were allowed to make it complex enough. We could argue whether this should have been a stock function at all, but either way, it is nice to know that we the hackers still have some of the power to make our appliances friendly — even when they don’t come with an OS. Certainly, every single one of us can think of an appliance long overdue for a usability boost like this. What are your examples?

We’ve covered quite a few Ghidra-involving hacks, but it never feels like we’ve had enough. What about patching an air quality meter to use Fahrenheit? Or another highly educational write-up on cracking GBA games? Perhaps, liberating a Linux-powered 4G router to reconfigure it beyond vendor-defined boundaries? If you have your own goal in mind and are looking to start your firmware reverse-engineering journey, we can say with certainty that you can’t go wrong with our HackadayU course on Ghidra.

Three-Dimensional Design Yields Compact Seven-Segment Hex Displays

November 11, 2021 by 10 Comments

Computers, from the simplest to the most complex, aren’t very useful if they can’t provide feedback to a user. Whether that interface takes the form of a monitor, a speaker, or a simple LED, there’s almost always some kind of output. One of the most ubiquitous is the ever-present seven-segment display. They’re small, they’re easy to use, and, perhaps most important, they’re cheap.

While the displays themselves are relatively compact, they often require some sort of driver circuitry — something that translates a digit into voltage at the correct pins. These drivers can take up valuable space, especially on a breadboard, and can sometimes make using seven-segment displays cumbersome. Thankfully, [John Lonergan] has a great solution: driver boards that sit completely beneath the displays. His dual seven-segment hex display project was born out of necessity — he needed it for the breadboard CPU SPAM-1, which was getting a bit too bulky. Each module is two seven-segment displays atop a small PCB. Beneath the displays lives an 8-bit PIC microcontroller, which acts as a driver for both of the displays.

It’s so easy to restrict ourselves to thinking in two dimensions when working on electronic design — even designing multilayer PCBs often feels like working on several, distinct two-dimensional areas rather than one three-dimensional one. The concept of stacking components to save space, while fairly straightforward to implement, is a great example of the kind of problem-solving we love to see here at Hackaday. Of course, if you like the idea of 3D circuit design, you have to check out some of these incredible circuit sculptures we’ve featured in the past.

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Hacking A PIC To Redefine A Microphone’s Transmit Frequency

August 1, 2021 by 1 Comment

Software defined radio and widespread software-controlled PLL synthesis for RF has been a game changer. Things like the RTL-SDR can be any kind of radio you like on almost any frequency you like. But not every SDR or PLL system opens the configuration doors to you, the end user. That was the problem [vgnotepad] faced when trying to connect a Sennheiser wireless microphone to some receivers. They didn’t use the same frequencies, even though the transmitter was programmable. The solution to that is obvious — hack the transmitter!

The post is only part one of several parts and if you read to the end, you’ll learn a lot about what’s inside the device and how to crack it. Luckily, the device uses a PIC processor, so getting to the software wasn’t a big issue.

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Astronomical Clock Uses Your Spare Clock Motors

July 10, 2021 by 1 Comment

We’ll admit we are suckers for clock projects, and the more unusual, the better. We liked the look of [Peter Balch’s] astronomical clock, especially since it was handcrafted and was a relatively simple mechanism. [Peter] admits that it looks like an astronomical clock, but it isn’t the same as a complex instrument from medieval times. Instead, it uses several standard clock motors modified.

We didn’t quite follow some of the explanations for the rotation of the different elements, but the animated GIF cleared it all up. The inner and outer discs are geared at a 6:5 ratio. It takes 2 hours for the inner disc to make one rotation, meaning that every 12 hours the two discs will be back to where they began relative to one another.

Modifying the motors is fine work, requiring a good bit of disassembly and some glue. The electronics that make it tick are quite interesting. To drive the motors, a very specific pulse train is needed, but you also want to conserve battery as much as possible. A simple oscillator with a hex inverter drew more power than desired and an Arduino, even more so. A PIC12F629, though, could sleep a lot and do the job for a very low current consumption. The final clock should run a year on two AA cells.