Hacking Digital Calipers For Automated Measurements And Sorta-Micron Accuracy

March 6, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

We’ll take a guess that most readers have a set of digital calipers somewhere close to hand right now. The cheapest ones tend to be a little unsatisfying in the hand, a bit crusty and crunchy to use. But as [Matthias Wandel] shows us, these budget tools are quite hackable and a lot more precise than they appear to be.

[Matthias] is perhaps best known around these parts for making machine tools using mainly wood. It’s an unconventional material for things like the CNC router he loves to hate, but he makes it work through a combination of clever engineering and a willingness to work within the limits of the machine. To assess those limits, he connected some cheap digital calipers to a Raspberry Pi by hacking the serial interface that seems to be built into all of these tools. His particular calipers output a pair of 24-bit words over a synchronous serial connection a couple of times per second, but at a level too low to be read by the Pi. He solved this with a clever resistor ladder to shift the signals to straddle the 1.8 volt transition on the Pi, and after solving some noise problems with a few strategically placed capacitors and some software debouncing, he was gathering data on his Pi.

Although his setup was fine for the measurements he needed to make, [Matthias] couldn’t help falling down the rabbit hole of trying to milk better resolution from the calipers. On paper, the 24-bit output should provide micron-ish resolution, but sadly, the readings seem to fluctuate rapidly between two levels, making it difficult to obtain an average quickly enough to be useful. Still, it’s a good exercise, and overall, these hacks should prove handy for anyone who wants to dip a toe into automated metrology on a budget.

Continue reading “Hacking Digital Calipers For Automated Measurements And Sorta-Micron Accuracy” →

Gonzo Film Making With The Raspberry Pi

February 28, 2025 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Gonzo journalism has been a hip thing since the 1970s or so, a way of covering a story in a compelling format with more subjectivity and less objectivity. The style has since been applied to all sorts of media, including film—and indeed, the makers of the Gonzo Pi.

The Gonzo Pi is a camera with an open source design, yes, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s intended to be an entire platform for film-making, all in the one housing. Camera-wise, the design combines a Raspberry Pi with the requisite first-party High Quality Camera, and warps it up in a 3D printed housing. You can build it up with a viewfinder and whatever old-school C-mount or 8 mm film lenses you can lay your hands on.

Beyond that, there’s an editing platform baked in to the device. It’s not unlike the tools in so many social media apps these days. The idea of the Gonzo Pi is that rather than shooting a whole ton of footage and takes and poring over them in great detail later, instead, you run and gun with the device and edit as you go. You can shoot retakes as you need, and even dub in more audio as necessary as you compose your film on the hoof. It’s intended to change the way you make films by virtue of its unique compositional paradigm.

We’ve featured some neat homebrew cameras before, to be sure, but none that quite put the edit suite right in the box.

Continue reading “Gonzo Film Making With The Raspberry Pi” →

A Precisely Elegant Cyberdeck Handheld

February 27, 2025 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

[Nicholas LaBonte] shows off a Cyberdeck Handheld that demonstrates just how good something can look when care and attention goes into the design and fabrication. He wanted to make something that blended cyberpunk and nautical aesthetics with a compact and elegant design, and we think he absolutely succeeded.

On the inside is a Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR. The back of the unit is machined from hardwood, and sports a bronze heat sink for the Raspberry Pi. The front has a prominent red PSP joystick for mouse input and a custom keyboard. The keyboard is especially interesting. On the inside it’s a custom PCB with tactile switches and a ATmega32U4 running QMK firmware — a popular choice for DIY keyboards — and presents to the host as a regular USB HID device.

The keys are on a single plate of little tabs, one for each key, that sits between the front panel and press on the tact switches inside.

How did he make those slick-looking keys? It’s actually a single plate that sits between the front panel and the switches themselves. [Nicholas] used a sheet of polymer with a faux-aluminum look to it and machined it down, leaving metal-looking keys with engraved symbols as tabs in a single panel. It looks really good, although [Nicholas] already has some ideas about improving it.

On the right side is the power button and charging port, and astute readers may spot that the power button is where a double-stack of USB ports would normally be on a Raspberry Pi 5. [Nicholas] removed the physical connectors, saving some space and connecting the USB ports internally to the keyboard and SDR.

As mentioned, [Nicholas] is already full of ideas for improvements. The bronze heat sink isn’t as effective as he’d like, the SDR could use some extra shielding, and the sounds the keyboard ends up making could use some work. Believe it or not, there’s still room to spare inside the unit and he’d maybe like to figure out a way to add a camera, GPS receiver, or maybe a 4G modem. We can’t wait! Get a good look for yourself in the video, embedded below.

Continue reading “A Precisely Elegant Cyberdeck Handheld” →

BlackBerry Keyboard Makes This Handheld Pi Stand Out

February 25, 2025 by Jenny List 14 Comments

In the decade or more since small inexpensive Linux-capable single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi came to the mainstream, many a hardware hacker has turned their attention to making a portable computer using one. With such a plethora of devices having been made one might think that the Pi handheld was a done deal, but every so often along comes a new one of such quality to re-ignite the genre. So it is with [Taylor Hay]’s BlackberryPi Handheld. As you might guess from the name, it uses a BlackBerry keyboard along with a square LCD screen to create a beautifully executed Pi handheld in an almost GameBoy-like form factor.

It starts with a beautifully designed and executed case that holds a Pi and a Pimoroni HyperPixel screen. Unexpectedly this is a full-size Pi, we think a Pi 4. The keyboard is a USB enhanced Blackberry module which also has the famous trackpad, and there’s a bezel on the front to protect the screen. The power meanwhile comes from three 18650 cells inside the back of the case, with a power bank PCB. The surprise here is how simple he’s made it by careful choice of modules, the usual rats-nest of wires is missing.

The files are available so you can make your own, and he’s actively encouraging people to remix and improve it. We like this project, a lot, and after you’ve seen the video below the break, we think you will too. Oddly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone try this combination.

Continue reading “BlackBerry Keyboard Makes This Handheld Pi Stand Out” →

Lorem Ipsum 36? Dolor Sit Amet Keyboard!

February 6, 2025 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

You know, it’s a tale as old as custom mechanical keyboards. [penkia] couldn’t find any PCBs with 36 keys and Gateron low-profile switch footprints, so they made their own and called it the LoremIpsum36. Isn’t it lovely?

This baby runs on an RP2040, which sits flush as can be in a cutout in the PCB. This maneuver, along with the LP switches in hard-to-find SK-33 sockets results in quite the thin board.

[penkia] says that despite using a 3 mm tray for added rigidity, the entire thing is thinner than the Nuphy Air60 v2, which is just over half an inch (13.9 mm) thick. For keycaps, [penkia] has used both XVX profile and FKcaps’ LPF.

And yeah, that area in the middle is crying out for something; maybe a trackball or something similar. But [penkia] is satisfied with it as-is for the first version, so we are, too.

Do you like 36-key boards, but prefer curves? Check out the Lapa keyboard, which doubles as a mouse.

A Raspberry Pi HAT with retro LED displays and a buttons, sitting on the keys of a laptop.

Good-Looking HAT Does Retro Displays Right

February 5, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Mick Jagger famously said that you cain’t always get what you want. But this is Hackaday, and we make what we want or can’t get. Case in point: [Andrew Tudoroi] is drawn to retro LEDs and wanted one of Pimoroni’s micro-LED boards pretty badly, but couldn’t get his hands on one. You know how this ends — with [Andrew] designing his first PCB.

The Pitanga hat is equally inspired by additional fruit that [Andrew] had lying around in the form of an 8devices Rambutan board. (Trust us, it’s a fruit.) With some research, he discovered the HT16K33 LED driver, which checked all the boxen.

The first version worked, but needed what looks like a couple of bodge wires. No shame in that! For the next revision, [Andrew] added buttons and decided to make it into a Raspberry Pi HAT.

This HAT is essentially a simple display with a basic input device, and a beauty at that. You can see all the various cool displays that [Andrew] tried both here and in the project log. Although he included pads for an ARM M0 microcontroller, he never did populate it. Maybe in the future.

Of course, this project was not without its challenges. For one thing, there was power compatibility to wrestle with. The Pi can sometimes work with I²C devices at 5 V, but this isn’t ideal long-term. So [Andrew] put the LED driver on the 3.3 V I²C bus. Despite the data sheet calling for 4.5 to 5.5 V, the setup worked fine. But for better reliability, [Andrew] threw a dedicated I²C logic level converter chip into the mix.

Don’t forget, you can run a noble amassment of HATs with the PiSquare.

All The Attacks On The RP2350

January 15, 2025 by Elliot Williams 29 Comments

Raspberry Pi’s new microcontroller, the RP2350, has a small section of memory that is meant for storing secrets. It’s protected by anti-glitching and other countermeasures, and the Raspberries wanted to test it. So this summer, they gave them out, pre-programmed with a secret string, as part of the badge for DEFCON attendees. The results of the cracking efforts are in, and it’s fair to say that the hackers have won.

First place went to [Aedan Cullen], who also gave a great talk about how he did it at 38C3. One of the coolest features of the RP2350, from a hacker perspective, is that it has dual ARM and dual RISC-V cores onboard, and they can be swapped out by multiplexers. The security module has a critical register that has disable bits for both of these processors, but it turns out that the ARM disable bits have priority. When [Aedan] glitched the security module just right, it disabled the ARM cores but left the RISC-V cores running in the secure context, with full debug(!), and the game was over. As of yet, there is no mitigation for this one, because it’s baked into the secure boot module’s silicon.

[Marius Muench] managed to pre-load malicious code into RAM and glitch a reboot-out-of-secure-mode on the USB module. This one is possibly fixable by checking other reboot flags. [Kévin Courdesses] has a sweet laser fault-injection rig that’s based on the 3D-printable OpenFlexure Delta Stage, which we’ve seen used for microscopy purposes, but here he’s bypassing the anti-glitching circuitry by exposing the die and hitting it hard with photons.

Finally, [Andrew Zonenberg] and a team from IOActive went at the RP2350 with a focused ion beam and just read the memory, or at least the pairwise-OR of neighboring bits. Pulling this attack off isn’t cheap, and it’s a more general property of all anti-fuse memory cells that they can be read out this way. Chalk this up as a mostly-win for the offense in this case.

If you want to read up on voltage glitching attacks yourself, and we promise we won’t judge, [Matthew Alt] has a great writeup on the topic. And ironically enough, one of his tools of choice is [Colin O’Flynn]’s RP2040-based Chip Shouter EMP glitcher, which he showed us how to make and use in this 2021 Remoticon talk.