Three different views of a tiny games console with a screen and a single button. It's assembled in the first picture, and the guts are shown in the second two pictures.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Salsa One Handheld Requires No PCB

August 16, 2024 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

If you’re thinking about building a single tiny game or even a platform, you might be tempted to use a single button for everything. Such is the case with [Alex]’s Salsa ONE minimalist game console, which is inspired by both the Arduboy and the ergonomics of the SanDisk Sansa music player.

With Salsa ONE, [Alex] aimed to make something that is both simple and challenging. The result is something that, awesomely enough, doesn’t need a PCB, and can be comfortably controlled with just one thumb. There isn’t much to this thing, which is essentially an RP2040, an OLED, a vibration motor, a buzzer, a button, and a CR2032 coin cell. [Alex] chose to program Salsa ONE in MicroPython. Be sure to check it out in action in the brief demo after the break.

Have you got an idea for a tiny game? Don’t hesitate to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.io and get started today.

Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: Salsa One Handheld Requires No PCB” →

D+ and D- wires from a USB cable connected to GPIO pins on the Pi Pico, using a female header plugged onto the jumper wires

Need A USB Sniffer? Use Your Pico!

August 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 24 Comments

Ever wanted to sniff USB device communications? The usual path was buying an expensive metal box with USB connectors, using logic analyzers, or wiring devboards together and hacking some software to make them forward USB data.

Now, thanks to [ataradov]’s work, you can simply use a Pi Pico – you only need to tap the D+ and D- pins, wire them to RP2040’s GPIOs, and you can sniff communication between your computer and any low-speed (1.5 Mbps) or full-speed (12 Mbps) devices. On the RP2040 side, plug the Pico into your computer, open the virtual serial port created, and witness the USB packets streaming in – for the price of a Pico, you get an elegant USB sniffer, only a little soldering required.

[ataradov] also offers us a complete board design with a RP2040 and a USB hub on it, equipped with USB sockets that completely free us from the soldering requirement; it’s an open-source KiCad design, so you can simply order some sniffers made from your favourite fab! This project is a great learning tool, it’s as cheap and easy to make as humanly possible, and it has big potential for things like reverse-engineering old and new systems alike. Just couple this hack with another Pico doing USB device or host duty, maybe get up to date with USB reverse-engineering fundamentals, and you could make a Facedancer-like tool with ease.

Need to reach 480 Mbit/s? [ataradov] has a wonderful board for you as well, that we have covered last year – it’s well worth it if a device of yours can only do the highest speed USB2 can offer, and, it offers WireShark support. Want WireShark support and to use a Pico? Here’s a GitHub project by another hacker, [tana]. By now, merely having a Pi Pico gives you so many tools, it’s not even funny.

We thank [Julianna] for sharing this with us!

A Look At The Intel N100 Radxa X4 SBC

July 29, 2024 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Recently Radxa released the X4, which is an SBC containing not only an N100 x86_64 SoC but also an RP2040 MCU connected to a Raspberry Pi-style double pin header. The Intel N100 is one of a range of Alder Lake-N SoCs which are based on a highly optimized version of the Skylake core, first released in 2015. These cores are also used as ‘efficiency’ cores in Intel’s desktop CPUs. Being x86-based, this means that the Radxa X4 can run any Linux, Windows and other OS from either NVMe (PCIe 3.0 x4) or eMMC storage. After getting his hands on one of these SBCs, [Bret] couldn’t wait to take a gander at what it can do.

Installing Windows 11 and Debian 12 on a 500 GB NVMe (2230) SSD installed on the X4 board worked pretty much as expected on an x86 system, with just some missing drivers for the onboard Intel 2.5 Gbit Ethernet and WiFi, depending on the OS, but these were easily obtained via the Intel site and installed. The board comes with an installed RTC battery and a full-featured AMI BIOS, as well as up to 16 GB of LPPDR5 RAM.

Using the system with the Radxa PoE+ HAT via the 2.5 Gbit Ethernet port also worked a treat once using a quality PoE switch, even with the N100’s power level set to 15 Watt from the default 6. The RP2040 MCU on the mainboard is connected to the SoC using both USB 2.0 and UART, according to the board schematic. This means that from the N100 all of the Raspberry Pi-style pins can be accessed, making it in many ways a more functional SBC than the Raspberry Pi 5, with a similar power envelope and cost picture.

At $80 USD before shipping for the 8 GB (no eMMC) version that [Bret] looked at one might ask whether an N100-based MiniPC could be competitive, albeit that features like PoE+ and integrated RPi-compatible header are definite selling points.

Particle Physics On A Small, Affordable PCB

July 13, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

Experimenting in the world of particle physics probably brings to mind large, expensive pieces of equipment like particle accelerators, or at least exotic elements or isotopes that most of us can’t easily find. But plenty of common objects emit various particles, and it turns out that detecting these particles does not require government backing or acres of test equipment. In fact, you can get this job done with a few readily-available parts and [Tim] shows us how it’s done with his latest project.

The goal of his build is to have a working particle detector for less than $10 per board, although he’s making them in bulk to be used in an educational setting. The board uses a set of photodiodes enclosed in a protective PCB sandwich to detect beta particles from a Potassium-40 source. The high-energy electron interacts with the semiconductor in the photodiode and creates a measurable voltage pulse, which can be detected and recorded by the microcontroller on the board. For this build an RP2040 chip is being used, with a number of layers of amplification between it and the photodetector array used to get signals that the microcontroller can read.

Getting particle physics equipment into the hands of citizen scientists is becoming a lot more common thanks to builds like this which leverage the quirks of semiconductors to do something slightly outside their normal use case, and of course the people building them releasing their projects’ documentation on GitHub. We’ve also seen an interesting muon detector with a price tag of around $100 and an alpha particle detector which uses a copper wire with a high voltage to do its work.

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Tasty Snacks Board

July 2, 2024 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

A pocket cyberdeck-looking thing with a screen and a thumb keyboard. — Image by [MakerM0] via Hackaday.IO

[MakerM0]’s LangCard is an entry into our 2024 Business Card Challenge that just so happens to fit the Keebin’ bill as well.

You might label this a pocket cyberdeck, and that’s just fine with me. The idea here is to have a full-keyboard development board for learning programming languages like CircuitPython, MicroPython, C++, and so on, wherever [MakerM0] happens to be at a given moment.

Open up the LangCard and you’ll find an RP2040 and a slim LiPo battery. I’m not sure what display that is, but there are probably a few that would work just fine were you to make one of these fun learning devices for yourself.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Tasty Snacks Board” →

Showing the modchip installed into a powered up Xbox, most of the board space taken up by a small Pi Pico board. A wire taps into the motherboard, and a blue LED on the modchip is lit up.

An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene

June 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 44 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a modchip that adds features to your game console, you might have noticed sanded-off IC markings, epoxy blobs, or just obscure chips with unknown source code. It’s ironic – these modchips are a shining example of hacking, and yet they don’t represent hacking culture one bit. Usually, they are more of a black box than the console they’re tapping into. This problem has plagued the original XBOX hacking community, having them rely on inconsistent suppliers of obscure boards that would regularly fall off the radar as each crucial part went to end of life. Now, a group of hackers have come up with a solution, and [Macho Nacho Productions] on YouTube tells us its story – it’s an open-source modchip with an open firmware, ModXO.

Like many modern modchips and adapters, ModXO is based on an RP2040, and it’s got a lot of potential – it already works for feeding a BIOS to your console, it’s quite easy to install, and it’s only going to get better. [Macho Nacho Productions] shows us the modchip install process in the video, tells us about the hackers involved, and gives us a sneak peek at the upcoming features, including, possibly, support for the Prometheos project that equips your Xbox with an entire service menu. Plus, with open-source firmware and hardware, you can add tons more flashy and useful stuff, like small LCD/OLED screens for status display and LED strips of all sorts!

If you’re looking to add a modchip to your OG XBOX, it looks like the proprietary options aren’t much worth considering anymore. XBOX hacking has a strong community behind it for historical reasons and has spawned entire projects like XBMC that outgrew the community. There’s even an amazing book about how its security got hacked. If you would like to read it, it’s free and worth your time. As for open-source modchips, they rule, and it’s not the first one we see [Macho Nacho Productions] tell us about – here’s an open GameCube modchip that shook the scene, also with a RP2040!

Continue reading “An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene” →

Probably The Cheapest Mac Emulation Hardware

June 20, 2024 by Jenny List 20 Comments

There are many ways to build your own Macintosh clone, and while the very latest models remain a little inaccessible, there are plenty of Intel-based so-called “Hackintoshes” which deliver an almost up-to-date experience. But the Mac has been around for a very long time now, and its earliest incarnation only has 128k of RAM and a 68000 processor. What can emulate one of those? Along comes [Matt Evans], with a working Mac 128k emulated on a Raspberry Pi Pico. Such is the power of a modern microcontroller that an RP2040 can now be a Mac!

The granddaddy of all Macs might have been a computer to lust after four decades ago, but the reality was that even at the time the demands of a GUI quickly made it under-powered. The RP2040 has plenty of processing power compared to the 68000 and over twice the Mac’s memory, so it seemed as though emulating the one with the other might be possible. This proved to be the case, using the Musashi 68000 interpreter and a self-built emulator which has been spun into a project of its own called umac. With monochrome VGA and USB for keyboard and mouse, there’s MacPaint on a small LCD screen looking a lot like the real thing.

If you want a 1980s Mac for anything without the joy of reviving original hardware, this represents an extremely cheap way to achieve it. If it can be compiled for microcontrollers with more available memory we could see it would even make for a more useful Mac, though your Mac mileage may vary.

Of course, this isn’t the only take on an early Mac we’ve brought you.