smartphone

100 Articles

Porting DOOM But In The Opposite Direction

July 20, 2022 by 4 Comments

DOOM was first released for MS-DOS, and is one of the pillar titles of the broader first-person-shooter genre. It’s also become a bit of a meme for being ported to any and every weird platform under the sun. Now, a group of developers in Costa Rica have found a way to flip that joke around – by porting an old mobile DOOM game back to the PC.

The game in question is DOOM RPG, made for BREW and Java-compatible phones in 2005. A group named GEC.inc has taken that game and ported it to Windows, outlining their work on the Doomworld forums. As with many such projects, the port is freely available, but doesn’t include the raw game files themselves due to copyright. You’ll have to find the gamedata yourself, and combine it with the files the group published on the forum to get it to work on a modern PC.

For those that have missed the turn-based role playing game based in the DOOM universe (Doomiverse?), today is a good day. No longer must you pine for your ancient, crusty Java smartphone of yesteryear. Now you can play the game on a less awful platform, and listen to the unique and compelling MIDI-esque soundtrack.

Doom ports are hot right now, whether it’s to forgotten Apple OSes or Sega arcade hardware. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Porting DOOM But In The Opposite Direction” →

Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR

June 28, 2022 by 21 Comments

In antiquity, we see examples of magnifying crystals formed into a biconvex shape as early as the 7th century BC. Whether the people of that period used them either for fire-starting purposes or vision is unclear. Still, it is famously said that Emperor Nero of Rome watched gladiator games through an emerald.

Needless to say, the views we get through modern lenses are a lot more realistic. So how did we get from simple magnifying systems to the complex lens systems we see today? We start with a quick journey through the history of the camera and the lens, and we’ll end up with the cutting edge in lens design for smartphone cameras and VR headsets.

Continue reading “Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR” →

Metal Detector Gets Help From Smartphone

June 27, 2022 by 15 Comments

[mircemk] is quite a wizard when it comes to using coils of wires in projects, especially when their application is within easy-to-build metal detectors. There are all kinds of ways to send signals through coiled wire to detect metal objects in the ground, and today [mircemk] is demonstrating a new method he is experimenting with which uses a smartphone to detect the frequency changes generated by the metal detector.

Like other metal detectors, this one uses two coils of wire with an oscillator circuit and some transistors. The unique part of this build, though, is how the detector alerts the user to a piece of metal. Normally there would be an audible alert as the frequencies of the circuit change when in the presence of metal, but this one uses a smartphone to analyze the frequency information instead. The circuit is fed directly into the headphone jack on the smartphone and can be calibrated and used from within an Android app.

Not only can this build detect metal, but it can discriminate between different types of metal. [mircemk] notes that since this was just for experimentation, it needs to be calibrated often and isn’t as sensitive as others he’s built in the past. Of course this build also presumes that your phone still has a headphone jack, but we won’t dig up that can of worms for this feature. Instead, we’ll point out that [mircemk] has shown off other builds that don’t require any external hardware to uncover buried treasure.

Continue reading “Metal Detector Gets Help From Smartphone” →

Two Nokia 1860 phones side by side - a Notkia-modded phone on the right, and an unmodified Nokia phone on the left

Notkia: Building An Open And Linux-Powered Numpad Phone

June 18, 2022 by 42 Comments

Many of us hackers have a longing for numpad-adorned mobile phones. We also have a shared understanding that, nowadays, such a phone has to be open and Linux-powered. Today’s project, Notkia, is the most promising and realistic effort at building a keypad phone that fits our requirements. Notkia is a replacement board for Nokia 168x series phones, equipped with an improved display, USB-C, WiFi, Bluetooth, and LoRa — and [Reimu NotMoe] of [SudoMaker] tells us this project’s extensive story.

The Notkia effort started over two years ago, because of [Reimu]’s increasing dislike for modern smartphones — something every hacker is familiar with. Her first-hand experience with privacy violations and hackability limitations on Android phones is recounted in detail, leading to a strong belief that there are fundamental problems with phones available nowadays. Building new hardware from the ground up seems to be the way forward. Two years later, this is exactly what we got!

Continue reading “Notkia: Building An Open And Linux-Powered Numpad Phone” →

How A Smartphone Is Made, In Eight “Easy” Blocks

May 9, 2022 by 21 Comments

The smartphone represents one of the most significant shifts in our world. In less than thirteen years, we went from some people owning a dumb phone to the majority of the planet having a smartphone (~83.7% as of 2022, according to Statista). There are very few things that a larger percentage of people on this planet have. Not clean water, not housing, not even food.

How does a smartphone work? Most people have no idea; they are insanely complicated devices. However, you can break them down into eight submodules, each of which is merely complex. What makes them work is that each of these components can be made small, at massive economies of scale, and are tightly integrated, allowing easy assembly.

So without further ado, the fundamental eight building blocks of the modern cellphone are: the application processor, the baseband processor, a SIM card, the RF processor, sensors, a display, cameras & lenses, and power management. Let’s have a look at them all, and how they fit together.

Continue reading “How A Smartphone Is Made, In Eight “Easy” Blocks” →

The New-Phone Blues: A Reminder That Hackers Shouldn’t Settle

March 22, 2022 by 67 Comments

For all the convenience and indispensability of having access to the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of your hand, the actual process of acquiring and configuring a smartphone can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standing in those endless queues at the cell phone store, jumping through the administrative hoops, and staring in sticker shock at a device that’s likely to end its life dunked in a toilet all contribute to the frustration.

But for my money, the real trouble starts once you get past all that stuff and start trying to set up the new phone just right. Sure, most phone manufacturers make it fairly easy to clone your old phone onto the new one, but there are always hiccups. And for something that gets as tightly integrated into the workflows of your daily life as cell phones do, that can be a real bummer. Especially when you find out that your shiny new phone can’t do something you absolutely depend on.

Continue reading “The New-Phone Blues: A Reminder That Hackers Shouldn’t Settle” →

Wordle bot

Solving Wordle By Adding Machine Vision To A 3D Printer

February 26, 2022 by 19 Comments

Truth be told, we haven’t jumped on the Wordle bandwagon yet, mainly because we don’t need to be provided with yet another diversion — we’re more than capable of finding our own rabbit holes to fall down, thank you very much. But the word puzzle does look intriguing, and since the rules and the interface are pretty simple, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a few efforts like this automated Wordle solver crop up lately.

The goal of Wordle is to find a specific five-letter, more-or-less-common English word in as few guesses as possible. Clues are given at each turn in the form of color-coding the letters to indicate whether they appear in the word and in what order. [iamflimflam1]’s approach was to attach a Raspberry Pi camera over the bed of a 3D printer and attach a phone stylus in place of the print head. A phone running Wordle is placed on the printer bed, and Open CV is used to find both the screen of the phone, as well as the position of the phone on the printer bed. From there, the robot uses the stylus to enter an opening word, analyzes the colors of the boxes, and narrows in on a solution.

The video below shows the bot in use, and source code is available if you want to try it yourself. If you need a deeper dive into Wordle solving algorithms, and indeed other variant puzzles in the *dle space, check out this recent article on reverse engineering the popular game.

Continue reading “Solving Wordle By Adding Machine Vision To A 3D Printer” →