Don’t Mess With Texas – The TI-99/4A Megademo

January 30, 2017 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

The demoscene is a hotbed of masterful assembly programming, particularly when it comes to platforms long forgotten by the passage of technology and time. There’s a certain thrill to be had in wringing every last drop of performance out of old silicon, particularly if it’s in a less popular machine. It’s that mindset that created Don’t Mess With Texas – a glorious megademo running on the TI-99/4A.

Entered in the oldskool demo contest at Syncrony 2017, the demo took out the win for [DESiRE], a group primarily known for demos on the Amiga – a far more popular platform in the scene. The demo even includes a Boing Ball effect as a cheeky nod to their roots. Like any good megademo, the different personalities and tastes brings a huge variety of effects to the show – there’s a great take on vintage shooters a la Wolfenstein in there too. [jmph] shared a few more details on the development process over on pouet.net.

The TI-99/4A wasn’t the easiest machine to develop for. It’s got a 16-bit CPU hamstrung by an 8-bit bus, and only 256 bytes of general purpose RAM. Despite the group’s best attempts, the common 32K RAM expansion present in the floppy drive controller is a requirement to run the demo. Just to make things harder, the in-built BASIC is too slow for any real use and there’s no function to allow the use of in-line assembly instructions. The group had to resort to a cartridge-based assembler to get the job done.

In the machine’s favour, it has a great sound chip put to brilliant use – the demo’s soundtrack will take you right back to the glory days of chiptune. It’s also got strong graphics capabilities for the era on par with, if not better than, the Commodore 64. The video subsystem in the TI works so hard that it’s the only DIP in the machine that gets a heatsink! The demo does a great job of pushing the machine to its limits in this regard.

If you’re suddenly feeling a strong attraction to the TI-99/4A, don’t worry – it’s got a cult following all its own. You can even find USB adapters & IDE controllers if you want to build a fully loaded rig, or play a stunning port of Flappy Bird if that tickles your fancy.

[Thanks to Gregg for the tip!]

Hacklet 117 – NFC Projects

July 23, 2016 by Adam Fabio 5 Comments

Near Field Communication (NFC) is something we take for granted these days. Nearly all smartphones have it. We even have NFC interfaces for all our favorite development boards. NFC’s history goes back all the way to 1997, when an early version was used in Star Wars special edition toys. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which NFC builds on, goes back even further. The patent citation trail leads all the way back to 1983 in a patent awarded to [Charles Walton]. NFC is much more than RFID though. The idea of two way communication between devices opens up tons of possibilities for projects and hacks. This week on the Hacklet we’re checking out some of the best NFC projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Patrick] and Ctrl-O. Somewhere in the hackerspace bible there is a clause that states “Thou shalt build an electronic access control system”. In [Patrick’s] case, a door lock became a complex membership subscription management database. Members who have paid can use an NFC tag to gain access to the hackerspace. The system consists of a Raspberry Pi with an NFC interface. A relay allows the Pi to control the door lock. The Pi can be manually configured through a web interface. It connects to Paypal to verify that each user’s membership has actually been paid. Of course a project like this is never done. The last we heard from [Patrick], he was planning future upgrades such as startup company memberships with multiple people.

Next up is [Pierre Charlier] and KeyDuino. KeyDuino is an Arduino compatible board with all the NFC hardware baked right in. The board is based upon the Arduino Leonardo, with an ATmega32u4 processor. [Pierre] must be on to something, because the KeyDuino had a successful Kickstarter back in 2015. It’s also open source hardware, so you can build your own whenever you want. The real gem is checking out [Pierre’s] other projects. He’s documented all his KeyDuino example projects right on Hackaday.io. These include an NFC Controlled infinity mirror coffee table, a locking wooden gift box, and NFC controlled car door locks, just to name a few.

Next we have [John McLear] with 2016 NFC Ring. [John] jumped into wearable technology with one of the toughest form factors imaginable – a ring. Between the tiny amount of space and the lack of batteries, you might think there isn’t much you can do with a ring. Undaunted, [John] managed to fit two NXP NFC chips and their antennas inside a standard ring. This is the upgraded 2016 version of the ring. [John] was nice enough to supply several hundred of the earlier models to hackers at the Hackaday Supercon back in 2015. [John’s] rings would be hard for the average hacker to reproduce. [Sean Hodgins] comes to the rescue here with his own project, DIY NFC Bentwood Ring.

Finally, we have [CaptMcAllister] with RFID air pressure sensor. As the name implies, this sensor measures air pressure. It could be in open air, a tire, or even a football used by the New England Patriots. Sure, cars all have Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) sensors which do something similar. [CaptMcAllister’s] design has one important difference – it has no batteries. The heart of the system is a Texas Instruments RF430FRL15X, a device with the NFC radio and a low power MSP430 microcontroller in one chip. The system is energy harvesting, being powered by an external reader. As you can imagine, tuning the antenna was critical to this design. You can read all about it in [CaptMcAllister’s] 24 project logs.

If you want to see more NFC projects and hacks, check out our new near field communication projects list. See a project I might have missed? Don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

We’re Headed To Maker Faire, Will You Be There?

May 13, 2016 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

The Hackaday Crew will be descending on San Mateo next weekend for Bay Area Maker Faire. Will you be there? Gerrit and I will be looking in every booth and byway for amazing hacks, new hardware, and anything else that tickles the fancy of hackers everyone.

We certainly didn’t miss the massive tin spider seen above at last year’s event. But it’s a huge venue, and I’m always afraid we’re going to miss something epic. If you’re exhibiting and want us to stop by, leave a comment below. If you know of something awesome that we shouldn’t miss this year, we’d love to hear about that too.

I’d also like to invite you to hang out with Hackaday on Saturday night. When the Faire closes its gates, something amazing happens every year at O’Neil’s Irish Pub. Don’t miss it!

Need a Ticket?

Texas Instruments sent us 4 Friday passes, and 9 weekend passes which we want to give away. The fairest way of doing that is a drawing using Twitter.

To enter, simply Tweet something about your favorite 2016 Hackaday Prize entry, including @Hackaday @TXinstruments #FairePass in the message. Here’s what an example Tweet looks like (don’t worry, I’m not eligible to win).

On Sunday, 4pm PDT we’ll make a list of all the Twitter handles that sent out a Tweet, then use random.org to choose 6 random numbers from that list. The second giveaway will happen at 4pm PDT on Wednesday 5/18, using the same procedure to choose the remaining 7 winners.

All of the obvious contest stuff applies: employees and family of Hackaday, Supplyframe, and TI are not eligible. Results of the drawing are final. We can’t substitute other prizes (we’re just giving away extra tickets) and this giveaway has no bearing on any other contests or winner selection.

Finally, An Upgrade For The TI-86

January 13, 2016 by James Hobson 60 Comments

The eternal and everlasting TI-86 graphing calculator is a great calculator: first made back in 1997, and still used by students today. But its battery life kinda sucks. So [Dalius] decided to bring his TI-86 into the 21st century.

If you’re not familiar, the TI-86 runs off of 4 AAA batteries, preferably alkaline. If you use rechargeable NiMH they don’t last very long since they have a lower voltage per cell, which means it ends up draining even faster to a voltage level the TI-86 cannot operate at.

Continue reading “Finally, An Upgrade For The TI-86” →

Hackaday Links: November 8, 2015

November 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Burt Rutan] is someone who needs no introduction. Apparently, he likes the look of the Icon A5 and is working on his own version.

Earlier this week, the US Air Force lost a few satellites a minute after launch from Barking Sands in Hawaii. This was the first launch of the three stage, solid fueled SPARK rocket, although earlier versions were used to launch nuclear warheads into space. There are some great Army videos for these nuclear explosions in space, by the way.

[Alexandre] is working on an Arduino compatible board that has an integrated GSM module and WiFi chip. It’s called the Red Dragon, and that means he needs some really good board art. The finished product looks good in Eagle, and something we can’t wait to see back from the board house.

The Chippocolypse! Or however you spell it! TI is declaring a lot of chips EOL, and although this includes a lot of op-amps and other analog ephemera (PDF), the hi-fi community is reeling and a lot of people are stocking up on their favorite amplifiers.

[Jeremy] got tired of plugging jumper wires into a breadboard when programming his ATMega8 (including the ‘168 and ‘328) microcontrollers. The solution? A breadboard backpack that fits right over the IC. All the files are available, and the PCB can be found on Upverter.

In case you haven’t heard, we’re having a Super Conference in San Francisco later this week. Adafruit was kind enough to plug our plug for the con on Ask an Engineer last week.

Mergers And Acquisitions: TI Looks To Snatch Up Maxim

October 28, 2015 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

BloombergBusiness is reporting rumors that Texas Instruments is in talks to acquire Maxim Integrated. Both companies have declined to respond to this leaked information. Earlier this year there were rumors that the two companies had been in talks in 2014 that didn’t result with an agreement.

We find it interesting that the article mentions Maxim doesn’t need to scale — yet we often find Maxim parts in short supply. If TI were to acquire the company this could change for some Maxium parts. Still, this move looks a lot like TI trying to bolster its hold on the portions of the analog chip market which both companies currently occupy.

Already this year we’ve seen Dialog acquire Atmel, Avago acquire Broadcom, and the merger agreement between Freescale and NXP. We probably missed a few, and this has us wonder who is next. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

[Thanks Kumar]

New Part Day: The BeagleBoard Gets Bigger

October 7, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Officially, the latest hardware revision we’ve seen from BeagleBoard is the BeagleBone Black, a small board that’s perfect for when you want to interface hardware to a Linux software environment. This last summer, the BeagleBone Green was introduced, and while it’s a newer hardware release, it’s really just a cost-reduced version of the BB Black. Over the entire BeagleBoard family, it’s time for an upgrade.

It’s been talked about for more than a year now, but the latest and greatest from the BeagleBoard crew is out. It’s called the BeagleBoard X15, and not only is it an extremely powerful Linux board, it also has more ports than you would ever need.

The new BeagleBoard features a dual-core ARM Cortex A15 running at 1.5GHz. There is 2GB of DDR3L RAM on board, and 4GB of EMMC Flash. Outputs include three USB 3.0 hosts, two Gigabit Ethernet controllers, one eSATA connector, LCD output, two PCIe connectors, and an HDMI connector capable of outputting 1920×1080 at 60 FPS. The entire board is open hardware, with documentation for nearly every device on the board available now. The one exception is the PowerVR SGX544 GPU which has a closed driver, but the FSF has proposed a project to create an open driver for this graphics engine so that could change in the future.

The expected price of the BeagleBoard X15 varies from source to source, but all the numbers fall somewhere in the range of $200 to $240 USD, with more recent estimates falling toward the high end. This board is not meant to be a replacement for the much more popular BeagleBone. While the development and relationship between the ~Board and ~Bone are very much related, the BeagleBone has always and will always be a barebone Linux board, albeit with a few interesting features. The BeagleBoard, on the other hand, includes the kitchen sink. While the BeagleBoard X15 hardware is complete, so far there are less than one hundred boards on the planet. These are going directly to the people responsible for making everything work, afterwards orders from Digikey and Mouser will be filled. General availability should be around November, and certainly by Christmas.

While it’s pricier than the BeagleBone, the Raspberry Pi, or dozens of other ARM Linux boards out there, The BeagleBone has a lot of horsepower and plenty of I/Os. It’s an impressive piece of hardware that out-competes just about everything else available. We can’t wait to see it in the wild, but more importantly we can’t wait to see what people can do with it.

Title image credit: Vladimir Pantelic