USB-C has its special Power Delivery standard, and is capable of delivering plenty of juice to attached hardware. This has led many to modify their TS-100 soldering irons to accept the connector. [Jan Henrik] is the latest, though he’s taken rather a different tack than you might expect.

[Jan] didn’t want to modify the original hardware or hack in an adapter. Instead, he struck out on his own, developing an entire replacement PCB for the TS-100 iron. The firmware is rough and ready, and minimal work has been done on the GUI and temperature regulation. However, reports are that functionality is good, and [Jan]’s demonstration shows it handling a proper desoldering task with ease.

Files are on Github for those that wish to spin their own. The PCB is designed to snap neatly inside the original case for a nice fit and finish. Power is plentiful too, as the hardware supports USB Power Delivery 2.0, which is capable of running at up to 100W. On the other hand, the stock TS-80 iron, which natively supports USB-C, only works with Quick Charge 3.0, and thus is limited to a comparatively meager 36W.

We’ve seen plenty of TS-100 hacks over 2019. Some have removed the standard barrel jack and replaced it with a USB-PD board. Meanwhile, others have created adapters that plug in to the back of the iron. However, [Jan] is dictating his own terms by recreating the entire PCB. Sometimes it pays to go your own way!

[Thanks to elad for the tip!]

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/adding-usb-c-to-the-ts100-but-not-how-you-think/

We sure wish we’d had a teacher like [Volos Projects]. He built this beautiful circuit sculpture to teach his students how to count in binary and convert it to decimal and hexadecimal. If you don’t already know binary, you get to learn it on DIP switches and a dead-bugged ATMega328 in the video after the break. Lucky you!

Once the students have the hang of entering binary input on the switches, they can practice it on the four-banger calculator. This educational sculpture can also take text input and scroll it, but it takes a bit of work. You have to look up the ASCII value of each character, convert the decimal to binary, and program it in with the switches. There’s one more function on the menu — a one-player PONG game to help the students relax after a long day of flipping switches.

Funny enough, this project came to be after [Volos Projects] came upon the DIP switch in his parts box and wasn’t quite sure what it was called. How great is it that he learned something about this part, and then used that knowledge to build this machine that uses the part to teach others? It’s surely the best fate that parts bin curiosities can hope for.

Don’t have the patience for circuit sculpture? You can make a pretty nice binary calculator with a bit of paper and a lot of compressed air.

Via [r/arduino]

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/circuit-sculpture-teaches-binary-plays-pong/

[Steven Merrifield] built his own Scalar Network Analyzer and it’s a beauty! [Steve]’s SNA has a digital pinout matching a Raspberry Pi, but any GPIO could be used to operate the device and retrieve the data from the ADC. The design is based around a few tried and true chips from Analog Devices. He’s taken some care to design it to be nice and accurate which is why he’s limited it to 1kHz to 30Mhz. We think it’s quite a fetching board once the shielding is in place.

We’ve covered network analyzers and their usefulness before. If you want to know how, for example, a mystery capacitor from your junk bin will respond to certain frequencies, a network analyzer could tell you. We’ve even taken a stab at hacking together our own.

There is more documentation on his website as well as some additional example curves. The board is easily ordered from OSHpark and the source code is available for review.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/diy-scalar-network-analyzer/

The race for chemical engineering is quite literally on. Every year, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AlChE) brings together hundreds of university students to face-off to design the fastest car using techniques they’ve learned from chemical engineering courses.

The Chem-E-Car competition races cars which are only powered by chemical reactions. The goal is to come up with an elegant solution – you can’t simply jettison matter out the back as the method of locomotion. In particular, the rules don’t allow the use of liquid or obnoxious odor discharge, commercial batteries, brakes, or electrical/mechanical timing devices. However, this doesn’t mean that electronics are absent from these designs. Many teams must gather data in order to design a control system to improve the performance of their car.

Students have to build a power system, stopping mechanism, circuitry, and mechanical assembly for the body of the car, all to fit in a size constraint not much bigger than a shoebox. The competition primarily judges the accuracy of the chemical reaction for stopping the car more so than speed or power. Given that the load the car must carry is typically unknown until the day of the competition, this is a significant challenge, allowing teams to find a way to design a flexible reaction that can accommodate a range of loads and distances.

For example, this 2015 entry from the Rice University team (PDF) uses a fuel cell for locomotion and an iodine clock reaction as a timer for braking. The fuel cell powers an Arduino which monitors a light-dependent resistor. In between the LED and that LDR, the clock reaction turns opaque at a predictable time and triggers the motors to stop turning.

While many schools choose not to disclose their designs in order to gain a competitive edge, we applaud the teams who have shared the story of their builds. Kudos to the Rice team mentioned above, to the 2014 Rutger’s team whose white paper outlines the construction of aluminum air batteries worthy of Walter White, to the car from the Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia powered by a thermoelectric generator (PDF), the UC Berkeley team for outlining numerous approaches to developing their power system, and the two Ohio State team’s entries seen winning the regional competition in the video below.

If you were on a team that compete the the Chem-E-Car, we want to hear about it!

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/a-car-that-runs-on-homemade-chemical-reactions/

[Thomas Sanladerer] has a filament-based 3D printer and a resin one. Can the two types of raw material combine to make something better? [Thomas] did some experiments using some magnets to suspend the parts and a hot air soldering gun to heat things up.

The trick turns out to be cutting the resin with alcohol. Of course, you also need to use a UV light for curing.

The parts looked pretty good, although he did get different results depending on a few factors. To see how it would work on a practical part, he took a very large printed alien egg. The problem is, the egg won’t fit in the curing station. A few minutes with a heat sink, a drill press, and an LED module was all it took to build a handheld UV curing light.

The good news is you don’t need a resin printer to take advantage of the process — just the resin. He points out, too, that if you had parts that were important to keep dimensions because they mate with another part, you could easily mask the part to keep the resin away from those areas.

Looking for other handy tricks to pull off with that 3D printer that just landed in your lap? One of my favorites has always been breaking complex prints down into more manageable chunks.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/finishing-fdm-prints-with-sls-resin/

Chuck Peddle, the patriarch of the 6502 microprocessor, died recently. Most people don’t know the effect that he and his team of engineers had on their lives. We often take the world of microprocessor for granted as a commonplace component in computation device, yet there was a time when there were just processors, and they were the size of whole printed circuit boards.

Chuck had the wild idea while working at Motorola that they could shrink the expensive processor board down to an integrated circuit, a chip, and that it would cost much less, tens of dollars instead of ten thousand plus. To hear Chuck talk about it, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the part of Motorola that made their living selling $14,000 processor boards and to knock off all of the noise about a $25 alternative.

In Chuck’s mind this was permission to take his idea, and the engineering team, elsewhere. Chuck and his team started MOS Technologies in the 1970’s in Norristown PA, and re-purposed their work on the Motorola 6800 to become the MOS 6502. Lawsuits followed.

If you asked Chuck about his contribution he would dismiss the claim that he was the father of the KIM-1 single board microcomputer of the early era, “Look at the keyboard, you can tell that was done by someone on the calculator side of things” I believe I heard him say.

When asked about the 6502, his reply was that he was more proud of the peripherals, the Input/Output (I/O) chips that supported a microprocessor. These support chips made it possible for a user to interact with the microprocessor and his reply was something along the lines of the fact that you couldn’t have a terminal or cash register system unless there was a way to read the user’s keys and display something back.

The story of the venerable 6502 is one of those that we will never know just how much influence it had on people’s computing experience, even today. You may have not played an Atari game yourself, but the chances are good that the architect/designer/programmer of your computer did. The designer of the game Minecraft started on a Commodore C128, a 6502 based system as was its famous predecessor the C64, and if you have ever seen a TV show about the 1980’s they inevitably show an Apple computer, based on the 6502.

Chuck and crew were gone by the time I got to Commodore, though I was officially hired by MOS first. We sat in their same chairs in their same offices and could feel their presence, I used to joke about a still warm cigar in the ashtray or spotting Peddle’s unicorn down the hall, a reference to the wizard-like aura we attributed to the early guys. I also used to call the early team the “Motorola 5”, in tribute to their “on the run” status from Motorola, though there may have actually been 6 of them.

In the video below, Jeri Ellsworth and Bil Herd ask Chuck Peddle if he is really an Evil Genius bent on world destruction.

I have seen the original 6502 schematic, it was as close to a religious experience as I have felt, it seemed to me that the lights dimmed and thought I could smell incense and hear chanting as the schematic was pulled from the lowest drawer… apparently early schematics were printed on parchment such was the condition of the old hand drawn schematic. My friend Benny, father of many a disk drive that you may never have heard of, brushed at something written lightly on one of the pad symbols and then laughed when he read what had been penciled in. What was written was in a sense a tribute to Chuck on a pin that he had lobbied for specifically to be included in the 6502, the Set Overflow (SO) pin, the pad had been renamed CPS for the Chuck Peddle Special pin.

To Chuck Peddle, one of the fathers of the modern processor AND the chips that made it usable: 1937-2019

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/honoring-chuck-peddle-father-of-the-6502-and-the-chips-that-went-with-it/

[Robson Couto] started to get interested in musical projects and as a side effect created downloadable code with simple notation for a good variety of themes, songs, and melodies. They are all for the Arduino and use only the built-in tone() function, but don’t let that distract you. If you look past that, you’ll see that each sketch is a melody that consists of single notes and durations; easily adapted to other purposes or simply used as-is. After all, [Robson] wanted the source of each tune to be easily understood, easily modified, and to have no external dependencies.

All that may sound a bit like MIDI, but MIDI has much more in common with hardware events than music notation because it includes (among other things) note starts and note ends as separate elements. Converting MIDI into a more usable format was a big part of a project that fed Bach music to a neural network and got surprisingly good results.

When doing music projects, sometimes having a recognizable melody represented very simply as notes and durations with only one note at a time can be an awfully handy resource, and you can find them on GitHub. There’s a brief video of the Tetris theme (actual name: Korobeiniki) being played after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/need-hackable-melodies-heres-the-tetris-theme-and-more/