Prior to the development of CD-quality audio hardware in the mid-1990s, home computers and consoles typically made do with synthesized music. Due to the storage and RAM limitations of the time, there weren’t a whole lot of other practical options. If you’re willing to ignore practicality, however, you can do some wonderful things – such as playing high-quality audio on a Commodore 64!

The project is the work of [Antonia Savona], who set out to play hi-fi audio on a Commodore 64 using only period-correct hardware. That means no 16MB RAM expansions, and no crazy high-capacity carts. The largest carts of the era were just 1MB, as produced by Ocean, and [Antonia] intended to cram in a full 90 seconds of music.

Targeting a sample rate of 48 KHz with 8-bit samples would mean the cartridge could only fit 20 seconds of raw audio into its 1MB of storage. This wasn’t good enough, so the audio would have to be compressed, with the target being a 4:1 ratio to reach the 90 second goal. With the C64’s CPU running at just 1MHz, there are just 21 clock cycles to deal with each sample when playing at 48 KHz.

Obviously, [Antonia] had set quite the challenge, and some masterful assembly coding was used to get the job done. The final result has the audio sounding impressively good, given that it’s being pumped out by a 6502 that is surely sweating to get the job done.

We love a good C64 hack around these parts, and it’s now even possible to build a new one from scratch if that’s your particular itch. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/hifi-audio-on-the-commodore-64-48khz-yo/

The LVL1 Hackerspace in Louisville hosted a hackathon for useless and impractical devices a couple of years ago and this makeshift Duh-Vinci Surgical Robot was one of the “successful” results. While it’s not necessarily a project that should ever be used for its intended purpose, its miniature setup is certainly an interesting one.

The project builds on top of the MeArm Open Source Robot and a camera controlled by a Blynk board. Servos are wired into the base of each of the robotic arms for freedom in rotating. A separate microcontroller is used for the motor controllers for the arms and for the camera, partially due to the current draw for the camera power supply. The remote control system runs on an Android tablet and is used to control each of the arms.

The ESP32-Cam supplied video input is configured as a RTSP stream. As for the operation, while the movements are jerky and the range of dexterity limited, the robot is technically able to handle the sharps. Its final setup looks a bit like a deranged game of Hungry Hungry Hippos meets Operation and definitely not something to be making its way to surgical tables anytime soon.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/dont-diy-this-surgical-robot-at-home/

Don’t you just hate it when dev boards have some annoying little quirk that makes them harder to use than they should be? Take the ESP32-CAM, a board that started appearing on the market in early 2019. On paper, the thing is amazing: an ESP32 with support for a camera and an SD card, all for less than $10. The trouble is that programming it can be a bit of a pain, requiring extra equipment and a spare finger.

Not being one to take such challenges lying down, [Bitluni] has come up with a nice programming board for the ESP32-CAM that you might want to check out. The problem stems from the lack of a USB port on the ESP32-CAM. That design decision leaves users in need of a USB-to-serial adapter that has to be wired to the GPIO pins of the camera board so that programs can be uploaded from the Arduino IDE when the reset button is pressed. None of that is terribly complex, but it is inconvenient. His solution is called cam-prog, and it takes care of not only the USB conversion but also resetting the board. It does that by simply power cycling the camera, allowing sketches to be uploaded via USB. It looks to be a pretty handy board, which will be available on his Tindie store.

To demonstrate the add-on, he programmed his ESP32-CAM and connected it to his enormous ping pong ball video wall. The video quality is about what you’d expect from a 1,200 pixel display at 40 mm per pixel, but it’s still pretty smooth – smooth enough to make his interpretive dance moves in the last few minutes of the video pretty interesting.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/add-on-board-makes-esp32-camera-board-easier-to-program/

Among amateur radio enthusiasts, there’s a subset of users who climb mountainous areas to use their gear from elevated positions. Anyone looking to take part in what’s known as Summits on the Air (SOTA) will obviously want to keep their equipment as light and small as possible. For [Stuart Thomas], that meant a collapsible yagi antenna he could easily pack away.

But one day he wondered why he was carrying around a separate antenna boom when his aluminum hiking pole would make a perfectly good substitute. All he had to do was figure out a way to mount the elements to the pole in a way that could be easily assembled in the field. He initially tried to use the sort of insulated electrical clamps used to hold down conduit, but he found they weren’t quite what he was after.

[Stuart] eventually ended up designing and 3D printing his own element mounts that use an M3 bolt to tightly clamp onto the hiking pole, preventing them from twisting while still being very lightweight and easy to adjust. To further reduce the packed size of the antenna, he cut each element in half with a pipe cutter and flared the ends slightly so he could reassemble them on location with inserts.

Even if you aren’t the type of person who owns hiking poles, let alone climbs mountains for fun, there’s still plenty of interesting applications for a lightweight yagi antenna. We’ve seen custom yagis built out of carbon fiber before and of course cobbling one together out of PVC and tape measures is a classic hack, but we think the solution [Stuart] has come up with strikes a nice balance between the extremes.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/hiking-pole-turned-lightweight-yagi-antenna/

Over the years, we’ve seen a number of projects that can blink an LED or otherwise notify you when the International Space Station is overhead. It’s a neat trick that brings space a little closer to home, but not exactly a groundbreaking achievement in 2020. That said, we think this version built by [Lance] deserves some special recognition for the unbearably adorable miniature ISS he designed it around.

Especially once you realize that its tiny little solar panels are actually functional. Well, more or less. [Lance] says conditions have to be pretty ideal for the panels to actually charge up the internal battery, so there’s the option to top things off with a USB cable if need be. To try and reduce power consumption as much as possible, he uses some pretty aggressive power saving tricks which are interesting in their own right.

As the ISS silently passes over your head several times per day, the notifier can’t spend too much time sleeping on the job. The Particle Photon needs to wake up regularly to pull down the time of the next pass given the current geographical position, then go back to sleep until right before showtime. When the Station is nearby, it blinks an Adafruit Smart NeoPixel positioned under a small 3D printed model of the Earth, and finally goes back to sleep until the process starts over.

If you’re looking for something a little less complicated, this two dimensional representation of the Space Station might be more your speed. Then again, an even more complicated take on the idea using lasers sounds pretty good too.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/mini-space-station-keeps-tabs-on-the-real-one/

After over a decade of laptop use, I made the move a couple of months ago back to a desktop computer. An ex-corporate compact PC and a large widescreen monitor on a stand, and alongside them a proper mouse and my trusty IBM Model M that has served me for decades. At a stroke, the ergonomics of my workspace changed for the better, as I no longer have to bend slightly to see the screen.

The previous desktop PC was from an earlier time. I think it had whatever the AMD competitor to a Pentium 4 was, and if I recall correctly, its 512 MB of memory was considered to be quite something. On the back it had an entirely different set of sockets to my new one, a brace of serial ports, a SCSI port, and a parallel printer port. Inside the case, its various drives were served by a set of ribbon cables. It even boasted a floppy drive. By contrast the cabling on its successor is a lot lighter, with much less bulky connectors. A few USB plugs and a network cable, and SATA for its disk drive. The days of bulky multiway interconnects are behind us, and probably most of us are heaving a sigh of relief.

You Might Need That Cable One Day!

The trouble with multiway cables is that they were usually quite expensive in their day, so I still ascribe a bit of value to them. Thus even when my last SCSI drive or VGA monitor has shuffled off this mortal coil I still hang on to the cables, y’know, just in case. There is a bulging box of them lurking on a shelf somewhere, or if you are in my makerspace in Milton Keynes, a bunch of bulging boxes. Before I have a clearout, let’s take a closer look at these artifacts, assuming you won’t be offended by taking the cutter to otherwise perfectly good cables. Scanning the pile, the most numerous come into four main groups. Parallel SCSI, VGA, parallel printer, and because this is being written in Europe, SCART multiway adiovisual cables.

As you’d expect from a parallel interface, a SCSI cable takes the form of a bundle of wires, but the surprise on taking a peek inside the plug is that there is neither any shielding between the wires, nor are they twisted pairs. The parallel printer cable has a very similar construction: it was simply an 8-bit port on the host computer.  VGA and SCART cables, on the other hand, contain a selection of co-ax shielded conductors for the video signals and a few single wires for control signals.

It was on considering how a cable like these might be reused that it really dawned on me how much we have moved on from the era of multiway cable interfaces. USB now covers most desktop-type devices once served by parallel SCSI, parallel, and serial ports, and nearly all audiovisual connectivity is fast heading towards HDMI. These fast serial interfaces deliver much higher data rates with much less copper involved.

It seems everywhere I look then there is a huge stack of cables that have become effectively useless. Unlike other technological shifts, such as for example from vacuum tubes to transistors, their usefulness did not tail away alongside the new technology, so it’s not as though they’ve outlived their service life. Instead they instantly became e-waste just as their technologies peaked, and it’s there we can find the origins of their ascribed value. If you have a pile of SCSI cables somewhere, did you hang onto them because you felt you’d need them again some day?

Re-Use, Keep, Or Recycle?

So what’s to be done? Can they be used for another purpose? Who uses a 40-way bundle of wires or a bundle of not-very-good co-ax these days anyway? I’d be interested to hear your views in the comments.

Meanwhile  I’ve have a huge pile of cables to get rid of, and here’s the problem. There’s a value to the copper they contain but in most cases their insulation is PVC can be problematic to recycle and if inefficiently burned it can release toxic chemicals. Over the years there have been a series of scandals involving e-waste from develped countries exported to developing countries where it was burned in the open to extract the metals, but even though steps have been taken to end this practice it’s still a concern that cables be disposed of responsibly.

Here, my local government has centralised recycling facilities, and in turn passes sorted recycled material to specialised recycling companies. In the case of PVC-coated cables they are shredded to separate the copper from the plastic, and then the plastic is broken down to produce hydrocarbon feedstocks for the chemical industry.

In my hackerspace, we’re going to throw a work party to bring the cable pile down to manageable proportions. We’ve lived through the passing of an era without realising it, even though Brian Benchoff called it for Hackaday several years ago. Intevitably some years down the line we’ll find a SCSI peripheral and regret throwing out those SCSI cables, but given the space we’ll gain I think we’ll take the risk. The question is, will you?

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/living-at-the-close-of-the-multiway-era/

Readers of a certain age may fondly remember ASCII art emerging from line printers in a long-gone era of computing; for others, it’s just wonderfully retro. Well, when [Emily Velasco] found a vintage Kodak Diconix 150 inkjet at a local thrift store for $4, she knew what she had to do: turn it into a dedicated ASCII-art machine.

Dating to the mid-1980s, the diminutive printer she scored was an early example of consumer inkjet technology; with only 12 “jets,” it sported a resolution roughly equivalent to the dot-matrix impact printers of the day. [Emily] notes that this printer would have cost around $1000 in today’s money — this is from a time before printer companies started selling the printer itself as a loss leader to make revenue on the back end selling consumables. It seems you can’t escape the razor-and-blades model, though: [Emily] had to pay $16 for a new ink cartridge to revive the $4 printer.

With the new ink in place, and some tractor-feed paper acquired, [Emily] started work on the art generator. The concept is something that might have been sold on late-night TV ads: a “cartridge” you plug into your printer to make ASCII masterpieces. Starting with a stripped-down Centronics printer cable that matches the printer’s port, she added an Arduino nano to store and serve up the art. The user interface is foolproof: a single button press causes a random selection from one of ten ASCII images to be printed. The whole thing is ensconced within a slick 3D printed case.

One of the coolest aspects of this project is the lack of power supply. When she first hooked the Arduino to the printer’s parallel port, [Emily] noticed that it powered right up with no external supply, and in true hacker fashion, just ran with it. Upon reflection, it seems that power is being supplied by the printer status lines, Busy and/or Ack, through the input protection diodes of the Atmega328 on the nano.

We really like this project, and are more than a little bummed we tossed those old printers that were kicking around the Hackaday labs for years. If you still have yours, and would like turn out some rad ASCII art, the code for this project is up on GitHub.

We’re no strangers to [Emily]’s work, but if you aren’t familiar with it, check out her inspiring talk from the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. Meanwhile, don’t miss the excellent video about the ASCII art printer cartridge, after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/vintage-mini-inkjet-prints-on-demand-ascii-art/

You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different.

In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time.

Meet The BeOS

BeOS was, at the time, a foray into a new way of doing home computing. The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking, journaling filesystems and an uncluttered desktop design. In a way, it was forward-thinking enough that if you look at a screenshot of it today you’d swear it was just any other modern Linux environment, ’90s graphical aesthetic aside. The main strength pushed by its developers was the multimedia support the platform offered: not only was the operating system designed in such a way that audiovisual formats were easy to work with, but also the hardware itself was built with a variety of I/O ports to accommodate such work.

In a time when dual-core computers were still a distant dream, the very first BeBox prototype was already being developed as a dual-processor AT&T Hobbit system. The Hobbit was a short-lived RISC processor specifically designed for the C language. However, since AT&T stopped the production of the chip, Be Inc. quickly shifted its development to a PowerPC-based system instead, which would become the BeBox we know today.

The BeBox finally debuted in October 1995, sporting a dual-PowerPC architecture clocked at 66 MHz each, with 133 MHz models following a year later. To emphasize the innovation of having two distinct processor cores, the front of its creatively-shaped case had two stacks of LEDs called “Blinkenlights”, each one of them displaying the current load of each CPU. On top of that, it offered interfaces no other home computer at the time had as standard: two MIDI I/O ports, multiple line-level audio channels and a connector dubbed “Geekport”. This connector was an experimental electronic-development oriented port, featuring power pins, two bi-directional 8-bit lanes and D/A and A/D converters, doing its name rightful justice.

Coulda Been A Contender

In 1994, Apple’s System 7 was showing its age. The company invested efforts into the development of a successor, codenamed Copland, to be released as System 8. By 1996, after missed deadlines and dysfunctional management, the project was deemed unviable and was cancelled. Now on the lookout for outside sources for their next operating system, Apple showed interest in acquiring Be Inc., which was rapidly gaining notoriety as a company pioneering new desktop computing paradigms. The object-oriented BeOS did everything Apple wanted the new Mac OS to do, and more.

Unfortunately for the Be Inc. employees, Apple wasn’t so set on the deal. Gambling on a new technology, the company low-balled an offer of only $125 million USD, which Be executives refused. Later that year, Apple would announce that they were buying NeXT for over twice that amount ($425 million USD). Of course, that deal included Steve Jobs in the package, something Be Inc. couldn’t offer, and the rest is history.

With the lack of an acquisition, Be’s hardware was left in a state of commercial unviability; after only about 1800 units sold, the company was forced to shift its focus on the software rather than hardware. BeOS was then ported to the more commonplace x86 architecture to cope with this change, but sales continued to decline.

The company finally resorted to giving BeOS away for free and focusing on BeIA, a version of BeOS meant for use on internet appliances — but even that pivot wasn’t enough to save the project or the company. Be Inc. laid off the majority of its employees in 2001 and sold the company’s assets to Palm, Inc., who decided not to pursue the project further. Aside from the leak of the minor version update R5.1 “Dano”, official production on BeOS was shuttered for good.

Haiku Marches On

The commercial demise of BeOS did not spell an end to the core vision of the Be Inc. employees. Since then, a new open source project called Haiku was started from scratch, picking up from where BeOS left off. The first beta of this new operating system was released on September 2018, and nightly releases continue to update it. New features include a full package manager such as the ones commonly seen in Linux distributions, and support for more modern media formats.

The original experience of BeOS as it was presented two decades ago can still be recreated through emulators. Since this method uses the later x86 port of BeOS, you don’t quite get the whole bells and whistles the custom BeBox hardware could give you, but it’s still a partial glimpse into the future world of yesterday. Adafruit has written a guide that walks you through setting up BeOS R5 using VirtualBox, however, since I had no luck in getting it to work no matter what I did, I ended up writing my own guide using PCem instead in case that one doesn’t work for you either.

What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead? How would Mac OS X look today, would it still have its iconic (pun intended) dock? Or maybe the tendency for technology to have a point of convergence means that eventually everything would develop the same way regardless. There’s no way of knowing, but it’s always fun to take a trip down memory lane.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos-the-alternate-universes-mac-os-x/

Samsung may have the highest-end options for hardware if you want an Android smartphone, but that hasn’t stopped them from making some questionable decisions on the software they sometimes load on it. Often these phones come with “default” apps that can’t be removed through ordinary means, or can’t even be disabled, and the latest discovery related to pre-loaded software on Samsung phones seems to be of a pretty major security vulnerability.

This software in question is a “storage cleaner” in the “Device Care” section of the phone, which is supposed to handle file optimization and deletion. This particular application is made by a Chinese company called Qihoo 360 and can’t be removed from the phone without using ADB or having root. The company is known for exceptionally bad practices concerning virus scanning, and the software has been accused of sending all information about files on the phone to servers in China, which could then turn all of the data it has over to the Chinese government. This was all discovered through the use of packet capture and osint, which are discussed in the post.

These revelations came about recently on Reddit from [kchaxcer] who made the original claims. It seems to be fairly legitimate at this point as well, and another user named [GeorgePB] was able to provide a temporary solution/workaround in the comments on the original post. It’s an interesting problem that probably shouldn’t exist on any phone, let alone a flagship phone competing with various iPhones, but it does highlight some security concerns we should all have with our daily use devices when we can’t control the software on the hardware that we supposedly own. There are some alternatives though if you are interested in open-source phones.

Thanks to [kickaxe] for the tip!

Photo from Pang Kakit [CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/spyware-discovered-on-all-samsung-phones/

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, and you don’t come between an engineer and his coffee. And really, if all your office has for coffee is a big old BUNN that makes caffeinated trash, you don’t discourage your coworkers from the pursuit of a better brew.

[George] is over at his desk each day treating coffee like the science experiment it is: with a kettle, a Chemex, and a manual coffee grinder. Trouble is, the setup is attracting more and more attention, and [George]’s unpaid side gig as the office barista is starting to wear out his arm. He considered buying an electric grinder just long enough to laugh at the idea, and then went out to the workshop and built this beautifully over-engineered motorized mount for his manual grinder.

The only trouble with motorizing these hand grinders or even driving them with a drill is that many of them have a pentagonal shaft. But that problem was no match for [George] and his file. He soon had his linkage between the 100RPM motor and the grinder shaft and set about building the overly adequate frame.

The whole thing is gorgeous, but we particularly like the gas spring that holds the motor up out of the way while he pours in the beans. [George] probably ought to start a bean fund, if he hasn’t already. That kind of noise followed by the smell of coffee is bound to bring a few more fresh-ground converts into the fold. Grab a fresh cup and grind past the break to see this baby pulverize some beanage.

Not everyone goes for pour over coffee, but there are hacks to be done at all points on the coffee spectrum. Check out [Maya Posch]’s adventures in totally tweaking an espresso machine.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/engineering-overkill-motorizes-the-daily-grind/

If you don’t get enough driving in your real life, you can top it off with some virtual driving and even build yourself a cockpit. To this end [Noctiluxx] created a very nice 3D printable stick shifter you can build yourself.

The design is adapted for 3D printing from an older aluminium version by [Willynovi] over on the X-Simulator forums. Every version uses an off-the-shelf ball joint for the main pivot, below which is a guide plate with the desired shift pattern.  Each position has a microswitch, which can be connected to a USB encoder from eBay which acts as a HID. The position is held in the Y-axis position by a clever spring-loaded cam mechanism above the ball joint, while the X-position is held by the bottom guide plate. The gear knob can be either 3D printed or the real deal of your choice.

This design is the perfect example of the power of the internet and open source. The original aluminium design is almost a decade old, but has been built and modified by a number of people over the years to get us to the easy to build version we see today. [amstudio] created an excellent video tutorial  on how to built your own, see it after the break.

For more awesome cockpits check out this one to fly an actual (FPV) aircraft, and this dazzling array of 3D printable components for your own Garmin G1000 avionics glass cockpit.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/01/08/3d-printable-stick-shift-for-your-racing-simulator/