Since the recent launch of the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400, the global hardware community have taken to the new platform and are investigating its potential for hardware enhancements. On the back it has the same 40-pin expansion connector as its single-board siblings, but it’s horizontal rather than vertical, which means that all of the conventional HATs sit in a rather ungainly upright position.
One of the first Pi 400 HATs we’ve seen comes from [Patrick Van Oosterwijck], who has made a very neat 18650-based UPS add-on that is intended to eventually fit in the back of the machine in a similar way to the home computer cartridge peripherals of old. Unfortunately not all has gone according to plan, and in finding out why that is the case we learn something about the design of the 400, and maybe even take a chance to reflect on the Pi Foundation itself.
On the face of it the 400’s interface is the same as that of its single board computer stablemates, but something this project reveals is that its 5 V pins have a current limit of 1 A. This turns out to preclude the type of plug-in Pi UPS that sits on a HAT that we’re used to, in that 1 A through the 5 V pin is no longer enough to run the computer.
This effectively puts a stop to [Patrick]’s project, though he can repurpose it for a Pi 4 and its siblings once he’s dealt with a converter chip overheating problem. He does however make a complaint about the Pi Foundation’s slowness in releasing such data about their products, and given that long-time Pi-watchers will remember a few other blips in the supply of Pi hardware data he has a point. A quick check of the Raspberry Pi GitHub repository reveals nothing related to the Pi 400 at the time of writing, and though it shares much with its Pi 4 sibling it’s obvious that there are enough differences to warrant some extra information.
Hardware hackers may not be part of the core education focus of the Pi range, but a healthy, interested, and active hardware community that feels nurtured by its manufacturer remains key to the supply of interesting Pi-related products feeding into that market. We’d like to urge the Pi Foundation to never forget the hardware side of their ecosystem, and make hardware specification an integral part of every product launch on day one.
Skills challenges have become a fun way to facilitate friendly competition amongst anyone who appreciates a fine solder joint. If you’ve seen any Supercon / Remoticon coverage there’s surely been a mention of the infamous soldering skills challenge, where competitors test their mettle against surface mount components sized to be challenging but fair. What if there was a less friendly SMD challenge designed to make you hold your breath lest you blow the components away? Well now there is, the SMD Challenge Extreme Edition by friend-of-the-Hackaday and winner of the 2019 Supercon soldering challenge [Freddie].
When assembled the SMD Extreme Edition uses a 555 timer and a 74HC4017 decade counter to light a ring of 10 LEDs lights around its perimeter, powered by a coin cell. However the Extreme Edition deviates from the typical SMD Challenge format. Instead of ramping up in difficulty with ever-shrinking components, the Extreme Edition only has one size: torturous. See those gray blobs in the title image? Those are grains of rice.
The Extreme Edition’s 0201-sized LEDs aren’t the absolute smallest components around, but to minimize enjoyment all passives are 01005. (Check out the SMD Challange Misery Edition for even 01005 LED action.)
The Extreme Edition has other tricks up its sleeve, too. That 555 may be venerable in age, but this version is in an iron-frustrating 1.41 x 1.43 mm BGA package, which pairs nicely with that decade counter in 2.5 mm x 3.5 mm QFN.
Despite the wordwide pandemic locking down travel and conferences, a fewbravechallengers have already taken up their iron and succeeded at Extreme SMD. Want to see it in action? Check out the original Tweets after the break.
Well that was a lot of fun! took about 30 minutes to solder. Didn't have a small enough banana, so rice for scale pic.twitter.com/ifCVVgYczB
For administering many computers at once, an IP KVM is an invaluable piece of equipment that makes it possible to get the job done over the network without having to haul a keyboard, monitor, and mouse around to each computer. The only downside is that they can get pricey, unless of course you can roll one out based on the Raspberry Pi and the PiKVM image for little more than the cost of the Pi itself.
The video linked below shows how to set all of this up, which involves flashing the image and then setting up the necessary hardware. The build shows an option for using HDMI over USB, but another option using the CSI bus would allow for control over options like video resolution and color that a USB HDMI dongle doesn’t allow for. It also makes it possible to restart the computer and do things like configure BIOS or boot from removable media, which is something that would be impossible with a remote desktop solution like VNC.
The creator of PiKVM was mentioned in a previous post about the creation of the CSI bus capture card, and a Pi hat based on this build will be available soon which would include options for ATX controls as well. Right now, though, it’s possible to build all of this on your own without the hat, and is part of what makes the Pi-KVM impressive, as well as its very low cost.
One of the hard things about electronics is that you can’t really see the working parts without some sort of tool. If you work on car engines, fashion swords, or sculpt clay, you can see with your unaided eye what’s going on. Electronic components are just abstract pieces and the real action requires a meter or oscilloscope to understand. Maybe that’s what [José] was thinking of when he built a-radio. This “humble experiment” pipes a scan from a software-defined radio into VR goggles, which can be as simple as a smartphone and some cardboard glasses.
The resulting image shows you what the radio spectrum looks like. Granted, so will a spectrum analyzer, but perhaps the immersion will provide a different kind of insight into radio frequency analysis.
[José] admits the project is the result of a “boring morning” so there is probably some room for improvement. We wondered if an array of antennas could give you head tracking so you could see what direction a signal was coming from, or — at least — where it was strongest.
Is this really better than just staring at a waterfall display? Perhaps not. But it is still a novel approach and we have to wonder if it couldn’t be used for other things? Maybe a VR circuit simulator or visualizing antenna patterns, for example.
A spectrum analyzer used to be a big purchase, but not anymore. For that matter, VR headgear used to be a big deal, too.
These days, Youtube is more competitive than ever. Creators put out videos of wildly expensive, complex projects with equally pricy camera gear. [Do It Whenever?] wanted to join the arms race, building his own camera rig for smooth, swooping shots.
The rig consists of a series of 3D printed axes all joined together into a 6-axis motion rig. Additionally, actuators attached to the lens of the camera allow zoom and focus to be be controlled programmatically too. An Arduino runs the show, interpreting G-code and running the various axes, with a Raspberry Pi acting as a gateway to allow the rig to be commanded from PCs or smartphones.
Currently, control is largely manual, by entering G-code commands to move the rig in various ways. The rig can also have its motors temporarily disengaged by a button, allowing the camera to be aimed by hand, before holding the position. In this way, it acts as a highly versatile tripod. Future plans involve more automation if suitable open-source software can be found.
It’s an impressive rig, even if it hasn’t quite found the perfect software to fully exploit its capabilities yet. We’ve seen similar builds before, too. Video after the break.
The Microlab 6C are a pretty nice pair of speakers, but [Michał Słomkowski] wasn’t too thrilled with the 8 watts they consume when on standby. The easy fix is to just unplug them when they aren’t in use, but unfortunately the digital controls on the front panel mean he’s got to turn them on, select the correct input, and turn the volume up to the appropriate level every time they’re plugged back in. Surely there must be a better way.
His solution was to use a Digispark to fire off the appropriate IR remote codes so they’d automatically be put back into a usable configuration. But rather than putting an IR LED on one of the GPIO pins, he simply spliced it into the wire leading back from the speaker’s IR receiver. All his code needs to do is generate the appropriate pulses on the line, and the speaker’s electronics think its a signal coming in from the remote.
Distinctive patterns on the IR sensor wires.
Power for the Digispark is pulled from the speaker itself, so it turns on once [Michał] plugs them back in. The code waits five seconds to make sure the hardware has had time to start up, then proceeds with the “Power On”, “Change Input”, and “Volume Up” commands with a few seconds in between each for good measure.
Not only was it easier to skip the IR and inject the signals directly, but it also made for a cleaner installation. Since the microcontroller doesn’t need line of sight to the IR receiver, [Michał] was able to hide it inside the speaker’s enclosure. From the outside, the modification is completely invisible.
Are you running out of ways to entertain yourself and your family? If you’ve read all the books and watched all the movies, it might be time to explore the psychic abilities of silicon. [Hari Wiguna] has just the trick to keep them guessing for a good long time.
This trick doesn’t take much, just a couple of Arduinos, some momentary buttons, a number pad, and a large helping of math. As you can see in the demo after the break, there is nothing connecting the two, not even 802.11(n). On the randomizer Arduino, [Hari] generates random numbers with the push of a button until the audience sees one they like. Then [Hari] locks in the number with the other button.
What happens next is key: the randomizer generates another random number, but uses it as a hint to set a sentinel digit. The randomizer Arduino subtracts the larger of the two digits in the number from nine and stores the result as the flag. When the next number comes up that has the flag digit in the correct place, the number after that will be the random number chosen at the beginning.
The psychic Arduino’s secret is that it knows the first guess it receives is special. It does the same sentinel digit math as the randomizer, so when the guesser enters the guess with the sentinel digit, it knows the next number entered is the winner. Clear as mud? Check out the second video below where [Hari] explains the trick, a new take on a magic classic.
Have you ever pulled a piece of electronics from the trash that looked like nothing was wrong with it, only to take it home and find out it really is dead? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we already know the answer. Trash picking is an honored hacker tradition, and we all know it’s a gamble every time you pull something from the curb. But when the Samsung Galaxy Tab S that [Everett] pulled from the e-waste bin wouldn’t take a charge, he decided to crack it open and see if it was really beyond repair.
The first step was using a USB power meter to see if the tablet was actually pulling any current when plugged in. With just 10 mA on the line, [Everett] knew the device wasn’t even attempting to charge itself. So his next step was to pull the battery and charge it from a bench supply. This got the tablet to wake up, and as far as he could tell, everything else worked as expected. It seemed like the only issue was a blown charging circuit.
Where we’re going, we don’t need ribbon cables.
Now at this point, [Everett] could have just gone online and bought a new motherboard for the tablet and called it a day. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, he wired up a simple charging circuit using a TP4056 IC on a scrap of flexible PCB and mounted it to a square of Kapton tape. He then used 34 AWG magnet wire to connect it between the tablet’s USB port and the battery, bypassing the tablet’s electronics entirely.
The fix worked, but there was a slight problem. Since the TP4056 only goes up to 4.2 V and the battery maxes out at 4.35 V, [Everett] says his hacked charger can only bring the tablet up to 92% capacity according to Android. But considering the alternative, we think its more than a worthy trade-off.
Have you ever pulled a piece of electronics from the trash that looked like nothing was wrong with it, only to take it home and find out it really is dead? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we already know the answer. Trash picking is an honored hacker tradition, and we all know it’s a gamble every time you pull something from the curb. But when the Samsung Galaxy Tab S that [Everett] pulled from the e-waste bin wouldn’t take a charge, he decided to crack it open and see if it was really beyond repair.
The first step was using a USB power meter to see if the tablet was actually pulling any current when plugged in. With just 10 mA on the line, [Everett] knew the device wasn’t even attempting to charge itself. So his next step was to pull the battery and charge it from a bench supply. This got the tablet to wake up, and as far as he could tell, everything else worked as expected. It seemed like the only issue was a blown charging circuit.
Where we’re going, we don’t need ribbon cables.
Now at this point, [Everett] could have just gone online and bought a new motherboard for the tablet and called it a day. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, he wired up a simple charging circuit using a TP4056 IC on a scrap of flexible PCB and mounted it to a square of Kapton tape. He then used 34 AWG magnet wire to connect it between the tablet’s USB port and the battery, bypassing the tablet’s electronics entirely.
The fix worked, but there was a slight problem. Since the TP4056 only goes up to 4.2 V and the battery maxes out at 4.35 V, [Everett] says his hacked charger can only bring the tablet up to 92% capacity according to Android. But considering the alternative, we think its more than a worthy trade-off.
Have you ever pulled a piece of electronics from the trash that looked like nothing was wrong with it, only to take it home and find out it really is dead? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we already know the answer. Trash picking is an honored hacker tradition, and we all know it’s a gamble every time you pull something from the curb. But when the Samsung Galaxy Tab S that [Everett] pulled from the e-waste bin wouldn’t take a charge, he decided to crack it open and see if it was really beyond repair.
The first step was using a USB power meter to see if the tablet was actually pulling any current when plugged in. With just 10 mA on the line, [Everett] knew the device wasn’t even attempting to charge itself. So his next step was to pull the battery and charge it from a bench supply. This got the tablet to wake up, and as far as he could tell, everything else worked as expected. It seemed like the only issue was a blown charging circuit.
Where we’re going, we don’t need ribbon cables.
Now at this point, [Everett] could have just gone online and bought a new motherboard for the tablet and called it a day. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, he wired up a simple charging circuit using a TP4056 IC on a scrap of flexible PCB and mounted it to a square of Kapton tape. He then used 34 AWG magnet wire to connect it between the tablet’s USB port and the battery, bypassing the tablet’s electronics entirely.
The fix worked, but there was a slight problem. Since the TP4056 only goes up to 4.2 V and the battery maxes out at 4.35 V, [Everett] says his hacked charger can only bring the tablet up to 92% capacity according to Android. But considering the alternative, we think its more than a worthy trade-off.
We see a lot of discrete-logic computer builds these days, and we love them all. But after a while, they kind of all blend in with each other. So what’s the discrete logic aficionado to do if they want to stand out from the pack? Perhaps this CPU-less computer with a single NOR-gate instead of an arithmetic-logic unit is enough of a hacker flex? We certainly think so.
We must admit that when we first saw [Dennis Kuschel]’s “MyNor” we thought all the logic would be emulated by discrete NOR gates, which of course can be wired up in various combinations to produce every other logic gate. And while that would be really cool, [Dennis] chose another path. Sitting in the middle of the very nicely designed PCB is a small outcropping, a pair of discrete transistors and a single resistor. These form the NOR gate that is used, along with MyNor’s microcode, to perform all the operations normally done by the ALU.
While making the MyNor very slow, this has the advantage of not needing 74-series chips that are no longer manufactured, like the 74LS181 ALU. It may be slow, but as seen in the video below, with the help of a couple of add-on cards of similar architecture, it still manages to play Minesweeper and Tetris and acts as a decent calculator.
We really like the look of this build, and we congratulate [Dennis] on pulling it off. He has open-sourced everything, so feel free to build your own. Or, check out some of the other CPU-less computers we’ve featured: there’s the Gigatron, the Dis-Integrated 6502, or the jumper-wire jungle of this 8-bit CPU-less machine.
[Niklas Roy] rolled his own photo diary, because he found the core functionality of something like instagram attractive, but didn’t want the social network baggage that it came with. His simple system is called my own insta 😉 and it consists of some javascript and PHP to create a nice progressive web app photo diary and backend that can be accessed just fine from a mobile device. It is available on GitHub for anyone interested in having their own.
This project came up because [Niklas] sometimes found himself working on small projects or experiments that aren’t destined for proper documentation, but nevertheless could benefit from being shared as a photo with a short description. This dovetails with what many social networks offer, except that those platforms also come with other aspects [Niklas] doesn’t particularly want. His online photo diary solves this by having a simple back end with which he can upload, sort, and caption photos in an easy way even from a mobile device.
First-timers playing with 8-bit micros such as the AVR and PIC will at some point in their lives, find themselves locked out of their MCUs. This is usually attributed to badly configured fuses that disable certain IO functions rending the device unprogrammable via conventional ICSP methods. [Uri Shaked] shares his story of how his ATtiny85 got locked and became the subject of a lengthy investigation into fuse bit configurations.
[Uri]’s journey started when he accidentally left some pins of the device connected to a second board while he was flashing the firmware. He quickly researched online for a solution for the problem and it turns out, there is a page[External Link] on a number of recipes on how to resolve the issue. As it turns out, his problem was not so straight-forward and warranted more digging. [Uri] ended setting up a High Voltage Programming serial programming setup and then probing the communications. He discovered that the chip refused to reset its fuses and would reject attempts to set fuses.
Further investigation of the fuse bits and reading them proved useful in understanding that the memory protection features were preventing alteration of the device. The quick-fix was to erase the attiny and things were back to normal thereafter. [Uri] details his pursuit of reading and comparing fuse bits from the impacted chip against a fresh device which is where he makes the discovery. The write-up is a case study in the investigation into the Idiosyncrasies of device programming and will be a great resource for many and reduce hair loss(self pulled hair in frustration) for some.
Prepare for the 2020 school year with our back-to-school tips. From establishing sleeping patterns to practising brain exercises, there are plenty of strategies you can use to ensure that your children are ready for the new school year. With proper preparation, you can decrease the stress that’s associated with this busy period. Find bags, Tupperware, toys, books, and more on Junk Mail.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Get all the school supplies ready
From
stationery to books, bags, and lunch boxes, you need to make sure that you
check everything off the school supplies list before your children go back to school,
preferably as soon as possible.
Make
sure you know the rules about book covering before you buy covers/paper.
Schools usually give out papers to stick onto their books to ensure everyone’s
books look the same. Getting this sorted will relieve stress and get your kids
excited about the new school year.
Additional tips:
Before
you buy stuff you don’t actually need, do proper “stocktake” of the school
supplies you have left from last year.
Don’t
send your kids to school with their newest and best supplies during the first
week.
You
can cut erasers in half or in 3 pieces, so if your child loses it, it’s not a
train smash.
Mark
absolutely everything. You can engrave (if possible) or use a permanent marker.
Just make sure the markings are legible and unique to your child.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Buying school clothes
When
buying school uniforms, make sure to take your children with you and let them
fit everything before you buy it. It’s also advisable to buy clothes a tiny bit
bigger to ensure they don’t grow out of their uniforms too quickly. You want to
get the most value for money.
Should
your children’s school uniforms no longer fit, you can either donate them to
the school, resell them to other parents you know or even sell them on Junk
Mail.
Photo Source – www.freepik.com
Set up a dedicated “homework station”
Create
a space with your child where they can do their homework or school projects.
This space needs to be big enough, away from distractions, and comfortable for
your children.
Photo Source – www.freepik.com
Establish sleep patterns
The
holidays are likely to disrupt your family’s usual routine, including the kids’
sleeping patterns. Prepare for the new school year by re-establishing their
regular bedtime routine at least a week before the holidays end. While your
children may protest at first, be consistent in getting them back into a
routine. A good night’s sleep plays a vital role in your children’s emotional
wellbeing as well as their academic performance.
Photo Source – www.freepik.com
Introduce healthy eating
Disruptions
to your schedule during the holidays mean you’re unlikely to maintain regular mealtimes.
The abundance of sweets and chocolates that are part of the festive season
celebrations also disrupt healthy eating patterns. Start with a nutritious
eating plan and regular mealtimes as soon as you can. Proper nutrition helps
your children have enough energy to get through the school day. It also helps
your children focus in the classroom while promoting their physical and
emotional wellbeing.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Re-establish rules about screen time
Although
screen time can be fun and educational for your kids, too much of it during the
week might affect their routines negatively and take away from much-needed
family time. Rules about screen time will also help when your kids have to do
homework or study for a test. Make sure you explain the rules about screen time
and try to re-enforce those rules a week before your kids go back to school.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Practice effective communication
Make
sure that you keep the communication lines open between you and your children
so that they know that they can approach you with any of their fears or
concerns. Have a family meeting before the new school year starts so that your
children have an opportunity to express how they’re feeling. You can also use
this time to provide them with information about any changes that are taking
place and to answer their questions. This is particularly important if your
child is starting at a new school.
Photo Source – www.freepik.com
Don’t stress
The back-to-school period can
invoke anxiety in parents and children alike. However, with proper preparation,
you can ease into the new school year with minimal stress. Returning to school
requires some adjustments so you can expect to face a few challenges during the
first few weeks of term. Use your support system and take care of yourself so
that you can remain calm during this hectic period. When you’re relaxed and
supportive, your children are more likely to be calm too.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Start with brain exercises
After
a long holiday, your children’s concentration levels will have decreased.
Gently prepare them for the new school year by practising a few brain exercises
in the week before the term starts. You can ask your children to read to you
each day as well as doing a few fun math exercises together. Reading your
children a bedtime story is a great opportunity to spend quality time with
them. Ask them a few questions about the story as you go along to improve their
comprehension capabilities.
You
can also take your children on fun, but educational outings, such as visiting
museums, the zoo, animal rescue centres or even taking them to pottery and
cooking classes.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Set goals
Goals
are an excellent way to stay motivated as the year progresses but it’s
important to avoid putting to pressure on your children. Excessive pressure can
damage your children’s self-esteem and it can also be detrimental to their
academic achievements. Allow your children to set their own goals and help them
to create steps on how they will reach their goals. Remind them that their
academic achievement is not a reflection of their self-worth and that there are
many other qualities that are also important, such as kindness, courage, and
empathy.
Photo Source – www.pixabay.com
Now that you’ve read our back-to-school tips, you can approach the new academic year with confidence. Visit Junk Mail today to find a wide variety of bags, Tupperware, toys, books, and much more.
For the casual breadboard experimenter with a microcontroller and a few peripherals, there’s little concern over interconnects as a set of jumper wires will suffice. But as any radio amateur will tell you though, at higher frequencies it’s a very different affair. [Ria Jairam N2RJ] has embarked upon a series of videos exploring co-axial cable and its various connectors, and her first offering features the humble UHF connector, sometimes known as the PL259. Though it’s one of the older choices and its design flaws mean that “UHF” is more of an aspiration for it than a reality, it remains a common connector at the lower end of the amateur radio frequency range.
She starts with a brief history of co-axial cable, before introducing the UHF connector. We’re the introduced to its major flaw, in that it doesn’t present a constant impedance. The resulting mismatch presents a significant problem to a transmitter, especially at higher frequencies. We’re then taken through the various different models of UHF connector, including those with honeycomb dielectric to minimize the mismatch, and the fancy expensive plugs with strain relief. Finally she takes us through the proper fitting of a PL259 plug, something that there’s a bit more to than most of us might think. Altogether it’s an interesting and informative watch from an engaging and knowledgeable host, and we look forward to more.
The rest of the media were reporting on an asteroid named 16 Psyche last month worth $10 quintillion. Oddly enough they reported in July 2019 and again in February 2018 that the same asteroid was worth $700 quintillion, so it seems the space rock market is similar to cryptocurrency in its wild speculation. Those numbers are ridiculous, but it had us thinking about the economies of space transportation, and what atoms are worth based on where they are. Let’s break down how gravity wells, distance, and arbitrage work to figure out how much of this $10-$700 quintillion we can leverage for ourselves.
The value assigned to everything has to do with where a thing is, AND how much someone needs that thing to be somewhere else. If they need it in a different place, someone must pay for the transportation of it.
In international (and interplanetary) trade, this is where Incoterms come in. These are the terms used to describe who pays for and has responsibility for the goods between where they are and where they need to be. In this case, all those materials are sitting on an asteroid, and someone has to pay for all the transport and insurance and duties. Note that on the asteroid these materials need to be mined and refined as well; they’re not just sitting in a box on some space dock. On the other end of the spectrum, order something from Amazon and it’s Amazon that takes care of everything until it’s dropped on your doorstep. The buyer is paying for shipping either way; it’s just a matter of whether that cost is built into the price or handled separately. Another important term is arbitrage, which is the practice of taking a thing from one market and selling it in a different market at a higher price. In this case the two markets are Earth and space.
Where did $10/$700 quintillion come from?
Here’s what we know:
The best mass estimate right now is (2.41±0.32)×1019 kg (source PDF).
10 quintillion is 1×1019 (yes, 1 quintillion is 1×1018, but the units work out better this way).
Estimates at the composition of the asteroid are metals, mostly iron and nickel, with about 10% being silicate rock with a sprinkling of other elements inside. This is from surface spectral analysis, as well as calculations of its density, but for all we know it could be filled with nougat and gold.
The current price of iron ore (on Earth) at the time of writing is $0.1235/kg.
The current price of nickel is $14.857/kg.
The current cost of putting a kilogram of material into low earth orbit on a Falcon 9 is roughly $2700.
The handy thing about these facts is that we can cancel out some units and pretend that there’s 2.4 kg of stuff and it’s worth $10. Subtract 10% from the silicate rock and you have 2.16 kg. If it were all iron, it’d be worth $.27. If it were all nickel it’d be worth $32.09. If it’s 50/50 then it’s $16. So the $10 quintillion is just a giant guess using current market prices of the metals that are likely present in the asteroid, and assuming the material is already on Earth. In fact, the author who came up with the number said exactly that.
To get $700 quintillion, consider the fact that the mass is already in space and that we want to keep it there. That means that each kilogram that’s already up there is worth $2700/kg in transportation costs and then we add the $10 quintillion in arbitrarily assigned value based on its worth on Earth, so the asteroid is worth $5,842 quintillion. Ok, I don’t know how they got $700 quintillion, but it’s a pointless clickbait number anyway.
Why Would We Even Want It Here?
An asteroid of 100km in diameter entering our atmosphere would completely sterilize Earth by imparting enough energy to boil the oceans. A mere 10 km rock could be an extinction level event. At a diameter of 200 km, we really don’t want all that mass crashing down on us, especially if it’s a particularly heavy metallic beast like 16 Psyche that won’t break up or burn up in the atmosphere. That would really hurt the market for iron or nickel. Even if it were broken into lots of pieces, anything larger than the size of a car crashing down without something to decelerate it is going to do considerable damage wherever it lands. That kind of risk, as well as the security threat of any country or organization controlling it, makes parking an asteroid in Earth’s orbit extremely unsettling. Besides that, there’s already a giant rock filled with iron in Earth’s orbit (3,474 km in diameter), and we’ve already landed on it before.
There’s a lot more iron and nickel here on Earth, and it’s readily available on all continents. Getting these ores from an asteroid and bringing them to Earth would be like getting your drinking water in a square bottle from a foreign island and flying it back to you when you have tap water nearby.
Current iron ore production worldwide is 2.6×109 kg/year. Nickel is less than 1% of that. At our current consumption rates of those materials, it would take us a mere 8.3 billion years to consume it all, during which the value of those ores would likely decline.
What Would It Take to Bring It Back?
My orbital mechanics are rusty, so this next bit might be off by a few orders of magnitude, but to move the asteroid from its current position to Earth’s orbit would require a Delta-V of about 10 km/s. E=1/2mv2, so 1.2x1019*100002 = 1.2x1027 joules, or 3.3x1020 kWh. This is, of course, ridiculous (a theme in this article). Maybe you could even hurl chunks of it backwards and trade mass for velocity. You wouldn’t want to move the whole thing at once, either; you’d probably mine a chunk at a time. And it would make the most sense to set up a refinery on the asteroid so that only the most valuable materials were shipped back. Assume, then, that you can set up a station on the asteroid that refines the material, bundles it up into a pretty package, and hurls it towards Earth.
Next, you’d need to be able to crash it down on Earth reasonably well enough to narrow its return to a few hundred mile radius, preferably in the middle of the ocean, so as not to destroy entire cities. It probably won’t float when it lands, so you’d have to have the equipment to go recover it before it sinks.
If the contents are just iron, you have to be able to do all of this for under $.1235/kg, or else you can’t compete with home-grown ores. Even if it’s palladium or platinum, you’ll probably barely turn a profit once you take into account getting all the mining and transportation equipment up there, getting the material back, and recovering it.
The way 16 Psyche could be useful to us is the fact that it’s already in space. If the future of humanity is in getting off the rock we’re quickly spoiling, then that means moving materials out of the gravity well of Earth or using resources that are already out there. Most asteroids are rock that is not very practical, but 16 Psyche has been identified as one that has a lot of the materials we like to use for building structures. If we sent the appropriate refining equipment to the asteroid, it could become a viable starting point for the construction of space vehicles. Then the $2700/kg could be spent on the materials like electronics and plastics and other raw supplies that can’t be sourced elsewhere, yielding a lower overall cost for the ship created in space. Going back to the arbitrage term, the market for iron already in space is very different from the market for iron on Earth; it would be a bad financial decision to try to sell the space iron on Earth. There are missions to visit this and other asteroids like it to figure out what exactly they are made of. If they are valuable materials for the construction of space habitats and vehicles, then it might make sense to mine them. But the likelihood is low that the material is plentiful on the asteroid and not on Earth and valuable enough on Earth that sourcing it off-world and bringing it back is the best option commercially.
Ultimately, the value of something is not just in the thing itself but also the cost to get it to where you want it. Putting $10 quintillion on an asteroid in deep space is completely meaningless because nobody wants all that material way out there right now, it would take billions of years to use it all, and it’s a plentiful material that’s readily available here on Earth already. But if that number is still interesting to you, I’ve got a local star putting out 3.846×1026 watts, which at $.12/kwh is about $4.6×1022 or $46 hextillion dollars an hour. All you have to do is build a Dyson sphere.
Getting into a big electronics project often involves the use of specialized tools, namely the use of some sort of soldering iron or other way to apply solder to often intricate, tiny, and heat-sensitive parts. While it’s best to learn to pick up this skill at some point, it’s not always necessary, even for big, complicated projects like [DerULF1]’s full 8-bit computer that he built entirely on breadboards.
For a fully featured 8-bit computer, this build goes deep into the details of how the computer works. The clock allows programs to be stepped through one cycle at a time, and even the memory can be individually accessed with a set of switches. There are plenty of other interesting features as well, such as using registers to access extra memory. It features an SPI port and PS/2 keyboard controller and also loads programs from an SD card.
The build was inspired by some of [Ben Eater]’s projects which famously focus on using logic gates and TTL chips to perform complex tasks, such as another breadboard computer which plays snake on a small display. It’s certainly a great way to learn about the inner function of computers, and better still that no soldering is required. But you may need a few extra breadboards.
If you’ve scrolled through the list of boot options offered on any PC’s BIOS, it reads like a history of storage technology. Up top we have the options to boot from disk, often a solid-state drive, then USB disk, optical drive, removable media, and down the bottom there’s usually an option to boot from the network. Practically no BIOS, however, has an option to boot a PC from a vinyl record — at least until now.
Clearly a project from the “Because why not?” school of hacking, [Jozef Bogin] came up with the twist to the normal booting process for an IBM-PC. As in the IBM-PC — a model 5150, with the putty-colored case, dual 5-1/4″ floppies, and one of those amazing monochrome displays with the green slow-decay phosphors. To pull off the trick, [Jozef] leverages the rarely used and little known cassette tape interface that PCs had back in the early days. This required building a new bootloader and burning it to ROM to make the PC listen to audio signals with its 8255 programmable peripheral interface chip.
Once the PC had the right bootloader, a 64k FreeDOS bootable disk image was recorded on vinyl. [Jozef] provides infuriatingly little detail about the process other than to mention that the audio was sent directly to the vinyl lathe; we’d have loved to learn more about that. Nonetheless, the resulting 10″ record, played back at 45 RPM with some equalization tweaks to adapt for the RIAA equalization curve of the preamp, boots the PC into FreeDOS just fine, probably in no more time than it would have taken to boot from floppy.
It’s may not be the first time we’ve seen software on vinyl, but it’s still a pretty cool hack. Want to try it yourself but lack a record-cutting lathe? Maybe laser-cutting your boot disc will work.
Thanks to [John] and a bunch of other folks who tipped us off on this one.
If you’ve scrolled through the list of boot options offered on any PC’s BIOS, it reads like a history of storage technology. Up top we have the options to boot from disk, often a solid-state drive, then USB disk, optical drive, removable media, and down the bottom there’s usually an option to boot from the network. Practically no BIOS, however, has an option to boot a PC from a vinyl record — at least until now.
Clearly a project from the “Because why not?” school of hacking, [Jozef Bogin] came up with the twist to the normal booting process for an IBM-PC. As in the IBM-PC — a model 5150, with the putty-colored case, dual 5-1/4″ floppies, and one of those amazing monochrome displays with the green slow-decay phosphors. To pull off the trick, [Jozef] leverages the rarely used and little known cassette tape interface that PCs had back in the early days. This required building a new bootloader and burning it to ROM to make the PC listen to audio signals with its 8255 programmable peripheral interface chip.
Once the PC had the right bootloader, a 64k FreeDOS bootable disk image was recorded on vinyl. [Jozef] provides infuriatingly little detail about the process other than to mention that the audio was sent directly to the vinyl lathe; we’d have loved to learn more about that. Nonetheless, the resulting 10″ record, played back at 45 RPM with some equalization tweaks to adapt for the RIAA equalization curve of the preamp, boots the PC into FreeDOS just fine, probably in no more time than it would have taken to boot from floppy.
It’s may not be the first time we’ve seen software on vinyl, but it’s still a pretty cool hack. Want to try it yourself but lack a record-cutting lathe? Maybe laser-cutting your boot disc will work.
Thanks to [John] and a bunch of other folks who tipped us off on this one.
Among Us is a hit game of deception and intrigue. Those who have played it know the frustration of trying to complete some of the intentionally difficult tasks onboard the Skeld. [Zach Freedman] decided to recreate some of these in real life.
[Zach] built what are arguably the three most frustrating tasks from the game. There’s the excruciatingly slow upload/download station built out of an old Samsung tablet and an NFC tag, and the reactor start console created using a Raspberry Pi 3B, Teensy 3.2, and a custom mechanical keyboard. But perhaps most annoying of all is the infamous card reader. Built with another Teensy, it requires the user to swipe their ID card at just the right speed, except that speed is randomly generated for every swipe. Also, the machine fails 20% of good swipes just because. Perhaps what we love most is the way [Zach] recreated the classic VFD look by putting an OLED display behind bottle-green plastic and using a 14-segment font.
Remember DSRC? If the initialism doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry — Dedicated Short-Range Communications, a radio service intended to let cars in traffic talk to each other, never really caught on. Back in 1999, when the Federal Communications Commission set aside 75 MHz of spectrum in the 5.9-GHz band, it probably seemed like a good idea — after all, the flying cars of the future would surely need a way to communicate with each other. Only about 15,000 vehicles in the US have DSRC, and so the FCC decided to snatch back the whole 75-MHz slice and reallocate it. The lower 45 MHz will be tacked onto the existing unlicensed 5.8-MHz band where WiFi now lives, providing interesting opportunities in wireless networking. Fans of chatty cars need not fret, though — the upper 30 MHz block is being reallocated to a different Intelligent Transportation System Service called C-V2X, for Cellular Vehicle to Everything, which by its name alone is far cooler and therefore more likely to succeed.
NASA keeps dropping cool teasers of the Mars 2020 mission as the package containing the Perseverance rover hurtles across space on its way to a February rendezvous with the Red Planet. The latest: you can listen to the faint sounds the rover is making as it gets ready for its date with destiny. While we’ve heard sounds from Mars before — the InSight lander used its seismometer to record the Martian wind — Perseverance is the first Mars rover equipped with actual microphones. It’s pretty neat to hear the faint whirring of the rover’s thermal management system pump doing its thing in interplanetary space, and even cooler to think that we’ll soon hear what it sounds like to land on Mars.
Speaking of space, back at the beginning of 2020 — you know, a couple of million years ago — we kicked off the Hack Chat series by talking with Alberto Caballero about his “Habitable Exoplanets” project, a crowd-sourced search for “Earth 2.0”. We found it fascinating that amateur astronomers using off-the-shelf gear could detect the subtle signs of planets orbiting stars half a galaxy away. We’ve kept in touch with Alberto since then, and he recently tipped us off to his new SETI Project. Following the citizen-science model of the Habitable Exoplanets project, Alberto is looking to recruit amateur radio astronomers willing to turn their antennas in the direction of stars similar to the Sun, where it just might be possible for intelligent life to have formed. Check out the PDF summary of the project which includes the modest technical requirements for getting in on the SETI action.
A few months ago we reported that Boston Dynamics was finally finding customers with use cases that fit their flagship product, the “Big Dog” robot nicknamed Spot. The customer was Ford and the application involved periodic surveys of their enormous transmission plant, normally performed by engineers. At the same time, BP was training Spot for a far more dangerous job: oil rig inspections. Normally, operators on offshore oil platforms make the rounds several times a day to spot anything out of the ordinary: leaks, corrosion, or other situations that can pose a hazard to the platform and the people on it. After oil rig simulator training, Spot moved on to BP’s “Mad Dog” rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where it wanders about making sure everything’s copacetic. They’ve even trained Spot to read gauges and discern valve handle positions, and they’ve equipped the robot with sensors for methane to detect leaks.
And finally, how about a little high-voltage fun? Jay Bowles over at Plasma Channel just released a new video where he explores electrostatic levitation. We had Jay on for a Hack Chat not too long ago where we discussed his passion for plasma. The new video doesn’t have much plasma, but it does focus on how to use a 70-kV voltage multiplier to float scraps of tinfoil in the air. Jay even throws himself into the circuit at one point, levitating things with his bare hands. It seems like good fun, even if we wouldn’t recommend it as particularly safe.
Six years on from the emergence of the Espressif ESP8266 we might believe that the focus had shifted to the newer dual-core ESP32. But here comes a twist in the form of the newly-revealed ESP32-C3. It’s a WiFi SoC that despite its ESP32 name contains a RISC-V core in place of the Tensilica core in the ESP32s we know, and uses the ESP8266 pin-out rather than that of its newer sibling. There’s relatively little information about it at the time of writing, but CNX Software have gathered together what there is including a draft datasheet whose English translation is available as a Mega download. As with other ESP32 family members, this one delivers b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) 5, where it differs is the RISC-V 32 Single-core processor with a clock speed of up to 160 MHz. There is 400 kB of SRAM and 384 kB ROM storage space built in.
Why they are releasing the part as an ESP32 rather than giving it a series number of its own remains a mystery, but it’s not hard to see why it makes commercial sense to create it in an ESP8266-compatible footprint. The arrival of competing parts in the cheap wireless SoC space such as the Bouffalo Labs BL602 we mentioned recently is likely to be eating into sales of the six-year-old chip, so an upgrade path to a more capable part with minimal new hardware design requirements could be a powerful incentive for large customers to stay with Espressif.
We’re left to guess on how exactly the rollout will proceed. We expect to see similar developer support to that they now provide for their other chips, and then ESP32-C3 powered versions of existing ESP8266 boards in short order. It’s also to be hoped that a standard RISC-V toolchain could be used instead of the device-specific ones for current Espressif offerings. What we should not expect are open-source replacements for the blobs that drive the on-board peripherals, as the new chip will share the same closed-source IP as its predecessors for them. Perhaps if the PINE64 initiative to reverse engineer blobs for the BL602 bears fruit, we might see a similar effort for this chip.
Six years on from the emergence of the Espressif ESP8266 we might believe that the focus had shifted to the newer dual-core ESP32. But here comes a twist in the form of the newly-revealed ESP32-C3. It’s a WiFi SoC that despite its ESP32 name contains a RISC-V core in place of the Tensilica core in the ESP32s we know, and uses the ESP8266 pin-out rather than that of its newer sibling. There’s relatively little information about it at the time of writing, but CNX Software have gathered together what there is including a draft datasheet whose English translation is available as a Mega download. As with other ESP32 family members, this one delivers b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) 5, where it differs is the RISC-V 32 Single-core processor with a clock speed of up to 160 MHz. There is 400 kB of SRAM and 384 kB ROM storage space built in.
Why they are releasing the part as an ESP32 rather than giving it a series number of its own remains a mystery, but it’s not hard to see why it makes commercial sense to create it in an ESP8266-compatible footprint. The arrival of competing parts in the cheap wireless SoC space such as the Bouffalo Labs BL602 we mentioned recently is likely to be eating into sales of the six-year-old chip, so an upgrade path to a more capable part with minimal new hardware design requirements could be a powerful incentive for large customers to stay with Espressif.
We’re left to guess on how exactly the rollout will proceed. We expect to see similar developer support to that they now provide for their other chips, and then ESP32-C3 powered versions of existing ESP8266 boards in short order. It’s also to be hoped that a standard RISC-V toolchain could be used instead of the device-specific ones for current Espressif offerings. What we should not expect are open-source replacements for the blobs that drive the on-board peripherals, as the new chip will share the same closed-source IP as its predecessors for them. Perhaps if the PINE64 initiative to reverse engineer blobs for the BL602 bears fruit, we might see a similar effort for this chip.
Six years on from the emergence of the Espressif ESP8266 we might believe that the focus had shifted to the newer dual-core ESP32. But here comes a twist in the form of the newly-revealed ESP32-C3. It’s a WiFi SoC that despite its ESP32 name contains a RISC-V core in place of the Tensilica core in the ESP32s we know, and uses the ESP8266 pin-out rather than that of its newer sibling. There’s relatively little information about it at the time of writing, but CNX Software have gathered together what there is including a draft datasheet whose English translation is available as a Mega download. As with other ESP32 family members, this one delivers b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) 5, where it differs is the RISC-V 32 Single-core processor with a clock speed of up to 160 MHz. There is 400 kB of SRAM and 384 kB ROM storage space built in.
Why they are releasing the part as an ESP32 rather than giving it a series number of its own remains a mystery, but it’s not hard to see why it makes commercial sense to create it in an ESP8266-compatible footprint. The arrival of competing parts in the cheap wireless SoC space such as the Bouffalo Labs BL602 we mentioned recently is likely to be eating into sales of the six-year-old chip, so an upgrade path to a more capable part with minimal new hardware design requirements could be a powerful incentive for large customers to stay with Espressif.
We’re left to guess on how exactly the rollout will proceed. We expect to see similar developer support to that they now provide for their other chips, and then ESP32-C3 powered versions of existing ESP8266 boards in short order. It’s also to be hoped that a standard RISC-V toolchain could be used instead of the device-specific ones for current Espressif offerings. What we should not expect are open-source replacements for the blobs that drive the on-board peripherals, as the new chip will share the same closed-source IP as its predecessors for them. Perhaps if the PINE64 initiative to reverse engineer blobs for the BL602 bears fruit, we might see a similar effort for this chip.
Today the newly-released Nintendo Game & Watch can play DOOM. Sure, there are caveats…this is a watered down version due to the restraints of the hardware itself. But the important thing is that this shows the hardware has been fully owned. This is code written to replace the firmware that ships on the STM32 within, and that makes this a gorgeous little hardware platform that is completely open to homebrew hacking.
We’ll have to wait for more details on exactly how to dump firmware, but [stacksmashing] drops enough of a mention in the video below to confirm the obvious. A common approach to dumping code from a locked microcontroller is to find a vulnerability that grants execution of custom code. Being able to run just a few lines of your own code is enough set up something as simple as looping through all internal flash memory addresses and dumping them over a few GPIO pins. In this case our two heroes discovered some ARM code was being loaded from the EEPROM onto the STM32, and managed to inject their own directives to perform the dump. They have promised full details soon.
What we have today is a pretty tricky hack not just to load code, but to get DOOM to run on meager hardware specs. Notably, 128 k of SRAM and 1.3 MB of external RAM. There’s also a bottleneck with the 1.1 MB of FLASH for storing game files. The textures were stripped down, and memory allocation was rewritten, but the proof of concept is there and the game runs. Homebrew, here we come!
