The art-music-technology collective “Electronicos Fantasticos!” (commonly known as Nicos) is the brain child of artist/musician [Ei Wada] in Japan. They revive old, retired and out-dated electrical appliances as new “electro-magnetic musical instruments” creating not just new ways to play music, but one that also involves the listener as a musician, gradually forming an interactive orchestra. They do this by creatively using the original functions of appliances like televisions and fans, hacking them in interesting ways to produce sound. The project started in the beginning of 2015, leading to the creation of a collaborative team — Nicos Orchest-Lab — around the end of that year. They have since appeared in concerts, including a performance at “Ars Electronica”, the world’s largest media arts festival in 2019.

For us hackers, the interesting bits can be found in the repository of their Work, describing sketchy but tantalising details of the musical instruments. Here are a few of the more interesting ones, but do check out their website for more amazing instruments and a lot of entertaining videos.

CRT-TV Gamelan – A percussion instrument made from old CRT monitors. Coloured stripes projected on the screen cause changes in static-electricity picked up by the players hands, which then propagates to an electrical coil attached to their foot. This signal is then patched to a guitar amplifier.

Electric Fan Harp – They take out the fan blade, and replace it with a “coded disk” containing punched holes. Then they shine a bulb from under the rotating disk, and the interrupted light is picked up by an optical receiver held by the player. Controlling the fan speed and the location of the receiver pickup, they can coax the fan to produce music – based on the idea “What if Jimi Hendrix, the god of electric guitars, played electric fans as instruments?”

Barcoder – This one is quite simple but produces amazing results, especially when you pair up with another Barcoder musician. The output of the barcode reader is pretty much directly converted to sound – just wave the wand over printed barcode sheets. And it works amazingly well when pointed at striped shirts too. Check out the very entertaining videos of this gizmo. This led to the creation of the Barcodress – a coded dress which creates an interactive music and dance performance.

Striped Shirtsizer – This one is a great hack and a synth with a twist. A camera picks up video signals, which is then fed to the “Audio” input of an amplifier directly. In the video on the project page, [Ei Wada] explains how he accidentally discovered this effect when he wrongly plugged the “yellow” video out connector to the audio input of his guitar amplifier. At an outdoor location, a bunch of people wearing striped shirts then become an interactive musician-audience performance.

Kankisenthizer a.k.a Exhaust Fancillator  – This one consists of an array of industrial exhaust fans – although one could just as well use smaller instrument cooling fans. On one side is a bright light, and on the other a small solar cell. Light fluctuations picked up by the solar cell are then fed to the guitar amplifier. The array consists of fans with different numbers of blades. This, coupled with changing the fan speed, results in some amazing sound effects.

There’s a whole bunch more, and even though the “instructions” to replicate the instruments aren’t well documented, there’s enough for anyone who’s interested to start experimenting.

Thanks for a great tip, [danielbpm].

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/when-appliance-hackers-hit-the-music-scene/

We have all heard that good variable names are important for creating readable programs — advice that will serve you well when you come back to your code two years later, or even twenty. Sometimes, when you are so deep in the zone and begin to question a variable name that you made three levels up the calling hierarchy, it can be helpful to take a step back and review your variable naming conventions. The wikipedia article on computer program naming conventions is a good starting point, where you can dig into the nitty gritty of Hungarian notation like bFlag, case separated names like camelCase, and so on. But sometimes you have to go meta, and need names to describe the names themselves.

For example, in everyday usage the terms parameter and argument are often used interchangeably. But strictly speaking, a parameter is a placeholder, the variables in a function declaration for example (see image above). An argument is the actual value itself, say the number 50.334 in the example.

We recommend that units of measure should always be clearly specified in your comments, perhaps even in the variable names if you’re mixing different systems in the same program. At Hackaday we prefer to use SI units, check out NIST SP 330 if you’re interested. But invariably, there are going to be exceptions for years to come. We like to deal with those at the edges during I/O if possible, thus keeping a consistent set of units in the core of the program.

What about the terms number and value? We like to think of a number as being a kind of value. For example, a function’s return value could be a number, say a velocity. Or it could return an enumeration or a boolean. Sometimes the perfect meta-name for something will collide with a reserved keyword in your programming language, names like string or data for example. In these cases you have to be creative and find suitable synonyms, perhaps text and payload.

Using consistent and precise language can be tedious, but it can be just as helpful as good commenting and variable naming practices. Do you have any examples where precise terminology such as this has been been helpful or perhaps tripped you up? If so, share in the comments section below.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/naming-names/

Home-based 3D printing is getting pretty unremarkable. Sure, printers aren’t as ubiquitous as, say, PCs. But you wouldn’t be any more surprised if your neighbor had a 3D printer than if you found out they had a drill press. In fact, sometimes the real value of 3D printing something isn’t to make a working part, but to make up something that helps you create other things using methods other than printing. That’s exactly what [iqless] does when he uses his printer to make some jigs to help him easily build shelves. (Video, embedded below.)

The issue is making dowel joints for the shelve’s feet. Sure, you could just drill a piece of scrap wood as a template, but with a 3D printer you can do better. Using OpenSCAD, it is possible to create a parameterized jig that fits exactly the job at hand.

There are several advantages to this approach. First, you can iterate on the design without having to rebuild a new jig. Of course, if a jig gets worn or broken, you can simply print another one. Finally, because the script is parameterized, it is easy to create a new jig for similar circumstances that have different dimensions.

If you have done a lot of OpenSCAD, you probably won’t see much new here, but if you haven’t created parameterized scripts, the video can show you how easy that can be.

We’ve looked at woodworking gadgets from 3D printers before. Or you can — sort of — print in plywood, if you like.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/openscad-prints-woodworking-aid/

When we want to prototype a rover, we’ve developed a tendency to immediately reach for the 3D printer and Arduino or Raspberry Pi. It’s easy to forget the prototyping tool many of us grew up using: LEGO. The [Brick Experiment Channel] has not forgotten, and in the video after the break demonstrates how he used Lego Technic components to prototype an impressive little obstacle climbing robot.

The little Lego rover starts as a simple four-wheeled rover trying to climb on top of a book. Swap in a four-wheel-drive gearbox and grippy tires, and it clears the first obstacle. Add a few books to the stack causes the break-over angle to become an issue, so the rover gets an inverted-V chassis. As the obstacle height increases, batteries are moved around for better weight distribution, but the real improvement comes when an actuating middle joint is added, turning it into a wheeled inchworm. Clearing overhangs suspended beams, and gaps are all just a matter of finding the right technique.

Thanks to Lego’s modularity, all this is possible in an hour or two where a 3D printer and CAD might have stretched it into days. This robot does have the limitation of not being able to turn. Conventional car steering or Mecanum wheels are two options, but how would you do it?

The [Brick Experiment Channel] knows a thing or two about building Lego robots, even for stealing keys.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/obstacle-climbing-rover-built-with-the-power-of-lego/

Considerable effort is often required to rejuvenate the yellowed and grungy plastic cases of retrocomputing gear. One generally does well to know their enemy in order to fight it, though, which is where this guide to the chemistry of plastic yellowing and whitening (PDF) comes in handy.

“The Retrobright Mystery” was written and sent in to us by a high school student who goes by the name [Saltypretzel]. The paper begins with an excellent description of the chemistry of plastic yellowing. We had always heard that the yellowing in ABS, or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, the plastic most commonly used for cases back in the day, was primarily caused by brominated compounds added to the plastic as flame retardants. It turns out that’s only a minor contributor, with the bulk of yellowing occurring thanks to a complex chain of reactions starting with free radicals liberated from the butadiene copolymer through a reaction requiring oxygen and energy.

Reactive radicals from the decomposing synthetic rubber, added to ABS to increase its flexibility, unroll the benzene ring in styrene copolymers to form a conjugated compound called 2-hydroxymuconic acid. The alternating double and single bonds in this compound tend to absorb light towards the blue end of the spectrum strongly, so the accumulation of 2-HMA in the plastic over time thus makes it reflect more and more yellow and red wavelengths, giving aged ABS its unhealthy bronze glow.

Luckily, just as ketchup smears and grass stains, both rich in conjugated compounds like lycopene and chlorophyll, can be bleached out of existence, so too can yellowed plastics. [Saltypretzel] notes that Retrobright, which contains a powerful dose of hydrogen peroxide, does its whitening trick by breaking the UV-absorbing double bonds in 2-HMA. There’s little that can be done about the embrittlement of the ABS caused by the breakdown of butadiene copolymers, but at least it’ll look good.

We found this guide quite comprehensive and instructive, and it should only help retrocomputing fans in their restoration efforts. For those less interested in the chemistry, [Bob Baddeley] published an overview of the yellowing of plastic and manufacturing steps to avoid it, and we covered the more practical considerations of Retrobright treatment too.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/a-deep-dive-into-the-chemistry-of-retrobright/

The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an affordable, capable microcontroller being made by a firm that’s never made microcontrollers before, so that’s newsy.

The Hackaday comments lit on fire about this chip, with some fraction of the commenters lamenting the lack of wireless radios onboard. It’s a glass-half-full thing, I guess, but the RP2040 isn’t an ESP32, folks. It’s something else. And it’s got a hardware trick up its sleeve that really tickles my fancy — the programmable input/output (PIO) units.

The other half of the commenters were, like me, salivating about getting to try out some of the new features. The PIO, of course, was high on that list, but this chip also caters to folks who are doing high-speed DSP, with fast multiplication routines burnt into ROM and a nice accumulator. (You know you’re a microcontroller nerd when you’re reading through a 663-page datasheet and thinking about all the funny ways you can use and/or abuse the hardware peripherals.)

All chip designs are compromises. Nothing can do everything. The new peripherals, novel combinations of old elements, and just pleasant design decisions, open up new opportunities if you’re willing to seek them out. When the ESP32 was new, I was looking at their oddball parallel-I2S hardware and thinking what kind of crazy hacks that would enable, and clever hackers have proven me right. I’d put my money on the PIO being similar.

New chips open up new possibilities for hacks. What are you going to do with them?

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/new-parts-new-hacks/

The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an affordable, capable microcontroller being made by a firm that’s never made microcontrollers before, so that’s newsy.

The Hackaday comments lit on fire about this chip, with some fraction of the commenters lamenting the lack of wireless radios onboard. It’s a glass-half-full thing, I guess, but the RP2040 isn’t an ESP32, folks. It’s something else. And it’s got a hardware trick up its sleeve that really tickles my fancy — the programmable input/output (PIO) units.

The other half of the commenters were, like me, salivating about getting to try out some of the new features. The PIO, of course, was high on that list, but this chip also caters to folks who are doing high-speed DSP, with fast multiplication routines burnt into ROM and a nice accumulator. (You know you’re a microcontroller nerd when you’re reading through a 663-page datasheet and thinking about all the funny ways you can use and/or abuse the hardware peripherals.)

All chip designs are compromises. Nothing can do everything. The new peripherals, novel combinations of old elements, and just pleasant design decisions, open up new opportunities if you’re willing to seek them out. When the ESP32 was new, I was looking at their oddball parallel-I2S hardware and thinking what kind of crazy hacks that would enable, and clever hackers have proven me right. I’d put my money on the PIO being similar.

New chips open up new possibilities for hacks. What are you going to do with them?

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/new-parts-new-hacks/

The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an affordable, capable microcontroller being made by a firm that’s never made microcontrollers before, so that’s newsy.

The Hackaday comments lit on fire about this chip, with some fraction of the commenters lamenting the lack of wireless radios onboard. It’s a glass-half-full thing, I guess, but the RP2040 isn’t an ESP32, folks. It’s something else. And it’s got a hardware trick up its sleeve that really tickles my fancy — the programmable input/output (PIO) units.

The other half of the commenters were, like me, salivating about getting to try out some of the new features. The PIO, of course, was high on that list, but this chip also caters to folks who are doing high-speed DSP, with fast multiplication routines burnt into ROM and a nice accumulator. (You know you’re a microcontroller nerd when you’re reading through a 663-page datasheet and thinking about all the funny ways you can use and/or abuse the hardware peripherals.)

All chip designs are compromises. Nothing can do everything. The new peripherals, novel combinations of old elements, and just pleasant design decisions, open up new opportunities if you’re willing to seek them out. When the ESP32 was new, I was looking at their oddball parallel-I2S hardware and thinking what kind of crazy hacks that would enable, and clever hackers have proven me right. I’d put my money on the PIO being similar.

New chips open up new possibilities for hacks. What are you going to do with them?

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/new-parts-new-hacks/

[Billy Wu] has been writing for a few years about electrochemical 3D printing systems that can handle metal. He’s recently produced a video that you can see below about the process. Usually, printing in metal means having a high-powered laser and great expense. [Wu’s] technique is an extension of electroplating.

Boiling down the gist of the process, the print head is a syringe full of electroplating solution. Instead of plating a large object, you essentially electroplate on tiny areas. The process is relatively slow and if you speed it up too much, the result will have undesirable properties. But there are some mind-bending options here. By using print heads with different electrolytes, you can print using different metals. For example, the video shows structures made of both copper and nickel. You can also reverse the current and remove metal instead of depositing it.

This looks like something you could pretty readily replicate in a garage. Electroplating is well-understood and the 3D motion parts could be a hacked 3D printer. Sure, the result is slow but, after all, slow is a relative term. You might not mind taking a few days to print a metal object compared to the cost and trouble of creating it in other ways. Of course, since this is copper, we also have visions of printing circuit board traces on a substrate. We imagine you’d have to coat the board with something to make it conductive and then remove that after all the copper was in place. When you build this, be sure to tell us about it.

We’ve seen electroplating pens before and that’s really similar to this idea. Of course, you can also make your 3D prints conductive and plate them which is probably faster but isn’t really fully metal.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/low-cost-metal-3d-printing-by-electrochemistry/

Interested in making a custom keyboard, but unsure where to start? Good news, because [Jared]’s build log for an adorable “2% Milk” two-key mini-keyboard covers everything you need to know about making a custom keyboard, including how to add optional RGB lighting. The only difference is that it gets done in a smaller and cheaper package than jumping directly in with a full-size DIY keyboard.

[Jared] is definitely no stranger to custom keyboard work, but when he saw parts for a two-key “2% Milk” keyboard for sale online, he simply couldn’t resist. Luckily for us, he took plenty of photos and his build log makes an excellent tutorial for anyone who wants to get into custom keyboards by starting small.

The hardware elements are clear by looking at photos, but what about the software? For that, [Jared] uses a Teensy board running QMK, an open source project for driving and configuring custom input devices. QMK drives tiny devices like the 2% Milk just as easily as it does larger ones, so following [Jared]’s build log therefore conveys exactly the same familiarity that would be needed to work on a bigger keyboard, which is part of what makes it such a great project to document.

Interestedin going a little deeper down the custom keyboard rabbit hole? You can go entirely DIY, but there’s also no need to roll everything from scratch. It’s possible to buy most of the parts and treat the project like a kit, and Hackaday’s own [Kristina Panos] is here to tell you all about what that was like.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/two-key-keyboard-build-log-starts-small-but-thinks-big/

Interested in making a custom keyboard, but unsure where to start? Good news, because [Jared]’s build log for an adorable “2% Milk” two-key mini-keyboard covers everything you need to know about making a custom keyboard, including how to add optional RGB lighting. The only difference is that it gets done in a smaller and cheaper package than jumping directly in with a full-size DIY keyboard.

[Jared] is definitely no stranger to custom keyboard work, but when he saw parts for a two-key “2% Milk” keyboard for sale online, he simply couldn’t resist. Luckily for us, he took plenty of photos and his build log makes an excellent tutorial for anyone who wants to get into custom keyboards by starting small.

The hardware elements are clear by looking at photos, but what about the software? For that, [Jared] uses a Teensy board running QMK, an open source project for driving and configuring custom input devices. QMK drives tiny devices like the 2% Milk just as easily as it does larger ones, so following [Jared]’s build log therefore conveys exactly the same familiarity that would be needed to work on a bigger keyboard, which is part of what makes it such a great project to document.

Interestedin going a little deeper down the custom keyboard rabbit hole? You can go entirely DIY, but there’s also no need to roll everything from scratch. It’s possible to buy most of the parts and treat the project like a kit, and Hackaday’s own [Kristina Panos] is here to tell you all about what that was like.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/23/two-key-keyboard-build-log-starts-small-but-thinks-big/

These days, having a little computer in your pocket is par for the course. But forty years ago, this was a new and high tech idea. [The 8-Bit Guy] has a great video covering the state of the art in pocket computers and personal digital assistants from the 1980s and 1990s. You can see the video below.

There are a lot of familiar faces on the video including the Radio Shack pocket computers, Palm Pilots, and some more obscure machines of varying quality.

It might impress you to know that the Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-1 pocket computer actually had two CPUs. Of course, each CPU was a 4-bit processor running at 256 kHz, so maybe not as impressive as it sounds. Still, what a marvel in its day, programming BASIC on a 24-character LCD.

The Casio PB-700 from 1983. For under $200, you got a 4-line display, with each line having 20 characters. But it also had some graphic capabilities. You could even get an optional docking station that provided a color plotter and a microcassette recorder. Unfortunately, they were not widely available, at least in the United States.

If you want ultra-portable, the Seiko UC-2000 was actually a wristwatch that could dock with a keyboard and printer. Unfortunately, [Guy] couldn’t get a battery for it, but we did enjoy seeing him take it apart to pull out the dead battery.

I suspect the personal anecdote at the end will be somewhat familiar to many people who were school-aged in the 1970s and 1980s. Times have certainly changed.

You can fit a lot more computing power in your pocket today, of course. This video isn’t the only nostalgic love letter we’ve seen for computers of that era.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/a-computer-in-your-pocket-1980s-style/

These days, having a little computer in your pocket is par for the course. But forty years ago, this was a new and high tech idea. [The 8-Bit Guy] has a great video covering the state of the art in pocket computers and personal digital assistants from the 1980s and 1990s. You can see the video below.

There are a lot of familiar faces on the video including the Radio Shack pocket computers, Palm Pilots, and some more obscure machines of varying quality.

It might impress you to know that the Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-1 pocket computer actually had two CPUs. Of course, each CPU was a 4-bit processor running at 256 kHz, so maybe not as impressive as it sounds. Still, what a marvel in its day, programming BASIC on a 24-character LCD.

The Casio PB-700 from 1983. For under $200, you got a 4-line display, with each line having 20 characters. But it also had some graphic capabilities. You could even get an optional docking station that provided a color plotter and a microcassette recorder. Unfortunately, they were not widely available, at least in the United States.

If you want ultra-portable, the Seiko UC-2000 was actually a wristwatch that could dock with a keyboard and printer. Unfortunately, [Guy] couldn’t get a battery for it, but we did enjoy seeing him take it apart to pull out the dead battery.

I suspect the personal anecdote at the end will be somewhat familiar to many people who were school-aged in the 1970s and 1980s. Times have certainly changed.

You can fit a lot more computing power in your pocket today, of course. This video isn’t the only nostalgic love letter we’ve seen for computers of that era.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/a-computer-in-your-pocket-1980s-style/

We always like citizen science projects, so we were very interested in DECO, the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory. That sounds like a physical location, but it is actually a network of cell phones that can detect cosmic rays using an ordinary Android phone’s camera sensor.

There may be some privacy concerns as the phone camera will take a picture and upload it every so often, and it probably also taxes the battery a bit. However, if you really want to do citizen science, maybe dedicate an old phone, put electrical tape over the lens and keep it plugged in. In fact, they encourage you to cover the lens to reduce background light and keep the phone plugged in.

According to the project website:

Cosmic rays are energetic subatomic particles produced by powerful cosmic accelerators, such as black holes and exploding stars. When they hit the top of the atmosphere, they produce showers of secondary particles, including electrons, photons, neutrinos, and muons. Many of these muons, which are similar to electrons but heavier, reach the ground at sea level and are a great tool for studying cosmic rays because they are easy to detect.

In practice, the app takes a photo every 1-2 seconds and looks for bright pixels. If it finds enough, the image becomes a candidate and receives further processing. Only a small number of frames are candidates and even fewer are actual events. They mention that it typically takes about 24 hours to get a few events on your phone. We aren’t sure how much data is sent to the server for processing and how much is done locally, but we suspect almost all the analysis is on the server. The app records your location but does degrade it somewhat for privacy.

You can see your results and the results of others on a public data page. There’s a map and you can narrow data by location, altitude, time, or even check in on a specific device or model.

Citizen and crowd-sourced science is all the rage lately, even NASA’s in. Citizen science even located a lost moon lander.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/do-androids-search-for-cosmic-rays/

The Casio F-91W is easily one of the most iconic and popular watches worldwide. But what’s cool about having the same exact thing as millions of other people? Not much, unless of course you modify it to make it your own. That’s exactly what [Gautchh] did to their beloved watch. Between permanent dark mode, stereo blue LED backlights, and a new strap, this timepiece really stands out from the crowd.

Once [Gautchh] got the watch open, the first order of business was to re-polarize the LCD with a different film so the digits are light and the background is dark. This watch ships with a single green backlight LED that’s fairly faint, so [Gautchh] upgraded it to bright blue and added a second 1206 LED in parallel on the other side of the readout. Finally, they replaced the rubber strap with something less likely to chafe.

We think dark mode looks great, though [Gautchh] says it requires a little bit of training to hold your wrist just right to make it readable. They make these mods look easy, but they likely aren’t for the faint of heart. If you want to give it a shot, there are good step-by-step instructions and several pictures to help out.

We’ve seen a lot of Casio F-91W projects over the years, including a method for waterproofing the internals. If you have a lot of love for this watch, why not make a giant version?

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/casio-f-91w-going-dark/

Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of hackers repurpose their Kindle or similar e-reader to reap the benefits of its electronic paper display. Usually this takes the form of some software running on the reader itself, since cracking the firmware is a lot easier than pulling out the panel and figuring out how to operate it independently. But what if somebody had already done that hard work for you?

Enter the Inkplate. By pairing a recycled Kindle display with an ESP32, Croatian electronics company e-radionica says they’ve not only created an open hardware e-paper display that’s easy for hackers and makers to use, but keeps electronic waste out of the landfill. Last year the $99 USD 6 inch version of the Inkplate ended its CrowdSupply campaign at over 920% of its original goal. The new 9.7 inch model is priced at $129, and so far managed to blow past its own funding goal just hours after the campaign went live. Clearly, the demand is there.

The new model’s e-paper display isn’t just larger, it also features a higher 1200 x 825 resolution and reduced refresh time. Outside of the screen improvements, you’ll also find more GPIO pins, an RTC module to keep more accurate time, and a USB Type-C port for both programming and power. You also get a choice of languages to use, with both Arduino and MicroPython libraries available for interfacing with the display. Interestingly, the Inkplate also features a so-called “Peripheral Mode” that allows you to draw graphics primitives on the screen using commands sent over UART.

While we’ve recently seen some very promising efforts to repurpose old e-paper displays, the turn-key solution offered by the Inkplate is admittedly very compelling. If you’re looking for an easy way to jump on the electronic paper bandwagon that works out of the box, this might be your chance.

[Thanks to Krunoslav for the tip.]

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/esp32-inkplate-gives-kindle-displays-a-second-chance/

Folks who like the take the old Amiga out for the occasional Sunday drive usually do it because they have wistful memories of the simpler times. Back when you could edit documents or view spreadsheets on a machine that had RAM measured in kilobytes instead of gigabytes. But even the most ardent retro computer aficionado usually allows for a bit of modern convenience.

Enter the mouSTer. This tiny device converts a common USB HID mouse into something older computers can understand. It even supports using Sony’s PlayStation 4 controller as a generic game pad. While the firmware is still getting tweaked, the team has confirmed its working on several classic machines and believe it should work on many more. Considering the prices that some of these old peripherals command on the second hand market, using a USB mouse or controller on your vintage computer isn’t just more convenient, but will likely be a lot cheaper.

Confirmed retrocomputing superfan [Drygol] is a member of the team working on mouSTer, and in a recent post to his retrohax blog, he talks a bit about what’s happened since his last update over the summer. He also talks a bit about the challenges they’ve faced to get it into production. Even if you’re not into poking around on vintage computers, there are lessons to be learned here about what it takes to move from a handful of prototypes to something you can actually sell to the public.

We especially liked the details about the mouSTer enclosure, or lack thereof. Originally [Drygol] says they were going to have the cases injection molded, but despite initial interest from a few companies they talked to, nobody ended up biting because it needed to be done with relatively uncommon low pressure injection. While 3D printing is still an option, the team ended up using clear heatshrink tubing to create a simple conformal protective shell over the electronics. Personally we think it looks great like this, but it sounds like this is only a temporary solution until something a bit more robust can be implemented.

As you might imagine we’ve seen DIY projects that aimed to bring modern input devices to vintage computers like the Atari ST, but the diminutive proportions of the mouSTer and the fact that it’s a turn-key product is sure to appeal to those who want to minimize headaches when working with their classic gear.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/mouster-brings-usb-to-retro-computers/

Vacuum tubes ruled electronics for several decades and while you might think of them as simple devices analogous to a transistor or FET, there were many special types. We’re all familiar with nixie tubes that act as numeric displays, and there are other specialty tubes that work as a photomultiplier, to detect radiation, or even generate microwaves. But one of the most peculiar and distinctive specialty tubes has an intriguing name: a magic eye tube. When viewed from the top, you see a visual indication that rotates around a central point, the out ring glowing while the inner is dark, like an iris and pupil.

These tubes date back to the RCA 6E5 in 1935. At the time, test equipment that used needles was expensive to make, so there was always a push to replace them with something cheaper.  They were something like a stunted cathode ray tube. In fact, the inventor, Allen DuMont, was well known for innovations in television. An anode held a coating that would glow when hit with electrons — usually green, but sometimes other colors. Later tubes would show a stripe going up and down the tube instead of a circle, but you still call them magic eyes.

The indicator part of this virtual meter took the form of a shadow. Based on the applied signal, the shadow would be larger or smaller. Many tubes also contained a triode which would drive the tube from a signal.

There’s a great web site full of information on these venerable tubes and it has examples of these tubes appearing in plenty of things. They frequently appeared in service equipment, radios, and tape recorders. They even appeared in pro audio equipment like the Binson Echorec echo-delay unit.

Before the Magic Eye

The magic eye actually replaced an even older technology: neon bulbs. Modified neon bulbs appeared in the early 1930s as Tune-A-Lite produced by a company named Duovac. You can read more about them at the Radio Museum. Interestingly, some of these had a mute output that could turn off the radio’s speaker when there was no signal present, like a modern-day squelch circuit.

The operation of the bulb is like a thermometer in that the tube is long and narrow and the glow rises in the tube as the voltage applied increases.

See One on a Monitor Near You

There’s nothing like seeing one of these old gems with your own eyes, but the video below will give you an idea of how a 6E5C eye appeared. The green glow reminds you of a 1950s science fiction film or what Hollywood thinks a nuclear reactor gives off. Some magic eyes like the EM80 had a different shape, check out this teardown video for a closer look.

Get One

Like most old stuff, these are available if you know where to look. eBay and Amazon both have quite a few at various prices. There are even a few kits for things like preamps that use magic eyes as VU meters. Even if you have a magic eye that appears burned out, you might try increasing the supply voltage as [M Caldira] does in this video about reviving weak magic eye tubes .

If you can’t find an actual tube, you might try faking it with persistence of vision using LEDs and a motor.

We’ve only seen a few magic eye projects in the past. There’s the spectrum analyzer. There was also a tear down of an antique capacitor tester.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/meet-the-magic-eye-vacuum-tube/

OpenWRT is one of my absolute favorite projects, but it’s had a rough week. First off, the official OpenWRT forums is carrying a notice that one of the administrator accounts was accessed, and the userlist was downloaded by an unknown malicious actor. That list is known to include email addresses and usernames. It does not appear that password hashes were exposed, but just to be sure, a password expiration has been triggered for all users.

The second OpenWRT problem is a set of recently discovered vulnerabilities in Dnsmasq, a package installed by default in OpenWRT images. Of those vulnerabilities, four are buffer overflows, and three are weaknesses in how DNS responses are checked — potentially allowing cache poisoning. These seven vulnerabilities are collectively known as DNSpooq (Whitepaper PDF).

Favicon Fingerprints

One of the frustrating-yet-impressive areas of research is browser fingerprinting. You may not have an account, and may clear your cookies, but if an advertiser wants to track you badly enough, there have been a stream of techniques to make it possible. A new technique was added to that list, Favicon caching (PDF). The big problem here is that the favicon cache is generally not sandboxed even in incognito mode (though thankfully not *saved* in incognito mode), as well as not cleared with the rest of browser data. To understand why that’s a problem, ask a simple question. How hard is it to determine if a browser has a cached copy of a favicon?

The exact scheme the authors suggest is to use multiple domains with discrete favicons, each one representing a single bit. Each user can then be assigned a different value by sending them through each domain through a redirect chain. As the favicons are loaded, that bit is set to true. You may wonder, how does that data get read back by the server? The client is handled in a read-only mode, where each of those favicon requests return a 404. By watching the requests come in, the server can rebuild the unique identifier based on which favicons were requested.

When I first read about this technique, a potential catch-22 stood out as a problem. How would the server know whether to put a new connection into a read mode, or a write mode? It seems, at first glance, like this would defeat the whole scheme. The researchers behind favicon fingerprinting have an elegant solution for this. The favicon for a single fixed domain works as a single bit flag, indicating whether this is a new or returning user. If the browser requests that favicon, it is new, and can be funneled through the identifier writing process. If the initial favicon isn’t requested, then it should be treated as a return visit, and the ID can be read. Overall, it’s a fiendishly clever way to track users, particularly since it can even work across incognito mode. Expect browsers to address this quickly. The first step will be to sandbox cached favicons in incognito mode, but the paper calls out a few other possible solutions.

Orbit Fox

The long-standing pattern in WordPress security is that WordPress itself is fairly bulletproof, but many of the popular plugins have serious security problems just waiting to be found. The plugin of the week this time is Orbit Fox, with over 400,000 active installs. This plugin provides multiple features, one being a user registration form. The problem is a lack of server-side validation of the form response. On a site with such a form, all it takes is to tweak the response data so user_role is now set to “administrator”. Thankfully, this vulnerability is only exposed when using a combination of plugins, and the problem was disclosed and patched back in December.

Patch Tuesday

Another patch Tuesday has come and gone, and the Zero Day Initiative has us covered with an overview of what got fixed. There are two patched vulnerabilities that are noteworthy this month. The first is CVE-2021-1647, a flaw in Microsoft Defender. This one has been observed in-the-wild, and is a RCE exploit. If your machine is always online, you probably got this patch automatically, since Windows Defender has its own automatic update system.

The second interesting problem is CVE-2021-1648. This vulnerability is the result of a flubbed fix for an earlier problem. From Google’s Project Zero: “The only difference between CVE-2020-0986 is that for CVE-2020-0986 the attacker sent a pointer and now the attacker sends an offset.” Thankfully this is just an elevation of privilege flaw, and has now been properly fixed, as far as we can tell.

Hacking Linux, Hollywood Style

Hacking Hollywood style occasionally works. You know the movies, where an “elite hacker” frantickly mashes on a keyboard while blathering nonsense about firewalls and reconfiguring the retro-encabulator. Sometimes, though, keyboard mashing actually finds security problems. In this case, a screensaver lock can be broken by typing rapidly on a physical keyboard and the virtual on-screen keyboard at the same time. The text from the bug report is golden: “A few weeks ago, my kids wanted to hack my linux desktop, so they typed and clicked everywhere, while I was standing behind them looking at them play… when the screensaver core dumped and they actually hacked their way in! wow, those little hackers…”

Zoom Unmasking

Imagine with me for a moment, that you work for Evilcorp. You’re on a Zoom call, and the evil master plan is being spelled out. You’re a decent human being, so you start a screen recorder to get a copy of the evidence. You’ve got the proof, now to send it off to the right people. But first, take a moment to think about anonymity. When your recording hits the nightly news, will Evilcorp be able to figure out that it was you that leaked the meeting? Yes, most likely.

There is a whole field of study around the embedding, detecting, and mitigating of identifying information in audio, video, and still images. This discipline is known as steganography, and fun fact, it’s named after the trio of books, “Steganographia“. The first written in 1499, Steganographia appears to be mystical texts about how to communicate over the distances via supernatural spirits. In a very satisfying twist, the books are actually a guide to hiding encrypted messages in written texts, the whole thing hidden using the techniques described in the hidden text. For our purposes, we could divide the field of steganography into two broad categories. Intentionally hidden data, and unintentionally included indicators.

At the top of the list of intentional data is Zoom’s watermarking feature. The call administrator can enable these, which includes unique identifiers in the the call audio, video, or both. The video watermarks are pretty easy to spot, your username overlayed onto the image. There’s no guarantee that there isn’t also sneakier watermarking being done. Next to consider is metadata. Particularly if you pulled out a cellphone to make the recording, that file almost certainly has time and location data baked into it. A GPS coordinate makes for quite the easy identifier, when it points right at your house.

Unintentional steganography could be as simple as having your self-view camera highlighted at the top of the call. There are more subtle ways to pull data out of a recording, like looking at the latency of individual call members. If speaker B is a few milliseconds ahead in the leaked version, compared to all the others, then the leaker must be physically close to that call member. It’s extremely hard to cover all your bases when it comes to anonymizing media, and we’ve just scratched the surface here.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/this-week-in-security-openwrt-favicons-and-steganographia/

OpenWRT is one of my absolute favorite projects, but it’s had a rough week. First off, the official OpenWRT forums is carrying a notice that one of the administrator accounts was accessed, and the userlist was downloaded by an unknown malicious actor. That list is known to include email addresses and usernames. It does not appear that password hashes were exposed, but just to be sure, a password expiration has been triggered for all users.

The second OpenWRT problem is a set of recently discovered vulnerabilities in Dnsmasq, a package installed by default in OpenWRT images. Of those vulnerabilities, four are buffer overflows, and three are weaknesses in how DNS responses are checked — potentially allowing cache poisoning. These seven vulnerabilities are collectively known as DNSpooq (Whitepaper PDF).

Favicon Fingerprints

One of the frustrating-yet-impressive areas of research is browser fingerprinting. You may not have an account, and may clear your cookies, but if an advertiser wants to track you badly enough, there have been a stream of techniques to make it possible. A new technique was added to that list, Favicon caching (PDF). The big problem here is that the favicon cache is generally not sandboxed even in incognito mode (though thankfully not *saved* in incognito mode), as well as not cleared with the rest of browser data. To understand why that’s a problem, ask a simple question. How hard is it to determine if a browser has a cached copy of a favicon?

The exact scheme the authors suggest is to use multiple domains with discrete favicons, each one representing a single bit. Each user can then be assigned a different value by sending them through each domain through a redirect chain. As the favicons are loaded, that bit is set to true. You may wonder, how does that data get read back by the server? The client is handled in a read-only mode, where each of those favicon requests return a 404. By watching the requests come in, the server can rebuild the unique identifier based on which favicons were requested.

When I first read about this technique, a potential catch-22 stood out as a problem. How would the server know whether to put a new connection into a read mode, or a write mode? It seems, at first glance, like this would defeat the whole scheme. The researchers behind favicon fingerprinting have an elegant solution for this. The favicon for a single fixed domain works as a single bit flag, indicating whether this is a new or returning user. If the browser requests that favicon, it is new, and can be funneled through the identifier writing process. If the initial favicon isn’t requested, then it should be treated as a return visit, and the ID can be read. Overall, it’s a fiendishly clever way to track users, particularly since it can even work across incognito mode. Expect browsers to address this quickly. The first step will be to sandbox cached favicons in incognito mode, but the paper calls out a few other possible solutions.

Orbit Fox

The long-standing pattern in WordPress security is that WordPress itself is fairly bulletproof, but many of the popular plugins have serious security problems just waiting to be found. The plugin of the week this time is Orbit Fox, with over 400,000 active installs. This plugin provides multiple features, one being a user registration form. The problem is a lack of server-side validation of the form response. On a site with such a form, all it takes is to tweak the response data so user_role is now set to “administrator”. Thankfully, this vulnerability is only exposed when using a combination of plugins, and the problem was disclosed and patched back in December.

Patch Tuesday

Another patch Tuesday has come and gone, and the Zero Day Initiative has us covered with an overview of what got fixed. There are two patched vulnerabilities that are noteworthy this month. The first is CVE-2021-1647, a flaw in Microsoft Defender. This one has been observed in-the-wild, and is a RCE exploit. If your machine is always online, you probably got this patch automatically, since Windows Defender has its own automatic update system.

The second interesting problem is CVE-2021-1648. This vulnerability is the result of a flubbed fix for an earlier problem. From Google’s Project Zero: “The only difference between CVE-2020-0986 is that for CVE-2020-0986 the attacker sent a pointer and now the attacker sends an offset.” Thankfully this is just an elevation of privilege flaw, and has now been properly fixed, as far as we can tell.

Hacking Linux, Hollywood Style

Hacking Hollywood style occasionally works. You know the movies, where an “elite hacker” frantickly mashes on a keyboard while blathering nonsense about firewalls and reconfiguring the retro-encabulator. Sometimes, though, keyboard mashing actually finds security problems. In this case, a screensaver lock can be broken by typing rapidly on a physical keyboard and the virtual on-screen keyboard at the same time. The text from the bug report is golden: “A few weeks ago, my kids wanted to hack my linux desktop, so they typed and clicked everywhere, while I was standing behind them looking at them play… when the screensaver core dumped and they actually hacked their way in! wow, those little hackers…”

Zoom Unmasking

Imagine with me for a moment, that you work for Evilcorp. You’re on a Zoom call, and the evil master plan is being spelled out. You’re a decent human being, so you start a screen recorder to get a copy of the evidence. You’ve got the proof, now to send it off to the right people. But first, take a moment to think about anonymity. When your recording hits the nightly news, will Evilcorp be able to figure out that it was you that leaked the meeting? Yes, most likely.

There is a whole field of study around the embedding, detecting, and mitigating of identifying information in audio, video, and still images. This discipline is known as steganography, and fun fact, it’s named after the trio of books, “Steganographia“. The first written in 1499, Steganographia appears to be mystical texts about how to communicate over the distances via supernatural spirits. In a very satisfying twist, the books are actually a guide to hiding encrypted messages in written texts, the whole thing hidden using the techniques described in the hidden text. For our purposes, we could divide the field of steganography into two broad categories. Intentionally hidden data, and unintentionally included indicators.

At the top of the list of intentional data is Zoom’s watermarking feature. The call administrator can enable these, which includes unique identifiers in the the call audio, video, or both. The video watermarks are pretty easy to spot, your username overlayed onto the image. There’s no guarantee that there isn’t also sneakier watermarking being done. Next to consider is metadata. Particularly if you pulled out a cellphone to make the recording, that file almost certainly has time and location data baked into it. A GPS coordinate makes for quite the easy identifier, when it points right at your house.

Unintentional steganography could be as simple as having your self-view camera highlighted at the top of the call. There are more subtle ways to pull data out of a recording, like looking at the latency of individual call members. If speaker B is a few milliseconds ahead in the leaked version, compared to all the others, then the leaker must be physically close to that call member. It’s extremely hard to cover all your bases when it comes to anonymizing media, and we’ve just scratched the surface here.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/this-week-in-security-openwrt-favicons-and-steganographia/

OpenWRT is one of my absolute favorite projects, but it’s had a rough week. First off, the official OpenWRT forums is carrying a notice that one of the administrator accounts was accessed, and the userlist was downloaded by an unknown malicious actor. That list is known to include email addresses and usernames. It does not appear that password hashes were exposed, but just to be sure, a password expiration has been triggered for all users.

The second OpenWRT problem is a set of recently discovered vulnerabilities in Dnsmasq, a package installed by default in OpenWRT images. Of those vulnerabilities, four are buffer overflows, and three are weaknesses in how DNS responses are checked — potentially allowing cache poisoning. These seven vulnerabilities are collectively known as DNSpooq (Whitepaper PDF).

Favicon Fingerprints

One of the frustrating-yet-impressive areas of research is browser fingerprinting. You may not have an account, and may clear your cookies, but if an advertiser wants to track you badly enough, there have been a stream of techniques to make it possible. A new technique was added to that list, Favicon caching (PDF). The big problem here is that the favicon cache is generally not sandboxed even in incognito mode (though thankfully not *saved* in incognito mode), as well as not cleared with the rest of browser data. To understand why that’s a problem, ask a simple question. How hard is it to determine if a browser has a cached copy of a favicon?

The exact scheme the authors suggest is to use multiple domains with discrete favicons, each one representing a single bit. Each user can then be assigned a different value by sending them through each domain through a redirect chain. As the favicons are loaded, that bit is set to true. You may wonder, how does that data get read back by the server? The client is handled in a read-only mode, where each of those favicon requests return a 404. By watching the requests come in, the server can rebuild the unique identifier based on which favicons were requested.

When I first read about this technique, a potential catch-22 stood out as a problem. How would the server know whether to put a new connection into a read mode, or a write mode? It seems, at first glance, like this would defeat the whole scheme. The researchers behind favicon fingerprinting have an elegant solution for this. The favicon for a single fixed domain works as a single bit flag, indicating whether this is a new or returning user. If the browser requests that favicon, it is new, and can be funneled through the identifier writing process. If the initial favicon isn’t requested, then it should be treated as a return visit, and the ID can be read. Overall, it’s a fiendishly clever way to track users, particularly since it can even work across incognito mode. Expect browsers to address this quickly. The first step will be to sandbox cached favicons in incognito mode, but the paper calls out a few other possible solutions.

Orbit Fox

The long-standing pattern in WordPress security is that WordPress itself is fairly bulletproof, but many of the popular plugins have serious security problems just waiting to be found. The plugin of the week this time is Orbit Fox, with over 400,000 active installs. This plugin provides multiple features, one being a user registration form. The problem is a lack of server-side validation of the form response. On a site with such a form, all it takes is to tweak the response data so user_role is now set to “administrator”. Thankfully, this vulnerability is only exposed when using a combination of plugins, and the problem was disclosed and patched back in December.

Patch Tuesday

Another patch Tuesday has come and gone, and the Zero Day Initiative has us covered with an overview of what got fixed. There are two patched vulnerabilities that are noteworthy this month. The first is CVE-2021-1647, a flaw in Microsoft Defender. This one has been observed in-the-wild, and is a RCE exploit. If your machine is always online, you probably got this patch automatically, since Windows Defender has its own automatic update system.

The second interesting problem is CVE-2021-1648. This vulnerability is the result of a flubbed fix for an earlier problem. From Google’s Project Zero: “The only difference between CVE-2020-0986 is that for CVE-2020-0986 the attacker sent a pointer and now the attacker sends an offset.” Thankfully this is just an elevation of privilege flaw, and has now been properly fixed, as far as we can tell.

Hacking Linux, Hollywood Style

Hacking Hollywood style occasionally works. You know the movies, where an “elite hacker” frantickly mashes on a keyboard while blathering nonsense about firewalls and reconfiguring the retro-encabulator. Sometimes, though, keyboard mashing actually finds security problems. In this case, a screensaver lock can be broken by typing rapidly on a physical keyboard and the virtual on-screen keyboard at the same time. The text from the bug report is golden: “A few weeks ago, my kids wanted to hack my linux desktop, so they typed and clicked everywhere, while I was standing behind them looking at them play… when the screensaver core dumped and they actually hacked their way in! wow, those little hackers…”

Zoom Unmasking

Imagine with me for a moment, that you work for Evilcorp. You’re on a Zoom call, and the evil master plan is being spelled out. You’re a decent human being, so you start a screen recorder to get a copy of the evidence. You’ve got the proof, now to send it off to the right people. But first, take a moment to think about anonymity. When your recording hits the nightly news, will Evilcorp be able to figure out that it was you that leaked the meeting? Yes, most likely.

There is a whole field of study around the embedding, detecting, and mitigating of identifying information in audio, video, and still images. This discipline is known as steganography, and fun fact, it’s named after the trio of books, “Steganographia“. The first written in 1499, Steganographia appears to be mystical texts about how to communicate over the distances via supernatural spirits. In a very satisfying twist, the books are actually a guide to hiding encrypted messages in written texts, the whole thing hidden using the techniques described in the hidden text. For our purposes, we could divide the field of steganography into two broad categories. Intentionally hidden data, and unintentionally included indicators.

At the top of the list of intentional data is Zoom’s watermarking feature. The call administrator can enable these, which includes unique identifiers in the the call audio, video, or both. The video watermarks are pretty easy to spot, your username overlayed onto the image. There’s no guarantee that there isn’t also sneakier watermarking being done. Next to consider is metadata. Particularly if you pulled out a cellphone to make the recording, that file almost certainly has time and location data baked into it. A GPS coordinate makes for quite the easy identifier, when it points right at your house.

Unintentional steganography could be as simple as having your self-view camera highlighted at the top of the call. There are more subtle ways to pull data out of a recording, like looking at the latency of individual call members. If speaker B is a few milliseconds ahead in the leaked version, compared to all the others, then the leaker must be physically close to that call member. It’s extremely hard to cover all your bases when it comes to anonymizing media, and we’ve just scratched the surface here.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/this-week-in-security-openwrt-favicons-and-steganographia/

There are plenty of powerful, “desktop-replacement” laptops out on the market if you’ve got the money to spend. Sometimes, though, that just doesn’t scratch that crazy itch in the back of your head for true, unbridled computing power. When you’ve got an insatiable thirst for FLOPS, you’ve got to strike out on your own, as [Jeff] did with this Threadripper laptop.

The aim was to pack an AMD Threadripper processor into a nominally portable laptop format. For this build, the AMD 1950X was chosen for its affordability and huge computing power, as well as a TDP of 180W. This high heat output has stopped the chips ending up in portable builds until now, but [Jeff] didn’t see this as a problem, but a challenge.

What results is a wild, lashed together build of high-power parts into what could charitably be called a laptop – though we’d recommend against putting it on your lap. With a 4K 18″ screen, keyboard, touchpad, and many Dell Powerbanks kludged together into an HP Media Center case, it fits the usual form factor, albeit with more exposed heatpipes and cables than the typical consumer may be used to.

[Jeff] claims this is the current most powerful laptop in the world, as builds that use the 3950X throttle it back in their applications. We don’t have the data to compare, but we certainly wouldn’t be stacking our own portable rig up against it in a fight. DIY laptops have a long history at Hackaday, going all the way back to 2007. If you’ve got your own wild build, be sure to drop us a line. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/amds-threadripper-is-the-beating-heating-heart-of-most-powerful-diy-laptop/

There are plenty of powerful, “desktop-replacement” laptops out on the market if you’ve got the money to spend. Sometimes, though, that just doesn’t scratch that crazy itch in the back of your head for true, unbridled computing power. When you’ve got an insatiable thirst for FLOPS, you’ve got to strike out on your own, as [Jeff] did with this Threadripper laptop.

The aim was to pack an AMD Threadripper processor into a nominally portable laptop format. For this build, the AMD 1950X was chosen for its affordability and huge computing power, as well as a TDP of 180W. This high heat output has stopped the chips ending up in portable builds until now, but [Jeff] didn’t see this as a problem, but a challenge.

What results is a wild, lashed together build of high-power parts into what could charitably be called a laptop – though we’d recommend against putting it on your lap. With a 4K 18″ screen, keyboard, touchpad, and many Dell Powerbanks kludged together into an HP Media Center case, it fits the usual form factor, albeit with more exposed heatpipes and cables than the typical consumer may be used to.

[Jeff] claims this is the current most powerful laptop in the world, as builds that use the 3950X throttle it back in their applications. We don’t have the data to compare, but we certainly wouldn’t be stacking our own portable rig up against it in a fight. DIY laptops have a long history at Hackaday, going all the way back to 2007. If you’ve got your own wild build, be sure to drop us a line. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/amds-threadripper-is-the-beating-heating-heart-of-most-powerful-diy-laptop/

Good old nRF24L01+ wireless modules are inexpensive and effective. Well, they are as long as they work correctly, anyway. The devices themselves are mature and well-understood, but that doesn’t mean bad batches from suppliers can’t cause hair-pulling problems straight from the factory.

[nekromant] recently got a whole batch of units that simply refused to perform as they should, but not because they were counterfeits. The problem was that the antenna and PCB design had been “optimized” by the supplier to the point where the devices simply couldn’t work properly. Fortunately, [nekromant] leveraged an understanding of the problem into a way to fix them without going insane in the process. The test setup is shown in the image above, and the process is explained below.

This issue wasn’t new to [nekromant], as previous batches had suffered from a “magic finger problem”, where bad performance is magically solved by placing one’s finger on the antenna. This had been fixed in the past by soldering in a missing 1.0 pF capacitor, but the newest batch of nRF24L01+ units was so bad that something more needed to be done. Simply adding a 1.0 pF capacitor was no longer enough, and it’s unclear exactly why.

For reasons likely related to the PCB antenna, each radio required adding a capacitor in a value usually somewhere between 1.0 pF and 2.2 pF. But there was no way to tell which value any particular board would need. To solve this, [nekromant] made a small test rig to profile each device in turn by sending packets and measuring how many failures were recorded. After profiling each device, fixing them was a matter of informed trial-and-error. Once putting a finger on the PCB antenna begins to worsen a device’s performance rather than improve it, that module (along with whatever value of capacitor was last soldered onto it) could be dropped into the “OK” bin, and the process repeats until the pile is gone.

[nekromant] points out that the obvious lesson here is to be careful about picking suppliers, but that’s increasingly difficult to do with modules like these. An annoying manual board rework process is one thing for a small hobby project, but would be quite another issue entirely if several hundred or thousand units were involved.

Counterfeit silicon wasn’t the issue this time, but maybe brush up a little on spotting counterfeits all the same.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/22/fixing-nrf24l01-modules-without-going-too-insane/

Nintendo’s Game Boy is legendary for being the meat in the handheld gaming revolution, as well as being nigh-on indestructible whether in the custody of children or soldiers in the Gulf War. However, [Jiri] decided to see if he could whip up a tribute of his own, in brass instead of plastic.

The hardware is based on the Odroid GO emulator firmware for the ESP32, running on a 2.2″ color TFT screen. It’s a great base for a custom build, which avoids gutting any precious classic hardware. It’s then assembled behind front plate milled out of brass, with delicate point-to-point brass wires giving it an artistic circuit sculpture look. The brass did prove difficult to work with at times, acting as a heat sink which prevented easy soldering of the standoffs in place. To get around this, [Jiri] used a hotplate to heat the plate from below, keeping it warm enough so that a hand iron could do the job.

The final result is a fun Game Boy emulator in a stylish case – though one you shouldn’t throw in a back pack lest it short out the exposed conductors. It would make a great gift for any lifelong Nintendo fan. [Jiri] is no strange to circuit sculpture, as we well know – we’ve featured his tools and methods before. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2021/01/21/game-boy-replica-built-in-brass/