How do you instantly make any game better? By lighting it up and playing at night. We would normally say ‘drinking’, but we’re pretty sure that drinking is already a prerequisite for cornhole — that’s the game where you toss bean bags at holes in angled boards.
Players get a point and a song for landing a bag on top of the board, and three points and a different song for making it in the hole. We love the Easter egg — anyone who manages to trip both the vibration sensor and the break-beam detector at the same time will be treated to the sound of a flock of honking geese. Check out the build journey after the break.
Electric bikes have increased in popularity dramatically over the past few years, and while you can easily buy one from a reputable bicycle manufacturer, most of us around here might be inclined to at least buy a kit and strap it to a bike we already have. There aren’t kits available for every bike geometry, though, so if you want an electric BMX bike you might want to try out something custom like [Shea Nyquist] did with his latest build. (Video, embedded below.)
BMX frames have a smaller front triangle than most bikes, so his build needed to be extremely compact. To that end, it uses two small-sized motors connected together with a belt, which together power a friction drive which clamps against the rear tire to spin it directly. This keeps the weight distribution of the bike more balanced as well when compared to a hub drive, where the motor is installed in the rear wheel. It also uses a more compact lithium polymer battery pack instead of the typical 18650 lithium ion packs most e-bikes use, and although it only has a range of around three miles it’s more than enough charge to propel it around a skate park.
The build boasts impressive numbers too, at 2.5 kW peak power per motor. This puts it in electric motorcycle territory, and it’s indeed fast despite its small stature. For a true high speed e-bike experience, though, you’ll need a slightly larger frame and motor even if it means tossing safety out of the window.
The world of custom keyboards has over the years developed its work into an art form, as mechanical key switches meet USB-HID capable microcontrollers for a plethora of designs as individual as their creators. This was however not always the case, and from the days of 8-bit home computers onwards making a custom keyboard often meant taking a surplus one from elsewhere and adapting its matrix to suit whatever controller interface was at hand. [Julian Calaby]’s USB conversion of an Apple Extended keyboard may be unusual in this day and age and was probably a late example even 15 years ago when he made it, but it remains a glorious piece of bodge-wire hardware hacking at its finest.
The task at hand with this type of conversion is to cut the matrix PCB tracks and replace them with soldered wires to create the new matrix required. This can then be wired to the controller, which in [Julian]’s case came from a cheap USB keyboard. He added a small USB hub to allow for a pair of USB sockets where Apple had put an ADB socket, making for quite a decent older keyboard with an unexpected USB interface.
Now older and wiser, he has plans to revisit his old keyboard with a modern microcontroller board, and needs to revisit the matrix again and give the peripheral new life. We still like the original though, as it captures a moment in time when keyboard matrix hacking made sense, and reminds us of our own youthful hardware follies.
Netherlands Defence MInister Ank Bijleveld’s Tweeted picture, with the access details blacked out by Daniël Verlaan.
Like any other video call, if you had the link you could enter the meeting. So when Netherlands Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld Tweeted a photo of a video call last Friday, the address bar of the browser gave away the secret to anyone with a keen eye. Dutch journalist Daniël Verlaan working for the broadcaster RTL saw the URL on the screen and deduced the login credentials for the meeting.
We say “deduced”, but in fact there were five of the six digits in the PIN in the clear in the URL, leaving him with the difficult task of performing a one-digit brute-force attack and joining with the username “admin”. He joined and revealed his presence, then was admonished for committing a criminal offence before he left.
On one level it’s an opportunity for a good laugh at the expense of the defence ministers, and we certainly wouldn’t want to be Ank Bijleveld or probably the EU’s online security people once the inevitable investigation into this gets under way. It seems scarcely credible that the secrecy on such a high-security meeting could have sat upon such a shaky foundation without for example some form of two-factor authentication using the kind of hardware available only to governments.
EU policy is decided not by individual ministries but by delicate round-table summits of all 27 countries. In a pandemic these have shifted to being half-online and half in-real-life, so this EU defence ministers’ meeting had the usual mosaic video feed of politicians and national flags. And one Zoom-bombing journalist.
[Jesse]’s modification doesn’t affect the laser beam itself; it is an improvement on the air assist, which is the name for a constant stream of air that blows away smoke and debris as the laser burns and vaporizes material. An efficient air assist is one of the keys to getting nice clean laser cuts, but [Jesse] points out that a good quality air assist isn’t just about how hard the air blows, it’s also about how smoothly it does so. A turbulent air assist can make scorch marks worse, not better.
3D-printed nozzle to promote laminar air flow on the left, stock nozzle on the right.
As an experiment to improve the quality of the air flowing out the laser nozzle, [Jesse] researched ways to avoid turbulence by creating laminar flow. Laminar flow is the quality of a liquid having layers flowing past one another with little or no mixing. One way to do this is to force liquid through individual, parallel channels as it progresses towards a sharply-defined exit nozzle. While [Jesse] found no reference designs of laminar flow nozzles for air assists, there were definitely resources on making laminar flow nozzles for water. It turns out that interest in such a nozzle exists mainly as a means of modifying Lonnie Johnson’s brilliant invention, the Super Soaker.
Working from such a design, [Jesse] created a custom nozzle to help promote laminar flow. Sadly, a laser cutter head carries design constraints that make some compromises unavoidable; one is limited space, and another is the need to keep the laser’s path unobstructed. Still, after 3D printing it in rigid heat-resistant resin, [Jesse] found a dramatic improvement in the feel of the air exiting the nozzle. Some test cuts confirmed a difference in performance, which results in a noticeably cleaner kerf without scorching around the edges.
One of the things [Nervous System] does is make their own custom puzzles, so any improvement to laser cutting helps reliability and quality. When production is involved, just about everything matters; a lesson [Nervous System] shared when they discussed making the best plywood for creating their puzzles.
While SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink satellites is nowhere near its projected final size, the company has enough of the birds zipping around in low Earth orbit to start a limited testing period they call the Better Than Nothing Beta. If you’re lucky enough to get selected, you have to cough up $500 for the hardware and another $100 a month for the service. Despite the fairly high bar for getting your hands on one, [Kenneth Keiter] decided to sacrifice his Starlink dish to the teardown Gods.
We say sacrifice because [Kenneth] had to literally destroy the dish to get a look inside. It doesn’t appear that you can realistically get into the exceptionally thin antenna array without pulling it all apart, thanks in part to preposterous amount of adhesive that holds the structural back plate onto the PCB. The sky-facing side of the phased array, the key element that allows the antenna to track the rapidly moving Starlink satellites as they pass overhead, is also laminated to a stack-up comprised of plastic hexagonal mesh layers, passive antenna elements, and the outer fiberglass skin. In short, there are definitely no user-serviceable parts inside.
The dish hides many secrets under its skin.
Beyond attempting to analyze the RF magic that’s happening inside the antenna, [Kenneth] also takes viewers through a tour of some of the more recognizable components of the PCB; picking out things like the Power over Ethernet magnetics, a GPS receiver, some flash storage, and the H-Bridge drivers used to control the pan and tilt motors in the base of the dish.
It also appears that the antenna is a self-contained computer of sorts, complete with ARM processor and RAM to run the software that aims the phased array. Speaking of which, it should come as no surprise to find that not only are the ICs that drive the dizzying array of antenna elements the most numerous components on the PCB, but that they appear to be some kind of custom silicon designed specifically for SpaceX.
While SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink satellites is nowhere near its projected final size, the company has enough of the birds zipping around in low Earth orbit to start a limited testing period they call the Better Than Nothing Beta. If you’re lucky enough to get selected, you have to cough up $500 for the hardware and another $100 a month for the service. Despite the fairly high bar for getting your hands on one, [Kenneth Keiter] decided to sacrifice his Starlink dish to the teardown Gods.
We say sacrifice because [Kenneth] had to literally destroy the dish to get a look inside. It doesn’t appear that you can realistically get into the exceptionally thin antenna array without pulling it all apart, thanks in part to preposterous amount of adhesive that holds the structural back plate onto the PCB. The sky-facing side of the phased array, the key element that allows the antenna to track the rapidly moving Starlink satellites as they pass overhead, is also laminated to a stack-up comprised of plastic hexagonal mesh layers, passive antenna elements, and the outer fiberglass skin. In short, there are definitely no user-serviceable parts inside.
The dish hides many secrets under its skin.
Beyond attempting to analyze the RF magic that’s happening inside the antenna, [Kenneth] also takes viewers through a tour of some of the more recognizable components of the PCB; picking out things like the Power over Ethernet magnetics, a GPS receiver, some flash storage, and the H-Bridge drivers used to control the pan and tilt motors in the base of the dish.
It also appears that the antenna is a self-contained computer of sorts, complete with ARM processor and RAM to run the software that aims the phased array. Speaking of which, it should come as no surprise to find that not only are the ICs that drive the dizzying array of antenna elements the most numerous components on the PCB, but that they appear to be some kind of custom silicon designed specifically for SpaceX.
The head is one of the few parts of the body that it seems impossible to live without. Many people are, of course, not happy with the one they’ve been given. For those dreaming of a more digital replacement, [Vivian’s] TV Head might be just the accessory to meet those needs.
The build starts with an old CRT, which [Vivian] promptly gutted to make room for her head. In place of the original tube, a thin polycarbonate sheet was installed with window tint applied. Behind this, rows of WS2812B are set up in a grid, spaced apart just enough to allow the wearer to see through. The setup is controlled by a Circuit Playground Express. A small PS/2 keyboard is used to control the light show, and the onboard accelerometer can be used for gravity reactive animations.
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.
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.
