Gauntlet is a well-known arcade game from 1985 with many sequels and ports to more modern architectures such as Xbox and GameCube. Thanks to its popularity and relative age, the original arcade cabinet is well documented with the schematics available online. It was regarded as the most complex and ambitious hardware Atari had ever developed at the time it was released. In what can only be described as an absolute labor of love, [Alex] has recreated the arcade hardware on the Pipistrello FPGA board.

The project can actually play Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, and Vindicators II as they all ran on the same hardware. Four joysticks are supported so up to four players can play, though the EEPROM is emulated in RAM so high scores are reset when the device is powered down. The FPGA is almost out of space and can’t quite squeeze in the SRAM needed. So an SRAM expansion daughterboard is required; nothing a quick board run from our favorite purple PCB manufacturer can’t solve.

In the repo is an incredible write-up detailing the system, how it works, and the process of debugging it. This project also includes a complete simulation of the TMS5220 Voice Synthesis Processor, as Gauntlet was the first coin-operated arcade machine with a voice synthesizer. Getting the video correct was particularly tricky and it took several tries to get the color palette and motion looking right. Since [Alex] didn’t have access to an original Gauntlet arcade cabinet, they had to make do with MAME. After writing a test to make sure the FPGA was working correctly, there were differences between the MAME emulation and the FPGA output. To help out, [Colin Davies] came to the rescue. After [Colin] hooked up an original Gauntlet Arcade PCB with the motion test loaded up, the test showed that the FPGA had the correct behavior.

During development [Alex] actually simulated several frames of the game in ISIM (at a whopping 90 seconds per frame or 90 minutes per in-game second). Using ISIM allowed them to compare system state to MAME and validate the design much faster as they could better inspect the interworkings of the different modules. Using a clever trick of grabbing state from MAME after a few seconds, they primed the FPGA state and saved themselves a few hours of simulation.

If you’re looking to get into old hardware style arcade game development, give the browser-based 8bitworkshop IDE a spin. Or start with something a little smaller in scope and size with this adorable mini CRT arcade cabinet.

Thanks [Alex] for sending this one in!

 

 

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/throwing-down-the-fpga-gauntlet/

Finding the JLCPCB component parts library frustrating to navigate, [Jan Mrázek] took matters into his own hands and made an open-source parametric search utility. We’ve all probably wasted time before trying to track down a particular flavor of a part, and this tool promises to make the process easier.  It downloads data from the JLCPCB parts site upon initialization and presents the user with typical selection filters for categories and parameter values. You can install it yourself on GitHub Pages, or [Jan] provides a link to his site.

For the curious, the details of how to pull parts information from the JLBPCB site can be found in the project’s source code.  We like it when a distributor provides this level of access to their part details and parameters, allowing others to sort and filter the parts in ways not originally envisioned by the site design team.  We think this is a win-win situation — distributors can’t sell parts that designers can’t find.

If [Jan]’s name sounds familiar, it should be.  We have written about several of his projects before, two of them are also PCB designer tools ( KiCad Board Renderings and KiCad Panelization ).

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/improved-part-searches-for-jlcpcb-parts/

If you’re interested in SDR and digital signal processing but don’t know where to start, you’re in luck. Ben Hillburn, president of the GNU Radio Project, recently tweeted about an online curriculum for learning SDR and DSP using Python. The course was developed by Dr. Mark Lichtman, who was a lead on GNU Radio, and from the look of it, this is the place to go to learn about putting SDRs to use doing cool things. The course is chock full of animations that make the concepts clear, and explain what all the equations mean in a way that’s sure to appeal to practical learners.

It’s not much of a secret that the Hackaday community loves clocks. We build clocks out of everything and anything, and any unique way of telling time is rightly applauded and celebrated on our pages. But does the clock motif make a good basis for a video game? Perhaps not, but that didn’t stop Clock Simulator from becoming a thing. To “play” Clock Simulator, you advance the hands of an on-screen clock by pressing a button once per second. Now, thanks to Michael Dwyer, you don’t even have to do that one simple thing. He developed a hardware cheat for Clock Simulator that takes the 1PPS output from a GPS module and wires it into a mouse. The pulse stream clicks the mouse once per second with atomic precision, rendering the player irrelevant and making the whole thing even more pointless. Or perhaps that is the point.

Maybe we were a little hard on Clock Simulator, though — we can see how it would help achieve a Zen-like state with its requirement for steady rhythm, at least when not cheating. Another source of Zen for some is watching precision machining, and more precise, the better. We ran into this mesmerizing video of a CNC micro-coil winder and found it fascinating to watch, despite the vertical format. The winder is built from a CNC lathe, to the carriage of which a wire dispenser and tensioning attachment have been added. The wire is hair-fine and passes through a ruby nozzle with a 0.6 mm bore, and LinuxCNC controls the tiny back and forth motion of the wire as it winds onto the form. We don’t know what the coil will be used for, but we respect the precision of winding something smaller than a matchhead.

Dave Jones over at EEVblog posted a teardown video this week that goes to a place few of us have ever seen: inside a processor module for an IBM System/390 server. These servers earned the name “Big Iron” for a reason, as everything about them was engineered to perform. The processor module Dave found in his mailbag was worth $250,000 in 1991, and from the look of it was worth every penny. From the 64-layer ceramic substrate supporting up to 121 individual dies to the stout oil-filled aluminum enclosure, everything about this module is impressive. We were particularly intrigued by the spring-loaded copper pistons used to transfer heat away from each die; the 2,772 pins on the other side were pretty neat too.

Here’s an interesting question: what happens if an earthquake occurs in the middle of a 3D printing run? It’s probably not something you’ve given much thought, but it’s something that regular reader Marius Taciuc experienced recently. As he relates, the magnitude 6.7 quake that struck near Kainatu in Papua New Guinea (later adjusted to a 6.3 magnitude) resulted in a solid 15 seconds of shaking at his location, where he was printing a part on his modified Mendel/Prusa i2. The shaking showed up clearly in the part as the machine started swaying with the room. It’s probably not a practical way to make a seismograph, but it’s still an interesting artifact.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/hackaday-links-october-11-2020/

If you’re interested in SDR and digital signal processing but don’t know where to start, you’re in luck. Ben Hillburn, president of the GNU Radio Project, recently tweeted about an online curriculum for learning SDR and DSP using Python. The course was developed by Dr. Mark Lichtman, who was a lead on GNU Radio, and from the look of it, this is the place to go to learn about putting SDRs to use doing cool things. The course is chock full of animations that make the concepts clear, and explain what all the equations mean in a way that’s sure to appeal to practical learners.

It’s not much of a secret that the Hackaday community loves clocks. We build clocks out of everything and anything, and any unique way of telling time is rightly applauded and celebrated on our pages. But does the clock motif make a good basis for a video game? Perhaps not, but that didn’t stop Clock Simulator from becoming a thing. To “play” Clock Simulator, you advance the hands of an on-screen clock by pressing a button once per second. Now, thanks to Michael Dwyer, you don’t even have to do that one simple thing. He developed a hardware cheat for Clock Simulator that takes the 1PPS output from a GPS module and wires it into a mouse. The pulse stream clicks the mouse once per second with atomic precision, rendering the player irrelevant and making the whole thing even more pointless. Or perhaps that is the point.

Maybe we were a little hard on Clock Simulator, though — we can see how it would help achieve a Zen-like state with its requirement for steady rhythm, at least when not cheating. Another source of Zen for some is watching precision machining, and more precise, the better. We ran into this mesmerizing video of a CNC micro-coil winder and found it fascinating to watch, despite the vertical format. The winder is built from a CNC lathe, to the carriage of which a wire dispenser and tensioning attachment have been added. The wire is hair-fine and passes through a ruby nozzle with a 0.6 mm bore, and LinuxCNC controls the tiny back and forth motion of the wire as it winds onto the form. We don’t know what the coil will be used for, but we respect the precision of winding something smaller than a matchhead.

Dave Jones over at EEVblog posted a teardown video this week that goes to a place few of us have ever seen: inside a processor module for an IBM System/390 server. These servers earned the name “Big Iron” for a reason, as everything about them was engineered to perform. The processor module Dave found in his mailbag was worth $250,000 in 1991, and from the look of it was worth every penny. From the 64-layer ceramic substrate supporting up to 121 individual dies to the stout oil-filled aluminum enclosure, everything about this module is impressive. We were particularly intrigued by the spring-loaded copper pistons used to transfer heat away from each die; the 2,772 pins on the other side were pretty neat too.

Here’s an interesting question: what happens if an earthquake occurs in the middle of a 3D printing run? It’s probably not something you’ve given much thought, but it’s something that regular reader Marius Taciuc experienced recently. As he relates, the magnitude 6.7 quake that struck near Kainatu in Papua New Guinea (later adjusted to a 6.3 magnitude) resulted in a solid 15 seconds of shaking at his location, where he was printing a part on his modified Mendel/Prusa i2. The shaking showed up clearly in the part as the machine started swaying with the room. It’s probably not a practical way to make a seismograph, but it’s still an interesting artifact.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/hackaday-links-october-11-2020/

Display technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the smartphone revolution. High-resolution LCD panels are dirt cheap and easy to interface with. There’s absolutely no logical reason to try and show images on a 32×32 array of RGB LEDs. But that didn’t stop [Felix Spöttel] from doing it anyway.

The project, which he calls thirtytwopixels, was designed to work in conjunction with MPD (Music Player Daemon) to show the album art for whatever is currently playing. The ultra-low resolution display added a certain element of abstractness to the artwork, which [Felix] said made it an interesting conversation starter. Guests would try and guess what the album art was depicting given the sparse rendition shown on the matrix.

[Felix] gives an excellent explanation of how to get the server and client-side software up and running should you want to recreate his setup, but his Python scripts also have a function where you can push an arbitrary image to the display if you don’t want to connect everything up to the MPD backend.

On the hardware side, thirtytwopixels uses the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet, and a 32×32 LED matrix that uses the HUB75 interface. Even a relatively small LED matrix like this can get pretty thirsty, so [Felix] is using a 5 volt power supply that can deliver 4 amps to keep the electronics happy.

If you wanted to keep the low resolution aesthetic but make the display larger, we’ve seen WS2812B LED strips and 3D printed frames used to make a custom jumbo matrix which could surely be adapted for this concept.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/lo-fi-art-on-a-32×32-matrix/

Display technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the smartphone revolution. High-resolution LCD panels are dirt cheap and easy to interface with. There’s absolutely no logical reason to try and show images on a 32×32 array of RGB LEDs. But that didn’t stop [Felix Spöttel] from doing it anyway.

The project, which he calls thirtytwopixels, was designed to work in conjunction with MPD (Music Player Daemon) to show the album art for whatever is currently playing. The ultra-low resolution display added a certain element of abstractness to the artwork, which [Felix] said made it an interesting conversation starter. Guests would try and guess what the album art was depicting given the sparse rendition shown on the matrix.

[Felix] gives an excellent explanation of how to get the server and client-side software up and running should you want to recreate his setup, but his Python scripts also have a function where you can push an arbitrary image to the display if you don’t want to connect everything up to the MPD backend.

On the hardware side, thirtytwopixels uses the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet, and a 32×32 LED matrix that uses the HUB75 interface. Even a relatively small LED matrix like this can get pretty thirsty, so [Felix] is using a 5 volt power supply that can deliver 4 amps to keep the electronics happy.

If you wanted to keep the low resolution aesthetic but make the display larger, we’ve seen WS2812B LED strips and 3D printed frames used to make a custom jumbo matrix which could surely be adapted for this concept.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/lo-fi-art-on-a-32×32-matrix/

Display technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the smartphone revolution. High-resolution LCD panels are dirt cheap and easy to interface with. There’s absolutely no logical reason to try and show images on a 32×32 array of RGB LEDs. But that didn’t stop [Felix Spöttel] from doing it anyway.

The project, which he calls thirtytwopixels, was designed to work in conjunction with MPD (Music Player Daemon) to show the album art for whatever is currently playing. The ultra-low resolution display added a certain element of abstractness to the artwork, which [Felix] said made it an interesting conversation starter. Guests would try and guess what the album art was depicting given the sparse rendition shown on the matrix.

[Felix] gives an excellent explanation of how to get the server and client-side software up and running should you want to recreate his setup, but his Python scripts also have a function where you can push an arbitrary image to the display if you don’t want to connect everything up to the MPD backend.

On the hardware side, thirtytwopixels uses the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet, and a 32×32 LED matrix that uses the HUB75 interface. Even a relatively small LED matrix like this can get pretty thirsty, so [Felix] is using a 5 volt power supply that can deliver 4 amps to keep the electronics happy.

If you wanted to keep the low resolution aesthetic but make the display larger, we’ve seen WS2812B LED strips and 3D printed frames used to make a custom jumbo matrix which could surely be adapted for this concept.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/lo-fi-art-on-a-32×32-matrix/

There is a certain magic and uniqueness to hardware, particularly when it comes to audio. Tube amplifiers are well-known and well-loved by audio enthusiasts and musicians alike. However, that uniqueness also comes with the price of the fact that gear takes up space and cannot be configured outside the bounds of what it was designed to do. [keyth72] has decided to take it upon themselves to recreate the smooth sound of the Fenders Blues Jr. small tube guitar amp. But rather than using hardware or standard audio software, the magic of AI was thrown at it.

In some ways, recreating a transformation is exactly what AI is designed for. There’s a clear and recordable input with a similar output. In this case, [keyth72] recorded several guitar sessions with the guitar audio sent through the device they wanted to recreate. Using WaveNet, they created a model that applies the transform to input audio in real-time. The Gain and EQ knobs were handled outside the model itself to keep things simple. Instructions on how to train your own model are included on the GitHub page.

While the model is simply approximating the real hardware, it still sounds quite impressive, and perhaps the next time you need a particular sound of your home-built amp or guitar pedal, you might reach for your computer instead.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/tube-amp-is-modeled-with-the-power-of-ai/

Building a retro computer, or even restoring one, is a great way to understand a lot of the fundamentals of computing. That can take a long time and a lot of energy, though. Luckily, there is a Twitter bot out there that can let you experience an old 8-bit Atari without even needing to spin up an emulator. Just tweet your program to the bot, and it outputs the result.

The bot was built by [Kay Savets] and accepts programs in five programming languages: Atari BASIC, Turbo-Basic XL, Atari Logo, Atari PILOT, and Atari Assembler/Editor, which was a low-level assembly-type language available on these machines. The bot itself runs on a Raspberry Pi with the Atari 800 emulator, rather than original hardware, presumably because it’s much simpler to get a working network connection on a Pi than on a computer from the 80s. The Pi runs a python script that polls Twitter every two minutes and then hands the code off to the emulator.

[Kay]’s work isn’t limited to just Ataris, though. There’s also an Apple II BASIC bot for all the Apple fans out there that responds to programs written in AppleSoft BASIC. While building your own retro system or emulating one on other hardware is a great exercise, it’s also great that there are tools like these that allow manipulation of retro computers without having to do any of the dirty work ourselves.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/access-an-8-bit-atari-through-twitter/

How many people still have a PS/2 keyboard kicking around in 2020? Admittedly asking such a question of the Hackaday audience is probably cheating (there’s a decent chance one of you will type a comment on one just to prove a point), but even the most pedantic reader has to admit that it’s a long dead standard. So we’re hardly surprised to hear that [Turbaned Engineer] didn’t have one handy when he tried to boot a motherboard so old that he couldn’t access the BIOS with a USB keyboard.

But rather than waiting for an adapter to show up in the mail, he decided to rig up an Arduino Nano to mimic a PS/2 keyboard just long enough for him to navigate the system configuration. Since that basically meant he only needed the arrow keys and Enter, he was able to rig up a handful of momentary buttons to serve as input. We wouldn’t recommend typing out your memoirs with such a spartan board, but it’s certainly good enough to juggle around the order of boot devices.

The fun didn’t stop there, though. [Turbaned Engineer] also had to clean some corrosion and fix a blown resistor on a bank of RAM to drag this old soldier over the finish line. He didn’t have a case handy, so he made a free-form one using the polycarbonate packaging that ICs ship in. The final machine isn’t exactly a sleeper, but it’s good enough to play Super Mario Bros. 3 on the TV.

At the end of the day, the minimal input device [Turbaned Engineer] put together isn’t so far removed from other homebrew keyboards we’ve seen recently. It seems that QMK even has some basic support for the PS/2 interface. Not that it would come up very often, but a “retro” mode might be an interesting addition to your next custom keyboard build.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/arduino-gets-old-pc-booted-and-back-into-action/

Master of 3D printed robots, [James Bruton], plans to do some autonomous rover projects in the future, but first, he needed a modular rover platform. Everything is cooler with tank tracks, so he built a rover with flexible interlocking track sections.

The track sections are printed with flexible Ninjaflex filament. Each section has a tab designed to slot through two neighboring pieces. The ends of the tabs stick through on the inside of the track fit into slots on the drive wheel like gear teeth. This prevents the track from slipping under load. The Ninjaflex is almost too flexible, allowing the tracks to stretch and almost climb off the wheels, so [James] plans to experiment with some other materials in the future. The chassis consists of two 2020 T-slot extrusions, which allows convenient mounting of the wheel bogies and other components.

For initial driving tests [James] fitted two completely overpowered 1500 W brushless motors that he had on hand, which he plans to replace with smaller geared DC motors at a later stage.

A standard RC system is used for control, but it does not offer a simple way to control a skid steer vehicle. To solve this, [James] added an Arduino between the RC receiver and the motor ESC. It converts the PWM throttle and turn signal from the transmitter, and combines is into differential PWM outputs for the two ESCs.

We look forward to seeing what [James] does with the rover. It seems like the perfect platform for the new Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB. A while back [rctestflight] built also built an interesting tracker 3D printed rover, which can run autonomously with Ardurover, and sometimes lives out at his flying field.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/modular-rover-platform-rolls-on-3d-printed-flexible-tank-tracks/

Master of 3D printed robots, [James Bruton], plans to do some autonomous rover projects in the future, but first, he needed a modular rover platform. Everything is cooler with tank tracks, so he built a rover with flexible interlocking track sections.

The track sections are printed with flexible Ninjaflex filament. Each section has a tab designed to slot through two neighboring pieces. The ends of the tabs stick through on the inside of the track fit into slots on the drive wheel like gear teeth. This prevents the track from slipping under load. The Ninjaflex is almost too flexible, allowing the tracks to stretch and almost climb off the wheels, so [James] plans to experiment with some other materials in the future. The chassis consists of two 2020 T-slot extrusions, which allows convenient mounting of the wheel bogies and other components.

For initial driving tests [James] fitted two completely overpowered 1500 W brushless motors that he had on hand, which he plans to replace with smaller geared DC motors at a later stage.

A standard RC system is used for control, but it does not offer a simple way to control a skid steer vehicle. To solve this, [James] added an Arduino between the RC receiver and the motor ESC. It converts the PWM throttle and turn signal from the transmitter, and combines is into differential PWM outputs for the two ESCs.

We look forward to seeing what [James] does with the rover. It seems like the perfect platform for the new Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB. A while back [rctestflight] built also built an interesting tracker 3D printed rover, which can run autonomously with Ardurover, and sometimes lives out at his flying field.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/modular-rover-platform-rolls-on-3d-printed-flexible-tank-tracks/

Master of 3D printed robots, [James Bruton], plans to do some autonomous rover projects in the future, but first, he needed a modular rover platform. Everything is cooler with tank tracks, so he built a rover with flexible interlocking track sections.

The track sections are printed with flexible Ninjaflex filament. Each section has a tab designed to slot through two neighboring pieces. The ends of the tabs stick through on the inside of the track fit into slots on the drive wheel like gear teeth. This prevents the track from slipping under load. The Ninjaflex is almost too flexible, allowing the tracks to stretch and almost climb off the wheels, so [James] plans to experiment with some other materials in the future. The chassis consists of two 2020 T-slot extrusions, which allows convenient mounting of the wheel bogies and other components.

For initial driving tests [James] fitted two completely overpowered 1500 W brushless motors that he had on hand, which he plans to replace with smaller geared DC motors at a later stage.

A standard RC system is used for control, but it does not offer a simple way to control a skid steer vehicle. To solve this, [James] added an Arduino between the RC receiver and the motor ESC. It converts the PWM throttle and turn signal from the transmitter, and combines is into differential PWM outputs for the two ESCs.

We look forward to seeing what [James] does with the rover. It seems like the perfect platform for the new Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB. A while back [rctestflight] built also built an interesting tracker 3D printed rover, which can run autonomously with Ardurover, and sometimes lives out at his flying field.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/11/modular-rover-platform-rolls-on-3d-printed-flexible-tank-tracks/

What do you do with an old cable modem in a closet? If you are [stdw] you reverse engineer it and turn it into a software-defined radio. The modem in question was a Motorola MB7220. After looking at a similar project using a different modem, it seemed like it should be doable.

Cracking open the case revealed two likely UART ports, one of which was active. The output from that UART provided a lot of info. The chip was a Broadcom BCM3383 which is a MIPS processor. It had eCos as an operating system. However, the bootloader eventually disables the UART, so there wasn’t much more investigation possible via the serial terminal.

The next step was to dump the flash memory. That required a little solder surgery to prevent the board from starting while the flash chip had power. It appeared that some key credentials and configuration data were present, but they were really backups. After doing a factory reset to remove the backups, the right data was apparent.

After some lengthy exploration, the diagnostic that builds a spectrum display gave up its data. At first, the data was just a small sample of what was really required, but it did show a local FM station as a spectrum. Eventually, the data loss rate was down to about 12% when streaming which is not great, but good enough. You can hear an audio clip of the reception. Not exactly crystal-clear quality, but not bad.

Of course, no one will use this for an FM radio. But it is a fascinating view into how far you can hack into a device like this if you have some skills and patience. There must be something about quarantine that is making people hack old gear, as we just recently saw a similar Netgear hack. Even cheap games aren’t safe.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/10/the-cable-modem-to-sdr-transformation/

At one time or another, most of us have seen a gadget for sale and thought we could build something similar for cheaper. Of course, we’re almost always wrong. Not about being able to build it, mind you. But when you add up the cost of the materials, the tool or two you almost inevitably end up buying, and the time spent chasing perfection, you’re lucky if you haven’t doubled the original price.

We’re not sure how much money, if any, [Taylor Hay] ended up saving by building his own portable power bank. But we do know it’s a gorgeous piece of hardware that’s certainly built far better than the average piece of consumer tech. The CNC-cut aluminum side panels look like something pulled out of a tank, and while we know some might balk at the 3D printed internal frame, we’re confident you could use this thing as an impromptu step stool without a problem.

Inside there’s 150 watt 240 VAC inverter, complete with a temperature-controlled fan to keep it cool under load. There are also four USB ports providing 2.1 A each, a standard 12 VDC accessory port, and a LED display that shows battery voltage and current being drawn. Rather than come up with his own battery pack, [Taylor] used a 3D printed interface that accepts an 18 V Milwaukee cordless tool battery. Naturally, the design could be adapted to take another brand’s cells if you were so inclined.

Around these parts, we know that a good project doesn’t have to be cheaper or even more practical than what’s already on the market. There’s an inherent value in building something exactly the way you want it that you simply can’t put a monetary price on.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/10/heavy-metal-power-bank-uses-tool-batteries/

We are no stranger to peculiar and wonderful musical instruments here at Hackaday. [James Bruton] has long been fascinated with barcode scanners as an input source for music and now has a procedural barcode-powered synth to add to his growing collection of handmade instruments. We’ve previously covered his barcode guitar, which converts a string of numbers from the PS/2 output to pitches. This meant having a large number of barcodes printed as each pitch required a separate barcode. As you can imagine, this makes for a rather unwieldy and large instrument.

Rather than looking at the textual output of the reader, [James] cracked it open and put it to the oscilloscope. Once inside, he found a good source that outputs a square wave corresponding to the black and white lines that the barcode sees. Since the barcodes [James] is using don’t have the proper start and stop codes, the barcode reader continuously scans.  Normally it would stop the laser to send the text over the USB or PS/2 connection. A simple 5v to 3.3v level shifter feeds that square wave into a Teensy board, which outputs the audio.

A video showcasing a similar technique inspired [James] with this project. The creators of that video have a huge wall of different patterns of black and white lines. [James’s] next stroke of brilliance was to have a small HDMI display to generate the barcodes on the fly. A Raspberry Pi 4 reads in various buttons via GPIO and displays the resulting barcode on the screen. A quick 3d printed shell rounds out the build nicely, keeping things small and compact. All the code and CAD files are up on GitHub.

Thanks [James Bruton] for the awesome project!

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/10/procedural-barcode-synth-is-as-simple-as-black-and-white/

Ordinarily, when we need gears, we pop open a McMaster catalog or head to the KHK website. Some of the more adventurous may even laser cut or 3D print them. But what about machining them yourself?

[Uri Tuchman] set out to do just that. Of course, cutting your own gears isn’t any fun if you didn’t also build the machine that does the cutting, right? And let’s be honest, what’s the point of making the machine in the first place if it doesn’t double as a work of art?

[Uri’s] machine, made from brass and wood, is simple in its premise. It is placed adjacent to a gear cutter, a spinning tool that cuts the correct involute profile that constitutes a gear tooth. The gear-to-be is mounted in the center, atop a hole-filled plate called the dividing plate. The dividing plate can be rotated about its center and translated along linear stages, and a pin drops into each hole on the plate as it moves to index the location of each gear tooth and lock the machine for cutting.

The most impressive part [Uri’s] machine is that it was made almost entirely with hand tools. The most advanced piece of equipment he used in the build is a lathe, and even for those operations he hand-held the cutting tool. The result is an elegant mechanism as beautiful as it is functional — one that would look at home on a workbench in the late 19th century.

[Thanks BaldPower]

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/10/homemade-gear-cutting-indexer-blends-art-with-engineering/

WiFi is an ubiquitous feature of the modern landscape, but due to power restrictions on most hardware alongside the high-frequency signal it’s typically fairly limited in range. This of course leads to frustration where a WiFi signal can be seen, but the connection is unreliable or slow. While most would reach for a range extender or other hardware bridge, [tak786] was able to roll out a better solution for his workplace by using a high-gain antenna and a single-board computer which gets him an amazing kilometer-wide WiFi network.

The build uses a 10 dBi antenna from TP-Link that’s rated for outdoor use and a single-board computer which acts as a sort of router. The antenna is placed at the top of a building which certainly helps with the extreme range as well. This setup doesn’t actually broadcast an open Internet connection, though. [tak786]’s employer needed a teleconferencing solution for their building, and he also created a fully open-source video conferencing solution called trango that can run on any LAN and doesn’t require an Internet connection. The WiFi setup in this build is effectively just a bonus to make the conferencing system more effective.

[tak786] is planning on releasing a whitepaper about this build shortly, but for now you can access the source code for the video conferencing system at his GitHub page. And, before anyone jumps to conclusions, apparently this is well within FCC rules as well. Some of the comments in the linked Reddit post suggest that with an amateur radio license this system could be pushed much further, too. If you need more range than a kilometer, though, it’s not too much more difficult to do once you have all the right hardware.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/10/long-range-wifi-broadcasts-open-source-video-conferencing/

The rise of smartphone and smartwatch fitness tracking has been an absolute boon for anyone interested in tracking their runs. However, it all falls short when you need a custom feature and start getting into serious long distance running, as most smartphone batteries simply won’t last. While there are devices out there for the ultra-running enthusiast, [Ivor Hewitt] decided he wasn’t willing to pay a monthly subscription for the pricy trackers or deal with the hassle of the generic cheap versions, and decided to roll his own.

The key pieces of this project are the A9G GPS module and the RDA8955 GRS/GPRS module. They’re both incredibly small and power efficient, perfect for a project that needs to be worn on your person with a long battery life. As an added bonus, the RDA8955 also includes a SoC that’s user-programmable. After battling the lackluster documentation and tooling, [Ivor] managed to get some software running on his new system. A power bug on the A9G GPS module was potentially show stopping, but thanks to some help by folks in the community, it was diagnosed and solved.

Further additions included adding a proper charging circuit (TP4056) and a beefy 2600 mAh battery scavenged from a Sony smartphone, giving the compact system around 38 hours of active battery life. An OLED screen was added to show upcoming aid stations and overall system status, driven by a custom display library. A snazzy translucent case makes the whole device slim and easy to carry. Now at the end of a long race or training session, [Ivor] has a wealth of tracked points that has already been uploaded to his own tracking website and a fully charged phone.

Next time you’re looking for a small compact GPS tracker or cellular logger take a look at this project’s code on GitHub or the A9G and RDA8955 modules.

Thanks [Ivor] for sending this one in!

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/tracking-your-run-over-the-long-haul/

If you ask power companies and cell phone carriers how much electromagnetic radiation affects the human body, they’ll tell you it doesn’t at any normal levels. If you ask [Calvin Carter] and some other researchers at the University of Iowa, they will tell you that it might treat diabetes. In a recent paper in Cell Metabolism, they’ve reported that exposing patients to static magnetic and electric fields led to improved insulin sensitivity in diabetic mice.

Some of the medical jargon in a paper like this one can be hard to follow, but it seems they feed mice on a bad diet — like that which many of us may eat — and exposed them to magnetic and electrical fields much higher than that of the Earth’s normal fields. After 30 days there was a 33% improvement in fasting blood glucose levels and even more for some mice with a specific cause of diabetes.

The magnetic field was 3 mT and the electric field was 7 kV/m. That sounds like a lot, but at sea level we normally experience about 120 V/m, so it’s hardly the equivalent of grabbing a live wire.

Interestingly, the same effect occurred when the mice were exposed for only seven hours a day. You can infer then that one day, diabetics might just sleep under an electromagnetic field and have improved glucose metabolism.

There’s some medical speak about why they think this works, but it was pretty dense on biology terms. The key phrase seems to be “modulating the systemic GSH/GSSG redox environment.” GSH/GSSG is the glutathione-to-glutathione disulfide redox couples, if that tells you anything.

This would be amazing news for people with diabetes, especially if they don’t decide it also causes blindness, cancer, and restless leg syndrome. No more fake pancreas! We don’t know, though, if the results would apply to type 1 diabetes as it sounds like the mice all had type 2.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/electronic-treatment-for-diabetes/

A while back, [Kutluhan Aktar] was trying to hack their chickens, quails, and ducks for higher egg production and faster hatching times by using a bit of classical conditioning. That is, feeding them at the same time every day while simultaneously exposing them to sound and light. Once [Kutluhan] slipped enough times, they hatched a plan to build an automatic feeder.

This fun rooster-shaped bird feeder runs on an Arduino Nano and gets its time, date, and temperature info from a DS3231 RTC. All [Kutluhan] has to do is set the daily feeding time. When it comes, a pair of servos and a pan-tilt kit work together to invert a Pringles can filled with food pellets. A piezo buzzer and a green LED provide the sound and light to help with conditioning. Scratch your way past the break to see it in action.

If [Kutluhan] gets tired of watching the birds eat at the same time every day, perhaps a trash-for-treats training program could be next on the list.

Via r/duino

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/classical-poultry-conditioning-is-a-bird-brained-scheme/

With all the cool and useful parts you can whip up (relatively) quickly on a 3D printer, it’s a shame you can’t just print a PCB. Sure, ordering a PCB is quick, easy, and cheap, but being able to print one-offs would peg the needle on the instant gratification meter.

[Peter Liwyj] may just have come up with a method to do exactly that. His Instructables post goes into great detail about his method, which uses an Elegoo Mars resin printer and a couple of neat tricks. First, a properly cleaned board is placed copper-side down onto a blob of SLA resin sitting on the print bed. He tricks the printer into thinking the platform is all the way down for the first layer by interrupting the photosensor used to detect home. He lets the printer go through one layer of an STL file that contains his design, which polymerizes a thin layer of plastic onto the copper. The excess resin is wiped gently away and the board goes straight into a ferric chloride etching bath. The video below shows the whole process.

As simple as it sounds, it looks like it works really well. And [Peter] didn’t just stumble onto this method; he approached it systematically and found what works best. His tips incude using electrical tape as a spacer to lift the copper off the print surface slightly, cleaning the board with Scotchbrite rather than sandpaper, and not curing the resin after printing. His toolchain is a bit uncoventional — he used SketchUp to create the traces and exported the STL. But there are ways to convert Gerbers to STLs, so your favorite EDA package can probably fit in to the process too.

Don’t have a resin printer? Don’t worry — FDM printers can work too.

Thanks to [abetusk] for the tip.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/put-that-new-resin-printer-to-work-making-pcbs/

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys riff on the hardware hacks that took the Internet by storm this week. Machining siege weapons out of aluminum? If they can throw a tennis ball at 180 mph, yes please! Welding aficionados will love to see the Hero Engine come together. We dive into the high-efficiency game of hypermiling, and spin up the polarizing topic of the Sun Cycle. The episode wouldn’t be complete without hearing what the game of Go sounds like as a loop sequencer, and how a variable speed cassette player can be abused for the benefit of MIDI lovers the world over.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~60 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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Episode 087 Show Notes:

New This Week:

• Hackaday Passes 1,000,000 Comments
  • The Pioneering Lifestyle In Low Earth Orbit
• Video: Exploring The Abandoned Birthplace Of The 6502 And Commodore 64

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Video: Exploring The Abandoned Birthplace Of The 6502 And Commodore 64
• Reel In The Years With A Cassette Player Synth
  • Zachteman Mini Mellotron made out of one Walkman.
  • Mellotron – Wikipedia
  • Tape-Head Robot Listens to the Floor
• The Amazing Technicolor Parts Organizer
  • Light the Way to Every Component
• Flywheel Trebuchet Spins Right Round
  • Trebucheting Tennis Balls At 124 MPH
  • Tracker Video Analysis and Modeling Tool for Physics Education
• Cleaning Up The Yard With AI — Avian Intelligence
  • BirdBox_gym_topside – YouTube
• Making Music With A Go Board Step Sequencer
  • Orbs Light to Billie Jean on this Huge Sequencer
  • Augmented Reality Sandbox Using A Kinect
• Making A Modern Version Of A Steam Engine From Antiquity
  • Hero’s Engine – YouTube

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Weigh Your Car With Paper
  • Clock Is Not Readable By Humans
  • Receipt Printers End It All In Moving Art Piece
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Custom Tool Helps Hakko Set Threaded Inserts
  • Teaching A Pocket Logic Analyzer (Many) New Tricks
  • Minimal TinyAVR 0 Programming

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• How To Get Into Cars: Hypermiling Mods
• Welcome To Solar Cycle 25; Our Sun Enters A New 11-Year Period

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/hackaday-podcast-088-flywheel-trebuchet-thieving-magpies-hero-engines-and-hypermiling/

Depending on the circles you run in, it can seem like the mechanical keyboard community is all about reduced layouts, and keebs without ten-keys are about as big as it gets. But trust us, there’s plenty of love out there for the bigger ‘boards like [Ben]’s tasty fat-bottomed keyboard. Man oh man, what a delicious slab of throwback to the days when keyboards doubled as melee weapons.

More specifically, this is a 199-key modified Sun Type 5 layout. It runs on two Teensy 2.0s — one for the keyboard matrix, and one for everything else. [Ben] made the metal enclosure entirely by hand without a CNC or laser cutter. While I don’t personally care for linear switches, I have mad respect for these, which are vintage Cherry Blacks pulled from various 1980s AT/XT boards. That 10-key island on the left is dedicated to elementary macros like undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, and open/close/save.

We absolutely love the gigantic rotary encoders, which give it a bit of a boombox look. There’s even reuse involved here, because the encoder knobs are made from jam jar lids that are stuffed with homemade Sugru. [Ben] can use them to play PONG on the LCD and other games not yet implemented on the everything-else Teensy.

Here’s another Sun-inspired keeb, but this one has a reverse 10-key layout that matches the DTMF phone dial.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/fat-bottomed-keebs-you-make-the-clackin-world-go-round/

GitHub has enabled free code analysis on public repositories. This is the fruit of the purchase of Semmle, almost exactly one year ago. Anyone with write permissions to a repository can go into the settings, and enable scanning. Beyond the obvious use case of finding vulnerabilities, an exciting option is to automatically analyse pull requests and flag potential security problems automatically. I definitely look forward to seeing this tool in action.

The Code Scanning option is under the Security tab, and the process to enable it only takes a few seconds. I flipped the switch on one of my repos, and it found a handful of issues that are worth looking in to. An important note, anyone can run the tool on a forked repo and see the results. If CodeQL finds an issue, it’s essentially publicly available for anyone who cares to look for it.

Simpler Code Scanning

On the extreme other hand, [Will Butler] wrote a guide to searching for exploits using grep. A simple example, if raw shows up in code, it often signals an unsafe operation. The terms fixme or todo, often in comments, can signal a known security problem that has yet to be fixed. Another example is unsafe, which is an actual keyword in some languages, like Rust. If a Rust project is going to have vulnerabilities, they will likely be in an unsafe block. There are some other language-dependent pointers, and other good tips, so check it out.

Stalking on Google

Real-world attacks, at least targeted attacks, involve lots of intelligence gathering on the target. Lots of data is available in the open on platforms like Facebook and Google, but sometimes it’s a pain to actually pull that data together. [mxrch] has published a tool specifically targeting Google accounts. Supply an email address, and GHunt attempts to scrape any public information available about that account.

What information might be available? First off, it looks for activity from that account on other Google services. YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Photos can be great sources of information. What’s not obvious about that is the extra information available from those sources. Images shared on Google Maps seems to have their metadata cleaned, but pictures left public on Google Photos don’t. Location data, camera hardware, and more interesting information is right there, so long as you know where to look. It would be interesting to stand up a GHunt instance and run it against your own Google account, just to see what information is out there.

New Malware, Old Malware

Emotet has been around since 2014, and has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. Ars has a brief history of the malware, and it’s an impressive run. It’s apparent that whoever is behind Emotet has continued developing the malware. The most puzzling development is the five months earlier this year when Emotet went silent, only to return via an aggressive spam presence. Perhaps even cyber-criminals took time off for Coronavirus.

An even older malware campaign with clearer provenance has popped up again. FinSpy was created by FinFisher as a commercial spyware tool. Amnesty International has been reporting on spyware campaigns launched against political activists for quite some time, and often their reports include interesting technical tidbits. This one is no exception, as they break the news that FinSpy now targets MacOS and Linux machines. The observed Linux binary is simply named PDF, leading me to suspect the primary infection mechanism is phishing.

Attacking the Seams in the Cloud

Our friends at Google’s Project Zero set their sights on HashiCorp’s Vault project (It’s Open Source). Vault looks like a really useful project, as it handles data encryption for shared data sets. Want to build a complex web service where data is properly encrypted at rest, but still accessible to multiple users? Vault might be worth looking at.

Not all is perfect in paradise. One of the common places to find security problems is the interface between the elements of a service. In this case, [Felix] found an issue where Vault interfaces with the AWS authentication service. A user can request access to an object, and Vault will turn around and forward that request to Amazon’s user authentication mechanism. The function that handles that response accepts either XML or JSON encoding. As it turns out, that function will also accepts messages that include *both* types of encoding. The trick was to find a way to get Amazon’s service to reflect an authentication request that included JSON supplied by the user. The intended response is in XML: “Yes, this person exists”. Also included in that message is a JSON spoofed response: “This person is a superuser”.

There’s another attack vector detailed in the article, so go get the full scoop if it strikes your fancy. The point is made that as cloud-based applications become more common, this sort of vulnerability will be seen more often, as well. It’s a different paradigm, looking at cloud security as compared to conventional computer security.

Jailbreaking Macs

The jailbreaking community have been punching holes in Apple mobile hardware for years. What about desktop hardware? Do the flaws used in iOS jailbreaks also work on Macs? A few of them, yes. A researcher at IronPeak Services put together a summary of the current state of hardware attacks against MacOS machines. The good news is that this family of attacks require physical access, and because the vulnerable component has immutable firmware, the attack isn’t persistent. The bad news is that the immutable firmware cannot be patched, and all that is needed for compromise is a USB device.

Today’s Macs containing a co-processor, the T2. This chip is essentially the ARM A10 from Apple’s mobile devices, and handles quite a few system functions, including trusted computing via the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) embedded inside. While the T2 firmware can be updated, the SEP firmware is read only, and can’t be touched. The shared hardware also means shared bugs, and a couple of those bugs exist in that immutable SEP firmware. Namely, Checkm8/Checkra1n. A USB device can trigger the jailbreak, and enable a debug mode. The end result is full root control over the T2 co-processor, and quite a bit of control over the entire system.

The need for a physical USB device means that this isn’t going to be used in widespread malicious attacks, but may prove useful for owners of the machines. The author claims that more is coming in the next few weeks. We’ll follow the story and let you know about it.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/10/09/this-week-in-security-code-scanning-information-gathering-and-seams-in-the-cloud/