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October 16, 2019
11:30
The Smallest Homebrewed TTL CPU In the World
» ‎ Hack a Day

The may very well be the smallest homemade TTL CPU we’ve ever seen. Measuring at one square inch, this tiny chip boasts 40 connections, an 8-bit databus, a 16-bit address bus, a 64 kB memory space, reset and clock inputs, and 5 V power lines.

TTL (transistor transistor logic) logic chips are pretty outdated today, but they do have all of the basics necessary for building a computer – logic gates, counters, buffers, and registers. The transistors perform both the logic and amplifying, as compared to resistor-transistor logic (RTL) and diode-transistor logic (DTL). In the 60s, when the technology was still fairly new, TTL ICs were commonly used in computers and industrial controls. Even after the advent of VLSI, TTL ICs were still being used for interfacing more densely integrated chips. Even so, most TTL chips tend to be on the bulkier side, which is what makes [roelh]’s project so unique. The entire PCB is hardly any larger than a coin.

On top of the hardware specs, [roelh] also implemented several useful software features: zero page addressing, load/store/compare instructions, stacks, conditioning branching, subroutine calls, and memory-mapped I/O. The registers are also in RAM, which has been implemented in microprocessors in the past (see TMS9900) for speed considerations, but in this case was implemented for size constraints.

An ALU was also left out of the design in order to constrain its size, leaving only 8 ICs on either side of the 2-layer PCB.

Microprograms are stored in Flash memory and can be programmed with a Raspberry Pi. by saving the Assembly code to a memory card and downloading the assembled binary code. Once the Raspberry Pi is connected to the development board, you can burn the binary code onto the Flash memory of the board using a Python script. An online Javascript editor also exists for assembling the Assembly code for the chip and simulating the CPU.

There is currently a development board made for the CPU, which includes six seven-segment displays and an I/O connector for running a digital clock and other applications. [roelh] has since built a retro TTL computer around the chip, which reintroduces the ALU and includes address registers, 256 KB of RAM, VGA video, PS/2 keyboard port, a sound system, and I/O pins. It’s a really exciting project that’s seriously pushing the constraints of retro computing.
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Tags: Hardware
8:30
DIY Video Microscopy
» ‎ Hack a Day

Owning a Microscope is great fun as a hobby in general, but for hackers, it is a particularly useful instrument for assembly and inspection, now that we are building hardware with “grain of sand” sized components in our basements and garages. [voidnill] was given an Eduval 4 microscope by a well-meaning friend during a holiday trip. This model is pretty old, but it’s a Carl Zeiss after all, made in Jena in the erstwhile GDR. Since an optical microscope was of limited use for him, [voidnill] set about digitizing it.

He settled on the Raspberry-Pi route. The Pi and a hard disk were attached directly to the frame of the microscope, and a VGA display connected via a converter. Finally, the Pi camera was jury-rigged to one of the eyepieces using some foam. It’s a quick and dirty hack, and not the best solution, but it works well for [voidnill] since he wanted to keep the original microscope intact.

The standard Pi camera has a wide angle lens. It is designed to capture a large image and converge it on to the small sensor area. Converting it to macro mode is possible, but requires a hack. The lens is removed and ‘flipped over’, and fixed at a distance away from the sensor – usually with the help of an extension tube. This allows the lens to image a very small area and focus it on the (relatively) large sensor. This hack is used in the “OpenFlexure” microscope project, which you can read about in the post we wrote earlier this year or at this updated link. If you want even higher magnification and image quality, OpenFlexure provides a design to mate the camera sensor directly to an RMS threaded microscope objective. Since earlier this year, this open source microscope project has made a lot of progress, and many folks around the world have successfully built their own versions. It offers a lot of customisation options such as basic or high-resolution optics and manual or motorised stages, which makes it a great project to try out.

If the OpenFlexure project proves to be an intimidating build, you can try something easier. Head over to the PublicLab where [partsandcrafts] shows you how to “Build a Basic Microscope with Raspberry Pi”. It borrows from other open source projects but keeps things simpler making it much easier to build.

In the video embed below, [voidnill] gives a brief overview (in German) of his quick hack. If you’ve got some microscope hacks, or have built one of your own, let us know in the comments section.

Tags: Hardware
October 13, 2019
4:00
Not All 7-Segment Displays Are Electronic
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are a variety of means by which numbers can be displayed from an electronic circuit, and probably the most ubiquitous remains the seven-segment display. Take seven LEDs, lamps, LCDs, VFD segments or mechanical flip-dot style units in the familiar rectangular figure eight, and your microcontroller or similar can display numbers. There are a variety of different interfaces, but at most all that is needed is a level shifter and a driver.

Sometimes though we encounter a completely novel 7-segment display, and such is the case with [Fhuable]’s all mechanical single digit display. It bears a superficial resemblance to a flipdot display, but instead of a magnetic actuator, it instead uses a complex system of gears and cams to flip the segments sequentially from the turning of a small crank. It appears to be the same mechanism he’s used in his subscription counter project whose video we’ve placed below the break, and it is truly a thing of beauty. We’re not entirely certain how useful it would be as a general-purpose display in its current form, however, we can see it being adapted with relative ease. A clock might, for example, be an eye-catching project.

Most displays that make it here have some electrical components, so it’s unusual to see an entirely mechanical one. But that’s not necessarily always the case.

Thanks [Mike Horne] for the tip.

Tags: Hardware
1:00
DIY MIDI Looper Controller Looks Fantastic!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Due to pedalboard size, complicated guitar pedals sometimes reduce the number of buttons to the bare minimum. Many of these pedals are capable of being controlled with an external MIDI controller, however, and necessity being the mother of invention and all, this is a great opportunity to build something and learn some new skills at the same time. In need of a MIDI controller, Reddit user [Earthwin] built an Arduino powered one to control his Boss DD500 Looper pedal and the result is great looking.

Five 16×2 LCD screens, one for each button, show the functionality that that button currently has. They are attached (through some neat wiring) to a custom-built PCB which holds the Arduino that controls everything. The screens are mounted to an acrylic backplate which holds the screens in place while the laser-cut acrylic covers are mounted to the same plate through the chassis. The chassis is a standard Hammond aluminum box that was sanded down, primed and then filler was used to make the corners nice and smooth. Flat-top LEDs and custom 3D printed washers finish off the project.

[Earthwin] admits that this build might be overkill for the looper that he’s using, but he had fun building the controller and learning to use an Arduino. He’s already well on his way to building another, using the lessons learned in this build. If you want to build your own MIDI controller, this article should help you out. And then you’re ready to build your controller into a guitar if you want to.

[Via Reddit]

Tags: Hardware
October 12, 2019
7:00
Dealing with Missing Pin Allocations
» ‎ Hack a Day

Blindsided by missing pin allocations? Perhaps you’re working on a piece of hardware and you notice that the documentation is entirely wrong. How can you get your device to work?

[Dani Eichhorn]’s troubles began when running an IoT workshop using a camera module. Prior to the work, no one had through to check if all of the camera modules ordered for the participants were the same. As it turns out, the TTGO T-CAM module had a number of revisions, with some even receiving a temperature/pressure sensor fixed on top of the normal board.

While the boards may have looked the same, their pin allocations were completely different.Changing the pin numbers wouldn’t have been difficult if they were simply numbered differently, but because the configurations were different, errors started to abound: Could not initialize the camera

As it turns out, even the LillyGo engineers – the manufacturers of the board – may have gotten a bit lost while working on the pin allocations, as [Eichhorn] was able to find some of the pins printed right onto the PCB, hidden behind the camera component.

To find information not printed on the board, a little more digging was required. To find the addresses of the devices connected to the I2C bus, running a program to find peripherals listening on the bus did the trick. This was able to print out the addresses of the SSD1306 OLED display driver and the microphone for the board at hand.

To find the pins of peripherals not printed on the PCB or hidden on the silkscreen, a GPIO scanner did the trick. This in particular worked for finding the PIR (passive infrared) motion sensor.

We picked up a few tips and tricks from this endeavor, but also learned that reverse-engineering anything is hard, and that there isn’t any one method for finding pin allocations when the documentation’s missing.

Tags: Hardware
4:00
Make Your Own Plasma Cutter
» ‎ Hack a Day
Of all the tools that exist, there aren’t many more futuristic than the plasma cutter, if a modern Star Wars cosplay if your idea of futuristic. That being said, plasma cutters are a powerful tool capable of making neat cuts through practically any material, and there are certainly worst ways to play with high voltage.

Lucky enough, [Plasanator] posted their tutorial for how to make a plasma cutter, showing the steps through which they gathered parts from “old microwaves, stoves, water heaters, air conditioners, car parts, and more” in the hopes of creating a low-budget plasma cutter better than any on YouTube or from a commercial vendor.

The plasma cutter does end up working up quite an arc, with the strength to slice through quarter-inch steel “like a hot knife through butter”.

Its parts list and schematic divide the systems into power control, high current DC, low voltage DC, and high voltage arc start:
- The power control contains the step down transformer and contactor (allows the DC components to come on line)
- The high current DC contains the bridge rectifier, large capacitors, and reed switch (used as a current sensor to allow the high voltage arc to fire right when the current starts to travel to the head, shutting down the high voltage arc system when it’s no longer necessary)
- The low voltage DC contains the power switch, auto relays, 12V transformer, 120V terminal blocks, and a terminal strip
- The high voltage arc start contains the microwave capacitor and a car ignition coil
At the cutting end, 13A is used to cut through quarter-inch steel. Considering the considerably high voltage cutter this is, a 20 A line breaker is needed for safety.

Once the project is in a more refined state, [Plasanator] plans on hiding components like the massive capacitors and transformer behind a metal or plastic enclosure, rather than have them exposed. This is mainly for safety reasons, although having the parts exposed is evocative of a steampunk aesthetic.

In several past designs, stove coils were used as current resistors and a Chevy control module as the high voltage arc start. The schematic may have become more refined with each build, but [Plasanator]’s desire to use whatever components were available certainly has not disappeared.

[Thanks to jafinch78 for the tip!]

Tags: Hardware
October 08, 2019
13:00
Spinning ESP32 Display Puts The Customer First
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most of the projects we feature on Hackaday are built for personal use; designed to meet the needs of the person creating them. If it works for somebody else, then all the better. But occasionally we may find ourselves designing hardware for a paying customer, and as this video from [Proto G] shows, that sometimes means taking the long way around.

The initial task he was given seemed simple enough: build a display that could spin four license plates around, and make it so the speed could be adjusted. So [Proto G] knocked a frame out of some sheet metal, and used an ESP32 to drive two RC-style electronic speed controllers (ESCs) connected to a couple of “pancake” brushless gimbal motors. Since there was no need to accurately position the license plates, it was just a matter of writing some code that would spin the motors in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Unfortunately, the customer then altered the deal. Now they wanted a stand that could stop on each license plate and linger for a bit before moving to the next one. Unfortunately, that meant the ESCs weren’t up to the task. They got dumped in favor of an ODrive motor controller, and encoders were added to the shafts so the ESP32 could keep track of the display’s position. [Proto G] says he still had to work out some kinks, such as how to keep the two motors synchronized and reduce backlash when the spinner stopped on a particular plate, but in the end we think the results look fantastic. Now if only we had some license plates we needed rotisseried…

If [Proto G] knew he needed precise positioning control from the start, he would have approached the project differently and saved himself a lot of time. But such is life when you’re working on contract.

Tags: Hardware
October 05, 2019
13:01
Building a Wind Power Generator in Your Backyard
» ‎ Hack a Day

For many environmental enthusiasts, horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) — the kind that look like windmills slowly spinning in the distance — are a pretty familiar sight. Unfortunately, there are quite a few caveats that make them harder to adopt despite the fact that harvesting renewable energy sources is more sustainable than relying on natural gas and fuels that can be depleted. Since they face in one axis, they need to be able to track the wind, or else trade off the ability to maximize energy output. In turbulent and gusty conditions, as well, HAWTs face accelerated fatigue when harvesting.

The development of the vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) solves several of these issues. In addition, the turbines are typically closer to the ground and the gearbox replacement is simpler and more efficient. Maintenance is more accessible due to the size of the turbines, so no heavy machinery is typically necessary to access crucial components on-site. In addition, the gearbox by nature of its operation takes on less fatigue and is able to function in turbulent winds, which reduces the rate of failure.

For a simple version of a VAWT that you can build yourself, [BlueFlower] has published several mechanical drawings that detail the layout of the design. The wind power generator uses 24 magnets, copper wire fashioned into coils, and a metal plate for the main generator. The coils are arranged in a circular formation on a static plate, while the magnets are equally spaced on a moving circular plate. As the magnets pass over coils, the flux induces a current, which increases as the plates spin faster.

The blades of the generator are made from blue foam with a metal bar running through it for structure. Three of the blades are attached with triangular bars to a central rod, which also holds the spinning magnetic plate.

In [BlueFlower]’s initial trials using the VAWT for charging a battery they were able to generate a max power of 15W on boost mode and 30-70W when charging in PWM mode. Not bad for a home-made wind power generator!

There aren’t only pros to the design, however. While VAWTs may be cheaper, more mobile, and more resistant to wear and tear, there are some design features that prevent the generators from functioning as well as HAWTs at harvesting energy. The blades don’t produce torque at the same time, with some blades simply being pushed along. This produces more drag on the blades when they rotate, limiting the efficiency of the entire system. In addition, higher wind speeds are typically found at higher altitudes, so the VAWTs will perform better if installed on a towering structure. Vibration forces close to the ground can also wear out the bearings, resulting in more maintenance and costs.

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Tags: Hardware
October 03, 2019
8:30
Solve Your Precision Woes With a Sliding Angle Grinder
» ‎ Hack a Day

Angle grinders are among the most useful tools for anyone who’s ever had to cut metal. They’re ergonomic, compact, and get the job done. Unfortunately, one of the tradeoffs you usually make when using them is precision.

But thankfully, there’s a DIY solution. YouTuber [workshop from scratch] demonstrated the build process for a sliding angle grinder in a recent video, welding steel beams into a flat frame and attaching fitted beams on top to slide across the rows. Where necessary, spacers are used to ensure that the slider is perfectly fitted to the beam. The contraption holding the angle grinder – a welded piece of steel bolted to the sliding mechanism – has a grip for the user to seamlessly slide the tool across the table.

The operation is like a more versatile and robust chop saw, not to mention the customized angle references you can make to cut virtually anything you like. The build video shows the entire process, from drill pressing and turning holes to welding pieces of the frame together to artfully spray painting the surface a classy black, with familiarity enough to make the project look like a piece of cake.

As the name implies, [workshop from scratch] is all about building your own shop tools, and we’ve previously taken a look at their impressive hydraulic vise and mobile crane builds. These tools, largely hacked together from scraps, prove that setting up your own shop doesn’t necessarily mean you need to break the bank.

Tags: Hardware
October 02, 2019
13:00
The Righteous Quest To Crack A Canon i9900
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Starhawk] is a man with a problem. More accurately, he’s a man whose mother has a problem, but ultimately that ends up being the same thing. Her wide-format Canon printer recently stopped working after better than a decade of reliable service, and he wants to know why. Rather than spend the money on buying a new printer, he’s determined to find out if she’s been the victim of planned obsolescence by reverse engineering the Canon i9900 to see what makes it tick (or stop ticking, as the case may be).

In the absence of any obvious hardware faults, [Starhawk] has suspicions that the machine’s QY6-0055 printhead has run over some internal “odometer” and simply turned itself off. We’ve all seen similar trickery at play when trying to use third party ink cartridges in our printers, so it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Canon i9900 is designed to reject heads once they’ve seen enough usage. Perhaps the biggest clue is that the QY6-0055 has a Seiko S93C56BR EEPROM on the board that’s keeping track of…something.

Right now, [Starhawk] is devoting his energies on trying to make sense of the data he pulled from the EEPROM using his TL866A programmer. But that’s no easy feat with a sample size of just one, which is why he’s looking for help. He’s hoping that other hackers with similar printers (and ideally ones that use the same QY6-0055 head) could submit their own EEPROM dumps and the community could get to work trying to decipher what’s stored on the chips. He’s really hoping that somebody at Canon might be willing to sneak him a couple tips on what he should be looking for, but at this point we think he’ll take whatever assistance he can get.

Now to be fair, there’s really no way to know definitively if there’s some flag stored on the EEPROM that’s keeping the printer from working. It could just be good old fashioned hardware failure, which would hardly be a surprise for a piece of consumer electronics from 2005. But even if the effort to understand the Canon’s EEPROM doesn’t get him any closer to a working printer, we still think it’s a fascinating example of real-world reverse engineering that’s worth it for the experience alone.

There’s a long history of hackers doing battle with their printers, from emulating an ink cartridge with a microcontroller to reinking the ribbon of a vintage 1980s behemoth. We’re interested in seeing where this project takes [Starhawk], but no matter what happens there are likely to be some interesting discoveries made along the way.

Tags: Hardware
September 29, 2019
7:01
The Price of Domestic Just In Time Manufacturing
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hardware is hard, manufacturing only happens in China, accurate pricing is a dark art. Facts which are Known To Be True. And all things which can be hard to conquer as an independent hardware company, especially if you want to subvert the tropes. You may have heard of [Spencer Wright] via his superb mailing list The Prepared, but he has also been selling an unusual FM radio as Centerline Labs for a few years. Two years ago they relaunched their product, and last year the price was bumped up by a third. Why? Well, the answer involves more than just a hand wave about tariffs.

The Public Radio is a single-station FM radio in a mason jar. It’s a seemingly simple single purpose hardware product. No big mechanical assemblies, no complex packaging, not even any tangential accessories to include. In some sense it’s an archetypically atomic hardware product. So what changed? A normal product is manufactured in bulk, tested and packaged, then stored in a warehouse ready to ship. But TPR is factory programmed to a specific radio station, so unless Centerline wanted one SKU for each possible radio station (there are 300) this doesn’t work. The solution was domestic (US) just in time manufacturing. When a customer hits the buy button, a unit is programmed, tested, packed, and shipped.

As with any business, there is a lot more to things than that! The post gives the reader a fascinating look at all the math related to Centerline Labs’ pricing and expenses; in other words, what makes the business tick (or not) including discussion of the pricing tradeoffs between manufacturing different components in Asia. I won’t spoil the logical path that led to the pricing change, go check out the post for more detail on every part.

We love hearing about the cottage hardware world. Got any stories? Drop them in the comments!

Tags: Hardware
September 09, 2019
14:30
Everything You Wanted To Know About Padauk MCUs And More
» ‎ Hack a Day

At this point you’d need to have lived underneath a rock somewhere on the dark side of the Moon to not have heard about these amazing, 3-cent microcontrollers. A number of places have pitched in on them, but comprehensive reviews, let alone a full-blown review of the entire ecosystem surrounding these Padauk MCUs have been scarce. Fortunately, [Jay Carlson] has put in a lot of effort to collect everything you could possibly want to know about anything Padauk.

The most important take-away is that these MCUs do not have any kind of communication peripherals. UARTs, I2C, and SPI all have to be done in software. They’re not very great at low-power or battery-powered applications due to high power usage. Essentially you’ll be using GPIO pins a lot. On the other hand, its multi-CPU context, FPPA feature is rather interesting, with the article covering it in detail.

As for the development tools, [Jay] came away very impressed with the In-Circuit Emulation (ICE) instead of running code on an MCU, as this can reduce development times significantly. This makes even the OTP (one-time programmable) property of most Padauk MCUs less significant than one might at first assume.

Then there’s the actual programming of the MCUs. The Micro C compiler Padauk provides essentially implements a sub-set of the C language, with some macros to replace things like for loops. Initially this may seem like a weird limitation, until you realize that these MCUs have 64 to 256 bytes of SRAM. That’s bytes, without any prefixes.

Finally, [Jay] shows off a couple of test projects, including a NeoPixel SPI adapter and bike light, which are all available on Github. The WS2812b project is something we have seen before, for example this project from [Anders Nielsen] (featured in the article image), which provides another take on this range of MCUs.

Did reading [Jay]’s article change your mind on these Padauk parts? Have you used these MCUs and ICE parts before? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: Hardware
September 08, 2019
13:00
Tiny LED Cube Packs A Meter of Madness
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [Freddie] was faced with the challenge of building a sendoff gift for an an LED-loving coworker he hatched a plan. Instead of making a display from existing video wall LED panels he would make a cube. But not just any cube, a miniature desk sized one that wasn’t short of features or performance. We’d be over the moon if someone gifted us with this itty-bitty Qi coil-powered masterpiece of an RGB cube.

Recently we’ve been blessed with a bevy of beautiful, animated RGB cubes but none hit quite this intersection of size and function. The key ingredient here is tiny but affordable RGB LEDs which measure 1mm on a side. But LEDs this small dwarf even the otherwise minuscule “2020” package WS2812’s and APA102s of the world. Pushing his layout capabilities to the max [Freddie] squeezed each package together into a grid with elements separated by less than 1mm, resulting in a 64 LED panel that is only 16mm x 16mm panel (with test points and controller mounted to the back). Each of these four-layer PCBs that makes up the completed cube contains an astonishing 950mm of tracking, meaning the entire cube has nearly six meters of traces!

How do you power such a small device with no obvious places to locate a connector? By running magnet wire through a corner and down to a Qi coil of course. Not to let the cube itself outshine the power supply [Freddie] managed to deadbug a suitably impressive supply on the back of the coil itself. Notice the grain of rice in the photo to the left! The only downside here is that the processor – which hangs diagonally in the cube on a tiny motherboard – cannot be reprogrammed. Hopefully future versions will run programming lines out as well.

Check out the video of the cube in action after the break, and the linked photo album for much higher resolution macro photos of the build. While you’re there take a moment to admire the layout sample from one of the panels! If this sets the tone, we’re hoping to see more of [Freddie]’s going-away hacks in the future!

https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/cube-vid.mp4
Tags: Hardware
September 05, 2019
22:00
PCIe Multiplier Expands Raspberry Pi 4 Possibilities
» ‎ Hack a Day

It probably goes without saying that hardware hackers were excited when the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced, but it wasn’t just because there was a new entry into everyone’s favorite line of Linux SBCs. The new Pi offered a number of compelling hardware upgrades, including an onboard PCI-Express interface. The only problem was that the PCIe interface was dedicated to the USB 3.0 controller; but that’s nothing a hot-air rework station couldn’t fix.

We’ve previously seen steady-handed hackers remove the USB 3.0 controller on the Pi 4 to connect various PCIe devices with somewhat mixed results, but [Colin Riley] has raised the bar by successfully getting a PCIe multiplier board working with the diminutive Linux computer. While there are still some software kinks to work out, the results are very promising and he already has a few devices working.

Getting that first PCIe port added to the Pi 4 is already fairly well understood, so [Colin] just had to follow the example set by hackers such as [Tomasz Mloduchowski]. Sure enough, when he plugged the port multiplier board in (after a bit of what he refers to as “professional wiggling”), the appropriate entry showed up in lspci.

But there was a problem. While the port multiplier board was recognized by the kernel, nothing he plugged into it showed up. Checking the kernel logs, he found messages relating to bus conflicts, and one that seemed especially important: “devices behind bridge are unusable because [bus 02] cannot be assigned for them“. To make a long story short, it turns out that the Raspbian kernel is specifically configured to only allow a single PCI bus.

Fortunately, it’s an easy fix once you know what the problem is. Using the “Device Tree Compiler” tool, [Colin] was able to edit the Raspbian Device Tree file and change the PCI “bus-range” variable from <0x0 0x1> to <0x0 0xff>. From there, it was just a matter of plugging in different devices and seeing what works. Simple things such as USB controllers were no problem, but getting ARM Linux support for the NVIDIA GTX 1060 he tried will have to be a topic for another day.

[Thanks to Paulie for the tip.]

Tags: Hardware
August 27, 2019
1:00
GigaDevice Releasing RISC-V MCUs And Development Boards
» ‎ Hack a Day
Probably not too many people have heard of Chinese manufacturer GigaDevice who so far has mostly been known as a NOR Flash memory manufacturer. Their GD32 range of MCUs is however STM32-compatible, making them interesting (cheaper) alternatives to sourcing directly from ST. Now GigaDevice has announced during a presentation that they are releasing a range of RISC-V-based MCUs: the GD32V series.

As GigaDevice has not yet updated their English-language website, the information we do have is based on CNX-Software‘s translations from Chinese. The specs for the GD32VF103 series of MCUs are listed by them as follows:
- Core – GD32VF103 RISC-V “Bumblebee Core” @ 108 MHz
- Memory – 8KB to 32KB SRAM
- Storage – 16KB to 128KB flash
- Peripherals – USB OTG and CAN 2.0B
- I/O – 3.3V, 5V tolerant
- Supply Voltage – 2.6 to 3.6V
- Package – QFN36, LQFP48, LQFP64, and LQFP100 packages
Whether they are pin-compatible with the GD32 MCUs is still to be confirmed. If that turns out to be the case, then this might be an interesting drop-in solution for some products. From the specs it seems clear that they are targeting the lower-end ARM-based MCUs such as ST’s Cortex-M3-based STM32F103, which are quite common in a large range of embedded systems.

Seeing a performance comparison between both types of MCU would be interesting to see as lower power usage and higher efficiency compared to the ARM cores is being claimed. Both MCUs and development boards are already available for sale at Tmall, with the basic GD32VF103C-START board going for about $11 and the GD32VF103TBU6 MCU (QFN36, 64 kB Flash) for roughly $1.27.

Documentation and SDKs in English seem to be a bit scarce at this point, but hopefully before long we too will be able to use these MCUs without having to take up Chinese language classes.

Thanks to [Flaviu] for the tip!

Tags: Hardware
August 24, 2019
19:00
Hacked Hoverboards Become Potent RC Tank
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hoverboards were the darling, or perhaps the scourge, of the last few years, Banned by vigilant airlines, they’re a great way to break an ankle or set your house on fire. However, they’re also a treasure trove of valuable parts for hacking, as [Aaron] ably demonstrates with his RC tank build.

[Aaron’s] build utilizes not only the hoverboard’s torquey hub motors but also the original control hardware, too. This is a cinch to repurpose, thanks to the custom firmware for the original controller developed by [Niklas Fauth], whose work we have featured before.

The hacked parts are crammed into a chassis built with aluminum extrusion, and the final result is a nimble and robust tank with one motor per wheel. This enables some exciting driving dynamics. Additionally, with all the torque available, [Aaron] is even able to ride the tank like an electric skateboard.

It’s a fun build that shows off the raw power available from the hoverboard hardware. We fully expect to see these parts remain popular in the hacking scene in the coming years. Video after the break.

https://github.com/NiklasFauth/hoverboard-firmware-hack/blob/master/README.md

Tags: Hardware
August 23, 2019
19:00
Joining The RISC-V Ranks: IBM’s Power ISA To Become Free
» ‎ Hack a Day

IBM’s Power processor architecture is probably best known today as those humongous chips that power everything from massive mainframes and supercomputers to slightly less massive mainframes and servers. Originally developed in the 1980s, Power CPUs have been a reliable presence in the market for decades, forming the backbone of systems like IBM’s RS/6000 and AS/400 and later line of Power series.

Now IBM is making the Power ISA free to use after first opening up access to the ISA with the OpenPower Foundation. Amidst the fully free and open RISC-V ISA making headway into the computing market, and ARM feeling pressured to loosen up its licensing, it seems they figured that it’s best to join the party early. Without much of a threat to its existing business customers who are unlikely to whip up their own Power CPUs in a back office and not get IBM’s support that’s part of the business deal, it seems mostly aimed at increasing Power’s and with it IBM’s foothold in the overall market.

The Power ISA started out as the POWER ISA, before it evolved into the PowerPC ISA, co-developed with Motorola and Apple and made famous by Apple’s use of the G3 through G5 series of PowerPC CPUs. The PowerPC ISA eventually got turned into today’s Power ISA. As a result it shares many commonalities with both POWER and PowerPC, being its de facto successor.

In addition, IBM is also opening its OpenCAPI accelerator and OpenCAPI Memory Interface variant that will be part of the upcoming Power9′ CPU. These technologies are aimed at reducing the number of interconnections required to link CPUs together, ranging from NVLink, to Infinity Fabric and countless more, not to mention memory, where OMI memory could offer interesting possibilities.

Would you use Power in your projects? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: Hardware

8:08
ZigDiggity – ZigBee Hacking Toolkit
» ‎ Darknet

ZigDiggity a ZigBee Hacking Toolkit is a Python-based IoT (Internet of Things) penetration testing framework targeting the ZigBee smart home protocol.

ZigBee continues to grow in popularity as a method for providing simple wireless communication between devices (i.e. low power/traffic, short distance), & can be found in a variety of consumer products that range from smart home automation to healthcare. Security concerns introduced by these systems are just as diverse and plentiful, underscoring a need for quality assessment tools.

Read the rest of ZigDiggity – ZigBee Hacking Toolkit now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: Hardware hacking

August 15, 2019
8:31
Uncovering the Echo Dot’s Hidden USB Port
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you upgraded to Amazon’s latest Echo Dot, you might have been surprised to find that the diminutive voice assistant had shed its USB port. Earlier models of the Dot used a garden variety micro USB port for power, which hackers eventually figured out also provided a helpful way to snoop around inside the device’s firmware. The fact that the USB port was deleted on the latest Echo Dot in favor of a simple barrel connector for power was seen by some as a sign that Amazon was trying to keep curious owners out of their hardware.

But as [Brian Dorey] shows, all they did was put a bump in the road. While they removed the external USB connector, the traces for it are still on the board waiting to be accessed. Even better, it turns out the USB data lines are connected to the test points located on the bottom of the Dot. All you need is a simple breakout that will connect through the existing opening in the device’s case, and you’ve got your USB port back.

So what can you do with USB on the Echo Dot? Well, not much right now. [Brian] found that the Dot shows up as a Mediatek device under Linux using lsusb, and fastboot can see it and even confirms the presence of a locked bootloader. It’s going to take some work from the community to see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

Even if you’re not interested in restoring its USB port, [Brian] has uncovered a wealth of fascinating hardware information about the Echo Dot during his deep-dive. He’s mapped out many of the test points located throughout the device’s PCBs, and found a few interesting points that might be worth further investigation. For example, he found that driving one of the pins high would trigger the Dot to mute its microphones; which could be useful for anyone looking to cover Alexa’s ears.

[Brian] first cracked open the Echo Dot last month, after scoring one for cheap during Amazon’s Prime Day sale. It looks like he’s making fairly rapid progress on unraveling the mysteries of this popular gadget, and we’re very interested in seeing where this research takes us.

Tags: Hardware
4:01
DIY PC Test Bench Puts Hardware Troubleshooting Out in the Open
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve built a few PCs, you know how frustrating troubleshooting can be. Finding a faulty component inside the cramped confines of a case can be painful — whether its literal when sharp edges draw blood, or just figurative when you have to open that cramped case multiple times to make adjustments.

[Colonel Camp] decided to make life a bit easier by building this PC test bench which makes component troubleshooting much easier and can be built with old parts you probably have lying around. [Camp] was inspired by an old Linus PC Tech Tips video on the same topic. The key to the build is an old PC case. These cases are often riveted together, s a drill makes quick work of disassembling the chassis to easily get to all of the components. The motherboard pan and rear panel/card cage become the top shelf of the test bench, while the outer shell of the case becomes the base and a storage area. Two pieces of lumber support the upper shelf. The build was primed and painted with several coats of grey.

[Camp] built up his testbench with a modest motherboard, cooler and a 970 video card. He loaded up Manjaro Linux to verify everything worked. The basic hardware has already been replaced with a new system including a ridiculously huge cooler. But that’s all in a day’s work for a test bench PC.

We’ve seen some wild workbenches over the years, and this one fits right in for all your PC projects. Check out the video after the break!

Tags: Hardware
August 11, 2019
7:00
Switching over to SMPS for Efficiency
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Hesam Moshiri] has built a variable switch-mode power supply over on hackaday.io. When prototyping a new circuit, often the goal is to get a proof-of-concept working as soon as possible to iron out all of the bugs it might have. The power supply can easily be an afterthought, and for smaller projects we might just reach for an adjustable LM317 voltage regulator to dial in the correct voltage and then move on with the meat of the project. These linear regulators are incredibly inefficient though, so if you find yourself prototyping with one of these often enough, it might be worthwhile to switch to something better.

While it’s easy to simply buy a switch-mode power supply (SMPS) that has everything you need, and rated for 90% or higher efficiency at the same time, getting one with an adjustable output isn’t as easy. This one is based on the relatively popular LM2576-Adj chip which handles the switching frequency part of the circuit automatically. You will also need some large capacitors, an inductor (one of the disadvantages of an SMPS circuit) and a small potentiometer to use as the feedback control for the LM2576. This special pin allows the output voltage of the SMPS to be precisely controlled.

Granted, this project might not be breaking any new grounds, but if you’ve never given serious thought to your small breadboard circuit power supplies, it’s definitely worth looking into. An improvement from a linear regulator’s 30% efficiency to 90% efficiency from an SMPS will not only save you a ton of energy but also solve a lot of heat dissipation problems. If you don’t want to build a switch-mode supply 100% from scratch, though, it might also be possible to modify an existing one to suit your needs as well.

Tags: Hardware
July 29, 2019
4:00
Taking a Peek Inside Amazon’s Latest Dot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Like a million or so other people, [Brian Dorey] picked up a third generation Echo Dot during Amazon’s big sale a couple weeks ago. Going for less than half its normal retail price, he figured it was the perfect time to explore Amazon’s voice assistant offerings. But the low price also meant that he didn’t feel so bad tearing into the thing for our viewing pleasure.

By pretty much all accounts, the Echo Dot line has been a pretty solid performer as far as corporate subsidized home espionage devices go. They’re small, fairly cheap, and offer the baseline functionality that most people expect. While there was nothing precisely wrong with the earlier versions of the Dot, Amazon has used this latest revision of the device to give the gadget a more “premium” look and feel. They’ve also tried to squeeze a bit better audio out of the roughly hockey puck sized device. But of course, some undocumented changes managed to sneak in there as well.

For one thing, the latest version of the Dot deletes the USB port. Hackers had used the USB port on earlier versions of the hardware to try and gain access to the Android (or at least, Amazon’s flavor of Android) operating system hiding inside, so that’s an unfortunate development. On the flip side, [Brian] reports there’s some type of debug header on the bottom of the device. A similar feature allowed hackers to gain access to some of Amazon’s other voice assistants, so we’d recommend hopeful optimism until told otherwise.

The Echo Dot is powered by a quad-core Mediatek MT8516BAAA 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35 processor and the OS lives on an 8GB Samsung KMFN60012M-B214 eMMC. A pair of Texas Instruments LV320ADC3101 ADCs are used to process the incoming audio from the four microphones arranged around the edge of the PCB, and [Brian] says there appears to be a Fairchild 74LCX74 flip-flop in place to cut the audio feed when the user wants a bit of privacy.

Of course, the biggest change is on the outside. The new Dot is much larger than the previous versions, which means all the awesome enclosures we’ve seen for its predecessor will need to be reworked if they want to be compatible with Amazon’s latest and greatest.

Tags: Hardware
1:00
A New KiCAD Tutorial Hits the Scene
» ‎ Hack a Day

KiCAD has a rightfully earned image problem regarding beginners. The shiny new version 5 has improved things (and we’re very excited for v6!) but the tool is a bit obtuse even when coming from a electronics design background, so we’re always excited to see new learning material. [Mike Watts] is the latest to join the esteemed group of people willing to export their knowledge with his KiCAD tutorial series on GitHub that takes the aspiring user from schematic through fab and assembly.

The tutorial is focused around the process of creating a development board for the dimuitive Microchip née Atmel ATSAMD10 Cortex M0 ARM CPU. It opens by asking the reader to create a schematic and proceeds to teach by directing them to perform certain actions then explaining what’s going on and which shortcuts can accelerate things. This method continues through layout, manufacturing, and assembly.

Of note is that when defining the board outline [Mike] describes how to use OpenSCAD to parametrically define it; a neat micro-tutorial on using the two great tools to compliment each other. We also love that upon successful completion of the tutorial series the user will have developed a tiny but useful development board that can be assembled for about $3 in single quantities!

As with all open source work, if you have quibbles or want to contribute open a pull request and give [Mike] a hand!

Tags: Hardware
July 20, 2019
1:00
A Microwave Kiln, From Scratch
» ‎ Hack a Day

We are normally told that microwave ovens are strictly for food only, and that anything else will cause all sorts of bad things to come our way. There can be few readers who haven’t at some time seen the shower of sparks when an inadvertent metallic object finds its way onto the turntable.

A particularly useful non-food application for a microwave oven comes in the form of the small kilns sold for glass fusing. These are ceramic cylinders coated internally with silicon carbide, and [ShakeTheFuture] shows us how to make your own.

Key to the process is ceramic fibre insulation, which is bonded both to itself and to the fused silicon carbide grit by a cured solution of waterglass, sodium silicate. The result can easily reach the required temperature for fusing glass, but also has an application in burning out surplus wax or PLA from a plaster mould. It’s particularly interesting to see the technique with the waterglass in action, and you can see a run-down of the whole thing in the video below the break.

Tags: Hardware
July 10, 2019
4:00
New Part Day: Two Millimeter Addressable LEDs
» ‎ Hack a Day

The WS2812, or “Neopixels”, or whatever you want to call them, are the standard when it comes to adding blinky to anything. These chips are individually addressable RGB LEDs, which you’ve seen in many LED strips and a thousand other products. These LEDs are rather big compared to normal, dumb LEDs, measuring 5 mm on each side. Here are WS2812s packed into a 2 mm x 2 mm square package. It’s the smallest and brightest blinky that works the same as the WS2812s you know and love.

This is the latest product from Worldsemi. We’ve heard of these before, but damned if we could find a supplier or even a price. Now they’re on AliExpress, at a price of $8 USD per 100, shipping not included.

Electrically, these appear to have the same properties of the normal, 5050-size WS2812 LEDs. Apply power and ground to two pins, send data in on one pin, and connect the next LED in the strand to the remaining pin. Yes, it requires a bit of work to turn this into a display, but microcontrollers are very fast now and have plenty of RAM. Attach a BeagleBone and you’ll be able to drive as many as your glowing heart desires.

If you’re wondering what the coolest project imaginable for these LEDs is, here’s the math: the largest (common) PCB panel for your random board house is 16 by 22 inches. Assuming a 3 mm pixel pitch, that means the largest PCB display you can make with these LEDs is 135 by 186 pixels, call it 120 by 180 just to make things easy. That’s 21,600 LEDs, at a cost of about $2,000. I would not recommend reflowing these, and assuming soldering a LED every thirty seconds, it will take about a month to solder them all by hand. There’s your project, now get to it.

Tags: Hardware
July 06, 2019
1:00
Safely Measuring Single And Three-Phase Power
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are many reasons why one would want to measure voltage and current in a project, some applications requiring one to measure mains and even three-phase voltage to analyze the characteristics of a device under test, or in a production environment. This led [Michael Klopfer] at the University of California, Irvine along with a group of students to develop a fully isolated board to analyze both single and three-phase mains systems.

Each of these boards consists out of two sections: one is the high-voltage side, with the single phase board using the Analog Devices ADE7953 and the three-phase board the ADE9708. The other side is the low-voltage, isolated side to which the microcontroller or equivalent connects to using either SPI or I2C. Each board type comes in either SPI or I2C flavor.

Each board can be used to measure line voltage and current, and the Analog Devices IC calculates active, reactive, and apparent energy, as well as instantaneous RMS voltage and current. All of this data can then be read out using the provided software for the Arduino platform.

The goal of this project is to make it easy for anyone to reproduce their efforts, with board schematics (in Eagle format) and the aforementioned software libraries provided. Here it is somewhat unfortunate that the documentation can be somewhat incomplete, with basic information such as input and measurement ranges missing. Hopefully this will improve over the coming months as it does seem like a genuinely useful project for the community.

We’ve covered the work coming out of [Michael]’s lab before, including this great rundown on Lattice FPGAs. They’re doing machine vision, work on RISC-Vchips, and more. A stroll through the lab’s GitHub is worth your time.

Tags: Hardware
June 25, 2019
13:00
Laser Cutting Wooden Pogo Pin Test Jigs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Now as far as problems go, selling so many products on Tindie that you need to come up with a faster way to test them is a pretty good one to have. But it’s still a problem that needs solving. For [Eric Gunnerson] the solution involved finding a quick and easy way to produce wooden pogo test jigs on his laser cutter, and we have a feeling he’s not the only one who’ll benefit from it.

The first step was exporting the PCB design from KiCad into an SVG, which [Eric] then brought into Inkscape for editing. He deleted all of the traces that he wasn’t interested in, leaving behind just the ones he wanted to ultimately tap into with the pogo pins. He then used the Circle tool to put a 0.85 mm red dot in the center of each pad.

You’re probably wondering where those specific parameters came from. The color is easy enough to explain: his GlowForge laser cutter allows him to select by color, so [Eric] can easily tell the machine to cut out anything that’s red. As for the size, he did a test run on a scrap of wood and found that 0.85 mm was the perfect dimensions to hold onto a pogo pin with friction.

[Eric] ran off three identical pieces of birch plywood, plus one spacer. The pogo pins are inserted into the first piece, the wires get soldered around the back, and finally secured with the spacer. The whole thing is then capped off with the two remaining pieces, and wrapped up in tape to keep it together.

Whether you 3D print one of your own design or even modify a popular development board to do your bidding, the test jig is invaluable when you make the leap to small scale production.

Tags: Hardware
June 24, 2019
8:30
Ditch the Switch: a Soft Latching Circuit Roundup
» ‎ Hack a Day

For some of us, there are few sounds more satisfying than the deep resonant “thunk” of a high quality toggle switch slamming into position. There isn’t an overabundance of visceral experiences when working with electronics, so we like to savor them when we get the chance. But of course there’s no accounting for taste, and we suppose there are even situations where a heavy physical switch might not be the best solution. So what do you do?

Enter the latching power circuit, often referred to as a “soft” switch. [Chris Chimienti] has recently put together a fascinating video which walks the viewer through five different circuits which can be used to add one of these so-called soft power switches to your project. Each circuit is explained, diagramed, annotated, and eventually even demonstrated on a physical breadboard. The only thing you’ve got to do is pick which one you like the most.

There’s actually a number of very good reasons to abandon the classic toggle switch for one of these circuits. But the biggest one, somewhat counterintuitively, is cost. Even “cheap” toggle switches are likely to be one of the most expensive components in your bill of materials, especially at low volume. By comparison, the couple of transistors and a handful of passive components it will take to build out one of these latching circuits will only cost you a couple of cents.

Even if you aren’t in the market for a new way to turn off your projects, this roundup of circuits is a fantastic reminder of how powerful discrete components can be. In an age where most projects seem assembled from pre-fabbed modules, it’s occasionally refreshing to get back to basics.

Tags: Hardware
June 16, 2019
4:01
Homemade Magic Makes the Metcal Go
» ‎ Hack a Day

First soldering irons are often of the ~~Radioshack or Maplin~~ firestarter variety. They’re basically wall power shorted across a nichrome heater or similar with some inline resistance to make it harder to burn down the house. You plug them in, the current flows, and they get hot. Done.

If you stick with the hobby for a while, these eventually get replaced with something like the venerable HAKKO FX-888D or that one Weller everyone likes with the analog knob. These are much improved; having temperature control leads to a more consistently heated tip and much improved soldering experience.

Entering the electronics workplace one comes across the next level of quality soldering iron: high end HAKKOs, Metcals, JBCs, and the like. Using one of these irons is practically a religious experience; they heat in a flash and solder melts while you blink. They even turn off when you put the handpiece down! But they’re expensive to buy (hint: think used). What’s a hobbyist to do?

[SergeyMax] seems to have had this problem. He bit the bullet, figured out how the Metcal works, and made his own base. This is no mean feat as a Metcal might look like a regular iron but it’s significantly more complex than ye olde firestarter. The Metcal magic is based on a oscillating magnetic fields (notice the handpiece is connected via BNC?) interacting with a tip bearing a special coating. In the presence of the changing field the tip heats up until it hits its Curie temperature, at which point it stops interacting with the magnetic field and thus stops heating.

When the user solders, the tip cools by sinking its heat into the part and drops below the Curie temperature again, which starts the heating again. It’s like temperature control with the sensor placed absolutely as close to the part as possible and a nearly instant response time, without even a control loop! [SergeyMax] has a much more thorough description of how these irons work, which we definitely recommend reading.

So what’s the hack? Based on old schematics and some clever reverse engineering from photos [SergeyMax] built a new base station! The published schematic is as rich with capacitors and inductors as one could hope. He didn’t post source or fab files but we suspect the schematic and photos of the bare board combined with some tinkering are enough for the enterprising hacker to replicate.

The post contains a very thorough description of the reverse engineering process and related concerns in designing a cost efficient version of the RF circuitry. Hopefully this isn’t the last Metcal replacement build we see! Video “walkthrough” after the break.

Thanks for the tip Freddie!

Tags: Hardware
June 13, 2019
1:00
SOICbite: A Program/Debug Connector for an SOIC Test Clip
» ‎ Hack a Day

The problem is well-known: programming and debug headers consume valuable board space and the connectors cost money. Especially troublesome are the ubiquitous 100-mil pin headers, not because they’re expensive, but because they’re huge, especially along the z-axis. If you’re building miniature devices, these things can take up a ridiculous amount of space. With some clever thinking, [Simon Merrett] has found a way to re-use something many of us already have — an SOIC-8 test clip — to connect to a special footprint on the PCB without requiring another connector. He calls the system SOICbite.

The SOIC clip attaches to a footprint consisting of eight pads, four on each side of the PCB, plus five non-plated-through holes, which serve to anchor the clip in place. The idea of mating a PCB footprint directly with a removable connector isn’t entirely new — Tag Connect has been doing this for a while, but the connectors are expensive and single-sourced. On the other hand, SOIC test clips of varying quality are available from a number of vendors, including dirt-cheap deals on your favorite websites. The one disadvantage we can see is that the SOICbite footprint must be at the edge of the PCB to properly mate with the clip. The savings in space and cost may well make up for this, however.

[Simon] has made his KiCAD footprint available in a GitHub repo, and has offered to host footprints for any other CAD package there as well. So, fire up your preferred tool and draw one up for him to get these things widely adopted, because we think this is a great idea.

For the commercial alternative, check out our coverage of Tag Connect back in 2014.

Tags: Hardware
June 10, 2019
22:00
Captivating ESP32 Camera Hack
» ‎ Hack a Day

You can never have enough DIY devices at home, so when you look at an ESP32 module that comes with the camera, you automatically start getting ideas. [Daniel Padilla] wanted a way to deploy DIY camera modules without the hassle of configuring them so he made one that looks like an access point and starts streaming as soon as you connect to it.[GitHub]

The code he provides allows the ESP32 to appear as an Open Access Point which you can connect to from a PC or smartphone. The awesome sauce here is that the ESP32 resolves all DNS requests to a redirect in a similar manner to what happens when someone connects to an open Wi-Fi access point in a mall, Instead of a captive portal page that asks the user to authenticate or accept terms and conditions, [Daniel Padilla]’s code instead redirects to the streaming page et voila! Instant camera stream, and it is that simple.

We love this project because it is an elegant way to solve a problem, and it also teaches newbies about captive portals and their implementation. We covered a cheap ESP32 Webcam in the past and this project also comes with code for you to get started. We would love to see what you come up with next.

Tags: Hardware
4:00
This Clapperboard Prints Movie Posters
» ‎ Hack a Day

The clapperboard is a device used in video to synchronize audio and video. Its role in movies is well known and its use goes back in one form or another to the 1920s. [Gocivici] is a big movie fan and created a clapperboard that is able to print out posters of recently announced movies when the clapper is clapped.

The poster is not a big, full color job, but rather a black and white one, roughly the size of a movie ticket. [Gocivici] keeps his movie tickets in a journal and wanted to be able to keep small posters in there along with them. A thermal printer is used to print the poster along with the title, the release date, and some information about the movie. In addition to the printer, the hardware involved is a Raspberry Pi, a switch, and an LED. The clapperboard itself is 3d printed and then painted. A bit of metal is used to keep the clappers apart and give a bit of resistance when pressing them together. A nice touch is a metal front, so you can use magnets to keep your posters on the board.

[Gocivici] has detailed build instructions up along with a video (available after the break) showing the printer in action. The 3d models are available as well as the code used to create the posters after grabbing data from TMDb. If you need your clapperboard to be as accurate as possible, take a look at this atomic clock clapperboard.

Tags: Hardware
June 06, 2019
16:00
Repurposed Plastic Protects PCBs
» ‎ Hack a Day

An errant wire snipping across the wrong electrical pins spells the release of your magic smoke. Even if you are lucky, stray parts are the root of boundless malfunctions from disruptive to deadly. [TheRainHarvester] shares his trick for covering an Arduino Nano with some scrap plastic most of us have sitting in the recycling bin. The video is also after the break. He calls this potting, but we would argue it is a custom-made cover.

The hack is to cut a bit of plastic from food container lids, often HDPE or plastic #2. Trim a piece of it a tad larger than your unprotected board, and find a way to hold it in place so you can blast it with a heat gun. When we try this at one of our Hackaday remote labs and apply a dab of hot glue between the board and some green plastic it works well. The video suggests a metal jig which would be logical when making more than one. YouTube commenter and tip submitter [Keith o] suggests a vacuum former for a tighter fit, and we wouldn’t mind seeing custom window cutouts for access to critical board segments such as DIP switches or trimmers.

We understand why shorted wires are a problem, especially when you daisy-chain three power supplies as happened in one of [TheRainHarvester]’s previous videos.

Tags: Hardware
June 05, 2019
1:00
Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Knocks our Clacks Off
» ‎ Hack a Day

Just a few days ago, on the other side of the planet from this author, there was a mechanical keyboard meetup in Tokyo. Fortunately through the magic of the Internet we can all enjoy the impressive collection of devices people brought, and boy were there some interesting specimens. There were certainly the inevitable collections of strange artisan keycaps, unusual handmade switches, and keycap sets only available in one group buy five years ago in Nicaragua. But among the bright colors were some truly unique custom designs the likes of which we haven’t see before. A single source is hard to credit, you could check the hashtag #tokyomk6 on Twitter, or [obra]’s thread of photos, or this great blog post (video walkthroughs and photos included) from [romly].

Speaking of [romly], one of their designs stands out as particularly unusual. There are a few things to note here. One is the very conspicuous surface profile of the (clearly totally custom) keycaps themselves. Instead of flat or cylindrical or spherical, these are round. Round like the outside of a log. If we didn’t know better it might look like the entire thing was sculpted or extruded as a single unit. And just below the deck are the perpendicular thumb clusters. Frankly we aren’t sure how to refer to this design feature. The switches are mounted at right angles facing inward so the user places a thumb inside it in a style reminiscent of the DataHand. It’s quite interesting, and we’d be love to know more about what specific functionality it provides.

Another interesting entrant is this keyboard with unusually staggered switches and hexagonal caps (check out the individual markings!). Very broadly there are two typical keyboard layout styles; the diagonal columns of QWERTY (derived from a typewriter in the 1800’s) or the non slanted columns of an “ortholinear” or matrix style layout. By those metrics this is something like an ortholinear keyboard in that its switches overlap their neighbors by half, but the edge to edge close packed caps imply that it might be something else. We’d be very interested to know how typing on this beast would be!

There were so many more awesome designs present at the meetup that this would never end if we tried to document them all. Take a look through the posts and call out anything else too excellent to go unnoticed!

Thanks [obra] for Tweeting about this so we could discover it.

Tags: Hardware
June 03, 2019
1:00
Tearing Apart Pulse Transformer Switches
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you like mechanical keyboards, you like switches. Historically, switches were weird, with strange capacitive rubber dome switches in Topre boards, buckling springs in the IBM Model M, and beamsprings in earlier IBM keyboards. This teardown of an HP signal generator has the weirdest keyboard switches ever. They’re being called pulse transformer switches, but they are the strangest, weirdest, and most complicated keyboard switch we’ve ever seen

Mechanically, these keys are mounted on a 1×5 plastic frame with a plunger that presses down on a (brass?) photoetched plate. Mechanically, this is effectively a metal dome keyboard that simply presses a springy bit of metal against a contact on a printed circuit board. That’s the mechanical explanation, the electrical theory of operation is much, much weirder.

Electrically, this keyboard consists of a printed circuit board with two coils underneath each key. The circuit is wired up so two keys are ‘read’ at the same time with a pulse from a multiplexer. This pulse induces a current in the ‘sense’ coil of two individual keys which is sent to a comparator. If both keys are not pressed, the comparator sees a positive and a negative voltage which cancels out, meaning no keys are pressed. If one key is pressed, the metal dome shorts out the transformer underneath the keyboard, meaning only one voltage is seen by the comparator, and that key is registered as being pressed.

This is some crazy keyboard circuitry, and I do not say that lightly. There are ‘acoustic’ keyboards out there which consist of a row of keys striking a metal bar with an acoustic transducer on each end. By measuring the time it takes for the sound of a keypress to reach either end of the metal bar, a keypress can be registered. This is weird and expensive to build, and it’s still simpler than a pulse transformer switch. Check out the video below.

Tags: Hardware
May 21, 2019
8:30
How Hard Can It Be To Buy A Computer In Germany And Get It Back Home To The UK?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Some of the best adventures in the world of hardware hacking start in the pub. For three volunteers at the National Museum Of Computing in the UK, [Adam Bradley], [Chris Blackburn], and [Peter Vaughan], theirs started over a pint with an eBay listing for an old computer in Germany. No problem you might think, we’re well used to international parcel shipping. This computer wasn’t a crusty old Commodore 64 though, instead it was a room-sized IBM System/360 Model 20 from the 1960s, complete with the full array of peripherals and what seemed to be a lot of documentation and software media. It would need a Mercedes Sprinter, a large van, to shift it, but that seemed feasible. With a bit of frantic bidding they secured the auction, and set off for Germany to view their purchase.

Arriving at the machine’s location they found a little bit more than they had expected. In an abandoned building on a side street in Nuremburg there was an intact machine room full of the IBM computer cabinets over a false floor with all the machine cabling in place, and the only usable access was through a street door which hadn’t been opened in decades and which was obstructed by the false floor itself. To cap it all they found they’d bought not one but two System/360s, and also unexpectedly a 1970s System/370 Model 125. Clearly this was more than a job for a quick in-and-out with a Sprinter.

What followed became a lengthy saga of repeated trips, van hire, constructing ramps, and moving heavy computer parts to a hastily rented storage unit. Decabling a computer of this size is no easy task at the best of times, and these cables had spent many decades in a neglected machine room. It’s a fascinating read, and a very well-documented one with plenty of photos. The machines now sit in their storage units awaiting a return to the UK, and the trio are soliciting any help they can find to make that happen. So if you happen to own a European haulage company with spare capacity on your Germany — UK route or if you can help them in any way, donate or get in touch with them. We think this project has much more to offer, so we’ll be following their progress with interest.

These three intrepid computer hunters were brought together at The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley, UK. If you find yourself within range it is an essential place to visit, we did so in 2016.

Tags: Hardware
May 14, 2019
11:31
A Full-Stack Web Browser
» ‎ Hack a Day

Interviewing to be a full-stack engineer is hard. It’s a lot harder than applying for a junior dev job where you’re asked to traverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard. For the full-stack job, they just give you a pile of 2N2222 transistors. (The first company wasn’t a great fit, and I eventually found a place that gave me some 2N2907s for the interview.) That said, there’s a certain challenge in seeing how far you can push some doped silicon. Case in point, [Alastair Hewitt]. He’s building a computer to browse the world wide web from the gate level up.

The goal of this project is to browse the web using only TTL logic. This presents problems that aren’t readily apparent at first glance. First up is being able to display text on a screen. The easiest way to do this now is to get a whole bunch of modern memories that are astonishingly fast for a 1970s vintage computer. This allows for VGA output, and yes, we’ve seen plenty of builds that output VGA using some big honkin’ memories. It turns out these RAM and ROM chips are a little better than the specs say they are, and this computer is overclocked from the very beginning.

A bigger problem is how to interface with a network. This is a problem for very old computers, but PPP still exists and if you have the software stack you can read something from a server over a serial connection. [Alistar] actually found the UART frequency was more important than the dot clock frequency of VGA, and the system clock must therefore be built around the serial port, not the display interface. This means the text mode interface is actually 96 columns instead of the usual 80 columns.

It’s very easy to say that you’re building a computer on a bread board. It’s another thing entirely to actually do it. This is actually a surprisingly well-though out sketch of a computer system that will, theoretically, be able to connect to the Internet. Of course, the reality of the situation is that this computer will be connecting over serial to a computer that’s connected to the Internet, but there’s no shame in that. You can check out the progress on the GitHub for this project.
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Tags: Hardware
May 13, 2019
19:00
Analog Failures on RF Product Cause Production Surprise
» ‎ Hack a Day

A factory is a machine. It takes a fixed set of inputs – circuit boards, plastic enclosures, optimism – and produces a fixed set of outputs in the form of assembled products. Sometimes it is comprised of real machines (see any recent video of a Tesla assembly line) but more often it’s a mixture of mechanical machines and meaty humans working together. Regardless of the exact balance the factory machine is conceived of by a production engineer and goes through the same design, iteration, polish cycle that the rest of the product does (in this sense product development is somewhat fractal). Last year [Michael Ossmann] had a surprise production problem which is both a chilling tale of a nasty hardware bug and a great reminder of how fragile manufacturing can be. It’s a natural fit for this year’s theme of going to production.
Surprise VCC glitching causing CPU reset
The saga begins with [Michael] receiving an urgent message from the factory that an existing product which had been in production for years was failing at such a high rate that they had stopped the production line. There are few worse notes to get from a factory! The issue was apparently “failure to program” and Great Scott Gadgets immediately requested samples from their manufacturer to debug. What follows is a carefully described and very educational debug session from hell, involving reverse engineering ROMs, probing errant voltage rails, and large sample sizes. [Michael] doesn’t give us a sense for how long it took to isolate but given how minute the root cause was we’d bet that it was a long, long time.

The post stands alone as an exemplar for debugging nasty hardware glitches, but we’d like to call attention to the second root cause buried near the end of the post. What stopped the manufacturer wasn’t the hardware problem so much as a process issue which had been exposed. It turned out the bug had always been reproducible in about 3% of units but the factory had never mentioned it. Why? We’d suspect that [Michael]’s guess is correct. The operators who happened to perform the failing step had discovered a workaround years ago and transparently smoothed the failure over. Then there was a staff change and the new operator started flagging the failure instead of fixing it. Arguably this is what should have been happening the entire time, but in this one tiny corner of the process the manufacturing process had been slightly deviated from. For a little more color check out episode #440.2 of the Amp Hour to hear [Chris Gammell] talk about it with [Michael]. It’s a good reminder that a product is only as reliable as the process that builds it, and that process isn’t always as reliable as it seems.

Tags: Hardware
May 12, 2019
19:01
Open Hardware E-Ink Display Just Needs an Idea
» ‎ Hack a Day

Its taken awhile, but thanks to devices like the Amazon Kindle, the cost of e-ink displays are finally at the point where mere mortals such as us can actually start using them in our projects. Now we’ve just got to figure out how to utilize them properly. Sure you can just hook up an e-ink display to a Raspberry Pi to get started, but to truly realize the potential of the technology, you need hardware designed with it in mind.

To that end, [Mahesh Venkitachalam] has created Papyr, an open hardware wireless display built with the energy efficiency of e-ink in mind. This means not only offering support for low-energy communication protocols like BLE and Zigbee, but keeping the firmware as concise as possible. According to the documentation, the end result is that Papyr only draws 22 uA in its idle state.

So what do you do with this energy-sipping Bluetooth e-ink gadget? Well, that part is up to you. The obvious application is signage, but unless you’re operating a particularly well organized hackerspace, you probably don’t need wireless dynamic labels on your part bins (though please let us know if you actually do). More likely, you’d use Papyr as a general purpose display, showing sensor data or the status of your 3D printer.

The 1.54 inch 200×200 resolution e-ink panel is capable of showing red in addition to the standard grayscale, and the whole thing is powered by a Nordic nRF52840 SoC. Everything’s provided for you to build your own, but if you’d rather jump right in and get experimenting, you can buy the assembled version for $39 USD on Tindie.

Tags: Hardware
May 11, 2019
13:01
Battle Tested Current Limiter for Cheap DC Motor Controllers
» ‎ Hack a Day

Running a brushed motor in muddy or dusty environments takes a toll on controllers, with both heavy back EMF and high stall currents. This explains one of the challenge in Europe’s Hacky Racer series, which is decidedly more off-road than America’s Power Racing Series.

In pushing these little electric vehicles to the limits, many builders use brushless Chinese scooter motors since they’re both available and inexpensive. Others take the brushed DC route if they’re lucky enough to score a motor — and then the challenge becomes getting the most performance without burning up your controller. To fix this, [MechanicalCat] has come up with a current limiter for cheap DC motor controllers.

The full write-up is in the included PDF file, and describes the set-up of an Arduino Nano sitting between throttle and controller, and taking feedback from a current sensor. The controller in question is a 4QD Porter 10 so an extra component is a DC-to-DC converter to provide a floating ground for the Arduino. However, there is also the intriguing possibility of the same set-up being used with absurdly cheap Chinese motor controllers. There is also advice on fitting flyback diodes, something which might have saved one controller in the Hackaday pits last year.

It’s yet to be seen what effect this will have on Hacky Racer competitiveness, however its applications go far beyond that field into anywhere a reliable small DC motor drive on the cheap is required. Meanwhile, if you’re unsure where this Hacky Racer stuff came from, you could start here.

Tags: Hardware
May 08, 2019
16:00
Help Solve The Single-Transistor Latch Mystery
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve spent any time on hackaday.io, you may have noticed that more than a few denizens of the site are fans of “alternative” electronic logic. Aiming to create digital circuits from such things as relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, and occasionally diodes, they come up with designs that use these components in either antiquated or occasionally new and unexpected ways. This is exactly what [Mark Sherman] has done with his latest project, a single-transistor latch.

If you think every design has to compete with cutting-edge integrated circuits, or even must have an immediate practical application, you might as well stop reading now — and to play on the famous Louis Armstrong quip about jazz, if you have to ask why someone would do such a thing, you’ll never know.

Given that you’ve come this far, you’ll appreciate what [Mark] has come up with. It’s semi-well-known that the collector-emitter junction of a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) can exhibit a negative resistance characteristic when reverse-biased into avalanche breakdown. It’s this principle that allows a single BJT to be used as an ultra-simple LED flasher. [Mark] took this concept and ran with it, creating a single-transistor latch that can store one bit of information. As a bonus — or is it a requirement? — the transistor also drives an LED, so that you can visualize the state. We’ve seen a one-transistor flip-flop before, but that one also required diodes and an AC bias supply. In this new device, none of this is necessary, so it’s a step up according to the unwritten, unspoken, and generally agreed upon rules of the game.

In true hacker fashion, [Mark] came up with a working device without fully understanding exactly how it works. We, too, are a little mystified at first glance. So, [Mark] is asking for your help in replicating and/or analyzing the circuit. He explains what he has found so far in the video after the break, but the main questions seem to revolve around why the base resistor is required, and why it works with 2N4401s but not 2N2222s.

So, Hackaday, what’s going on here? Sound off in the comments below.

Tags: Hardware
May 05, 2019
19:00
A Function Generator In Its Purest Form
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you have a modern function generator on your bench it is quite likely to contain a direct-digital synthesis circuit that creates arbitrary waveforms using a microporcessor controlled DAC. If you have a cheap function generator it’s likely to contain a one-chip solution that generates approximations to sine and triangle waveforms through modifying a square wave with a set of filters.

These methods both produce adequate waveforms for most of your function generator needs, but they are both far from perfect for the purist. Both methods introduce some distortion, and to address this [michal777] has produced a generator that takes the process back to basics with all stages implemented using building block ICs and transistors. The circuit follows the same square-wave-modifying path as the cheaper integrated devices, but with significant attention paid to the design to ensure that it does as good a job as possible. It also makes for a fascinating dive into function generator design.

The generator hardware has been neatly fitted onto a PCB with a riser for a set of front panel controls. He shares a few pictures of previous designs. We particularly like one that appears to have been fitted into a redundant cooking pot.

We’ve brought you a few function generators over the years. If you’ve got one of the cheaper examples, we’ve even covered how you might improve it a little.

Tags: Hardware
April 25, 2019
16:00
Charge All Your Batteries With USB PD
» ‎ Hack a Day

USB-C has been around for a while, and now that it can charge phones and Macbooks and Thinkpads, the hackers are starting to take note of power adapters that can supply lots of current. [Alex] was turned on to USB-C after he charged a laptop, Nintendo Switch, and phone with one power adapter. This led him to create a USB-C battery charger for all your LiPos.

The high-level design of this project is simply a board with a USB C port on one end, an XT60 plug on the other, and some support for balance leads. Plug this board into a USB C adapter, plug a battery in, and the battery will charge automagically. The only UI is an RGB LED. It’s difficult to imagine a battery charger that’s easier to use.

For the electronics, [Alex] is using an STM32G0 for the smarts of the device, which includes handling the USB PD spec. This gives the charger 20 Volts to play with, and this is then regulated and sent into the battery. Right now, this board will charge 2-4c batteries. That’s a good enough proof of concept to charge some quadcopter batteries, or just as a really simple way to charge some LiPo cells.

Tags: Hardware
April 17, 2019
16:00
Shitty Add-Ons Go Electroluminescent
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s that time of the year again, and once more we’re faced with the latest innovations in Badgelife, the movement to explore the artistic merits of electronics and manufacturing. This is an electroluminescent printed circuit board, and it’s some of the finest work we’ve seen. It’s also a Shitty Add-On that glows blue.

The process for applying an electroluminescent coating to printed circuit boards is, surprisingly, something we’ve covered before. Late last year, [Ben Krasnow] delved deep into a DIY EL display. The process is expensive, but all the products come from a company called Lumilor. The first step in this process is applying a thin conductive coating on a substrate with an airbrush. Since the entire idea of printed circuit boards is to have a layer of conductive material etched into any shape you want, the simple circuit board is the idea experimental platform for playing with EL displays. Traditionally, EL displays were made entirely with a silk screen process, like [Fran]’s ongoing attempt to recreate the Apollo DSKY display.

The electronics for this badge are simply a Microchip MIC4832 EL Driver, which converts the 3.something volts from the add-on header into 100 or so Volts AC at hundreds of Hz. This is a single-chip solution to driving EL displays, and the only other parts you need are an inductor, diode, and a few caps and resistors. An ATtiny85 can be used to blink the circuits, or, alternatively, you could copy [Ben]’s work and build a character EL display.

The process of applying an electroluminescent coating to a PCB does require a spray gun or airbrush, and the chemicals are a bit expensive. This, though, is pushing the boundaries of what can be done with artistic PCBs. It’s new applications of technology, simply as wearable electronics. It’s the best example of the possibilities of the medium and some of the best work that’s come out of the Badgelife scene.

Tags: Hardware
April 15, 2019
4:00
A Robust ESP8266 RFID Access Control System
» ‎ Hack a Day

By now we’ve seen plenty of projects that use an ESP8266 as a form of rudimentary access control: tap a button on your smartphone, and the door to your apartment unlocks. With the power and flexibility of the ESP, it’s a very easy project to pull off with minimal additional hardware. But what about if you want to get a little more serious, and need to support many users?

Rather than reinvent the wheel, you might want to check out the extremely impressive ESP-RFID project. It’s still based on the ESP8266 we all know and love, but it combines the diminutive WiFi-enabled microcontroller with a nice custom PCB and some exceptionally slick software to create a very professional access control system without breaking the bank. As the name implies, the system is geared towards RFID authentication and supports readers such as the MFRC522, PN532 RFID, or RDM6300. Add in a stack of Mifare Classic 1KB cards, and your hackerspace is well on the way to getting a new door control system.

The official hardware for ESP-RFID can be purchased through Tindie with or without an installed ESP-12F module, but as it’s a fully open source project, you’re also free to build your own version if you’d like. In either event, the board allows you to easily connect the ESP up to your RFID reader of choice, as well as door sensors and of course the door locks themselves.

On the software side of things, ESP-RFID should be able to handle about 1000 unique users and their RFID cards before the relatively limited RAM and storage of the ESP catches up with it. But if you’ve got that many people coming and going in your hackerspace, it might be time to update your systems to begin with. Incidentally, the project makes no guarantees about the security of the ESP-RFID code, and says that the system shouldn’t be used for secure locations. That said, you can run ESP-RFID without an Internet connection to reduce your attack surface, at the cost of losing NTP time synchronization.

If you’re not managing a few hundred users and their RFID cards, one of the more simplistic ESP8266 door locks might be more your speed. We’ve also seen similar tricks pulled off with the Particle Photon, in case you’ve got one of those rattling around the parts bin.

Tags: Hardware
April 11, 2019
8:30
Implementing Qi Inductive Charging Yourself
» ‎ Hack a Day

Inductive charging is a technology that has promised a lot, but hasn’t quite delivered on the promise of never needing to plug in your phone again. The technology behind it is surprisingly simple though, and [Vinod.S] takes us through it all with an ATtiny13-based example.

An inductive charger has to be clever in its operation, for if it were to operate continuously it would soon have more in common with an inductive hob and thus become a fire risk, so it has to be sure that a compatible device is resting upon it before it tries to transmit power. It achieves this by periodically sending out a pulse of power intended to wake any devices in contact with it, and the device responds with a serial data stream encoded onto the device’s field by modifying the resonance of the receiver tuned circuit. This is done by a pair of MOSFETs under the control of the ATtiny in [Vinod]’s device, resulting in a functioning inductive power receiver built on a piece of prototyping board and sporting a buck converter capable of supplying 5 volts suitable to charge a phone. You can find the code on GitHub and see it in action below the break.

This tech has made an appearance here before a few times, such as when a Qi charger was integrated into a Chromebook.

Tags: Hardware
4:00
A Bolt-On I2C Navigation Key for Your Next Project
» ‎ Hack a Day

We often talk about the advantages of modular hardware here at Hackaday; the ability to just order a few parts online, hook them up with some jumper wires, and move onto the software side of things is a monumental time saver when it comes to prototyping. So anytime we see a new module that’s going to save us time and aggravation down the road, we get a bit excited.

Today we present the very slick I2CNavKey developed by [Saimon], a turn-key interface solution for your builds that can’t quite get away with a couple toggle switches. It not only gives you a four-way directional pad with center button, but a rotary “wheel” like on the old iPods. All of which you can access easily and with a minimum of wiring thanks to the wonders of I2C.

But even that might be selling the module short. This isn’t just a couple of buttons on a breakout board, the I2CNavKey is powered by its own PIC16F18345 microcontroller and features three configurable GPIOs with PWM support (perfect for an RGB LED) plus 256 bytes of onboard EEPROM storage.

[Saimon] has released the entire project as open source hardware for your hacking pleasure, but you can also get them as ready-to-use modules on Tindie for $18 USD [Editor’s Note: Because of a typo we originally we left the 1 out of the price]. Whether you’re a paying customer or not, you get access to the project’s absolutely phenomenal documentation, including a nearly 30 page manual that contains everything you’d ever want to know about the I2CNavKey and how to integrate it into your project. If all hardware was documented with this level of dedication, the world would be a much nicer place for folks like us.

If you recognize the name, or perhaps the affinity for neat I2C-connected input devices, it’s probably because you’ve seen his very similar I2C rotary encoder on these pages previously, which was a finalist in our Open Hardware Design Challenge during the 2018 Hackaday Prize.

Tags: Hardware
April 09, 2019
16:00
Making A Birthday Party Magical With Smart Wands
» ‎ Hack a Day

Visitors to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios are able to cast “spells” by waving special interactive wands in the air. Hackers like us understand that there must be some unknown machinations happening behind the scenes to detect how the wands are moving, but for the kids …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 03, 2019
22:00
Giving An Industrial Push Button USB, Elegantly
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Glen]’s project sounds perfectly straightforward: have a big industrial-style push button act as a one-key USB keyboard. He could have hacked something together in any number of ways, but instead he decided to create a truly elegant solution. His custom PCB mates to the factory parts perfectly, and the USB …read more

Tags: Hardware
19:00
The Three Faces Of The 555
» ‎ Hack a Day

In these days of cheap microcontrollers, it is hard to remember there was a time when timing things took real circuitry. Even today, for some applications it is hard to beat the ubiquitous 555 timer IC. It is cheap, plentiful, and reliable. What’s interesting about the 555 is it isn’t …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 01, 2019
4:00
One Pin To Rule Them All
» ‎ Hack a Day

When Maxim acquired Dallas Semiconductor, they took over the popular 1-Wire product line. These are sensors that get power and bidirectional data over the same pin. However, we never liked the name 1-Wire as you really need two wires: one for the power and data and, of course, a ground …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 28, 2019
13:00
Ammo Can Holds A 14,000 Lumen LED Flashlight
» ‎ Hack a Day

For most people, a flashlight is just something you keep in a drawer in the kitchen in case the power goes out. There’s even a good chance your “flashlight” is just an application on your phone at this point. But as we’ve seen many times before from mechanical keyboards to …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 24, 2019
7:00
A Ruined Saw Blade Becomes A Bowl
» ‎ Hack a Day

Every workshop generates waste, whether it be wood shavings, scrap metal, or fabric scraps, and sometimes that waste seems too good to throw away. [Igor Nikolic]’s hackerspace had a ruined circular saw blade in the trash, and rather than let it go to waste he took it to the forge …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 15, 2019
13:00
Octavo Systems Shows Off With Deadbug Linux Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Once upon a time, small Linux-capable single board computers were novelties, but not anymore. Today we have a wide selection of them, many built around modules we could buy for our own projects. Some of the chipset suppliers behind these boards compete on cost, others find a niche to differentiate …read more

Tags: Hardware
February 27, 2019
9:00
Ask Hackaday: Can We Get Someone To Buy And Destroy RAM?
» ‎ Hack a Day

We like blinky things. We’re moths drawn to the flame of serially-addressable RGB LEDs. If the LEDs are smaller, we want to know. If you can drive more of them, we want to know. That said, the most interesting news out of CES last January was both right up our …read more

Tags: Hardware
February 23, 2019
19:00
Thinkpad T25 Gets Less Retro with Hardware Swap
» ‎ Hack a Day

For many, the Thinkpad T25 was something of a dream come true. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the venerable business-oriented laptop that hackers love so much, it featured a design inspired by “retro” Thinkpads of yore, but with modern hardware inside. Unfortunately, as it was more fan service than a …read more

Tags: Hardware
February 19, 2019
22:00
Cheaply Charging Cylindrical Cells
» ‎ Hack a Day

For one reason or another, a lot of us have a bunch of 18650 cells sitting around. Whether they’re for flashlights, our fancy new vape pen, remote controlled toys, or something more obscure, there is a need to charge a bunch of lithium ion cells all at once. This project, …read more

Tags: Hardware
February 12, 2019
8:30
Putting an Out of Work iPod Display to Good Use
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Mike Harrison] produces so much quality content that sometimes excellent material slips through the editorial cracks. This time we noticed that one such lost gem was [Mike]’s reverse engineering of the 6th generation iPod Nano display from 2013, as caught when the also prolific [Greg Davill] used one on a recent board. Despite the march of progress in mobile device displays, small screens which are easy to connect to hobbyist style devices are still typically fairly low quality. It’s easy to find fancier displays as salvage but interfacing with them electrically can be brutal, never mind the reverse engineering required …read more

Tags: Hardware
February 05, 2019
1:00
Yell At Your Desk To Get Up In The Morning
» ‎ Hack a Day

Standing desks are great conversation starters in the office – whether you like it or not. How do you know someone’s got a standing desk? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Standing desks have their benefits, but for maximum flexibility, many people choose a desk that can raise and lower depending on their needs. [Wassim] had just such a desk, but found pushing the buttons too 20th century for his tastes. Naturally, Google Assistant integration was the key here.

[Wassim] started out intending to capture and then spoof the desk controller’s signals to the motors, before realising it was likely easier …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 17, 2019
8:30
You’ll Never See the End of This Project
» ‎ Hack a Day

…theoretically, anyway. When [Quinn] lucked into a bunch of 5 mm red LEDs and a tube of 74LS164 shift registers, a project sprang to mind: “The Forever Number,” a pseudo-random number generator with a period longer than the age of the universe. Of course, the components used will fail long before the sequence repeats, but who cares, this thing looks awesome!

The core of the project is a 242-bit linear-feedback shift register (LFSR) constructed from (31) 74LS164’s. An XOR gate and inverter computes the next bit of the sequence by XNOR’ing two feedback bits taken from taps on the register, …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 15, 2019
4:00
Deep Discounts Yield Deep Reverse Engineering of Biotech Hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hitting the electronic surplus shop is probably old hat to most of our readership. Somewhere, everyone’s got that little festering pile of hardware they’re definitely going to use some day. An old fax is one thing, but how would your partner feel if you took home an entire pallet-sized gene sequencing rig? Our friend [kaspar] sent along an interesting note that the folks at Swiss hackerspace Hackteria got their hands on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 last year (see funny “look what we got!” photo at top) and have generated a huge amount of open documentation about whats inside and how …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 14, 2019
10:01
A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets its Maker
» ‎ Hack a Day

The holidays bring us many things. Family and friends are a given, as is the grand meal in which we invariably overindulge. It’s a chance for decades old songs and movies to somehow manage to bubble back up to the surface, and occasionally a little goodwill even slips in here or there. But perhaps above all, the holidays are a time for every retailer to stock themselves to the rafters with stuff. Do you need it? No. Do they want it? No. But it’s there on display anyway, and you’re almost certainly going to buy it.

Which is precisely how …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 10, 2019
4:00
Is Baking a Raspberry Pi the Recipe for Magic Smoke?
» ‎ Hack a Day

No, Hackaday hasn’t become a baking blog. We’re just here to give you a bit of advice: if [MickMake] ever offers you one of his fresh-baked Pis, proceed with caution. While we have no doubt that there will be some interesting smells wafting out of his kitchen, these aren’t the tasty pies you’re looking for. There’s no delicious home-baked treat when that timer dings, just a handful of Raspberry Pis that have had an exceptionally hard day.

To properly explain the odd sight of some Raspberry Pis laid out on a cookie sheet, we need to take a step back. …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 03, 2019
7:01
Compiling NodeMCU for the ESP32 With Support for Public-Private Key Encryption
» ‎ Hack a Day

When I began programming microcontrollers in 2003, I had picked up the Atmel STK-500 and learned assembler for their ATtiny and ATmega lines. At the time I thought it was great – the emulator and development boards were good, and I could add a microcontroller permanently to a project for a dollar. Then the ESP8266 came out.

I was pretty blown away by its features, switched platforms, except for timing-sensitive applications, and it’s been my chip of choice for a few years. A short while ago, a friend gave me an ESP32, the much faster, dual core version of the …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 26, 2018
11:31
Bottom of the Barrel Connector: Tell Us Your Socket Hacks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sometimes you get an epiphany for a project that will change the world. A simple device, on a custom circuit board with inexpensive parts that will disrupt the status quo and make you a billion dollars in no time. Then there are the times where you need to throw scraps of copper at a prototyping board and strangle nine-volts out by any means necessary.

This is about the latter. In one of our Hack Chats, [Morning.Star] shared a couple of images wherein a barrel connector was needed, but there was no time to wait for one in the mail. Necessity …read more

Tags: Hardware
8:31
Bonanza of Keyswitch Datasheets Fills Our Decks with Clack
» ‎ Hack a Day

Mechanical keyboards use switches of a few different types. But even those types include myriad variations. How’s a hacker to know just exactly what equipment is out there?

For example, if you grab a fellow cube-farmer’s mechanical keyboard (possibly because they clacked on their Cherry Blue’s just one too many times) and angrily rip off a few keycaps to show you’re serious, what do you see? In most cases you expect to see the familiar color and stem shape of a Cherry MX switch or one of its various clones. But you may find a square box around it like …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 16, 2018
19:00
Cheap Multimeter Leads Come With Extra Ohms, Free!
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Nop head] discovered that cheap multimeter leads costing only a few bucks can come with more than one may have bargained for. The first set had a large amount of useful-looking attachments, but the wires used for the leads were steel with a resistance of about one ohm each. With two leads in use, that means any resistance measurement gets two ohms added for free. More seriously, when measuring current, the wires can heat up rapidly. Voltage measurements would be affected the least, but the attachments and lead design expose a large amount of bare metal, which invites accidental shorts …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 14, 2018
13:00
Vintage Plotter Turned Fruit Spectrometer
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fruit can be a tricky thing: if you buy it ripe you’ll be racing against time to eat the pieces before they turn into a mushy mess, but if you buy the ones which are a bit before their prime it’s not always easy to tell when they’re ready to eat. Do you smell it? Squeeze it? Toss it on the counter to see if it bounces? In the end you forget about them and they go bad anyway. That’s why here at Hackaday we sustain ourselves with only collected rainwater and thermo-stabilized military rations.

But thankfully Cornell students [Christina …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 11, 2018
13:00
Open Hardware Board For Robust USB Power Monitoring
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve all seen the little USB power meters that have become popular since nearly every portable device has adopted some variation of USB for charging. Placed between the power source and the device under test, they allow you to see voltage and current in real time. Perfect for determining how long you’ll be able to run a USB powered device on batteries, or finding out if a USB power supply has enough current to do the business.

[Jonas Persson] liked the idea of these cheap little gadgets, but wanted something a bit more scientific. His design, which he refers to …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 07, 2018
1:00
Hacking Your Way to a Custom TV Boot Screen
» ‎ Hack a Day

More and more companies are offering ways for customers to personalize their products, realizing that the increase in production cost will be more than made up for by the additional sales you’ll net by offering a bespoke product. It’s great for us as consumers, but unfortunately we’ve still got a ways to go before this attitude permeates all corners of the industry.

[Keegan Ryan] recently purchased a TV and wanted to replace its stock boot screen logo with something of his own concoction, but sadly the set offered no official way to make this happen. So naturally he decided to …read more

Tags: Hardware
December 02, 2018
7:01
Spring-Loaded Bed for K40 Laser Acts As an Auto-Focus
» ‎ Hack a Day

Laser engraving and cutting has something in common with focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass: good focus is critical to results. If materials of varying thicknesses are used, focus needs to be re-set every time the material changes, and manual focusing quickly becomes a chore. [Scorch Works] has a clever solution to avoid constant re-focusing that doesn’t involve sensors or motors of any sort. The result is a self-adjusting bed that compensates for material height changes, ensuring that the top surface of the material is always a fixed distance from the laser’s head.

The way [Scorch Works] has …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 30, 2018
4:00
New Part Day: The Twenty Five Cent USB Microcontroller (With A Toolchain!)
» ‎ Hack a Day

Last year, Jiangsu Yuheng Co., Ltd introduced a new microcontroller. The CH554 is a microcontroller with an E8051 core with a 24 MHz clock, a little more than 1 kB of RAM, and a bit more than 14 kB split between the code and data Flash. In short, it’s nothing too spectacular, but it makes up for that with peripherals. It’s got SPI and ADCs and PWM, UARTs, and even a few capacitive touch channels. It’s also a USB device, with some chips in the series able to function as a USB host. You can buy this chip for a …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 28, 2018
13:00
Sniffing RFID Readers With A Piece of Paper
» ‎ Hack a Day

We feature plenty of printed projects here on Hackaday, though they tend to be of the three dimensional type thanks to the proliferation of affordable 3D printers. But in this case, [Milosch Meriac] has managed to put together a printable design that’s not only a very cool hack, but is made up of a scant two dimensions. His creation, which could perhaps be considered something of an interactive circuit diagram, allows anyone with a paper printer and a few passive components make a functional low-frequency RFID sniffer.

[Milosch] tells us the goal of the project is to lower the barrier …read more

Tags: Hardware
1:00
Advances In Flat-Pack PCBs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Right now, we’ve got artistic PCBs, we’ve got #badgelife, and we have reverse-mounted LEDs that shine through the fiberglass substrate. All of this is great for PCBs that are functional works of art. Artists, though, need to keep pushing boundaries and the next step is obviously a PCB that doesn’t look like it has any components at all. We’re not quite there yet, but [Stephan] sent in a project that’s the closest we’ve seen yet. It’s a PCB where all the components are contained within the board itself. A 2D PCB, if you will.

[Stephen]’s project is somewhat simple as …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 26, 2018
16:00
A Sub-$1000, Non-X86 Motherboard
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re building a computer, your options are nearly limitless. You can get a motherboard with red LEDs, with blue LEDs, green LEDs, or if you’re feeling spendy, RGB LEDs. You can get custom-milled heat spreaders in any shape you want, as long as it’s angular and screams ‘gamer’. If you want a motherboard that doesn’t use x86 — either AMD or Intel — you’re kind of out of luck. Either it doesn’t exist, or it’s going to cost a small fortune.

Raptor Engineering have just released a motherboard that isn’t x86 and doesn’t cost as much as a …read more

Tags: Hardware
8:30
Applied Science Rolls An Electroluminescent Controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

After LEDs and TFTs and OLEDs and liquid crystals, there’s another display technology that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Electroluminescent displays have been around for ages, and there still aren’t a whole lot of applications for them. That might change soon, because Applied Science a.k.a. [Ben Krasnow] figured out an easy way to build EL displays on anything, and created a simple circuit that’s capable of driving video on a remarkable blue phosphor EL display.

For this build, [Ben] is using a specialty product from Lumilor consisting of a copper-ish conductive base layer, a clear dielectric, the ‘lumicolor’ phosphor, …read more

Tags: Hardware
1:00
Watch The Low-Cost Mechatronics Lab Dispense Candy, Sort Cups
» ‎ Hack a Day

A lot can be done with simple motors and linear motion when they are mated to the right mechanical design and control systems. Teaching these principles is the goal behind the LCMT (Low Cost Mechatronics Trainer) which is intended primarily as an educational tool. The LCMT takes a “learn by doing” approach to teach a variety of principles by creating a system that takes a cup from a hopper, fills it with candy from a dispenser, then sorts the cups based on color, all done by using the proper combinations of relatively simple systems.

The Low Cost Mechatronics Trainer can …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 23, 2018
22:01
Energy Sipping Neodymium Sphere Keeps on Spinning
» ‎ Hack a Day

At this point we’re sure you are aware, but around these parts we don’t deduct points for projects which we can’t immediately see a practical application for. We don’t make it our business to say what is and isn’t worth your time as an individual hacker. If you got a kick out of it, great. Learned something? Even better. If you did both of those things and took the time to document it, well that’s precisely the business we’re in.

So when [Science Toolbar] sent in this project which documents the construction of an exceptionally energy efficient spinning neodymium sphere, …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 19, 2018
11:30
Many Ways to Drive a Small Motor
» ‎ Hack a Day

Tiny motors used for haptic feedback and vibration come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The most familiar is the “eccentric rotating mass” (ERM) variety which just spins an imbalanced weight on a small motor and comes packaged in two form factors. The classic is the pager “pager motor” which just looks like a tiny, adorable motor and the squat cylindrical “pancake style”. ERMs are simple to use but provide imprecise response when compared to their new-age cousin the “linear resonant actuator”. Unlike the motor in an ERM, LRAs are typically an enclosed mass on a spring placed near …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 18, 2018
13:00
Fail of the Week: Laser-based Persistence of Vision Gadget
» ‎ Hack a Day

[XTronical]’s idea for a laser-based persistence of vision gadget failed, but the basic idea seemed sound. A row of inexpensive red lasers shine into a spinning mirror and are reflected onto a distant surface, making 8 scan lines. A reflective object sensor detects mirror position, and by rapidly turning individual lasers on and off, a pattern can be drawn out.

That was the idea, anyway. A quick prototype consisting of some small and economical red laser diodes and a double-sided mirror hot glued to the shaft of a small DC motor formed the guts of the unit. [XTronical] worried that …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 17, 2018
1:00
A Sneak Peek at Anechoic Chamber Testing
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Mathieu Stephan] has something new in the works, and while he isn’t ready to take the wraps off of it yet, he was kind enough to document his experience putting the mysterious new gadget through its paces inside an anechoic chamber. Considering the majority of us will never get inside of one of these rooms, much less have the opportunity to test our own hardware in one, he figured it was the least he could do.

If you’re not familiar with an anechoic chamber, don’t feel bad. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you’ll have at the local makerspace. …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 14, 2018
8:00
The Value of Cardboard In Product Design
» ‎ Hack a Day

A while ago, [Eric Strebel] created a backpack hanger. The result was great — by just bolting this backpack hanger to the wall, he kept his backpack off the floor and out of the way. There was even a place for him to set his phone to charge. [Eric] is thinking about turning this idea into a product, and just posted a video on his process of making a cardboard mockup.

Since this is a study in industrial design, any mockup will need to keep in mind how the finished article will be constructed. In this case, [Eric] is going …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 11, 2018
22:00
A Daylight-Readable Bar Graph Display in the 70s Wasn’t Cheap
» ‎ Hack a Day

LEDs weren’t always an easy solution to displays and indicators. The fine folks at [Industrial Alchemy] shared pictures of a device that shows what kind of effort and cost went into making a high brightness bar graph display in the 70s, back when LEDs were both expensive and not particularly bright. There are no strange materials or methods involved in making the display daylight-readable, but it’s a peek at how solving problems we take for granted today sometimes took a lot of expense and effort.

The display is a row of 28 small incandescent bulbs, mounted in a PCB and …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 10, 2018
7:00
What Good Are Counterfeit Parts? Believe It Or Not, Maybe A Refund
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Charles Ouweland] purchased some parts off Aliexpress and noticed that the Texas Instruments logo on some of his parts wasn’t the Texas Instruments logo at all, it was just some kind of abstract shape that vaguely resembled the logo. Suspicious and a little curious, he decided to take a closer look at the MCP1702 3.3v LDO regulators he ordered as well. Testing revealed that they were counterfeits with poor performance.

Looking at the packages, there were some superficial differences in the markings of the counterfeit MCP1702 versus genuine parts from Microchip, but nothing obviously out of place. To conclusively test …read more

Tags: Hardware
November 09, 2018
17:01
Raspberry Pi PoE Redux
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Martin Rowan] was lucky enough to get his hands on the revised Power Over Ethernet (PoE) hat for the Raspberry Pi. Lucky for us, he wrote it up for our benefit, including inspection of the new hat, it’s circuit, and electrical testing to compare to the original hardware.

You may remember the original release of the PoE hat for the Raspberry Pi, as well as the subsequent recall due to over-current issues. In testing the revised board, [Martin] powered a test load off the USB ports, and pulled over an amp — The first iteration of the PoE hat would …read more

Tags: Hardware
4:00
The Negative Rail Explained
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the high availability of modular components and incredible wealth of information and tutorials online, it’s now easier than ever for hackers and makers to assemble complex electronic projects without getting bogged down with the theory behind it all. But the downside is that the modern electronic hobbyist often doesn’t have as deep an understanding of the low-level concepts that they would have if they had to build everything from scratch. This can be a problem when they try diagnosing and repairing faults, or when they start to branch out into reverse engineering.

Which makes “Building Blocks” by [David Christensen] …read more

Tags: Hardware
October 23, 2018
8:30
Putting a Motor Inside a Speed Controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

One of the more interesting hacks we’ve seen this year is [Carl]’s experimentations with making motors out of PCBs. Honestly, it’s surprising no one has done this before — a brushless motor is just some coils of wire and a few magnets; anyone can turn some coils into traces and make a 3D print that will hold a few magnets. This latest advancement is something else entirely. It’s a motor and an electronic speed controller all in one.

This project is a continuation of [Carl]’s PCB motor project, which started with him routing coils for a brushless motor as traces …read more

Tags: Hardware

October 15, 2018
7:17
CHIPSEC – Platform Security Assessment Framework For Firmware Hacking
» ‎ Darknet

CHIPSEC is a platform security assessment framework for PCs including hardware, system firmware (BIOS/UEFI), and platform components for firmware hacking.

It includes a security test suite, tools for accessing various low-level interfaces, and forensic capabilities. It can be run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and UEFI shell.

You can use CHIPSEC to find vulnerabilities in firmware, hypervisors and hardware configuration, explore low-level system assets and even detect firmware implants.

Read the rest of CHIPSEC – Platform Security Assessment Framework For Firmware Hacking now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: Hardware hacking

October 06, 2018
10:00
The Carbon Fiber Construction Of Large Propellers
» ‎ Hack a Day

Props for your little RC airplane or drone are effectively consumables. They’re made of plastic, they’re cheap, and you’re going to break a lot of them. When you start swinging something larger than 12 inches or so, things start getting expensive. If you’re building gigantic octocopters or big RC planes, those props start adding up. You might not think you can build your own gigantic carbon fiber propellers, but [Tech Ingredients] is here to prove you wrong with an incredible video demonstration of the construction of large propellers

The key ideas behind the build are laid out in a video …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 30, 2018
19:00
What’s the Cheapest Way to Scan Lots of Buttons?
» ‎ Hack a Day

So you’re building a new mechanical keyboard. Or attaching a few buttons to a Raspberry Pi. Or making the biggest MIDI grid controller the world has ever know. Great! The first and most important engineering question is; how do you read all those buttons? A few buttons on a ‘Pi can probably be directly connected, one for one, to GPIO pins. A mechanical keyboard is going to require a few more pins and probably some sort of matrix scanner. But the grid controller is less clear. Maybe external I/O expanders or a even bigger matrix? Does it still need diodes …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 25, 2018
4:00
Trials and Tribulations in Sending Data with Wires
» ‎ Hack a Day

When working on a project that needs to send data from place to place the distances involved often dictate the method of sending. Are the two chunks of the system on one PCB? A “vanilla” communication protocol like i2c or SPI is probably fine unless there are more exotic requirements. Are the two components mechanically separated? Do they move around? Do they need to be far apart? Reconfigurable? A trendy answer might be to add Bluetooth Low Energy or WiFi to everything but that obviously comes with a set of costs and drawbacks. What about just using really long wires? …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 24, 2018
13:00
A Three Axis Mill For The End Of The World
» ‎ Hack a Day

A mill is one of those things that many hackers want, but unfortunately few get their hands on. Even a low-end mill that can barely rattle its way through a straight cut in a piece of aluminum is likely to cost more than all the other gear on your bench. A good one? Don’t even ask. So if something halfway decent is out of your price range, you might as well throw caution to the wind and build one.

That’s more or less the goal behind this extremely basic three axis mill built by [Michael Langeder]. Designed around a cheap …read more

Tags: Hardware
11:30
A Motion Capture System For Everyone
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Chordata] is making a motion capture system for everyone to build and so far the results are impressive, enough to have been a finalist in the Hackaday Human Computer Interface Challenge. It started a few years ago as one person’s desire to capture a digital performance of a dancer on a stage and has grown into a community of contributors. The board files and software have just been released as alpha along with some instructions for making it work, though more detailed documentation is on the way.

Fifteen sensor boards, called K-Ceptors, are attached to various points on the body, …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 21, 2018
16:00
The Un-Economy Of Building Your Own Spot Welder
» ‎ Hack a Day

If there’s one thing that brings hackers together, it’s the ability to build something for less money than it takes to buy it. It’s an exercise [Great Scott Gadgets] put to the test because he was playing around with some 18650 lithium cells, and had a huge need to put some tabs on batteries. This can be done by soldering, but to do it right you should really use a spot welder. Here’s the rub: you can buy a spot welder for about $250, and you can build one for a little less. So, the question: should [Great Scott] build …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 20, 2018
22:01
New Part Day: Put An Alexa In Everything
» ‎ Hack a Day

The last great hope for electronics manufactures is smart home assistants. The Alexas and Siris and OK Googles are taking over homes across the country. At its best, it’s HAL 9000, only slightly less homicidal. It will entertain your children, and you can order cat litter just by saying you want cat litter. This is the future, whether we like it or not.

In an attempt to capture the market, Amazon has released the Alexa Connect Kit. This is an Amazon-Echo-On-a-Chip — a piece of hardware that adds Alexa to microwaves, blenders, and whatever other bit of home electronics you …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 18, 2018
8:30
Get Your PCBs Made at the Mall
» ‎ Hack a Day

As we’ve seen with some recent posts on the subject here at Hackaday, there seems to be a growing schism within the community about the production of PCBs. Part of the community embraces (relatively) cheap professional fabrication, where you send your design off and get a stack of PCBs in the mail a couple weeks later. Others prefer at home methods of creating PCBs, such as using a CNC, laser engraver, or even the traditional toner transfer. These DIY PCBs take some skill and dedication to produce, but the advantage is that you can have the board in hand the …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 17, 2018
19:00
A $1, Linux-Capable, Hand-Solderable Processor
» ‎ Hack a Day

Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that’s been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It’s hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it right, this will get you into the territory of a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi Zero, on a board that’s whatever form factor you can imagine. Here’s the best part: you can get this part for $1 USD in large-ish quantities. A cursory glance at …read more

Tags: Hardware
13:00
Open Source Paramotor Using Quadcopter Tech
» ‎ Hack a Day

Have you ever dreamed of flying, but lack the funds to buy your own airplane, the time to learn, or the whole hangar and airstrip thing? The answer might be in a class of ultralight aircraft called powered paragliders, which consist of a soft inflatable wing and a motor on your back. As you may have guessed, the motor is known as a paramotor, and it’s probably one of the simplest powered aircraft in existence. Usually little more than big propeller, a handheld throttle, and a gas engine.

But not always. The OpenPPG project aims to create a low-cost paramotor …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 12, 2018
13:00
Bixel, An Open Source 16×16 Interactive LED Array
» ‎ Hack a Day

The phrase “Go big or go home” is clearly not lost on [Adam Haile] and [Dan Ternes] of Maniacal Labs. For years they’ve been thinking of creating a giant LED matrix where each “pixel” doubled as a physical push button. Now that they’ve built up experience working on other LED projects, they finally decided it was time to take the plunge and create their masterpiece: the Bixel.

Creating the Bixel (a portmanteau of button, and pixel) was no small feat. The epic build is documented in an exceptionally detailed write-up on the team’s site, in addition to the time-lapse video …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 10, 2018
8:30
Direction Finding And Passive Radar With RTL-SDR
» ‎ Hack a Day

To say that the RTL-SDR project revolutionized hacker’s capabilities in the RF spectrum would be something of an understatement. It used to be that the bar, in terms of both knowledge and hardware, was so high that only those truly dedicated were able to explore the radio spectrum. But today anyone with $20 can pick up an RTL-SDR device, combine it with a wide array of open source software, and gain access to a previously invisible world.

That being said, RTL-SDR is usually considered an “Economy Ticket” to the world of RF. It gets your foot in the door, but …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 07, 2018
16:00
Create Your Own ESP8266 Shields
» ‎ Hack a Day

The ESP8266 has become incredibly popular in a relatively short time, and it’s no wonder. Cheap as dirt, impressively powerful, Arduino-compatible, and best of all, includes Wi-Fi right out of the box. But for all its capability and popularity, it’s still lagging behind the Arduino in at least one respect. Namely, the vast collection of add-on “Shields” which plug into the Arduino to add everything from breadboards to GPS receivers.

Until such time as the free market decides to pick up the pace and start making standardized shields for the various ESP8266 development boards, it looks as if hackers are …read more

Tags: Hardware
13:00
Scooter Hauls Kids With A Little Heavy Metal
» ‎ Hack a Day

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Similarly, where there’s a paying customer and a well stocked metalworking shop, there will also be a way. That’s about all the backstory you need to understand this latest creation from [Richard Day] of 42Fab. A customer asked him to build something that didn’t exist, and in a few hours he not only fabricated it from scratch but documented the whole thing for our viewing pleasure.

The object in question is a mount that would allow the customer to pull a “Burley Bee” kid trailer behind their electric scooter. The trailer is only …read more

Tags: Hardware
September 04, 2018
8:00
Interactive KiCAD BOMs Make Hand Assembly a Breeze
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve all been there; you finally get the last DigiKey box and now your desk is covered in parts to stuff into a shiny new PCB you’ve been working on. First stop? Passive town, population endless waves of 1uF capacitors. The first one goes in the upper left, then a little below that, then… once you get to C157 it’s getting pretty hard to remember exactly which parts go where. Enter the literally named InteractiveHtmlBom (IHB) to smooth this process out.

IHB makes the frustrating task of mapping lines in a BOM to a physical position on a board easy. …read more

Tags: Hardware
7:00
When are Dumb LEDs the Smart Choice?
» ‎ Hack a Day

A couple years ago I got into making electronic conferences badges by building a device for DEFCON 25 shaped like a dragonfly. Like all badges the most important design factor was quite literally how flashy it was, and two years ago I delivered on that with ten RGB LEDs. At the time I planned to hand-assemble each and every of the 105 badges at my kitchen table. Given those constraints, and a desire for electrical and programmatic simplicity, I landed on using APA102s (DotStar’s in Adafruit parlance) in the common 5050 sized package. They were easy to place, easy to …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 27, 2018
19:00
The Solution To Oversized Dev Boards: A Literal Hack
» ‎ Hack a Day

Oh, there was a time when you could prototype just about everything on a breadboard. The CPU in your computer came in a DIP package, and there were no BGA packages. to be found anywhere. In the forty years since then, chips have gotten smaller, packages have gotten more cramped, and you can barely hand-solder the coolest chips anymore. No worries — companies are still spitting out dev boards with 0.1″ headers, but there’s a problem: they don’t fit on a solderless breadboard. They’re too wide. Our world is falling apart.

[Luc] had a problem when he was playing with …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 25, 2018
10:01
You’ve Never See A Solid-State Oscilloscope Like This One
» ‎ Hack a Day

Remember a the time before oscilloscopes had a brain? It’s easy to forget as we’ve become accustomed to a class of simple solid state oscilloscope using a microcontroller as signal processor and a small LCD display to show the resulting waveforms. They are commonly available as inexpensive kits, and while their bandwidth is not huge they give a good account of themselves in low frequency applications. But of course, originally the signal processing was handled in a much simpler way.

[SimpleTronic] reminds us that a small solid state oscilloscope does not need a microcontroller, with a ‘scope on a breadboard …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 23, 2018
19:00
Retro-uC, Your Favorite Instruction Sets On Custom Silicon
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few months ago, we caught wind of an interesting project in Big-O Open silicon. It’s a chip, loaded up with the great CPU cores of yore. Now, it’s finally a project on Crowdsupply. The Retro-uC project is an Open Source microcontroller for the retro geek, with a Zilog Z80, MOS 6502, and Motorola 68000 buried in the epoxy of a single QFP package. Oh yes, custom silicon and retro goodness, what more could you want?

The Retro-uC project is part of the Chips4Makers project to develop an Open Source chip for the community. Of course, this has been done …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 17, 2018
22:00
Multi-switch Useless Box Is Useless In Multiple Ways
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

We’ve probably all seen (and built) a useless box, in which you flip a switch that activates a servo that pops out a finger and flips the switch off. [Coffeman500] decided to take this a step further by building a useless box with multiple switches. Flip one, the finger pops out to flip it back. Flip several switches, and the finger pops out and flips each back in turn.

It’s a smart build that [coffeeman500] says is his first electronics build. The compulsively switching brain of this is an ATmega328 driving an A4988 stepper motor driver, with one stepper moving …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 15, 2018
8:31
Arcade Inspired Halloween Candy Dispenser
» ‎ Hack a Day

The days are getting shorter and the nights are a little cooler, which can only mean one thing: it’s officially time to start devising the trials you’ll put the neighborhood children through this Halloween. For [Randall Hendricks], that means building a new candy dispensing machine to make sure the kids have to work for their sugary reward. After all, where’s the challenge in just walking up and taking some candy from a bowl? These kids need to build character.

[Randall] writes in to share his early work on this year’s candy contraption which he’s based on a popular arcade game …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 12, 2018
22:01
Build Your Own Linux Single Board Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

We are fortunate enough to have a huge choice of single-board computers before us, not just those with a bare-metal microcontroller, but also those capable of running fully-fledged general purpose operating systems such as GNU/Linux. The Raspberry Pi is probably the best known of this latter crop of boards, and it has spawned a host of competitors with similarly fruity names. With an entire cornucopia to choose from, it takes a bit more than evoking a berry to catch our attention. The form factors are becoming established and the usual SoCs are pretty well covered already, show us something we …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 07, 2018
19:00
Failed Tool Turned Exploded Wall Art
» ‎ Hack a Day

Few things hit a hacker or maker harder than when a beloved tool goes to that Big Toolbox In The Sky. It can be hard to trash something that’s been with you through countless repairs and teardowns, made all the worse by the fact most employers don’t recognize “Tool Bereavement” as a valid reason to request time off. Maybe next time one of your trusty pieces of gear gives up the ghost, you can follow the example set by [usuallyplesent] and turn it into a piece of art to hang up on the shop wall.

The shop had gotten years …read more

Tags: Hardware
August 05, 2018
19:00
A Plasma Speaker Using A TL494
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’re used to loudspeakers as circular components with a paper cone and a big magnet inside which is suspended a coil that is connected to our audio amplifier. But moving-coil speakers are not the only way to create sound from electricity, there are one or two other weapons in the audio designer’s arsenal.

One of the more spectacular and entertaining is the plasma speaker, and it’s one [Marcin Wachowiak] has been experimenting with. A continuous plasma in the form of a discharge between two electrodes is modulated with an audio signal, and the resulting rapid changes in the volume of …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 30, 2018
19:00
A Crystal Oscillator For A Stable Bench Reference
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Paul] likes a precise oscillator. His recent video shows a crystal oscillator with a “watch crystal” and a CMOS counter, the CD4060. Using such a circuit can produce very stable frequencies and since the 32.768 kHz crystal is a power of 2, you get nice divisions out of the counter.

We’ve seen the same trick done with decade counters (like the 4518B) to divide by 10 instead of powers of two to make frequency standards. A 1 MHz crystal can easily generate 100 kHz, 10 kHz, etc.

[Paul] mentions the clock is a Schmitt trigger input (he said output, but …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 24, 2018
16:00
Open Source Power Converter For The Masses
» ‎ Hack a Day

GaN or Gallium Nitride Transistors have been in the news for their high-frequency and high-efficiency applications. Anyone interested in the Power Converter domain will love this open-source project by Siemens. The offering is called SDI TAPAS and it is a multipurpose GaN FET based board with a TMS320F28x controller onboard.

A quick look at the schematic reveals a lot of stuff going on like current and voltage sense chips along with a neatly designed GaN power stage with by-the-book drivers. There is a plethora of connectors on-board including one for the Raspberry Pi which is an added bonus. The git …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 22, 2018
22:00
IHC badge: It’s Not (Quite) a Nokia
» ‎ Hack a Day

Electronic conference badges are an integral part of our culture, and have featured many times here. The norm for a badge is an exquisitely designed printed circuit board with some kind of microcontroller circuit on it, often a display, and some LEDs.

This is not enough though for [Mastro Gippo], for he has given us an interesting alternative, the shell of a Nokia 3310 mobile phone fitted with a new motherboard holding an ESP32 module, and of course that classic display. It is to be the badge for IHC Camp, which initialism if you hadn’t guessed stands for Italian Hacker …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 20, 2018
4:00
The C.H.I.P Returns, Maybe
» ‎ Hack a Day

Remember the C.H.I.P? The little ARM-based and Linux-capable single board computer that was launched in 2015 at what was then a seemingly impossibly cheap price of $9, then took ages to arrive before fading away and the company behind it going under? Like a zombie, it has returned from the dead!

So, should we be reaching for the staples of zombie movies, and breaking out the long-playing records? Or should we be cautiously welcoming it back into the fold, a prodigal son to the wider family of boards? Before continuing, it’s best to take a closer look.

The C.H.I.P that …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 19, 2018
19:00
A Slightly Scientific Examination Of Epoxies
» ‎ Hack a Day

Two-part epoxy is one of those must-have items in your toolbox, albeit kept in a ziploc bag to keep all that goo off the rest of your tools. It’s a glue with a million uses, but which brand is best? Should you keep some cheap five-minute epoxy around, or should you splurge for the fancy, long-setting JB Weld. It’s not a perfect analysis, but at least [Project Farm] has done the experiment. This is a test of which two-part epoxy you can find at your local home supply store is strongest.

The epoxies tested include Gorilla epoxy, Devcon Plastic Steel, …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 18, 2018
1:00
How Low Can You Go? Tiny Current Generator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Current limited power supplies are a ubiquitous feature of the bench, and have no doubt helped prevent many calamities and much magic smoke being released from pieces of electronics. But for all their usefulness they are a crude tool that has a current resolution in the range of amps rather than single digit milliamps or microamps.

To address this issue, [Yann Guidon] has produced a precision current source, a device designed to reliably inject tiny currents. And in a refreshing twist, it has an extremely simple circuit in the form of a couple of PNP transistors. It has a range …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 17, 2018
1:00
CortexProg Is A Real ARM-Twister
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve got a small box of microcontroller programmers on our desktop. AVR, PIC, and ARM, or at least the STMicro version of ARM. Why? Some program faster, some debug better, some have nicer cables, and others, well, we’re just sentimental about. Don’t judge.

[Dmitry Grinberg], on the other hand, is searching for the One Ring. Or at least the One Ring for ARM microcontrollers. You see, while all ARM chips have the same core, and thus the same SWD debugging interface, they all write to flash differently. So if you do ARM development with offerings from different chip vendors, you …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 11, 2018
22:00
Shoehorning A Slick Spotify Remote Into An ESP8266
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 2017 Spotify finally deprecated their public vanilla C SDK library, libspotify, and officially replaced it with dedicated SDKs for iOS and Android and this new-fangled web thing we’ve all heard so much about. This is probably great for their maintainability but makes writing a native application for a Linux or a hardware device significantly harder, at least without an application process and NDA. Or is it? Instead of using that boring slab of glass and metal in their pocket [Dani] wanted to build a handy “now playing” display and remote control interface but was constrained by the aforementioned SDK …read more

Tags: Hardware
19:00
Diode Recovery Time Explained
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are at least two phases to learning about electronics. In the first phase, you learn about how components are supposed to work. In the second phase, you learn about how they really work. Wires have resistance and inductance. Adjacent wires have capacitance. Capacitors leak. Inductors have resistance. All of these things matter. [Learnelectronics] has a recent video that explores recovery time for a diode — a phase two conversation.

If you haven’t run into recovery time before, it is the amount of time the diode takes to shut off after it is conducting. This manifests itself as a little …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 10, 2018
22:00
SPIDriver Shows You What’s Going On
» ‎ Hack a Day

When you’re debugging two bits of electronics talking SPI to each other, there’s a lot that can go sideways. Starting from the ground up, the signals can be wrong: data not synced with clocks right, or phase inverted. On top of that, the actual data sent needs to make sense to the receiving device. Are you sending the right commands?

When nothing’s working, you’re fighting simultaneously on these two fronts and you might need different tools to debug each. An oscilloscope works great at the physical layer, while something like a Bus Pirate or fancier logic analyzer works better at …read more

Tags: Hardware
July 07, 2018
16:00
A Peek Into a Weed-Eating Robot’s Test Fixtures
» ‎ Hack a Day

When it comes to production, fast is good! But right the first time is better. Anything that helps prevent rework down the line is worth investing in. Some of the best tools to catch problems are good test fixtures. The folks at Tertill (a solar-powered robot for killing weeds that kickstarted last year) took the time to share two brief videos of DIY test fixtures they use to test components before assembly.

The videos are short, but they demonstrate all the things that make a good test: on the motor tester there are no connectors or wires to fiddle with, …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 28, 2018
16:00
This Year, Badges Get Blockchains
» ‎ Hack a Day

This year’s hottest new advance in electronics comes through wearable badges. You can’t have failed to notice another technology that’s getting really hot. It’s the blockchain. What is a blockchain? It’s a linked list where every item in the list contains a cryptographic hash of the previous item in the list. What is a blockchain in English? It’s the most revolutionary technology that’s going to solve every problem on the planet, somehow. It’s the basis for crypto (no not that one, the other one). The blockchain is how you add more Lamborghinis to your Lamborghini account. Even though we’re …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 27, 2018
1:00
Ken Shirriff Found Butterflies In His Op-Amp
» ‎ Hack a Day

In 1976, Texas Instruments came out with the TL084, a four JFET op-amp IC each with similar circuitry to Fairchild’s very popular single op-amp 741. But even though the 741 has been covered in detailed, when [Ken Shirriff] focused his microscope on a TL084, he found some very interesting things.

To avoid using acid to get at the die, he instead found a ceramic packaged TL084 and pried off the cover. The first things he saw were four stabilizing capacitors, by far the largest structures on the die and visible to the naked eye.

When he peered into his microscope …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 22, 2018
8:30
Beats an Extension Cord
» ‎ Hack a Day

What does your benchtop power supply have that [Pete Marchetto]’s does not? Answer: an extension cord draped across the floor. How often have you said to yourself, “I just need to energize this doodad for a couple seconds,” then you start daisy chaining every battery in the junk drawer to reach the necessary voltage? It is not uncommon to see battery packs with a single voltage output, but [Pete] could not find an adjustable one, so he built his own and put it on Tindie.

Presumably, the internals are not going to surprise anyone: an 18650 battery, charging circuit, a …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 17, 2018
4:01
Cheap Front Panels with Dibond Aluminium
» ‎ Hack a Day

The production capability available to the individual hacker today is really quite incredible. Even a low-end laser engraver can etch your PCBs, and it doesn’t take a top of the line 3D printer to knock out a nice looking enclosure. With the wide availability of these (relatively) cheap machines, the home builder can churn out a very impressive one-off device on a fairly meager budget. Even low volume production isn’t entirely out of the question. But there’s still one element to a professional looking device that remains frustratingly difficult: a good looking front panel.

Now if your laser is strong …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 15, 2018
4:00
Silicon Bugs In The FTDI FT232R, And A Tidy RF VCO Project
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Scott Harden] wrote in to tell us of some success he’s having using the FT232 chip to speak SPI directly from his laptop to a AD98850 digital signal generator. At least that was his destination. But as so often in life, more than half the fun was getting there, finding some still-unsolved silicon bugs, and (after simply swapping chips for one that works) potting it with hot glue, putting it in a nice box, and putting it up on the shelf.

In principle, the FTDI FT232 series of chips has a bit-bang mode that allows you to control the individual …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 12, 2018
8:30
3D Print A Remote Control Flame Thrower
» ‎ Hack a Day

We all have a weakness for a good flamethrower project, but sometimes they can look a little hairy, even if losing hairs to them seems to be the order of the day. [Hyper_Ion] has a ‘thrower that might satisfy the need for fire among the cautious though, because he’s created a remote control flamethrower.

Fuel for the flames is provided from a butane canister held within a 3D-printed frame, and is delivered via a piece of copper tube to a welding nozzle. A plunger beneath the can is connected to a rack-and-pinion driven by a servo, connected to a …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 11, 2018
19:00
A Close Eye on Power Exposes Private Keys
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hardware wallets are devices used exclusively to store the highly sensitive cryptographic information that authenticates cryptocurrency transactions. They are useful if one is worried about the compromise of a general purpose computer leading to the loss of such secrets (and thus loss of the funds the secrets identify). The idea is to move the critical data away from a more vulnerable network-connected machine and onto a device without a network connection that is unable to run other software. When designing a security focused hardware devices like hardware wallets it’s important to consider what threats need to be protected against. More …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 09, 2018
22:00
Marvel at Soviet-era Smart Display’s Tiny Size
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s easy to assume that older components will be less integrated and bulkier than we might otherwise expect. Then something seems ahead of its time, like the teeny-tiny 490IP1 LED which was produced in the former Soviet Union. [AnubisTTP] obtained and shared images of this tiny integrated single digit LED display in which the number measures a scant 2.5 mm tall; in production it was made easier to read with an external bubble lens magnifier clipped to the outside. The red brick the 490IP1 is pictured with is the Texas Instruments TIL306, a relatively normal sized DIP component with similar …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 05, 2018
16:00
Magnetic Spheres Line Up for Rotary Encoder Duty
» ‎ Hack a Day

When it comes to rotary encoders, there are plenty of options. Most of them involve putting a credit card number into an online vendor’s website, though, and that’s sometimes just not in the cards. In that case building your own, like this encoder using magnetic spheres, is a pretty cool way to go too.

If he’d had less time to spare, we imagine [Antonio Ospite] would have gone for a commercial solution rather than building an encoder from scratch. Then again, he says his application had noise considerations, so maybe this was the best solution overall. He had some latching …read more

Tags: Hardware
1:00
Sonoff Postmortem Finds Bugs, Literally
» ‎ Hack a Day

While nobody is exactly sure on the exact etymology of the term, Thomas Edison mentioned some of his inventions being riddled with “bugs” in a letter he wrote all the way back to 1878. In the context of computers, any loyal Hackaday reader should know Grace Hopper’s infamous account of a moth being caught in an early electromechanical computer’s relays. To this pantheon of troublesome insects, we would humbly summit the story of a Sonoff TH16 switch being destroyed by a lowly ant.

According to [CNX Software], the Sonoff TH16 had been working perfectly for a year and a half …read more

Tags: Hardware
June 01, 2018
16:00
An Electromagnet Brings Harmony to this Waving Cat
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve noticed waving cats in restaurants and stores for years, but even the happy bobbing of their arm didn’t really catch our attention. Maybe [Josh] had seen a couple more than we have when it occurred to him to take one apart to see how they work. They are designed to run indoors from unreliable light sources and seem to bob along forever. How do the ubiquitous maneki-neko get endless mechanical motion from one tiny solar cell?

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the prevalence and cost of these devices, the answer is quite simple. The key interaction is between a permanent magnet …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 31, 2018
22:00
Tiny FPGA Board Fits in Your Laptop
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are a bunch of FPGA development boards to choose from, but how many will fit inside your laptop? The PicoEVB is a tiny board that connects to a M.2 slot and provides an evaluation platform for the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA family.

This minimalist board sports a few LEDs, a PCIe interface, an integrated debugger, on-board EEPROM, and some external connectors for hooking up other bits and pieces. The M.2 connector provides the board with power, USB for debugging, and PCIe for user applications.

A major selling point of this board is the PCIe interface. Most FPGA boards with PCIe …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 25, 2018
22:00
This Robot Barfs Comics!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

If there’s one thing that’s more fun than a comic, it’s a randomly generated comic. Well, perhaps that’s not true, but Reddit user [cadinb] wrote some software to generate a random comic strip and then built a robot case for it. Push a button on the robot and you’re presented with a randomly generated comic strip from the robot’s mouth.

The software that [cadinb] wrote is in Processing, an open source programming language and “sketchbook” for learning to code if you’re coming from a visual arts background. The Processing code determines how the images are cropped and placed and what …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 20, 2018
10:01
Stretching The Definitions Of A Custom IC
» ‎ Hack a Day

Maker Faire is the nexus for all things new and exciting. At the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, zGlue introduced a new platform that stretches the definition of custom ICs. Is this custom silicon? No, not at all. zGlue is a platform allowing anyone to take off-the-shelf ICs and package them into a single module, allowing you to build a smaller PCB with a shorter BOM.

The idea behind zGlue is to take all of the fun chips available today from accelerometers to tiny microcontrollers with integrated wireless and put them on a tiny, tiny board that is then …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 19, 2018
22:01
Scrapped Motors Don’t Care About Direction
» ‎ Hack a Day

Spinners built into games of chance like roulette or tabletop board games stop on a random number after being given a good spin. There is no trick, but they eventually rest because of friction, no matter how hard your siblings wind up for a game-winning turn. What if the spinning continued forever and there was no programming because there was no controller? [Ludic Science] shows us his method of making a perpetual spinner with nothing fancier than a scrapped hard disk drive motor and a transformer. His video can also be seen below the break.

Fair warning: this involves mains …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 18, 2018
22:00
Nuclear Synchroscope Gets New Life
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Synchroscope is an interesting power plant instrument which doubles up as two devices in one. If the generator frequency is not matched with the grid frequency, the rotation direction of the synchroscope pointer indicates if the frequency (generator speed) needs to be increased or decreased. When it stops rotating, the pointer angle indicates the phase difference between the generator and the grid. When [badjer1] ~~[Chris Muncy]~~ got his hands on an old synchroscope which had seen better days at a nuclear power plant control room, he decided to use it as the enclosure for a long-pending plan to build …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 17, 2018
19:00
DIY SSR For Mains Switching
» ‎ Hack a Day

Typical power strips have their sockets tightly spaced. This makes it cumbersome to connect devices whose wall warts or power bricks are bulky — you end up losing an adjoining socket or two. And if the strip has a single power switch, you cannot turn off individual devices without unplugging them.

Planning to tackle both problems together, [Travis Hein] built himself some custom Dual SSR Controlled Socket Outlets for his workbench. He also decided to add remote switching ability so he could turn off individual sockets via a controller, Raspberry Pi, smartphone app or most ideally, a nice control panel …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 14, 2018
16:01
DIY Variacs get ESP8266 Upgrades
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’be been hacking and making long enough, you’ve probably run into a situation where you realize that a previous project could be improved with the addition of technology that simply wasn’t available when you built it. Sometimes it means starting over from scratch, but occasionally you luck out and can shoehorn in some new gear without having to go back to the drawing board.

The two isolated variacs that [nop head] built were already impressive, but with the addition of the ESP8266 he was able to add some very slick additional features which really took them to the next …read more

Tags: Hardware
1:00
ESP Cookbook Goes Beyond Chips and DIPs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Are you putting ESP8266s in all your projects these days, whether they need one or not? We don’t blame you. These boards are cheap, tiny, oh and they have WiFi.

If you want to spend less time writing code and more time blinking RGB LEDs over Wi-Fi, then check out this ESP cookbook over on IO. [Turo Heikkinen] and team are writing a soup-to-nuts guide to these darlings of IoT. The cookbook leads off with pinouts and networking (of course) before moving into more intricate recipes involving popular sensors and displays.

This cookbook is funny, it’s helpful, and it’s really …read more

Tags: Hardware
May 02, 2018
13:00
The Incredible Shrinking Rework Station
» ‎ Hack a Day

Anyone who’s ever tried setting up a workbench in a tight space knows the struggle: you want to have all your test equipment and tools out and within arm’s reach, but you just don’t have enough surface area. If you fill the whole bench with your tools, there’s not going to be anywhere left to work. So you either have a bench full of tools that’s uncomfortable to use, or you’re forced to choose what stays out and what gets packed away. Neither is conducive to actually getting work done, which is why you are trying to set up a …read more

Tags: Hardware
4:00
Scotty Allen Builds A USB Drive From An iPhone
» ‎ Hack a Day

What happens when you come across a mysterious, partially populated circuit board in the Huaqiangbei electronics market in Shenzhen? If you’re [Scotty Allen], the only answer is to make your own USB drive from iPhone parts.

[Scotty] made a name for himself through his YouTube channel Strange Parts where he built his own iPhone from scratch, added a headphone jack to an iPhone, and other various exploits involving hot air in Shenzhen. This latest build is no different. It begins with a random PCB [Scotty] found at the electronics market. It has a USB port on one end, it has …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 23, 2018
22:00
Assemble Your Own Modular Li-Ion Batteries
» ‎ Hack a Day

Low-voltage DC power electronics are an exciting field right now. Easy access to 18650 battery cells and an abundance of used Li-Ion cells from laptops, phones, etc. has opened the door for hackers building their own battery packs from these cheap cells. A big issue has been the actual construction of a pack that can handle your individual power needs. If you’re just assembling a pack to drive a small LED, you can probably get by with spring contacts. When you need to power an e-bike or other high power application, you need a different solution. A spot welder that …read more

Tags: Hardware
1:00
The Simplest Possible DIY Ultrasonic Levitator
» ‎ Hack a Day

We thought that making things levitate in mid-air by the power of sound was a little bit more like magic, or at least required fancy equipment. It turns out that you can do it yourself easily enough with parts that any decent hacker’s closet should have in abundance: a motor-driver IC, two ultrasonic distance pingers, and a microcontroller. This article shows you how (translated here, scroll down).

But aside from a few clever tricks, there’s not that much to show. The two HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensors are standard fare, and are just being used as a cheap source of 40 …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 12, 2018
1:00
Building the Perfect Home Router
» ‎ Hack a Day

When a favorite piece of hardware dies, it’s fairly common to experience a bit of dread. The thought that now you’ll have to go through the process of getting a replacement for the device can be very troubling, and is fraught with difficult questions. Is the hardware still available? Has it been made obsolete by something else in the time you’ve had it? But while it can be a hassle, there’s no question you can come out the other side better than you went in. Sometimes it takes the passing of an old piece of gear for you to really …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 08, 2018
4:00
Function Generator Gets DIY Frequency Standard
» ‎ Hack a Day

For those of us who like to wrangle electrons from time to time, there are some exceptional deals out there for low (or at least lower) cost imported test equipment. If you’re willing to part with a few hundred dollars US, you can get some serious hardware that a decade ago would have been effectively outside the reach of the hobbyist. Right now you can order a four channel oscilloscope for less than what a new Xbox costs; but which one you’ll rack up more hours staring at slack-jawed is up to you.

Of course, these “cheap” pieces of …read more

Tags: Hardware
April 03, 2018
22:00
Filter your Pi and be a Responsible Pirate
» ‎ Hack a Day

At this point it’s pretty well-known that you can tack a long wire to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO, install some software, and you’ve got yourself the worlds easiest pirate FM radio station. We say that it’s a “pirate” station because, despite being ridiculously easy to do, broadcasting on these frequencies without a license is illegal. Even if you had a license, the Raspberry Pi with a dangling bit of wire will be spewing out all kinds of unintentional noise, making it a no-go for any legitimate purposes.

In an effort to address that issue, [Naich] has written up a couple …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 27, 2018
8:30
Everything You Wanted to Know about Transformers (But were Afraid to Ask)
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jim Pytel] has a lot of very good instructional videos on his channel, and he recently added one you’ll enjoy on transformers. You probably know that transformers convert one AC voltage into another AC voltage. Some step up voltage, some step down voltage, and others simply pass voltage through but isolate the input from the output.

The 40 minute video covers basics including how the transformer works, the meaning of the turns ratio, and how transformers reflect impedance. You probably should understand how to compute AC power, but if you need a refresher [Jim] has a video for that, too. …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 25, 2018
7:00
Iron Man Mask With A HUD!
» ‎ Hack a Day

At some point, a child will inevitably dream of being a superhero. Not all children get the chance to see that dream made manifest, but a few take that destiny into their own hands. Redditor [Lord_of_Bone] — seizing at that goal — has built himself an Iron Man mask with an integrated HUD!

Relying on a conceptually similar project he’d previously built, much of the code was rehashed for this ‘Mark II’ version. Pieces of a smartphone holo pyramid act as projection surfaces — using a lens to focus the image to be viewed at such close distances — and …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 22, 2018
7:00
An Introduction to Storm Detector Modules
» ‎ Hack a Day

Lightning storm detectors have been around for a surprisingly long time. The early designs consisted of a pair of metal bells and a pendulum. When there was a charge applied, for example by connecting one bell to the ground and the other to a lightning rod, the bells would ring when a lightning storm was close by. In the mid 18^th century, these devices were only practical for demonstration and research purposes, but very likely represent the earliest devices that convert electrostatic charge to mechanical force. A bit over a hundred years later, the first lightning detector was considered …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 21, 2018
8:00
3D Printed Magnetic Stirrer Could Hardly be Simpler
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve spent much time in a chemistry or biology lab, you’ve probably seen a magnetic stirrer. This is a little table that you put a beaker on. A little bar (often called a flea or a pill) goes in the solution and spins to stir the beaker’s contents. Simple versions are not that expensive, but nicer ones can cost a bit. [John] decided to build his own using 3D printing and the design is delightfully simple.

The electronics is nothing more than a PC fan, an off-the-shelf fan controller with a display, and a 3D printed bracket with some …read more

Tags: Hardware
March 14, 2018
22:00
Introduce Yourself To a PocketBeagle With BaconBits
» ‎ Hack a Day

The PocketBeagle single-board computer is now a few months old, and growing fast like its biological namesake. An affordable and available offering in the field of embedded Linux computing, many of us picked one up as an impulse buy. For some, the sheer breadth of possibilities can be paralyzing. (“What do I do first?”) Perhaps a development board can serve as a starting point for training this young puppy? Enter the BaconBits cape.

When paired with a PocketBeagle, everything necessary to start learning embedded computing is on hand. It covers the simple basics of buttons for digital input, potentiometer for …read more

Tags: Hardware
January 06, 2013
6:59
Hardware SPI with Python on a Raspberry Pi
» ‎ Hack a Day

While the Raspberry Pi has very good support for an I2C bus, a lot of very cool chips – including the in system programmer for just about every ATtiny and ATmega microcontroller – use an SPI bus. [Louis] sent in a tutorial for getting hardware SPI on his Raspi, and even though it’s rather limited [...]
Tags: raspberry Hardware spi louis spi-bus system-programmer microcontroller raspberry
December 31, 2012
4:00
Building a hardware security module
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Stefan] was nervous about putting the secret key for his Amazon Web Services account in his config file. In the security world, storing passwords in plain text is considered a very bad thing. but luckily there are ways around it. [Stefan]‘s solution was to make a hardware security module out of the newest ARM-powered Arduino [...]
Tags: security Hardware module stefan amazon-web security-module arduino hacks
December 24, 2012
14:01
UPDATE: Roll your own GPS can now track twice as many satellites
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Andrew Holme] wrote in to tell us about some work he’s done to improve his scratch-built GPS receiver. He figured out a way to use the same hardware but double the number of satellites it can track to a total of eight. When we looked at the original hardware about a year ago it was [...]
Tags: gps Hardware update andrew-holme holme number-of-satellites scratch hacks
12:01
Robot can barely move with so much hardware strapped to it
» ‎ Hack a Day

We think that [Andrej Škraba] needs to start looking for a beefier motor platform. This little robot has so much hardware strapped to it the motors can barely keep up. But with a little help it can make its way around the house, and it takes a whole lot of connectivity and computing power along [...]
Tags: kraba Hardware robot andrej computing-power whole-lot robots hacks
December 21, 2012
7:00
Open source software defined radio transceiver
» ‎ Hack a Day

As the year draws to a close, we must look back and look at the advances in amateur radio this year. The RTL-SDR tuner hack, a USB TV Tuner to create a software defined radio receiver, is one of the greatest hacks of the last 12 months and a great justification for 2012 being the [...]
Tags: year radio Software usb-tv-tuner radio-transceiver open-source-software Hardware
December 20, 2012
5:00
Two computer vision builds from Cornell
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bruce Land], professor at Cornell, is a frequent submitter to our tip line. Usually he sends in a few links every semester from undergraduate electronics courses. Now the fall semester is finally over and it’s time to move on to the more ambitious master’s projects. First up is a head-mounted eye tracker, [Anil Ram Viswanathan] [...]
Tags: semester cornell computer bruce-land ram-viswanathan eye-tracker computer-vision Hardware
December 19, 2012
15:01
Which way do non-polarized film capacitors go? There is an answer.
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you, like us, thought that capacitor orientation only matters for polarized varieties like electrolytic capacitors you should read through this article. [Bruce Trump] looks at why some film capacitors have a stripe printed on one end and why their orientation can matter. He has an image rolled into his post showing both axial and [...]
Tags: way orientation film bruce-trump film-capacitors electrolytic-capacitors capacitor Hardware
December 16, 2012
8:35
[Bunnie] builds a laptop for himself, hopefully us
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bunnie Huang], creator of the Chumby and artisan of chips and electrons, is building his own completely open source laptop. It’s called the Novena, and is powered by a quad-core ARM CPU, it’s got enough bells and whistles to make any hacker happy including an on-board FPGA, dual Ethernet ports, and enough GPIO pins [...]
Tags: laptop bunnie huang bells-and-whistles chumby fpga Hardware
December 15, 2012
9:08
A thermal imaging camera for your phone
» ‎ Hack a Day

When last we heard of a cheap thermal imaging camera accessory for any smart phone, we were blown away at how easily a very expensive electronic device could be replicated with an Arduino and enough know how. Now, that thermal imaging camera is a kickstarter project and provides a cheap way to put a thermal imaging [...]
Tags: imaging camera phone thermal-imaging-camera cheap-thermal-imaging-camera arduino Hardware
December 14, 2012
4:25
Almost building an engine from hardware store parts
» ‎ Hack a Day

You can build a surprising amount of stuff from parts you can pick up at a hardware store. Sometimes, though, getting a project built from sections of pipe is very, very difficult. That’s the case with [Lou]‘s hardware store engine: despite an inordinate amount of cleverness, he just can’t seem to get an engine made [...]
Tags: engine store Hardware lou hardware-store cleverness store-engine engine hacks
December 13, 2012
8:31
Rooting your AT&T U-verse modem
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unhappy with the performance of his U-verse modem [Jordan] decided to dig in and see if a bit of hacking could improve the situation. Motorola makes this exclusively for AT&T and there are no other modems on the market which can used instead. Luckily he was able to fix almost everything that was causing him [...]
Tags: rooting verse modem jordan modems motorola Hardware
December 12, 2012
12:30
LiPo internal resistance measurement tool
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is a scratch-build meter for measuring the internal resistance of Lithium Polymer cells. [Bleuer Csaba] uses the LiPo cells for RC vehicles and thet take quite a beating from the motors they’re supplying. This means that he only gets about 100-200 cycles out of each cell. To figure out where one is in its life cycle [...]
Tags: measurement lipo resistance lithium-polymer resistance-measurement internal-resistance Hardware
December 11, 2012
6:01
Breadboard friendly FPGAs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Regular Hackaday readers will be familiar with all the cool things you can do with FPGAs; emulating old video game consoles, cracking encryption protocols, and DIY logic analyzers become relatively simple projects with even a modest FPGA dev board on your workbench. Many FPGA boards aren’t geared towards prototyping, though, and breadboard friendly devices are [...]
Tags: fpga breadboard fpgas video-game-consoles fpga-boards old-video-game Hardware
4:00
Level converters to make all your hardware (5.5V and under) play with each other
» ‎ Hack a Day

I finally set aside some time for one of my own projects. I have been playing around with ARM microcontrollers a lot lately and wanted to try out my GLCD display that uses the KS0108 protocol. It’s 5V but I had heard that some of these displays will work with 3.3V TTL. But the datasheet [...]
Tags: level Hardware time v-ttl level-converters datasheet ARM
December 10, 2012
9:36
Transmit FM using Raspberry Pi and no additional hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

Now here’s a project that actually hacks the Rapsberry Pi rather than just using it as an embedded computer. [Londons Explorer] figured out how to turn the RPi into an FM transmitter. For now it’s done entirely in the user space, but we’re sure it could be improved if someone wanted to drill down further [...]
Tags: raspberry transmit Hardware fm-transmitter rpi radio hacks
December 08, 2012
5:28
Building a spectrum analyzer with parallel processing
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s the end of the semester for [Bruce Land]‘s microcontroller design class at Cornell, and the projects coming off the workbench this semester look as awesome as any before. For their final project, [Alexander Wang] and [Bill Jo] designed an audio frequency spectrum analyzer using two microcontrollers in a parallel setup. This spectrum analyzer takes an [...]
Tags: semester analyzer spectrum bill-jo bruce-land alexander-wang frequency-spectrum-analyzer microcontroller-design Hardware
December 07, 2012
13:01
$250,000 hard drive teardown
» ‎ Hack a Day

Have you ever seen hard drive platters this big before? Of course you haven’t, the cost of this unit is way beyond your pay grade. But now that it’s decades old we get a chance to post around inside this beast. [Dave Jones] — who we haven’t seen around these parts in far too long [...]
Tags: teardown haven drive dave-jones platters beast decades Hardware
December 05, 2012
13:01
The story behind developing the Sifteo from an engineer’s perspective
» ‎ Hack a Day

The video game industry must be one of the most secretive sectors when it comes to developing the electronic hardware used in the gaming consoles. The big guys don’t want to give anything away — to the competition or to the hackers who will try to get around their security measures. But it seems Sifteo [...]
Tags: sifteo engineer story video-game-industry electronic-hardware security-measures Hardware
November 26, 2012
5:00
Abstracting transistors into high-level design
» ‎ Hack a Day

Although it’s not the best way of understanding computers, most people tend to imagine electronic devices as black boxes filled with magic and blue smoke. Even microcontrollers, the most fundamental means of computation, are treated like little black plastic centipedes with metal legs. In a series of blog posts, [Andrew Gibiansky] is tearing down the walls [...]
Tags: design way abstracting andrewgibiansky metal-legs black-boxes tearing-down-the-walls Hardware
November 21, 2012
9:04
Automated resistor sorter puts them into small plastic tubes
» ‎ Hack a Day

This one might be an oldie, but it’s certainly a goodie. Way back in 2005, [David] and [Charles] needed a project for one of their engineering courses. With so many loose resistors scattered over the lab, they decided to build an automated resistor sorter (PDF warning) to separate these resistors and put resistors of the same value [...]
Tags: automated resistor sorter charles david plastic-tubes resistors engineering-courses Hardware
November 20, 2012
7:29
Outlet charging station retrofitted with the guts of a WiFi router
» ‎ Hack a Day

While wandering around the aisles of his local electronics store this Westinghouse USB charging station caught [James'] eye. He sized it up and realized it would make the perfect enclosure for a small WiFi router. And so began his project to turn a TP-Link TL-WR703N into a DIY Pwn Plug. The basic idea is to include [...]
Tags: router station wifi james charging-station tp-link retrofitted Hardware
5:01
More continuous wave radar fun
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Gregory Charvat] continues to have a great time testing out radar systems. He and a friend have pointed the radar out the garage door and are using it to see who can reach a high running velocity. The last time we looked in on [Greg's] work he had acquired an old police radar unit and [...]
Tags: radar wave time gregory-charvat greg continuous-wave-radar radar-unit police-radar Hardware
November 19, 2012
14:01
Raspberry Pi reaches critical mass as XBMC hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the [...]
Tags: raspberry xbmc Hardware hardware-developments box-software critical-mass home entertainment hacks
November 18, 2012
9:06
[Jeri] uses light bulbs in an oscillator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Way back when [Ms Ellsworth] was a kid, she kept seeing the same circuit over and over again in her various op-amp books. It was a Wien bridge oscillator, a small circuit that outputs a sine wave with the help of a light bulb. Now that [Jeri] is much wiser, she decided to play around [...]
Tags: oscillator circuit jeri ms-ellsworth wien wien-bridge-oscillator light-bulbs sine-wave Hardware

November 13, 2012
0:00
Vuln: Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Tags: intel cpu Hardware privilege-escalation-vulnerability intel-cpu local-privilege-escalation

November 05, 2012
13:01
Building your own Fusion Drive
» ‎ Hack a Day

We missed the original announcement, but Apple unveiled more than just the iPad Mini at their last event. They’ve got a new storage system called Fusion Drive which is supposed to combine the access speeds of solid state with the storage density of platter drives. When you look just under the surface what you’re really [...]
Tags: storage drive fusion new-storage-system fusion-drive storage-density Hardware
5:00
[Jeri] shows off a delta sigma ADC
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jeri] has had a bear of a time moving up to Valve Software, but electron microscope is safely in her garage (!) and her electronics lab is slowly taking shape. Since she can’t bring out the real-life gravity gun she’s working on, she decided to show off a one-bit ADC that uses just a flip-flop to [...]
Tags: adc delta jeri electron-microscope delta-sigma electronics-lab Hardware
November 01, 2012
4:00
Discrete FPGA will probably win the 7400 logic competition
» ‎ Hack a Day

For this year’s 7400 logic competition, [Nick] decided to build an FPGA out of logic chips. Perhaps a short explanation is in order to fully appreciate [Nick]‘s work. The basic component of an FPGA is a slice, or cell, that performs boolean operations on its input and sends the result on its output. The core of these slices [...]
Tags: competition fpga logic nick logic-chips boolean-operations Hardware
October 29, 2012
7:14
DIY pick and place builds boards, is awesome
» ‎ Hack a Day

In what can probably be attributed to the pains of placing a lot of SMD components, [gravelrash] built his own home-made pick and place machine. Instead of being frustrated with tweezers, stereo microscopes, and having an inordinate amount of concentration, [gravelrash] built a pick and place machine from a Chinese CNC router. The build doesn’t [...]
Tags: gravelrash machine pick stereo-microscopes cnc-router smd-components Hardware
5:19
Bora board teaches binary hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re just starting out in your quest to build really cool electronic devices, you’ll find a ton of options ready for the beginner. The Arduino makes toggling pins dead simple, and the Raspi brings the wonders of blinking a LED from the command line down from the gods and into the hands of the [...]
Tags: quest board Hardware bora arduino electronic-devices pins
October 27, 2012
7:00
OpenPLC, for industrial automation to Halloween displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Stepping out onto just about any factory floor you’ll find complex automatons building anything and everything imaginable. These machines need to be controlled somehow and before the age of computers these manufacturing robots were controlled with relays wired together to produce a multitude of actions. Relays, no matter how reliable and bulletproof the are, can’t be programmed without [...]
Tags: openplc automation halloween industrial-automation multitude robots Hardware
7:00
OpenPLC, for industrial automation to Halloween displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Stepping out onto just about any factory floor you’ll find complex automatons building anything and everything imaginable. These machines need to be controlled somehow and before the age of computers these manufacturing robots were controlled with relays wired together to produce a multitude of actions. Relays, no matter how reliable and bulletproof the are, can’t be programmed without [...]
Tags: openplc automation halloween industrial-automation multitude robots Hardware
October 25, 2012
11:01
Fixing a first generation GuruPlug’s cooling problems
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Doragasu] had been using a hacked Xbox as his file server but upgraded to a single board Linux device when the GuruPlug was released. Unfortunately the first run of these devices had an overheating issue, which resulted in reboots even at moderate CPU load. The design was changed from a passively cooled heat sink to [...]
Tags: fixing generation guruplug heat-sink cpu-load single-board Hardware

October 23, 2012
9:34
[Video] Its my box: how the hardware and software traps in the Xbox were beaten and Linux installed
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Andy Green Michael Steil Milosch Meriac
Tags: games
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 19th (19C3) 2002
Abstract: Microsoft went to some lengths to ensure that only approved code could be run on their 'Microsoft-only' PC, the Xbox. The talk gives an overview of the Xbox hardware components, and a detailed background into the Xbox 'security' architecture of the Xbox, and how the chain of trust was defeated using custom hardware. Also covered in detail is Microsoft's recent changes to the boot crypto using Palladium-style hash methods, and how this was broken by our team. We will also talk briefly about TCPA/Palladium, the implications and its possible future as well as the process of porting Linux.
Tags: Hardware xbox linux andy-green michael-steil chaos-communication-congress milosch security-architecture
9:28
[Audio] Its my box: how the hardware and software traps in the Xbox were beaten and Linux installed
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Andy Green Michael Steil Milosch Meriac
Tags: games
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 19th (19C3) 2002
Abstract: Microsoft went to some lengths to ensure that only approved code could be run on their 'Microsoft-only' PC, the Xbox. The talk gives an overview of the Xbox hardware components, and a detailed background into the Xbox 'security' architecture of the Xbox, and how the chain of trust was defeated using custom hardware. Also covered in detail is Microsoft's recent changes to the boot crypto using Palladium-style hash methods, and how this was broken by our team. We will also talk briefly about TCPA/Palladium, the implications and its possible future as well as the process of porting Linux.
Tags: Hardware xbox linux andy-green michael-steil chaos-communication-congress milosch security-architecture

7:01
Graphing the efficiencies of LED light strips
» ‎ Hack a Day

After adding a few LED light strips above his desk, [Bogdan] was impressed with the results. They’re bright, look awesome, and exude a hacker aesthetic. Wanting to expand his LED strip installation, [Bogdan] decided to see if these inexpensive LED strips were actually less expensive in the long run than regular incandescent bulbs. The results [...]
Tags: led desk graphing bogdan incandescent-bulbs efficiencies Hardware
5:01
Exploring the Mandelbrot set in real time
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Mandelbrot set – the fractal ‘snowman turned on its side’ seen above – has graced the covers of magazines, journals, and has even been exhibited in art galleries. An impressive feat for what is nothing more than a mathematical function, and has become something of an obsession for [Chiaki Nakajima]. Even on modern computers, [...]
Tags: mandelbrot exploring time impressive-feat mathematical-function Hardware
October 16, 2012
9:01
Storing user data on your FPGA
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve seen FPGAs used to recreate everything from classic arcade games to ancient computers, but with each of these builds a common problem arises. Once you’ve got the hardware emulated on an FPGA, you’ve also got to get the ROMs into the project as well. In a very interesting hack, [Mike] figured out that the [...]
Tags: fpga user storing mike classic-arcade-games ancient-computers Hardware
7:01
Weird Processing Unit only has 4 instructions
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Tomáš], a.k.a. [Frooxius] is playing around with computational theory and processor architectures – a strange hobby in itself, we know – and has created the strangest CPU we’ve ever seen described. The Weird Processing Unit, or WPU, isn’t designed like the Intel or ARM CPU in your laptop or phone. No, the WPU is a [...]
Tags: unit processing weird strange-hobby computational-theory wpu Hardware

0:00
Vuln: Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Tags: intel cpu Hardware privilege-escalation-vulnerability intel-cpu local-privilege-escalation

October 12, 2012
6:45
[Slides] WORKSHOP - Hardware Reverse Engineering: Access, Analyze, and Defeat
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Joe Grand
Tags: hardware hacking
Event: Black Hat DC 2011
Abstract: Electronics are embedded into nearly everything we use. Hardware products are being relied on for security-related applications and are inherently trusted, though many are completely susceptible to compromise. In this workshop, Joe will discuss the hardware hacking and reverse engineering processes, and then provide an open lab environment for you to probe, analyze, and hack. Joe will bring a variety of products to tinker with, though attendees are heavily encouraged to bring their own pieces of hardware to explore. Basic tools and electronics test/measurement equipment will be provided. You'll leave the workshop with new skills, ideas for further attacks, and maybe even some defeated hardware.
Tags: Hardware workshop engineering joe-grand joe test-measurement-equipment hardware-hacking

October 10, 2012
7:00
Free Software Foundation certifies hardware that Respects Your Freedom
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Free Sofware Foundation, the very same organization responsible for the GNU General Public License and open source advocacy on the part of the Free Software stalwart [Richard Stallman], has certified its first piece of hardware as Respecting Your Freedom. This new certification goes far beyond the goals of Open Source Hardware. In addition to providing documentation, schematics, and [...]
Tags: free Hardware Software richard-stallman open-source-advocacy free-software-foundation news
6:00
Playing around with MRAM
» ‎ Hack a Day

For the longest time, hardware tinkerers have only been able to play around with two types of memory. RAM, including Static RAM and Dynamic RAM, can be exceedingly fast but is volatile and loses its data when power is removed. Non-volatile memory such as EPROMS, EEPROMS, and Flash memory retains its state after power is removed, but [...]
Tags: memory power ram non-volatile-memory types-of-memory time-hardware Hardware
October 09, 2012
10:01
Exploiting DFU mode to snag a copy of firmware upgrades
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Travis Goodspeed] continues his work at educating the masses on how to reverse engineer closed hardware devices. This time around he’s showing us how to exploit the Device Firmware Updates protocol in order to get your hands on firmware images. It’s a relatively easy technique that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to dump the firmware image [...]
Tags: dfu exploiting firmware travis-goodspeed firmware-image man-in-the-middle-attack firmware-upgrades Hardware
October 07, 2012
12:00
Giving the MSP430 a GUI
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sometimes you need to toggle or read a few pins on a microcontroller for a project so simple (or so temporary) that coding some firmware is a rather large investment of time. [Jaspreet] had the same problem – wanting to read values and toggle pins without writing any code – so he came up with [...]
Tags: msp toggle gui toggle-pins msp430 microcontroller Hardware
October 04, 2012
6:01
Seeed Studio shows off their wares
» ‎ Hack a Day

Everyone’s favorite Open Hardware store – Seeed Studio - was at Maker Faire this last weekend. They showed off a bunch of cool toys, oscilloscopes, Arduino shields and other hardware goodness, but one of the more interesting products was from their B Squares line. As [Colin] from Seeed showed us, each B Square is a small [...]
Tags: Hardware seeed studio colin b-squares b-square squares-line open-hardware interesting-products

October 03, 2012
21:42
[Video] GameCube Hacking
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Felix Domke Michael Steil Rob Reilink
Tags: games
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 21th (21C3) 2004
Abstract: The GameCube - what it is made of and how it can be hacked. We'll describe different approachs of getting own code onto the GameCube and things that you can do with a GameCube under your control. Of course it runs Linux. A GameCube has very interesting hardware (PowerPC, G3-style, processor and fast 3d acceleration), but unfortunatetly it's "closed" because it's a game console and not a computer. But - of course - this shouldn't prevent anyone running Linux on it, as it has very nice hardware which is worth to exploit with something useful and more interesting than games. We will describe the GameCube's hardware in detail (including the stuff you won't read elsewhere), and show ways how to get your own code onto the cube. We will explain different approaches of software hacks (PSO, Action Replay Loader) and exploits as well a hardware modification (exchanging the IPL). We show how own code can be developed for the GameCube, and finally present Linux running on the Gamecube.
Tags: gamecube code Hardware rob-reilink felix-domke powerpc michael-steil chaos-communication-congress 3d-acceleration software-hacks
21:42
[Slides] GameCube Hacking
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Felix Domke Michael Steil Rob Reilink
Tags: games
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 21th (21C3) 2004
Abstract: The GameCube - what it is made of and how it can be hacked. We'll describe different approachs of getting own code onto the GameCube and things that you can do with a GameCube under your control. Of course it runs Linux. A GameCube has very interesting hardware (PowerPC, G3-style, processor and fast 3d acceleration), but unfortunatetly it's "closed" because it's a game console and not a computer. But - of course - this shouldn't prevent anyone running Linux on it, as it has very nice hardware which is worth to exploit with something useful and more interesting than games. We will describe the GameCube's hardware in detail (including the stuff you won't read elsewhere), and show ways how to get your own code onto the cube. We will explain different approaches of software hacks (PSO, Action Replay Loader) and exploits as well a hardware modification (exchanging the IPL). We show how own code can be developed for the GameCube, and finally present Linux running on the Gamecube.
Tags: gamecube code Hardware rob-reilink felix-domke powerpc michael-steil chaos-communication-congress 3d-acceleration software-hacks

13:01
Breadboarding with a 144-core processor
» ‎ Hack a Day

At the center of that green PCB is a tiny little processor with way too many cores. It’s the GA144 which was taken for a test-drive on a breadboard by [Andrew Back]. We saw a multi-core Kickstarter project last month. This will cost a lot less and get you more than twice the number of [...]
Tags: breadboarding processor core andrew breadboard core-processor pcb Hardware

9:41
[Audio] GameCube Hacking
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Felix Domke Michael Steil Rob Reilink
Tags: games
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 21th (21C3) 2004
Abstract: The GameCube - what it is made of and how it can be hacked. We'll describe different approachs of getting own code onto the GameCube and things that you can do with a GameCube under your control. Of course it runs Linux. A GameCube has very interesting hardware (PowerPC, G3-style, processor and fast 3d acceleration), but unfortunatetly it's "closed" because it's a game console and not a computer. But - of course - this shouldn't prevent anyone running Linux on it, as it has very nice hardware which is worth to exploit with something useful and more interesting than games. We will describe the GameCube's hardware in detail (including the stuff you won't read elsewhere), and show ways how to get your own code onto the cube. We will explain different approaches of software hacks (PSO, Action Replay Loader) and exploits as well a hardware modification (exchanging the IPL). We show how own code can be developed for the GameCube, and finally present Linux running on the Gamecube.
Tags: gamecube code Hardware rob-reilink felix-domke powerpc michael-steil chaos-communication-congress 3d-acceleration software-hacks

7:00
Checking in with [Ian] from Dangerous Prototypes
» ‎ Hack a Day

Former Hackaday writer and electronic wizard [Ian] from Dangerous Prototypes made his way to the Maker Faire last weekend. He had a ton of cool stuff to show off, and luckily we were able to grab a few videos. First up is a chainable Nixie module. [Ian], like all gurus of his caliber, had a [...]
Tags: former checking prototypes ian gurus caliber Hardware
October 01, 2012
12:01
Fantastic programming makes this Arduino gaming device something special
» ‎ Hack a Day

The hardware that went into this Arduino gaming console is just fine. But the coding that produced this game called Twisted SNAKE is beyond compare. [Rodot] has programmed several games for the hardware, which uses an Arduino, 160×168 TFT screen, a 3 axis accelerometer, and two input buttons. If you’re interested, there is a forum [...]
Tags: arduino gaming Hardware axis-accelerometer input-buttons gaming-device hacks
September 23, 2012
7:53
Volumetric display projects 200 Million voxels per second
» ‎ Hack a Day

Over the last four years, [Will] and [Gav] have spent their time creating a huge, high-resolution 3D display. The’re just about done with their build, so they decided to offer it up to the Internet in the hopes of people creating new 3D content for their display. They call their project the HoloDome, and it’s [...]
Tags: million display volumetric gav voxels 3d-content high-resolution Hardware
September 20, 2012
7:01
Homebrew FPGAs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Homebrew CPUs made out of logic chips are nothing new, but a homebrew FPGA is another matter entirely. [Joshua] sent in a project he whipped up where he made a single logic cell FPGA. Despite how complicated and intimidating they are in practice, FPGAs are really very simple. They’re made of thousands of logic blocks [...]
Tags: logic homebrew fpgas joshua logic-chips logic-cell logic-blocks Hardware
4:00
Reading bare NAND flash chips with a microcontroller
» ‎ Hack a Day

NAND flash, the same memory chips found in everything from USB thumb drives to very expensive solid state disk drives, are increasingly common. As they (partially) serve as the storage for cellphones, Wiis, routers and just about every piece of consumer electronic devices, you’re probably surrounded by dozens of NAND chips at any one time. [...]
Tags: memory microcontroller nand nand-flash-chips solid-state-disk solid-state-disk-drives Hardware
4:00
Reading bare NAND flash chips with a microcontroller
» ‎ Hack a Day

NAND flash, the same memory chips found in everything from USB thumb drives to very expensive solid state disk drives, are increasingly common. As they (partially) serve as the storage for cellphones, Wiis, routers and just about every piece of consumer electronic devices, you’re probably surrounded by dozens of NAND chips at any one time. [...]
Tags: memory microcontroller nand nand-flash-chips solid-state-disk solid-state-disk-drives Hardware
September 19, 2012
14:01
Home automation hack controls lights based on head count
» ‎ Hack a Day

This home automation hardware turns on and off the lights based on room occupancy. The hack is an extension of an earlier version that was only a proof of concept. [RPisces] took the idea and made it into reality by mounting the sensor hardware in a doorway. He prototyped the device using the MSP430 launchpad. [...]
Tags: automation Hardware home home-automation-hardware proof-of-concept msp430 hacks
September 17, 2012
13:01
Vending machine prototyping
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Vending Mexico] plans to design, build, and sell their of vending machines. You’ve got to start somewhere so they’ve built this prototype. It offers a range of vending features but was built with parts we’re used to seeing in hobby projects. The one challenge they didn’t take on is the ability to identify coins and [...]
Tags: prototype machine vending mexico hobby-projects vending-machine vending-machines Hardware
September 14, 2012
13:01
Sculpting with LCD pixels
» ‎ Hack a Day

Each one of the small squares in this sculpture is actually an LCD cell, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. What you see here is just a small portion of the sculpture that spans multiple floors of the atrium at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s made up of multiple [...]
Tags: north-carolina-museum-of-natural-sciences museum-of-natural-sciences lcd-cell Hardware
11:01
A truly professional Raspi analog input
» ‎ Hack a Day

Much to the chagrin of hardware tinkerers, the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have analog inputs on its GPIO pins. Sure, you can blink a LED with just a few console commands, but reading sensors with a bone-stock Raspi requires a little additional hardware. [Brian Dorey] just released a board that allows for 8 analog inputs on [...]
Tags: analog raspi Hardware brian-dorey bone-stock analog-inputs gpio raspberry
7:00
Testing 30 brands of batteries
» ‎ Hack a Day

Batteries come packaged in bright blister packs emblazoned with vague guarantees such as “45% more pictures” and “five times longer lasting.” During his internship at BitBox this summer, [Thomas] decided to put those statements to the test. He tested thirty brands of batteries on a homebrew rig to find the batteries with the most power and [...]
Tags: testing blister batteries thomas homebrew-rig internship Hardware
September 12, 2012
7:00
Generating random numbers from white noise
» ‎ Hack a Day

Even though rand() may be a good enough random number generator for making a video game, the patterns of random bits it spits out may not be sufficient for applications requiring truly random data. [Giorgio] built his own random number generator, and after many statistical tests it ended up being random enough for a few very [...]
Tags: number generator generating random-number-generator random-data random-bits Hardware
September 11, 2012
4:00
Bed of nails and accuracy in PCB manufacturing
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few days ago, we mentioned the new ARM-powered Teensy 3.0 project on Kickstarter. The creator, [Paul Stoffregen], decided to share the trials of building a test fixture along with a shocking comparison of the accuracy of different PCB manufacturers in an update to his Kickstarter. Because [Paul]‘s Teensy 3.0 has more IO pins than should [...]
Tags: pcb accuracy kickstarter paul-stoffregen paul bed-of-nails pcb-manufacturers Hardware
September 10, 2012
5:00
Put a solder mask on those homebrew PCBs
» ‎ Hack a Day

While making your own PCBs at home is one of the best marks of a competent builder, if you want to give your project a more professional vibe, you’re going to need to do better than bare copper traces on a piece of fiberglass. To help out his fellow makers, [Chris] sent in his Instructable [...]
Tags: homebrew mask solder chris copper-traces instructable solder-mask Hardware
September 07, 2012
14:01
Rotary and cordless phones mashup
» ‎ Hack a Day

This pile of hardware marries telecommunications hardware from distinctly different generations. [Andrew D. Farquharson] wanted the retro look and operation of a rotary phone, with the convenience of a modern cordless. He combined the two technologies to achieve his goal. The first problem was to find a way to translate the rotary inputs to something [...]
Tags: mashup Hardware rotary andrew-d.-farquharson rotary-phone farquharson retro-look arduino hacks
September 05, 2012
9:01
Mess of wires is actually a one instruction computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re going to build your own computer, it probably wouldn’t do you well to exactly emulate the computer you’re looking at right now. The modern x86 and x64 chips that power your desktop or laptop contain hundreds of individual instructions, and the supposed RISC CPUs found in ARM-powered devices contain nearly as many. No, [...]
Tags: instruction mess computer risc-cpus instruction-computer own-computer Hardware
September 04, 2012
10:01
Open source brushless motor controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s been a long time coming, but efforts to create Open Source brushless motor controller are finally paying off. The Open-BLDC project aims to create an open source motor controller for the brushless motors usually found in remote control airplanes, helicopters, and quadcopters. Normally, these motor controllers – usually called electronic speed controllers – can’t supply [...]
Tags: controller motor source electronic-speed-controllers remote-control-airplanes bldc Hardware
September 03, 2012
11:01
Displaying images on the surface of bubbles
» ‎ Hack a Day

The image you see above isn’t a simple photograph of our blue marble from thousands of miles above. No, that image is much cooler than a satellite because it’s a projection of the Earth onto a soap film screen. Yes, we can now display images on the surface of bubbles. Instead of a the soap [...]
Tags: soap image surface soap-film blue-marble film-screen Hardware

September 02, 2012
21:46
[Video] Camp Network Review
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Elisa Jasinska Maxim Salomon Niels Bakker
Tags: network
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2007
Abstract: An introduction into the structure and design of the camp network - featuring a description of hardware setup and focusing on the Backbone Network infrastructure and Wireless LAN. Building a high-demand outdoor network in less than one week is a job that requires sufficient planning in advance. It starts with organizing hardware that is capable to serve the usage profile of about 2342 power-users and ends in asking providers to contribute in upstream connectivity. This talk will give you an outline of what the NOC people do - beginning month before Camp doors open. The Camp network concept is based on the experiences of the last Congresses. So this talk will show you why network is the way it is. Focus of this talk is network from access layer to the backbone and our Wireless LAN. It intends to give network administrators a brief overview of our approach to meet all requirements.
Tags: talk network Hardware lan elisa-jasinska maxim-salomon-niels-bakker camp-network chaos-communication-camp backbone-network video-camp
21:46
[Slides] Camp Network Review
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Elisa Jasinska Maxim Salomon Niels Bakker
Tags: network
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2007
Abstract: An introduction into the structure and design of the camp network - featuring a description of hardware setup and focusing on the Backbone Network infrastructure and Wireless LAN. Building a high-demand outdoor network in less than one week is a job that requires sufficient planning in advance. It starts with organizing hardware that is capable to serve the usage profile of about 2342 power-users and ends in asking providers to contribute in upstream connectivity. This talk will give you an outline of what the NOC people do - beginning month before Camp doors open. The Camp network concept is based on the experiences of the last Congresses. So this talk will show you why network is the way it is. Focus of this talk is network from access layer to the backbone and our Wireless LAN. It intends to give network administrators a brief overview of our approach to meet all requirements.
Tags: talk network Hardware lan elisa-jasinska maxim-salomon-niels-bakker camp-network chaos-communication-camp backbone-network usage-profile
September 01, 2012
21:43
[Video] Hardware Hacking for Software Geeks
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: David Gustin
Tags: hardware hacking
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2007
Abstract: How to build your own lab in your basement for engineering and reverse-engineering on a budget. Demystifying modern System On a Chip (SOC) Micro-Controllers for early hardware prototyping and software development. Practical reverse engineering; using your verification tools to reverse engineer and modify systems without source code. A presentation on getting started with embedded engineering. There is a lot to be said about the work area required for embedded engineering, what tools you will need and how to use them to accomplish useful tasks. An overview of hardware and software necessary to develop or reverse engineer embedded devices. As you will learn in this talk the tools are the same for both tasks. When you begin an embedded project of your own, what chips do you want to use? How do you go about prototyping your hardware? What methods should be considered before designing the system. Is your task better suited to multiple microcontrollers? Once you start writing code, how do you test it? Will your method of loading a binary into your final hardware differ? Do you need to write a bootloader? All these questions need to have answers to tackle an embedded project, we will be showing a variety of methods to solve these common questions. When reverse engineering a device, you need to figure out how it was put together. You need to get into the designer's head and figure out what methods were used to create the device. As you begin to answer these questions you can slowly unravel the device's secrets. We will show some techniques for reverse engineering embedded electronics and firmware and present a plethora of resources to start you off on your own journeys into this field.
Tags: engineering Hardware Software chip david-gustin-tags chaos-communication-camp david-gustin hardware-prototyping

August 27, 2012
0:00
Vuln: Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Tags: intel cpu Hardware privilege-escalation-vulnerability intel-cpu local-privilege-escalation

August 24, 2012
14:01
Generating truly random sequences
» ‎ Hack a Day

Your brain can’t generate random numbers, and computers can’t either. Most of the ‘random’ numbers we come across in our lives are actually pseudorandom numbers; random enough for their purpose, but ordered enough to throw statistical analyses for a loop. [Giorgio] thought generating random sequences would make for an excellent project, so he whipped up [...]
Tags: pseudorandom brain generating random-sequences pseudorandom-numbers statistical-analyses Hardware

August 22, 2012
21:53
[Video] Void the warranty!
» ‎ SecDocs

Tags: hardware hacking
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006
Abstract: We're surrounded by blackboxes containing digital technology nowadays. There are complex devices like cell phones as well as more simple ones that don't look very digital at all. This lecture shall motivate the listener to take more electronic things apart, examine the mode of operation and modify it. The intention of this lecture is showing the listener that it's possible to analyse and mess around with a wide range of devices at home and how to do this. Thus low-cost and homebrewn hardware tools are used as far as possible. Enabling the listener to design such hardware is also an ambition of this talk. The JTAG-Finder can be given as an example here. The lecture will also point out some of the common problems during the research, and ideas on how to deal with them (e.g. acquiring data in realtime and getting it into a PC for the analysis). Various example projects of different complexities along with the procedure of analysis and modification will be explained throughout the lecture. Recovering a lost PIN-number from a DECT-station or circumventing a printer's anti-refill technology are less complex examples while connecting a (non-DMA) PCMCIA (or CompactFlash) card to a common microcontroller is a more complex one.
Tags: listener Hardware lecture chaos-communication-congress example-projects hardware-hacking
August 21, 2012
21:32
[Slides] Void the warranty!
» ‎ SecDocs

Tags: hardware hacking
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006
Abstract: We're surrounded by blackboxes containing digital technology nowadays. There are complex devices like cell phones as well as more simple ones that don't look very digital at all. This lecture shall motivate the listener to take more electronic things apart, examine the mode of operation and modify it. The intention of this lecture is showing the listener that it's possible to analyse and mess around with a wide range of devices at home and how to do this. Thus low-cost and homebrewn hardware tools are used as far as possible. Enabling the listener to design such hardware is also an ambition of this talk. The JTAG-Finder can be given as an example here. The lecture will also point out some of the common problems during the research, and ideas on how to deal with them (e.g. acquiring data in realtime and getting it into a PC for the analysis). Various example projects of different complexities along with the procedure of analysis and modification will be explained throughout the lecture. Recovering a lost PIN-number from a DECT-station or circumventing a printer's anti-refill technology are less complex examples while connecting a (non-DMA) PCMCIA (or CompactFlash) card to a common microcontroller is a more complex one.
Tags: listener Hardware lecture chaos-communication-congress example-projects hardware-hacking
21:32
[Audio] Void the warranty!
» ‎ SecDocs

Tags: hardware hacking
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006
Abstract: We're surrounded by blackboxes containing digital technology nowadays. There are complex devices like cell phones as well as more simple ones that don't look very digital at all. This lecture shall motivate the listener to take more electronic things apart, examine the mode of operation and modify it. The intention of this lecture is showing the listener that it's possible to analyse and mess around with a wide range of devices at home and how to do this. Thus low-cost and homebrewn hardware tools are used as far as possible. Enabling the listener to design such hardware is also an ambition of this talk. The JTAG-Finder can be given as an example here. The lecture will also point out some of the common problems during the research, and ideas on how to deal with them (e.g. acquiring data in realtime and getting it into a PC for the analysis). Various example projects of different complexities along with the procedure of analysis and modification will be explained throughout the lecture. Recovering a lost PIN-number from a DECT-station or circumventing a printer's anti-refill technology are less complex examples while connecting a (non-DMA) PCMCIA (or CompactFlash) card to a common microcontroller is a more complex one.
Tags: listener Hardware lecture chaos-communication-congress example-projects hardware-hacking

August 20, 2012
14:30
Making a gigantic 18 pole 16 throw switch
» ‎ Hack a Day

When you’re building something that hasn’t been done before, sometimes the parts you need just don’t exist. [Bacteria] over on the Made by Bacteria forum is building a huge all-in-one video game machine, combining hardware from 16 different consoles released through the years. This build requires a way to switch the video output between consoles, [...]
Tags: video pole bacteria video-game-machine video-output Hardware
5:30
Toorcamp: Nibble Node.js Widget
» ‎ Hack a Day

The hardware hacking village at Toorcamp provided space and tools to work on hardware. It was interesting to see what hardware hacks people had brought to work on. One example is [Owen]‘s Nibble Node.js Widget. The widget combines the popular node.js platform and custom hardware to create a node for the “internet of things.” The hardware [...]
Tags: node widget Hardware owen hardware-hacks custom-hardware nibble cons
August 17, 2012
10:30
Prototyping with very, very small ICs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Gone are the days when all the cool chips are able to be thrown into a breadboard very easily. [starlino] was working with a circuit that uses an accelerometer, but unfortunately these chips come in hard to solder LGA-16 packages. [starlino] figured out a way to prototype with these packages that doesn’t require a custom breakout board [...]
Tags: starlino ics prototyping breadboard accelerometer prototype Hardware
August 15, 2012
11:01
Buying cheaper electronics and not saving money
» ‎ Hack a Day

As an engineer at Spectrum Design in Minneapolis, [Carl] works with clients to get their product out to the masses. When designing a new USB-powered device, one client thought it would be a great idea to include a USB car charger with the device. The client promptly ordered a few thousand car chargers from China and everything [...]
Tags: device client car carl china minneapolis spectrum-design car-chargers car-charger Hardware
August 13, 2012
14:03
Southwest Tour: Scrap Tattoo Gun
» ‎ Hack a Day

I had an idea for keeping things interesting on this long road trip through the southwest. I was going to gather a few bits from each hackerspace and build something using minimal tools while we were driving down the road. I settled on the idea of a really simple “jailhouse” tattoo gun. I knew I [...]
Tags: tattoo road idea gun southwest-tour minimal-tools jailhouse Hardware

August 10, 2012
21:39
[Paper] GECKO3, an open hardware FPGA application board
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Christoph Weber
Tags: FPGA
Event: Chaos Communication Camp 2007
Abstract: Hardware developers ever envyed the software developers in the way that they can build and try something extremly fast an with no cost, minutes compared to days or weeks. Today the field of programable logic, mostly the FPGA, has reached a point where digital hardware design is as easy as writing software and with the possibility to make many iterations without rebuilding your device. I show you some examples and what is behind programable logic. In the rest of the presentation I present you an new compact board for FPGA based system development, the GECKO3. Starting with the description of programable logic I will go on to the ways how you can programm them, what modern tools can do for you and what you have to think about when you would like to start building your own CPUs, Cryptocrackers or other things that are better fittet in hardware than in software. After I gave you a basic knowledge of the field, I will talk about an new FPGA based application board, called GECKO3. The complete board, schematics, pcb files, source codes,... is opensource, so you can use it as it is or take it as a help to build your own system from scratch. It is an application board, these means that it is small and cheap enought to include it in your product, not like a typical big overloaded development board. These board was developed at the Berne School of Applied Science in Biel Switzerland, where I work currently. The GECKO3 is built around a large FPGA (in the range from 1 Mio. to 4 Mio Gates) and includes the necessary things to achive a fast and riskless start of YOUR project. Around the FPGA there is the powersupply, 32 Mbyte of NOR Flash, 2x64 Mbyte DDR SDRAM, 100 Mbit/s Ethernet and a USB 2.0 Controler. Most important for your own application is that you get over 160 digital I/O pins to connect your application specific hardware. The Board is completly configurable through the USB connection, you do not need a special cable. we wrote software to make it easy to exchange any data between your PC and the FPGA without any knowledge of USB.
Tags: fpga board Hardware christoph-weber switzerland chaos-communication-camp digital-hardware-design berne-school

August 08, 2012
14:04
Sparkfun recognized for their growth
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Denver Business Journal has recognized Sparkfun Electronics as the 2nd fastest growing company in the Denver area (in the $17.5-$46million class). This is fantastic news, not only for Sparkfun, but for Open Source Hardware. Sparkfun is the worlds largest manufacturer of open source hardware, located right in the middle of the country, Boulder Colorado. [...]
Tags: sparkfun Hardware source boulder denver denver-business-journal open-source-hardware fantastic-news news
August 01, 2012
10:01
OLinuXino booting Android
» ‎ Hack a Day

We can’t say the name rolls off the tongue, but it is beginning to look like the OlinuXino is going to happen. Here you can see the prototype hardware booting Android. If this is the first time you’re seeing the hardware you can think of it in the same category as the Raspberry Pi. It’s a butt-kicking [...]
Tags: olinuxino Hardware android prototype-hardware raspberry butt hacks
July 30, 2012
12:01
Hackathon results in the Facebook book
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jeremy Blum] and [Jason Wright] pose with their project at the end of a 24 hour hackathon. The Facebook headquarters in New York City held the event as part of their Summer of Hack program. As an homage to the hosts, the hacking duo decided to create a physical book and populate it with the [...]
Tags: facebook book hackathon summer jeremy-blum jason-wright new-york-city hack-program blum Hardware
11:05
Mechanical relay logic that was snubbed for a microcontroller
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Alex] was tasked with a control design problem for a set of motors. The application called for the back of a truck to open up, some 3D scanning equipment to rise from its enclosure, and finally the equipment needed to rotate into place. All of this needed to happen with one flip of a switch, [...]
Tags: equipment relay mechanical alex scanning-equipment microcontroller logic Hardware
July 28, 2012
10:01
Geigers on a plane
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Thomas] took a Geiger counter he built on a plane. Why? Because he can, much to the chagrin of airport security. [Thomas]‘ Geiger counter is built around an old Russian SBT-10A detector containing ten separate Geiger tubes. This tube was connected to a circuit containing a LiPo battery, a few high-voltage components, and an audio jack connected [...]
Tags: geiger plane geigers thomas geiger-tubes geiger-counter voltage-components Hardware
July 25, 2012
10:01
Emulating the DCPU on an AVR
» ‎ Hack a Day

[skywodd] just finished his own DCPU emulator (French, translation) based on [notch]‘s upcoming game, 0x10c. The neat thing about [skywodd]‘s build is his emulator uses the lowly ATMega328, the same microcontroller found in (some) Arduinos. The DCPU specification goes over the operations required of any DCPU emulator. There’s a lot of crazy stuff here – a division instruction [...]
Tags: dcpu emulator skywodd french-translation crazy-stuff microcontroller Hardware
July 21, 2012
11:00
Servos, servos, and more servos
» ‎ Hack a Day

For one reason or another, a lot of Hackaday readers are doing stuff with servos as of late. Here’s a few servo hacks that made their way into our tip line over the past day or so: USB servo controller and a Stewart Platform [Patricio] needed a way to control a bunch of servos for [...]
Tags: way servos servo stewart-platform patricio servo-controller tip-line Hardware
July 18, 2012
9:01
A hardware random number generator for your FPGA
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Zach] sent in a project he’s been working on that brings hardware random number generators to common hardware you might have lying around. It’s called Whirlyfly and it turns an FPGA dev board into a hardware random number capable of outputting random bits over a USB connection at 3 Mbps. Previously, the whirlygig ran on [...]
Tags: fpga number Hardware zach random-number-generators random-number-generator hardware-random-number-generator
July 16, 2012
16:01
Cracking open an ancient avionics gyroscope
» ‎ Hack a Day

This artificial horizon might as well have come from an alien ship. [Mike] somehow manages to get his hands on most interesting equipment, this time its a very old piece of avionics equipment. The mechanical gyroscope functioned as the artificial horizon, and he’s going to take us inside for a look. He doesn’t spend quite [...]
Tags: equipment horizon gyroscope mike artificial-horizon alien-ship avionics Hardware
4:00
Rocket telemetry from UAV hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

When we posted our call for rocketry hacks and builds, we expected to see a few altitude sensors and maybe a GPS module or two. Apparently, we forgot similar hardware is very popular in the remote-controlled aircraft world, and can be successfully added to a rocket as [Kevin] and his ArduPilot equipped J motor rocket [...]
Tags: telemetry Hardware rocket kevin remote-controlled-aircraft aircraft-world gps-module

July 12, 2012
0:00
Vuln: Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Tags: intel cpu Hardware privilege-escalation-vulnerability intel-cpu local-privilege-escalation

July 11, 2012
7:00
Ouya, a $100 game console for indie developers
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the explosion of mobile gaming (due in no small part to the egg-bombing Angry Birds), the Ouya was bound to happen. It’s a $100 game console powered by Android that puts indie games right into your living room. The specs for the Ouya means this cube of games isn’t a slouch: the console comes [...]
Tags: game indie ouya indie-games mobile-gaming slouch Hardware

0:00
Vuln: Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

Intel CPU Hardware Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Tags: intel cpu Hardware privilege-escalation-vulnerability intel-cpu local-privilege-escalation

July 09, 2012
9:00
On not designing circuits with evolutionary algorithms
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Henrik] has been working on a program to design electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It’s still very much a work in progress, but he’s gotten to the point of generating a decent BJT inverter after 78 generations (9 minutes of compute time), as shown in the .gif above. To evolve these circuits, [Henrik] told a [...]
Tags: program progress work henrik evolutionary-algorithms electronic-circuits work-in-progress Hardware

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