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Lockdown Remote Control Project is Free and Open

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If you flew or drove anything remote controlled until the last few years, chances are very good that you’d be using some faceless corporation’s equipment and radio protocols. But recently, open-source options have taken over the market, at least among the enthusiast core who are into squeezing every last bit of performance out of their gear. So why not take it one step further and roll your own complete system? Apparently, that’s what [Malcolm Messiter] was thinking when, during the COVID lockdowns, he started his own RC project that he’s calling LockDownRadioControl . The result covers the entire stack, from the protocol to the transmitter and receiver hardware, even to the software that runs it all. The 3D-printed remote sports a Teensy 4.1 and off-the-shelf radio modules on the inside, and premium FrSky hardware on the outside. He’s even got an extensive folder of sound effects that the controller can play to alert you. It’s very complete. Heck, the transmitter even has a game of...
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The Transputer in your Browser

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We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a JavaScript emulator for the transputer , you can try in your browser. If you don’t recall, the transputer was a groundbreaking CPU architecture made for parallel processing. Instead of giant, powerful CPUs, the transputer had many simple CPUs and a way to chain them all together. Sounds great, but didn’t quite make it. However, you can see the transputer’s influence on CPUs even today. Made to work with occam, the transputer was built from the ground up for concurrent programming. Context switching was cheap, along with simple message passing and hardware scheduling. The ersatz computer has a lot of messages in Spanish, but you can probably muddle through if you don’t hablar español . We did get the ray tracing example to work, but it was fairly slow. Want to know more abou...
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First PCB with the Smallest MCU?

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[Morten] works very fast. He has already designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market , and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below. You might have heard about this new TI ARM Cortex MO micro on these very pages, where we asked you what you’d do with this grain-of-rice-sized chunk of thinking sand . (The number one answer was “sneeze and lose it in the carpet”.) From the video, it looks like [Morten] would design a breakout board using Kicad 8, populate it, get it blinking, and then use its I2C lines to make a simple digital thermometer demo. In the video, he shows how he worked with the part, from making a custom footprint to spending quite a while nudging it into place before soldering it carefully down. But he nailed it on the first try, and honestly it doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as we’d feared, mostly because of the two-row layout of the balls. It actually looks easy enough to fan out. Because you ca...
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Vintage Computer Festival East This Weekend

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If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East . After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [ Brian Kernighan ]. Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops , but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout. [Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year , so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments! from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/UdTflDY
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The Weird Way A DEC Alpha Boots

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We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure . Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 da...
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Teardown of a Scam Ultrasonic Cleaner

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Everyone knows that ultrasonic cleaners are great, but not every device that’s marketed as an ultrasonic cleaner is necessarily such a device. In a recent video on the  Cheap & Cheerful YouTube channel the difference is explored, starting with a teardown of a fake one. The first hint comes with the use of the description ‘Multifunction cleaner’ on the packaging, and the second in the form of it being powered by two AAA batteries. Unsurprisingly, inside you find not the ultrasonic transducer that you’d expect to find in an actual ultrasonic cleaner, but rather a vibration motor. In the demonstration prior to the teardown you can see that although the device makes a similar annoying buzzing noise, it’s very different. Subsequently the video looks at a small ultrasonic cleaner and compares the two. Among the obvious differences are that the ultrasonic cleaner is made out of metal and AC-powered, and does a much better job at cleaning things like rusty parts. The annoying thin...
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Australia’s Silliac Computer

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When you think about the dawn of modern computers, you often think about the work done in the UK and the US. But Australia had an early computer scene, too, and [State of Electronics] has done a series of videos about the history of computers down under. The latest episode talks about SILLIAC , a computer similar to ILLIAC built for the University of Sydney in the late 1950s. How many racks does your computer fill up? SILLIAC had quite a few. This episode joins earlier episodes about CSIRAC, and WREDAC. The series starts with the CSIR Mark I, which was the first computer in the southern hemisphere. The -AC computers have a long history . While you often hear statements like, “
in the old days, a computer like this would fill a room,” SILLIAC, in fact, filled three rooms. The three meters of cabinets were in one room, the power supply in another. The third room? Air conditioning. A lot of tubes (valves, in Australia at the time) generate a lot of heat. It is hard to put an exact...
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