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Pi Pico Recreates The Heathkit Pocket Packet

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Packet radio is a particularly fun part of the ham radio hobby. Once upon a time, you might have squirted data about the airwaves using something like the Heathkit HK-21 Pocket Packet. Heathkit stopped being a going concern some time ago, but [btech] has now recreated the device with modern hardware. [btech] has called the project the Pocket Pico, and like the hardware that inspired it, it acts as a terminal node controller for amateur packet radio. It literally runs the same firmware as the real HK-21. It achieves this by using the Raspberry Pi Pico to run a Z80 processor emulator that can run the same code, while also using the microcontroller to do the work of modulating and demodulating Bell 202 audio tones at 1200 baud to avoid the need for a dedicated modem chip. Thanks to running the same firmware as the HK-21, you can use the Pocket Pico with lots of old packet radio software. It’s fully capable of doing APRS as well as AX.25 Level 2, and has a built in Personal Bulletin...
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Investigating a Rare Burnout 3 Beta Disc

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These days, it’s pretty easy to buy old retail console games just by hunting online auction sites. It’s much rarer to come across a disc holding a beta version that was only ever intended for internal us, and yet, that’s precisely what landed in [MattKC’s] hands—a copy of the Beta 3 release of Burnout 3 for the original Xbox. He thus set about the task of investigating the differences to the retail release and preserving the beta for the future. The first task involved figuring out how to read the disc. Retail Xbox games show up as a DVD Video disc if you put them into a PC, which can complicate reading them. However, being a burnt beta disc for use in an Xbox devkit, this one was a little different. It was easy enough to read and dump with a regular DVD drive and some common tools for ripping Xbox ISOs. From there, it was a matter of comparing the dumped disc to the retail PAL release. There wasn’t a  lot  of differences to find—with [MattKC] noting tha...
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FPGA for All — CERN Releases “colibri” VHDL Library

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Since you’re reading Hackaday, we’re pretty sure CERN needs no introduction, so we’ll get right to it– they’re giving back again, this time with a VHDL library called “colibri” containing over 100 components, functions, and procedures to help jumpstart your next FPGA project. Like a lot of what CERN gives away under its CERN Open Hardware Licence, this library and the functions in it were developed in house to make CERN run better– specifically to streamline the development of gateway devices. As you might imagine, with the prodigious amount of data CERN’s various experiments spit out, FPGAs have become a key part of many of them. The best part is that because the fine folks at CERN don’t want to get locked in, everything here is vendor-independent and has been tested on multiple platforms. Speaking of tested, you get self-checking testbenches in there to make sure everything’s working, and there’s even formal ver...
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Robot Makes Literal Daisy Chains

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[Jude Robinson]’s robot Daisy has an unusual function: making a literal chain of daisies . The device is his student final project and demonstrates how a system can replace sensing with clever mechanical constraints. Instead of bringing tools to bear on each daisy, the daisies are brought to the tools in a repeatable, deterministic way. Daisy is essentially two X-Y gantries with grippers facing one another. Between them is a conveyor upon which daisies are fed, plus a blade at the top with a threading post nearby. A gripper takes a daisy, feeds the stem through the hole in the previous one, then lifts the new addition up to a scalpel blade which cuts a short incision. The thin threading post goes through the new hole in the new stem, ready for the next daisy to be inserted. The two gantries alternate roles, building the chain one daisy link at a time. [Jude] says that daisy stem shape and diameter have the most impact on reliability, so it’s very important to constrain t...
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A 7-Segment Clock Built With No Digital Electronics

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If you wanted to build a clock with a 7-segment display, there are a wide variety of ways you might go about it. You could grab some 74-series logic chips and create a whole bunch of counters and decoders to drive the display, or you could wire up a microcontroller with an RTC and have it do the hard work. Or, as a Japanese company once did… you could create a “digital” looking clock with no digital electronics whatsoever. The geared mechanism and switch contacts are visible; they switch the neons of the various segments on and off at the correct times. Credit: YouTube video [Mark Furneaux] set about tearing down a Lumitime clock, built by the Japanese company Tamura. From the outside, it appears to be a rather stylish digital clock, with a bold red 7-segment display lit with neons. And in some regards, it is. Only, the secret of this clock is that it doesn’t use digital electronics to do the job. There are no counters inside, no real-time clock module, no tran...
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Handheld Scanner is a Radio Multi-tool

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These days, it’s possible to cram a whole lot of radio functionality into a very compact device. A great example of that is the LakeShark scanner from [SAMS0N1TE]. The LakeShark is based on the LilyGO T-Display P4—which combines an ESP32-P4 microcontroller with a 4.1 inch AMOLED touchscreen display. It comes with an onboard SX1262 LoRa radio module as well as GPS and a nine-axis Inertial Measurement Unit to boot. [SAMS0N1TE] then set it up to also hook up to an RTL-SDR Blog V3 or V4, providing all kinds of extra software-defined radio functionality. It can scan everything from P25 Phase 1 trunking transmissions, to ADS-B, POCSAG, and even good old FM broadcast radio. If you want to listen in on what’s on the air, or see a minimap with tracks of the planes flying overhead, you can do it all with this rig. You can even investigate various bands with waterfall displays or try and look for activity from nearby nRF24 devices. Ultimately, it’s a bit of a Swiss Army knife ...
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A Tiny Toy Synth For Smaller Computers

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Even for the non-musical among us there is a lot of fun to be had with a simple synthesiser and sequencer, as the different controls can be manipulated to show their effect on the sound. Beeper, from [Valentyn Danylchuk] is just such a synth, and with only built-in loops, it has a focus on the instrument rather than the arrangement. What you get are a simple set of controls, from which you can modify the sound to your liking. We’ve been playing with it here, and it’s surprisingly addictive. The target for Beeper is ESP32 microcontrollers, with builds for the S3 and P4, but there’s also a web version and one for the Mac. It’s operated using the arrow keys on your keyboard, and  the web one at least isn’t the most responsive piece of software. Below the break you can see (and hear) it on a Tanmatsu ESP32-P4 based handheld computer. It’s certain that there are more accomplished synthesisers and sequencers to be found, but there’s still a place...
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