Kritik sah

Often, we need to power a 5V-craving project of ours on the go. So did [Burgduino], and, unhappy with solutions available, designed their own 5V UPS! It takes a cheap powerbank design and augments it with a few parts vital for its UPS purposes. You might be tempted to reach for a powerbank when facing such a problem, but most of them have a fatal flaw, and you can’t easily tell a flawed one apart from a functioning one before you buy it. This flaw is lack of load sharing – ability to continue powering the output when a charger is inserted. Most store-bought powerbanks just shut the output off, which precludes a project running 24/7 without powering it down, and can cause adverse consequences when something like a Raspberry Pi is involved. Understandably, [Burgduino] wasn’t okay with that. Their UPS is based on the TP5400, a combined LiIon charging and boost chip, used a lot in simple powerbanks, but not capable of load sharing. For that, an extra LM66100 chip – an “ideal diode” con

Do you ever have to ensure that an exact amount of time passes between two tasks in your microcontroller code? Do you know what’s the difference between precision and accuracy? Today, [Jim Mack] tells us about pushing timers and interrupts to their limits when it comes to managing time, while keeping it applicable to an ever-popular ATMega328P target! Every now and then, someone decides to push the frontiers of what’s possible on a given platform, and today’s rules is coding within constraints of an Arduino environment. However, you should check [Jim]’s post out even if you use Arduino as a swearword – purely for all of the theoretical insights laid out, accompanied by hardware-accurate examples! This will be useful to any hacker looking to implement, say, motor encoder readings, signal frequency calculations, or build a gadget processing or modifying audio in real time. To give you a sample of this article, [Jim] starts by introducing us to distinctions between precision and accura

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible? The LED string protocol is very simple, with one address field and one data field. [Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post . As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered whe

When it comes to taking an idea from concept to prototype reality, depending on the type of project, there can be quite a few sub-tasks along the way. Take for example, your latest electronic widget design. You’ve finished the schematic, and the PCB layout is a work of art (if you do say so yourself) but having that kicking around on the desk unprotected with wires dangling is not the end game. Now you’ve got to make an enclosure of some kind, and I don’t know about you, but this is the bit where this scribe struggles a little to get something to fit nice. Even if you’ve got the latest 3D printer dialed in to within a gnat’s whisker of perfection, you’ve still got to come up with the design, and those dimensions need to be really accurate. So, for those of us who are great at the PCB, but suck at the enclosure, [Willem Aandewiel] has been busy making the tool just for you, with his PCB-orientated Yet Another Parametric Projectbox generator (YAPP.) Defining the PCB mounting points w.

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link ), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing. A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn’t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where

We’re all used to swapping RAM in our desktops and laptops. What about a GPU, though? [dosdude1] teaches us that soldered-on RAM is merely a frontier to be conquered . Of course, there’s gotta be a good reason to undertake such an effort – in his case, he couldn’t find the specific type of Nvidia GT640 that could be flashed with an Apple BIOS to have his Xserve machine output the Apple boot screen properly. All he could find were 1GB versions, and the Apple BIOS could only be flashed onto a 2GB version. Getting 2GB worth of DDR chips on Aliexpress was way too tempting! The video goes through the entire replacement process, to the point where you could repeat it yourself — as long as you have access to a preheater, which is a must for reworking relatively large PCBs, as well as a set of regular tools for replacing BGA chips. In the end, the card booted up, and, flashed with a new BIOS, successfully displayed the Apple bootup logo that would normally be missing without the special Appl

One of the biggest reasons for playing older video games on original hardware is that emulators and modern controllers can’t replicate the exact feel of how those games would have been originally experienced. This is true of old PC games as well, so if you want to use your original Sidewinder steering wheel or antique Logitech joystick, you’ll need something like [Necroware]’s GamePort adapter to get them to communicate with modern hardware . In a time before USB was the standard, the way to connect controllers to PCs was through the GamePort, typically found on the sound card. This has long since disappeared from modern controllers, so the USB interface [Necroware] built relies on an Arduino to do the translating. Specifically, the adapter is designed as a generic adapter for several different analog joysticks, and a series of DIP switches on the adapter select the appropriate mode. Check it out in the video after the break. The adapter is also capable of automatically calibrating t

After all the fuss and bother along the way, it seems a bit anticlimactic now that the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its forever home orbiting around L2. The observatory finished its trip on schedule, arriving on January 24 in its fully deployed state, after a one-month journey and a couple of hundred single-point failure deployments. The next phase of the mission is commissioning, and is a somewhat more sedate and far less perilous process of tweaking and trimming the optical systems, and getting the telescope and its sensors down to operating temperature. The commissioning phase will take five or six months, so don’t count on any new desktop photos until summer at the earliest. Until then, enjoy the video below which answers some of the questions we had about what Webb can actually see — here’s hoping there’s not much interesting to see approximately in the plane of the ecliptic. In other solar system news, it turns out that one of the minor moons of Saturn may be mo

Roomba aside, domestic robots are still in search of the killer app they need to really take off. For the other kind of home automation to succeed, designers are going to have to find the most odious domestic task and make it go away at the push of the button. A T-shirt folding robot is probably a good first step. First and foremost, hats off to [ Stefano Pontoglio ] for his copious documentation on this project. Not only are complete instructions for building the laundry bot listed, but there’s also a full use-case analysis and even a complete exploration of prior art in the space. [Stefano]’s exhaustive analysis led to a set of stepper-actuated panels, laser-cut from thin plywood, and arranged to make the series of folds needed to take a T-shirt from flat to folded in just a few seconds. The video below shows the folder in action, and while it’s not especially fast right now, we’ll chalk that up to still being under development. We can see a few areas for improvement; making the

Over in the Swedish city of Södertälje, about 30 km southwest of Stockholm, a pilot program is being explored which will  enlist crows to clean up discarded cigarette butts . Butts account for over 60% of litter in Sweden, and the per-butt cleanup cost falls between 0.8 and 2 Swedish kronor each. The company behind the project, Corvid Cleaning, estimates the cost will be around 0.2 kronor. If the birds picked up all the butts, that would be a substantial savings, but in reality, the current manual cleaning will still be needed. Total savings to the city will depend on the ratio of bird-collected vs. people-collected butts. Of course, if people would throw their butts in ashcans or carry pocket ashtrays like those popular in Japan, this would be a non-starter. Crows were selected because they are considered one of the most intelligent bird — they’re easy to teach, and they communicate with each other. All crows participating in the project are volunteers, and are paid by the butt with

If you don’t own a cat, hearing the sound of one meowing from somewhere in the house probably comes as quite a shock. The Cat Prank box built by [Reuben] promises to deliver such hilarity with aplomb.  The idea is simple: hide the Cat Prank box in a cupboard or other space in a friend’s house, and it will meow from its secret location. When found, either the light sensor or motion sensor will trigger the yowling of an angry feline, with hopefully startling effects. An Arduino Mini is the brains of the operation, paired with an XY-V17B sound module which plays the required animal wailings. There’s also a 433 MHz radio module that lets the prankster trigger meowing via remote control. Code is available for those wishing to build their own. We’d love to see a mod with a time delay built in, so the device could be hidden and left to start meowing at some later date when the prankster is far away. Similar work has graced these pages before, like the devilishly fiendish OpenKobold desi

Over on Retro Recipe’s YouTube channel, [Perifractic] has been busy restoring an old promotional video of how Commodore computers were made back in 1984 ( video below the break ). He cleaned up the old VHS-quality version that’s been around for years , translated the German to English, and trimmed some bits here and there. The result is a fascinating look into the MOS factory, Commodore’s German factory, and a few other facilities around the globe. The film shows the chip design engineers in action, wafer manufacturing, chip dicing, and some serious micro-probing of bare die. We also see PCB production, and final assembly, test and burn-in of Commodore PET and C64s in Germany. Check out the video description, where [Perifractic] goes over the processes he used to clean up video and audio using machine learning. If restoration interests you, check out the piece we wrote about these techniques to restore old photographs last year . Are there any similar factory tour films, restored or

Those readers who have experimented with winding their own inductors will know that it’s not an easy task, and when those inductors are handling high voltages it can be especially tricky to maintain adequate insulation between layers of windings. [Open Frime TV] has a video addressing this in a novel way, by creating the windings for a switch-mode power supply transformer using stacked PCB coils instead of wire (Russian language; you’ll have to enable YouTube’s subtitle auto-translation). The video below the break makes for a handy primer on PCB coil construction, reminding the viewer that the turns need all to lie in the same direction as well as the importance of insulation between windings. There’s a discussion of the properties of a PCB coil in relation to the switching frequency, and once the transformer has been assembled, we see it hooked up to a power supply board for a test. What happens next may be familiar to seasoned transformer-winders; nothing works, and the transforme

Seems like all the cool kids are rewriting legacy C programs in Rust these days, so we suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to combine the memory-safe language with some of the most historically significant software ever written by way of a new Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) emulator . Written by [Felipe], the Apache/MIT licensed emulator can run either ROM files made from the computer’s original rope core memory, or your own code written in AGC4 assembly language. It’s worth noting that the emulator, called ragc , needs a bit of help before it can deliver that authentic Moon landing experience. Specifically, the code only emulates the AGC itself and stops short of recreating the iconic display and keyboard (DSKY) module. To interact with the programs running on the virtual AGC you’ll need to also install yaDSKY2, an open source project that graphically recreates the panel Apollo astronauts actually used to enter commands and get data from the computer. Of co

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill . If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state. EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The

Many readers will be familiar with the Dyson Air Multiplier, an ingenious bladeless fan design in which a compressor pushes jets of air from the inside edge of a large ring. This fast-moving air draws the surrounding air through the ring, giving the effect of a large conventional fan without any visible moving parts and in a small package. It’s left to [Integza] to take this idea and see it as the compressor for a jet engine, and though the prototype you see in the video below is fragile and prone to melting, it shows some promise. His design copies the layout of a Dyson with the compressor underneath the ring, with a gas injector and igniter immediately above it. The burning gas-air mixture passes through the jets and draws the extra air through the ring, eventually forming a roaring jet engine flame exhaust behind it. Unfortunately the choice of 3D print for the prototype leads to very short run times before melting, but it’s possible to see it working during that brief window. Fu

Have you ever heard of topological insulators? These are exotic materials where electricity flows only on the surface with very little loss. Now, according to IEEE Spectrum, scientists at Harvard have used the same concept to create a transistor for sound waves and it may be a new branch of electronics. The actual paper is available if you want some light reading. Apparently, topological insulators protect electrons moving along their surfaces and edges, something that won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Photons can also be protected topologically so they move with very little loss across the materials. Making electrons flow in this manner is an attractive proposition, but there are challenges, especially when creating a device that can switch the flow of electrons on and off as you might with a transistor in and out of saturation. Sound waves, however, are much easier to work with. The device is large for what we think of as a transistor and consists of an airtight box containi

[Elite Worm] had a problem; there had been two minor burglaries from a storage unit. The unit had thick concrete walls, cellular signal was poor down there, and permanent wiring wasn’t possible. He thus set about working on a burglar alarm that would fit his unique requirements . An ESP32 is the heart of the operation, paired with a long-range LoRa radio module running at 868 MHz. This lower frequency has much better penetration when it comes to thick walls compared to higher-frequency technologies like 4G, 5G or WiFi. With a little coil antenna sticking out the top of the 3D-printed enclosure, the device was readily able to communicate back to [Elite Worm] when the storage unit was accessed illegitimately. With an eye to security, the device doesn’t just warn of door open events. If signal is lost from the remote transmitter in the storage unit, perhaps due to an advanced adversary cutting the power, the alarm will also be raised. There’s still some work to be done on the transmitt

We’ve often heard it said that springs come in in all shapes and sizes…except for the one you need. In light of this, the hardware hacker would do well to keep the tools and knowledge required to make a custom spring close at hand when building something that moves. Luckily, all it really take is some stiff metal wire, a rod, and patience. Unless you’ve got a 3D printer, that is. In which case, we’d suggest you print out this very clever “Spring Factory” designed by [Vincent Baillet] . The simple tool, consisting of just two parts, makes it easier and faster to make consistent DIY springs when compared to traditional methods. Rather than trying to eyeball the spacing of the coil as you wind the wire around the mandrel, this design does it for you. As seen in the video, springs made with this tool look very professional. Not only does the threaded mandrel keep the spacing between coils even, it also makes sure all the springs you produce are identical. This can be especially importan

The core ethos of “hacking” is usually interpreted as modifying something for a use that it wasn’t originally built for. Plenty of builds are modifications or improvements on existing technology, but sometimes that just isn’t enough. Sometimes we have to go all the way down and build something completely from scratch, and [Balthasar]’s recent piano-like musical instrument fits squarely into this category. This electronic keyboard is completely designed and built from scratch, including the structure of the instrument and the keys themselves. [Balthasar] made each one by hand out of wood and then built an action mechanism for them to register presses. While they don’t detect velocity or pressure, the instrument is capable of defining the waveform and envelope for any note, is able to play multiple notes per key, and is able to change individual octaves. This is thanks to a custom 6×12 matrix connected to a STM32 microcontroller. Part of the reason [Balthasar] chose this microcontroll

If you are old enough, you may remember that, for a time, almost every year was the year that home video was going to take off. Except it never was, until VHS tape machines appeared. We saw something similar with personal computers. Nowadays, we keep hearing about the home robot, but it never seems to fully materialize or catch on. If you think about it, it could be a problem of expectations. What we all want is C3PO or Rosie the Robot that can do all the things we don’t want to do. What we usually get is something far less than that. You either get something hideously expensive that does a few tasks or something cheap that is little more than a toy. Labrador Systems is trying to hit the middle ground. While no one would confuse their Caddie and Retriever robots with C3PO, they are useful but also simple, presumably to keep the cost down which are expected to cost about $1,500. The robots have been described as “self-driving shelves.” You can watch a video about the devices below.

Lightning is a force to be reckoned with: ever since ancient times, humans have been in awe of the lethal power of lightning strikes and the deafening roar of thunder. Quite reasonably, they ascribed these events to acts of angry gods; today, modern science provides a more down-to-earth explanation of the physics involved, and a world-wide network of sensors generates a real-time record of lightning strikes around the globe. [Dmitry Morozov]’s latest kinetic art installation called Adad is driven by this stream of data. Named after a Mesopotamian god of thunder, it consists of a set of arms that suddenly jerk upwards when a lightning strike is detected anywhere in the world. When an arm falls down again, it strikes a piezo crystal, which generates an electric charge that triggers a bright flash of light as well as a sound effect. Those crystals are pieces of potassium sodium tartrate (also known as Rochelle salt) and were grown specifically for this project. They are housed in plexi