Kritik sah

You can get an IDE to USB bridge from all the usual sources, but you may find those fail on the older drives in your collection– apparently they require drives using logical block addressing, which did not become standard until the mid-1990s. Some while some older drives got in on the LBA game early, you were more likely to see Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. That’s why [JJ Dasher], a.k.a [redruM0381] created ATABoy, an open-source IDE bridge that can handle the oldest drives that fit on the bus. The heart of the build is an RP2350, which serves as both IDE and USB host controller. To computer, after a little bit of setup, the drive attached to ATABoy shows up as a regular USB mass storage device. A little bit of setup is to be expected with drives of this vintage, you may remember. Luckily [JJ] included a handy BIOS-themed configuration utility that can be accessed through any serial console. He says you’ll usually be able to get away with “Auto Detect & Set Geometry,” b...

You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is. New Tech A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job . You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum . A modern projection clock on the ceiling. In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock . Sometimes known as “ceil...

You may or may not know, but printf is a Turing-complete language, once you exploit all the strange and wonderful format characters in it (especially %n). But who has time to write code as printf modifiers? Now, thanks to [sebsite], you can at least write in a slightly higher level assembly language and compile to printf . Practical? No. Cool? Undeniably. As an example, the page shows fizzbuzz written in the assembler: <pre><code>alias i, fizz, buzz ->fizz ([i] + 1) % 3 == 0 ->buzz ([i] + 1) % 5 == 0 ->i [i] + 1 ->exit [i] == 100 [i] if !![i] & ![fizz] & ![buzz] "Fizz" if [fizz] "Buzz" if [buzz] "\n" if [i]</code></pre> <pre> The alias keyword defines constants and, owing to default values, sets i to zero, fizz to one, and buzz to 2. The “arrow” statements store a result into a variable (so the first assignment sets the resulting value into fizz). You need C23 to compile the assembler. Good luck tr...

Many people who use water cooling in their computer systems like to go full-bore with ‘aquarium’ aesthetic, which includes adding a window to their cooling blocks so that they see the water flowing through the window from behind the case’s window. Traditionally PMMA acrylic is used for these windows, as it’s quite durable and easy to handle. Using glass offers some advantages over acrylic, but has its own disadvantages, most of all that it’s hard to process, but also that it’s known for shattering quite easily if pushed beyond its limits. This is why [der8auer] as a manufacturer of such water blocks has now spent a few years investigating the viability of using glass for this purpose. First and foremost is safety, with an early prototype glass water block suddenly shattering without clear cause. Although normally the water cooling loop is only expected to experience pressures of about 600 mbar, the new glass windows that are now entering mass-production had to be tested to their br...

We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th , a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman , problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair. The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close...

Meshtastic has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, as the off-grid, long-range radio text messaging protocol gains a ton of new users. It’s been used to create mesh networks in cities, during disasters and protests, in small groups while hiking or camping, and for search and rescue operations. Although it’s connected plenty of people together in all of these ways, [GreatScott!] wanted to put it to work connecting some computing resources instead. He has a garden shed that’s too far for WiFi, so Meshtastic was used to connect it instead . This isn’t a project to bring broadband Internet out to the shed, though; Meshtastic is much too slow for that. All he really wanted to do here was to implement a basic alarm system that would let him know if someone had broken in. The actual alarm triggering mechanism is an LED emitter-detector pair installed in two bars, one of which sends a 12V signal out if the infrared beam from the other is broken. They’re connected to a Heltec ESP...

Theoretically a belt drive makes for a great upgrade to a bicycle, as it replaces the heavier, noisy and relatively maintenance-heavy roller chain with a zero-maintenance, whisper-quiet and extremely reliable belt that’s rated at an amazing 20-30,000 km before needing a replacement. Of course, that’s the glossy marketing brochure version of reality, which differed significantly from what [Tristan Ridley] experienced whilst cycling around the globe. Although initially he was rather happy with his bike, its sealed car-like Pinion gearbox and Gates carbon belt drive system, while out in the wilds of Utah he had a breakdown when the belt snapped. When the spare belt that he had carried with him for the past months also snapped minutes later after fitting it on, it made him decide to switch back to the traditional bush roller chain . Despite this type of chain drive tracing its roots all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, they actually offer many advantages over the fancy carbon-fiber-...

[Hans Rosenberg] has a new video talking about a nasty side effect of using resistors: noise . If you watch the video below, you’ll learn that there are two sources of resistor noise: Johnson noise, which doesn’t depend on the construction of the resistor, and 1/f noise, which does vary depending on the material and construction of the resistor. In simple terms, some resistors use materials that cause electron flow to take different paths through the resistor. That means that different parts of the signal experience slightly different resistance values. In simple applications, it won’t matter much, but in places where noise is an important factor, the 1/f or excess noise contributes more  to errors than the Johnson noise at low frequencies. [Hans] doesn’t just talk the math. He also built a simple test rig that lets him measure the 1/f noise with some limitations. While you might pretend that all resistors are the same, the test shows that thick film resistors produce much more...

An interesting detail about the Intel 8087 floating point processor (FPU) is that it’s a co-processor that shares a bus with the 8086 or 8088 CPU and system memory, which means that somehow both the CPU and FPU need to know which instructions are intended for the FPU. Key to this are eight so-called ESCAPE opcodes that are assigned to the co-processor, as explained in a recent article by [Ken Shirriff]. The 8087 thus waits to see whether it sees these opcodes, but since it doesn’t have access to the CPU’s registers, sharing data has to occur via system memory. The address for this is calculated by the CPU and read from by the CPU, with this address registered by the FPU and stores for later use in its BIU register. From there the instruction can be fully decoded and executed. This decoding is mostly done by the microcode engine, with conditional instructions like cos featuring circuitry that sprawls all over the IC. Explained in the article is how the microcode engine even k...

If you’re interested in extraterrestrial life, these past few years have given an embarrassment of places to look, even in our own solar system. Mars has been an obvious choice since before the Space Age; in the orbit of Jupiter, Europa’s oceans have been of interest since Voyager’s day; the geysers of Enceladus give Saturn two moons of interest, if you count the possibility of a methane-based chemistry on Titan. Even faraway Neptune’s giant moon Triton probably has an ocean layer deep inside. Now the planet Uranus is getting in on the act, offering its moon Miranda for consideration in a kinda-recent  study in the Planetary Science Journal. Miranda and Uranus, the new hot spot for life-hunters.  Photomontage credit NASA. Even if you’re into astronomy, it may seem like this is coming out of left field. “Miranda, really? What new data could we possibly have on a moon of Neptune nobody’s visited since the 1980s?” Well, none, really. This study relies on reexamining the da...

On the list of cars widely regarded as the most reliable vehicles ever built, up there with the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Honda Civic, and the Mercedes W123 diesels, is the unassuming Toyota Prius. Although it adds a bit of complexity with its hybrid drivetrain, its design eliminates a number of common wear items and also tunes it for extreme efficiency, lengthening its life and causing minimal mechanical stress. The Prius has a number of other tricks up its sleeve as well, which is why parts of its hybrid systems are often used in EV conversions like [Jeremy]’s electric CJ-5 Jeep . Inside the Prius inverter is a buck/boost converter used for stepping up the battery voltage to power the inverter and supply power to the electric motor. [Jeremy]’s battery is much higher voltage than the stock Prius battery pack, though, which means he can bypass the converter and supply energy from his battery directly to the inverter. Since the buck/boost converter isn’t being used, he can put it to w...

True or false? Your green laser pointer is more powerful than your red one. The answer is almost certainly false. They are, most likely, the same power, but your eye is far more sensitive to green, so it seems stronger. [Brandon Li] was thinking about how to best represent colors on computer screens and fell down the rabbit hole of what colors look like when arranged in a spectrum . Spoiler alert: almost all the images you see of the spectrum are incorrect in some way. The problem isn’t in our understanding of the physics, but more in the understanding of how humans perceive color. Perception may start with physics, but it also extends to the biology of your eye and the psychology of your brain. What follows is a lot of math that finally winds up with the CIE 1931 color space diagram and the CIE 2012 system. Some people obsess about fonts, and some about colors. If you are in the latter camp, this is probably old hat for you. However, if you want a glimpse into just how complicated...

Even though digital cameras have lowered the barrier of entry to photography dramatically, as well as made it much easier for professionals and amateurs alike to capture stunning images without the burden of developing film, the technology behind them is considerably more complex than their analog counterparts. In fact, an analog film camera (not counting the lens) can be as simple as a lightproof box and a way to activate a shutter. Knowing that, any kind of film camera could be built for any number of applications, like this 3D-printed panoramic camera from [Denis Aminev] . The custom-built camera works by taking a standard roll of 35mm film, which is standardized to take 36 pictures, and exposing a wider section of the film to create a panorama. This reduces the number of pictures on the roll to 19. This is the fifth version of this camera, called the Infidex 176 V, and has everything a standard film camera would have, from an exposure counter, pressure plate for the film, a winde...

Considering that the Nintendo DS already has its own remake of  Super Mario 64 , one might be tempted to think that porting the original Nintendo 64 version would be a snap. Why you’d want to do this is left as an exercise to the reader, but whether due to nostalgia or out of sheer spite, the question of how easy this would be remains. Correspondingly, [Tobi] figured that he’d give it a shake , with interesting results. Of note that is someone else already ported SM64 to the DSi , which is a later version of the DS with more processing power, more RAM and other changes. The reason why the 16 MB of RAM of the DSi is required, is because it needs to load the entire game into RAM, rather than do on-demand reads from the cartridge. This is why the N64 made do with just 4 MB of RAM, which is as much RAM as the ND has. Ergo it can be made to work. The key here is NitroFS , which allows you to implement a similar kind of segmented loading as the N64 uses. Using this the [Hydr8gon] DSi...

The RF section of the ESP32-C6 die. (Credit: electronupdate, YouTube) With the ESP32-P4 not having any wireless functionality and instead focusing on being a small SoC, it makes sense to combine it with a second chip that handles features like WiFi and Bluetooth. This makes the Guition ESP32-P4-M3 module both a pretty good example of how the P4 will be used, and an excellent opportunity to tear into, decap and shoot photos of the dies of both the P4 and the ESP32-C6 in this particular module, courtesy of [electronupdate]. There also the blog post for those who just want to ogle the shinies. After popping the metal shield on the module, you can see the contents as in the above photo. The P4 inside is a variant with 32 MB of PSRAM integrated along with the SoC die. This results in a die shot both of this PSRAM and the P4 die, though enough of the top metal seems to remain to clearly see the latter. The Boya brand Flash chip is quite standard inside, and along with a glance at the...

When you’re livestreaming, it can be tempting to fire off all kinds of wacky sound effects like you’re a morning radio DJ back in the heady days of 1995. If that’s who you want to be, you might like this soundboard project from [Biker Glen]. The build is based around an RP2040 microcontroller. It’s paired with an I2S digital-to-analog converter for sound output, which in turn feeds a small amplifier hooked up to a speaker or a line output.  The RP2040 is programmed to respond to MIDI commands by playing various sounds in response, which are loaded off a microSD card. It’s able to act as a USB MIDI host, which allows it to work seamlessly with all sorts of off-the-shelf MIDI controllers like the MIDI Fighter or the Novation Launchpad. It’s an interesting hardware solution to a problem that you could probably also solve with software on your streaming machine, especially if you’ve already got a USB MIDI controller. However, there’s something to be said for lightening the load when...

As common as the Xbox 360 was, the development kits (XDKs) for these consoles are significantly less so. This makes it even more tragic when someone performs a botched surgery on one of these rare machines, leaving it in dire straits. Fortunately [Josh Davidson] was able to repair the XDK in question for a customer, although it entailed replacing the GPU, CPU and fixing many traces. The Xbox 360 Development Kit is effectively a special version of the consumer console — with extra RAM and features that make debugging software on the unit much easier, such as through direct access to RAM contents. They come in a variety of hardware specifications that developed along with the game console during its lifecycle, with this particular XDK getting an upgrade to being a Super Devkit with fewer hardware restrictions. Replacing the dead GPU was a new old stock Kronos 1 chip. Fortunately the pads were fine underneath the old GPU, making it easy to replace. After that various ripped-off pads...

We are going to bet that as a kid, you had a View-Master. This toy has been around for decades and is, more or less, a handheld stereoscope. We never thought much about the device’s invention until we saw a recent video from [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble]. It turns out that the principle of the whole thing was created by the well-known [Charles Wheatstone]. However, it was piano repairman [William Gruber] who invented what we think of as the View-Master. [Gruber] didn’t just work on normal pianos, but complex player pianos and, in particular, the pianos used to record player piano rolls. He was also, as you might expect, a stereo photography enthusiast. Many of the ideas used in automating pianos would show up in the View-Master and the machines that made the reels, too. In the 1930s, stereoscopes were not particularly popular and were cumbersome to use. Color film was also a new technology. [Gruber] realized that a disk-like format would be easy to use and, more important...

[James]’ Mechanical Organ of Dutch origin has been around longer than he has, but thanks to being rebuilt over the years and lovingly cared for, it delivers its unique performances just as well as it did back in the day. Even better, we’re treated to a good look at how it works. The organ produces music by playing notes on embedded instruments, which are themselves operated by air pressure, with note arrangements read off what amounts to a very long punch card. [James] gives a great tour of this fantastic machine, so check it out in the video embedded below along with a couple of its performances. The machine is mobile and entirely self-contained. It would be wheeled out to a venue, where it would play music as long as one could keep cranking the main wheel and the perforated cardboard book containing the chosen musical arrangement hasn’t reached its end. As perforations in the card scroll by inside the machine, each hole triggers valves that operate pipes, percussion hits, and ev...