Mysterious Files PH

As the sun goes down on a glorious spring evening on the western edge of Europe, Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for a look at the week in all things Hackaday.

First up: Hackaday Europe tickets are on sale! Bad luck folks, the early bird tickets disappeared in an instant, but regular ones are still available for now. We’re really looking forward to making our way to Lecco for a weekend of hacks, and it would be great to see you there too.

Then we have a new feature for the podcast, the Hackaday Mailbag. This week’s contribution comes from [Kenny], a longtime friend of Hackaday and probably our most regular conference attendee.

To the hacks, and we have some good ones. An air hockey robot might not seem like a challenge, but the engineering which went into [BasementBuilds’] one proves it’s not a job for the faint hearted. Then we look at compression molding of recycled plastic using 3D-printed molds, something that seems surprisingly accessible and we’d like to try, too. We’ve got a new DOS, a 3D-printed zipper repair, the IPv4 replacement we didn’t get, and the mind-bending logic of ternary computing. It’s one of those weeks where the quick hacks could all deserve their own in-depth look, but perhaps the stand-outs are and Arduino style compiler that includes the source code compressed within the binary, and a beautifully-done revival of a 1980s brick cellphone as a modern 5G unit.

Finally in the longer reads we’ve got an examination of wired versus Bluetooth headphones — we’re both in the wired camp — and a look back at the age of free dialup. As is so often the case, the experience there differed between Brits and Americans. Anyway, enjoy the episode, and we have another week to look forward to.

Download your own personal copy of the Podcast in glorious 192 kB MP3.

News:

• Hackaday Europe Tickets Go On Sale, CFP Extended

What’s that Sound?

• Congrats to [Captain Click-Clack] who got it wrong, but just as right as anyone else.
• NASA’s Sounds From Beyond

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Building A Robot Partner To Play Air Hockey With
• Recycled Plastic Compression Molding With 3D-Printed Molds
  • Printing With PHA Filament As Potential Alternative To PLA
• The IPV4 We Didn’t Get
• DR-DOS Is Back, But Not Quite As We Knew It
• Relays Run This Balanced Ternary Adder
• This Printed Zipper Repair Requires No Unsewing

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Mapping The Sound Field Of An Acoustic Levitator
  • Testing Whether Heated Chambers Help Brittle Filaments
  • Forgetfulino Puts Back Up Of Source Inside The Binary
  • ATtiny85 Plays The Chrome Dinosaur Game
• Jenny’s Picks:
  • Off-Grid Electricity And Hot Water From Scrap Wood
  • A Voltage Regulator Before Electronics
  • Zip-Drive Emulator Puts Big Disks Back On LPT
  • No More Paperweight: This Vintage Brick Phone Is Back Online

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Ask Hackaday: Wired Or Wireless Headphones?
• The Rise And Fall Of Free Dial Up Internet

Sometimes you wanna test a piece of USB hardware, but you don’t just want to plug it into a random old phone charger. [KS-Elektronikdesign] has whipped up a useful tool for just that case, allowing one to easily power USB hardware from a common bench supply.

It would have been simple enough to whip up an adapter board to connect banana jacks to the power pins of a regular USB port. Easing the hookup process was indeed a part of the motivation for this project, in making it easy to power hardware that hooks up via USB-A and USB-C. However, it also goes a little further. It includes TUSB319 chip to handle the all-important power negotiation, without which many USB devices will not feel confident drawing their required amount of current.

There is also polarity protection and over-voltage protection to stop you from blowing stuff up if you hook the board up wrong, which might save you a smartphone or three in the lab. The board will allow negotiated output power up to 10 W via USB-A and 15 W via USB-C, which isn’t heaps, but will be fine for lots of smaller devices. You can up that to 25 W and 35 W respectively if the board is switched to pass-through mode. We particularly like the physical design—the board will plug straight into the banana plugs on any supply with a jack spacing of 19 to 23 mm.

Overall, this is a useful tool to have in the lab if you want to run USB hardware with the flexibility of the voltage and current limits available on your bench supply. There are other ways to power modern USB devices, too, and you can do all kinds of wild stuff if you learn about USB PD and USB PPS. If you’re working up your own nifty lab tools for similar purposes, we’d love to know about it on the tipsline.

Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe.

The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the integrated 320 x 240 LCD screen. [Jordan] took this all-in-one device and wrapped it in an attractive 3D-printed housing in the shape of an old-school CRT monitor, just… teenier. A special lever mechanism was built in to the enclosure to allow front panel controls to activate the tactile buttons on the CYD board. The ESP32 is programmed to check Open-Meteo feeds for forecasts and current weather data, while also querying a webcam feed and satellite and radar JPEGs from available weather services. These are then displayed on screen in a way that largely resembles the Windows 95 UI design language, with pages for current conditions, future forecasts, wind speeds, and the like.

We’ve seen some fun weather displays over the years, from graphing types to the purely beautiful. If you’ve found a fun way to display the weather (or change it) don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline. Particularly in the latter case.

You have a tiny twenty-year-old hard drive with a weird interface. How do you read it? If you’re [Will Whang], by reverse engineering, and building an interface board.

In many of our portable, mobile, and desktop computers, we’re used to solid-state storage. It’s fast and low power, and current supply-chain price hikes notwithstanding, affordable in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t always this way though, a couple of decades ago a large flash drive was prohibitively expensive. Hard drive manufacturers did their best to fill the gap with tiny spinning-rust storage devices which led to the smallest of them all: the Toshiba MK4001MTD. It crammed 4 GB onto a 0.85″ platter, and could be found in a few devices such as high-end Nokia phones.

The drive’s connector is a pattern of pads on a flexible PCB, one he couldn’t help noticing had a striking resemblance to an obscure SD card variant. Hooking it up to an SD reader didn’t work unfortunately, so a battered Nokia was called into service. It was found to be using something electrically similar to the SD cards, but with the ATA protocol familiar from the world of full-size hard drives.

The interface uses the PIO capability of the RP2040, and the board makes a tidy peripheral in itself. We’re guessing not many of you have one of these drives, but perhaps if you do, those early 2000s phone pics aren’t lost for good after all.

These drives are rare enough that this is the first time we’ve featured one here at Hackaday, but we’ve certainly ventured into hard drive technology before.

But sir, it is wafer-thin. That’s how they get you! Just when you couldn’t possibly justify building another keyboard, let alone owning one, along comes the Kambala by [aroum2].

Now, ‘Kambala’ means a few things, but here it refers to fish, as evidenced by logo and matching themed PCB key chain shown in the gallery.

This catch is so flat because of the switches: PG1316S, and 42 of them. These are better known to some as Kailh butterfly switches, and are meant for laptops. But, this is Hackaday.

No matter what you call them, those switches are controlled by a nice!nano V2-compatible controller, which allows for ZMK firmware support. There’s a 110 mAh battery and four status LEDs, and best of all, the charging indicator is in the fish’s eyes.

[aroum2] might share the files later. Here’s hoping!

Let’s Talk DIY Palm Rests

Palm rests! Depending on the keyboard, they can be built right in. This here Kinesis Advantage comes to mind. That said, you can buy a pair of nice adhesive pads for your Kinesis once the ABS shine starts to bother you, or better yet, before that happens. Don’t make your own out of adhesive foam sheets. Just, trust me on this.

But oftentimes, especially with travel keyboards, palm rests aren’t included. And that’s fair, because people want different things. Before you go printing some, or even rendering a pair from zebrawood, consider cheap alternatives like a large car-washing sponge cut in half and covered with the fabric of your choice.

On the slightly more expensive side, many employ a pair of Purple mattress samplers, which have doubled in price since I bought some 2022, but are still worth it.

Depending on your desk, you could do something as simple as cutting a pool noodle in half and shoving it onto the edge. Maybe you’ve done something even more temporary that turned out to be permanent. Tell me in the comments!

Even if you have built-in palm rests, sometimes you need to temporarily insert something like a spiral notebook between your desk edge and keyboard, pushing the thing further away and putting your delicate elbows at risk. This is me right now, and each elbow is on a mouse bag. Simple and effective.

Another consideration is attached versus unattached. I mean, if a travel keyboard is going to have palm rests, they should attach rather than just be placed in front. Maybe that’s just me.

 

The Centerfold: Telegraph Key Macro Pad is Dashing

The system works! [Colin] sent a tip about his Telegraph Key Macro Pad, which is exactly what it sounds like. [Colin] says that his job these days mostly consists of copy/pasting from GPT, and it was quickly becoming a pain in the wrist. (Boy, can I relate.)

Using the thing is just as it should be: to copy, you long press the key like a Morse code dash. To paste, you do the short one. This enables [Colin] to paste many times, and quickly. [Colin] started with a Soviet-era telegraph key from the electronic bay, and a Pimoroni Tiny 2040 programmed with Arduino. It may be wildly overpowered for the application, but hey, it fits nicely in the base of the telegraph key.

The default is to make a sound when you do either action. [Colin] used a piezo disk so that it can handle different tones. This was done mostly for the luls, but it also lets him know when something is copied. There’s also a nifty silent mode that moves the mouse cursor in a quick loop-dee-loo when the deed is done.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Crown Was a Machine for the Millions… Not!

You might wonder why I choose so many index typewriters for this portion of the program. I suppose it’s because they can be so differently designed, yet serve the same purpose. And that’s just cool to me.

The Crown index typewriter is no exception. Let’s start with the fact its creator, Byron Alden Brooks, was a celebrated inventor of early typewriters. You may have heard of the Brooks; he also had a hand in the People’s, the National, the Travis, and of course, the Crown index typewriter. Perhaps most unforgettable among his accomplishments, Brooks invented the Shift key.

The Crown was produced between 1888 and 1894, though it is thought that Brooks began work on it as early as 1881, evidenced by the date on the typewheel patent. It’s also thought that production really ceased in 1893.

That’s right, the Crown used a typewheel and a linear index from which the user selected each character. The ink came from a felt roller situated between the carriage and typewheel. Every time a character was selected, this roller would swing out of the way so the typewheel could strike the platen.

Originally, the Crown cost $20 (about $700 today), with the wooden case thrown in free. The price dropped to $16 by the middle of 1891. Despite being billed as ‘a machine for the millions’, the Crown was a failure.

Finally, There’s a Quiz To Find Your Switch Type

If you’re really up on things, you’re of course no stranger to KBD News and the corresponding newsletter. KBD is a great resource for all things keyboard, and now there’s a switch compatibility quiz to help you get started.

Of course, not all switches work with all PCBs, so you can’t begin this journey without knowing which path to head down. Choose MX, and you’ll have a bevvy of beauties to choose from. There are far fewer low-profile and Hall-effect switches out there, so keep that in mind.

Let’s say you go down the MX path. Your next choice is important: how much feedback do you need? None? A little? An audible click? Remember to keep your environment in mind.

If you’re me, you choose clicky. Now it’s time to think about actuation force. There are no light-force clicky switches; it’s just not a thing. So you can choose mid, heavy, or no preference, which takes you directly to RGB choices. Do you want a transparent housing? A light diffuser? Both? If you have no preference here, your final choice concerns factory lubrication. I ended up with 10 different switch recommendations, but of course, YMMV.

It’s important to note that KBD News has a comprehensive guide to choosing keyboard switches, which covers everything from actuation force to travel distance to RGB support, or lack thereof. And don’t miss the mechanical switch FAQ, just below the quiz.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

Until now, if you were seated at your Sega Genesis and wanted to check your stock portfolio, you were out of luck. You had to get a smartphone, or a computer, or maybe even a television to look up stock prices and understand your financial position. Thankfully, though, Sega’s neglect of its hero platform has finally been corrected. [Mike Wolak] has given the 16-bit console the real-time stock ticker it so desperately needed. 

The build runs on a MegaWiFi cartridge, which uses an ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller to add WiFi communication to the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive). [Mike] wrote a custom program for the platform that would query the Finnhub HTTPS API and display live stock prices via the Genesis’s Video Display Processor. It does so via a clean console-like interface that would be familiar to users of other 16-bit machines from this era, though seeing so much textual output would have been uncommon.

By default, the stock ticker is set to show prices for major tech stocks, but you can set it up to display any major symbol available in the Finnhub data stream. You can configure up to eight custom stocks and input your holdings, and the software will calculate and display your net worth in real time.

All the files are available for those eager to monitor their portfolios on a Sega, as the financial gods intended. [Mike] notes it took a little work to get this project over the line, particularly as the ESP32-C3 doesn’t support HTTPs with stock firmware. A few other hacks were needed to keep the Genesis updating the screen during HTTP queries, too.

If you have a concentrated portfolio and a spare Sega Genesis, this could be a fun retro way to keep an eye on your holdings. Alternatively, you might prefer to go the classic paper tape route.

The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good use for AI work, as [akandr] demonstrates.

The first thing you’ll have to figure out is how to take an individual BC250 APU and get it up and running. It’s effectively a full system-on-chip, combining a Zen 2 CPU with a Cyan Skillfish RDNA 1.5 GPU. However, it was originally intended to run inside a rackmount server unit rather than a standalone machine. To get it going, you’ll need to hook it up with power and some kind of cooling solution.

From there, it’s a matter of software. [akandr] explains how to get AI workflows running on the BC250 using Ollama and Vulkan, while noting useful hacks to improve performance like disabling the GUI and tweaking the CPU governor. The hardware can be used with a wide range of different models depending on what you’re trying to achieve, it just takes some careful management of the APU’s resources to get the most out of it. Thankfully, that’s all in the guide on GitHub.

We’ve already seen these AMD APUs repurposed before for gaming use. Unfortunately the word is out already  about their capabilities, so prices have risen significantly in response to demand. Still, if you manage to score a BC250 and do something cool with it yourself, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!