Ep 298: Forbidden USB-C, a Laser Glow-o-Scope, the Epoch Super Cassette Vision
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So let's see if that works.

Hello, welcome to the hacker podcast. I'm earlier .

William on Jenny list.

This is episode two ninety eight forbidden U. S, B, C, A laser glower scope and the epic super cassettes. Sion, nice to have you on the podcast.

Well, thank you very much.

The first thing in the news this week is the real go asteroid ID sample return project. And this is a really cool scientific paper. They found biological material looks like bacteria on this sample that they kept in an ultra clean, clean room that came back from the asteroid.

Real problem is looks like it's earth bacteria and so it's a really need right up packet. You should go read the scientific paper. It's basically about how impossible IT is no matter what your clean room procedures to prevent earth life from contaminated in samples that you bring back to earth.

But I can just in in my head, I just imagine these scientists from Jackson who are sitting there looking at the same, going, oh my god, you know, there's life. And I like, h yeah. Match is exactly the profile of our control here. It's our life.

Yes, I know this is something that we hacked. This is a disgust in the past with respect to space stories. And I was reminded of for many years, i've been a hamburger at time, make making my alcohol beverages.

I grew up in a small farm. And just how difficult IT is to keep bacteria out of a homebrew thing. And I can imagine that just as persistent if you have the ultimate lab equipment. So i'm sorry if that reminded me of something very close to home, but I feel their pain and having had to throw out out in entire back insider that went wrong and at least I didn't spend many billions of dollars getting those apples for sure.

What I mean in the end, I think there's so much more interested in, you know what kind of rocks of things made of and all of that. So you know the fact that there's biological contaminant is he doesn't ruin any of the science to go along with that. In fact.

of course, no, no. In fact.

if anything, get kind of augments. So it's like, oh, hey, look how hard is IT is to keep from doing this. But then if you look at the comments, everybody's pointed out that you know we've sent so many landers to mars already that I know that na tries to take incredible precautions against accident, bringing life. The other plan is especially before we've figured out if there is any or has been any there before. But man, you you just have to know there are probably earth bacteria on mars now if, well, a summing.

they can still survive. Yeah perhaps a somebody will go back to the was IT mariner landers, which which first lander .

the landing in and mariner .

somebody will go back to those in sort of a centuries time and probably find lots of colonies of life and get very excited for a minute before they can't. Pro, back to the Smith Sonia, I guess.

Yeah, the right up this is a dot org brings up the fact that NASA actually has a strain of bacteria that lives on a cleaning product that they use in one of their cleaning rooms. You know it's one of those like microbial life can find a way kind of things right?

Like there's I do remember reading a paper who probably over twenty years ago, I was talking about the specific strains of I think was bacteria, fungi that had evolved in the conditions on mor. And I suspect there probably a bundle papers come out to the international space station if they haven't already evident yeah initially that will vex my microbiologists across space programs for very long time.

Other bit of hag day news this week, we were talking about hacking the red box machines last week, and right before that podcast went live, we got a tip about a red box machine hacking Vicky. And we wrote that there's now Vicky for hacking red box machines.

Throw the links in for that in the show note another person has since then come up and said, hey, I had a Vicky exactly like this and these people may have copied IT from me and we have no idea. We we don't know whose first store can't adjudicate any of that, but I encouraged this person to head on over the comments and leave their link too. So IT may be that there's even more information out there. Then just what we've got, well.

I can say is, is somebody living on the right hand side of the atlantic. I'm sorry to be missing out on the fun.

Yeah right. Free, free, crazy machines.

Every hacked space is gna have when you just know, yeah.

I love what the comments on this one they're talking about. You know, what else could you, vin, these? Because IT really is tailor to the DVD format and maybe put components between a couple pieces of cardboard, five, five, five timers embedded in cardboard. And I could spent five, five lives for you that be .

areas almost every hacker space I have been a member of as either had a very machine, whether it's working or some of y's project which will work one day or has decided they want one. But I don't know that i've ever seen a hacker's face that actually successfully events in that you can walk up the thing and you can buy an art. We know.

But by my observation, not many people actually do. That is just where this is cool to have. So that's probably a question in there. What is the justification for actually having a vending machine in the hack space other than its cool what they're selling.

the wrong things. Space has a drink machine that they've hacked to run on their own. They have IT like an internal currency and credit system. And so if completely redone the electronics to allow you to vent off your points with IT.

I wasn't think of drink spending machines. I know more one hacks spacing has one of those that's been hacked was really just thinking the the usual I can buy a bread board or and we know or some other useful pacing hackers to.

The problem is when you're in a hacker space, there's always somebody who's gonna just give you the art we know you need, right?

Well, there is that yes, is usually made in my hacker space.

Hey, does anybody have a blank and somebody i'll come up with IT. It's kind of creating A A stocking problem when it's much easier to just say, hey, land mean is cable but I know what you mean, but there so tempting, right? Like it's an awesome piece of functional .

machine well .

and that brings us to what's that sound.

This week, I actually have one Jenny, that is exactly tailed for you. This is not guarantee that you're going to guess IT correctly, but let let's give IT a look.

okay? I will give you my best shot.

Any clue? Love to be looking at this on respective analyser.

right?

If I had to guess, I would say that IT was some kind of slow down television or similar radio format, but is no one I heard before.

Not bad, not bad. It's not one i'd ever heard before either. And usually I pick the sounds knowing what the sound is.

And then I go out to listen to IT. And this one I actually stumbled on IT like, wow, that's the crazy thing i've ever heard. IT is your signal.

What's that? IT is an old school pager broadcast that used to use the bands at the very low end of the f mity band OK. And I know they did IT in germany. I don't know if they did IT in other places. Let's go look at the wikipedia.

T. I don't think we had IT in the U. K. Otherwise I recognize that because an a radio listener through entire nineteen and seventy three, two thousand. So I think if I had that, I would recover ze IT.

Wikipedia says germany in one nine hundred and seventy four, france in one nine hundred and seventy five, and switzerland one thousand nine and eighty five. And IT was running until kind of the late nineties. Those different tones you hear, IT uses them to encode, of course, different numbers.

And apparently everyone's page had its own particular I D. number. They send that out and then they send the number that you're supposed to call. But because this was way, way down at the low end of the F M. Band, whatever we could be is saying they had four channels, kind of eighty seven megahertz. H if you had a radio that would let you tune down there, you could actually, like, listen to them live as they were going off. Really fun.

What I did have a radio that, so I can only conclude that they weren't broadcast in the U. K. In the thousand. Nine hundred seventies, which evidently I missed out on a formative hacker experience if .

they were in france. I wonder if you could heard .

them from there if I had been known, the south guys being little, but but I been really a lox, which, no chance.

Well, this one brought out a bunch of germans who guessed that correctly. IT looks like what fifteen answers. This was a tough one. Like I said, I didn't know IT with fifteen answers. And of them five got IT correctly.

The winner is.

let's say so five days I got a six sided die. Let's see who wins uh to congratulations to Nicholas sounds like the euro signal the soundtrack of my childhood when I was playing space lego in the ladies, tuning the radio to the end of the scale, talking awesome.

congratulating Nicholas. One of the other .

right answers actually comes from another seller who did a really need hack that we covered last week.

which was the glow in the dark. H. H.

the dice did not favour of him, but sounds like page notification sounds. I remember at being broadcast around eighty eight megahertz at the end of the F. M.

Radio band is about the right answer. Like I said, i'd never heard IT before. Sometimes even I learned something. And so congrats, nicolas. I will shoot your email, get your t 恤 t size and get you in the mail shortly。 Everyone else thought there.

Stay tuned next week when we will play another sound and you'll have your chance to guess, all right, well, let's start up the hacks. This week, I wanted to start up with angers from makers muse wood. An indexing feature benefit your next inge design.

And the indexing bit is a really neat trick that he throws in at the end of this video. But honestly, this is a ten minute video showing you everything you need. Didn't know if you're three d printing about designing your own built in hinges, and it's just an absolute, absolutely fantastic.

He starts off with what he calls the bud hinge. And this is, you know, the one you're thinking of. When you think of a hinge, it's got of a of A U shape bit and on a piece that fits in there and a pen going through IT, the one that people usually do printing place.

His first point is that often just leaving these as holes and driving a screw through IT is much more reliable. IT makes the tolerance is easier, and IT makes IT so that you can back the through out, take the thing apart, and we screw IT back together later. It's funny to hear him, a three d printer maniacs, a guy who pushes crazy three d printing designs to be saying, don't think so hard about the printing place hinge, but there you have IT.

He then starts to talk about the printing place hinge, as we know, IT, and has a couple really need tricks, including using a flat bottom for the pin, because IT makes that bridging that IT has to do easier because it's got a longer area. If you think about a circular pen, right, IT has to run one thread and then two threads on top of that and three on top. That's kind of asking for group. And instead, if you just shoot like a flat bottom across IT helps a lot. And similarly, when you're printing the whole, there's an old red rap trick where you make a tear drop at the top so you don't have that really flat overhang at the top, which also .

is hard print.

So it's a really cute couple small design tips to how to printing place hines Better. But then he suggests a couple other different hinch designs that are much more robust than don't worry as much about the tolerance of your three printer, like a snap hinge, which is really cool. It's basically just got a ball knobs on the outside of one piece that fit until little the holes on the piece that IT snaps into.

And the nice thing about that is that, you know, if you taper the walls on the nobs and on the holes, they kind of automatically snugged themselves together. And if you can handle IT be being removable, which sometimes is a benefit IT definitely makes for a Better fitting hinge. And I think that's really cool too.

He talks about living hinges, which are the, you know, you just fold the plastic that kind of never works very well with 3d prints because the plastic fatigue pretty quickly。 But then the last one, and this is the bit that got the name for our post, is this indexing pins, where you make the pin and center have a rectangle profile. And even though the whole around IT is basically circular, but then you can kind of cut a slot out so that the rectangle can fold in there, so you can get a hinge that folds, but you can also pull IT out and IT locks into place.

And he demos this by making an awesome, cute little go pro try part that you can fold up and then unfold, lock into place, which is kind of cool. He also adds his a tired angle hinge to this one design just took show off, I guess. But what he doesn't even mention, and this totally made me crazy, is the go pro hinge, which, you know, he's attaching a go pro camera to IT and that one is this, you know how he's got those kind of .

interlocking fingers, fingers. Yeah, yeah.

And you tighten IT together with a boat that runs through. And that's a fantastic one to have in your 3d printing arsenal as well。

definitely. My microphones sitting in front of IT at the moment is on my three printed, time designed stem that is all go.

He's one of the first designs I ever shared publicly was a fan shout for repap printers that use the go bro hinge because, yes, it's just exactly what you need when you need something that you can bend around and locking place.

I might have to hand back my golden rancher for this and be what's forced to walk away in shame. I think printing place is an incredibly cool thing you can do with the threat printer. And we seen some wonderful three d printed items that come out of IT.

Probably the first thing I am way back, sort of ten years or more ago, fifteen years ago was the first time I saw somebody did a print in place. You nobody, the murban st. Strip gears that would work, and you can only little in place.

And they're beautiful. And since then, we've even more intricate devices commodity. And these hinges are brilliant example. Now here's where i'm going to have to hand back my golden rancher. I think sometimes our community does print in place for the sake of IT. And maybe it's something to do with being a black miss kid, but I like to make the part separately and assemble them because then i'll probably gets a Better result with something intricate that doesn't lessen my seeing printing in places cool, but sometimes you just need to do what you need to do to make something that works. Can you tell me, apart in the comments.

the whole series of like articulated animal things know lets you do things that you couldn't do otherwise. And so there is definitely, there is definitely a case for but you're not wrong. Like the first five years, six years of people doing in in place hangers who is all just .

because .

you could it's just so cool. And I think actually that something that Angus starts off this video kind of swimming upstream against, right? He does say you is easier to get Better talent. Sometimes if you just run a pin through IT, get a piece of metal run IT through the middle like you should.

And you know, I do have some print of opportunities. Nineteen eighties console world is a japanese console that came out just after the uh, intended entertainment system in the same of aster system and was meant to be the next big thing from its manufacturing, but completely missed the mark by simply not being as good as the two big cells ninety eighties that we've heard of.

I'm talking about the e pox super cassez vision, which was a console that if IT had been released two years early, I would want floor with everything. I had multicolor sprites. I think you had unlimited sprites first scandal. And I move sprites around.

But the rest of its capabilities will wife ly, inadequate compared to the attended, all the saker in particularly had a soundcheck which was taken from handheld game, you know, the little eight, late one thousand nine hundred and seventy handheld games that make beats and booths. And when the competition had full synthesized as ended, wow, li bad, it's always interesting to see the dead ends in the a world of consoles because they're plenty of them. The biggest console, which was just the cassel vision, was a big seller in the early eighties in japan.

And overnight they went from being leader, the markets, to being nowhere ever behind. Cigaret intended the previous council, the concept, vision, not the super concept vision. SHE quite interesting, its own right.

We used to console being a computer into which he plugged a ROM. Or in the case of some of the latest snail games, the rome actually did not have some D, S, P, other chips in IT. But the cash vision looked like that. But in fact, each cassette had a program micro controller.

In effect, they're taken the guts of the late ninety seventy TV games, which had moved on from being a sort of specific logic state machine for pong and the like to being a microcontroller and the'd stuck different microcontrollers with different games into cartridge. So in fact, every cartridge contained its own N C mp d, seven, seven, four, a Michael controller. So both those consoles were councils I never heard of. And with sort of fascinating sort of foot notes in the world of one, nine hundred and eight console. So that called my eye.

That is a crazy machine. I've never seen this ever before in my life.

I think if you don't, he wouldn't have.

But of course, someone comes up in the comments. Stagg p, stop trivial information. This game console had the first dragon ball theme game on .

an impressive see IT .

must have been really interesting back then, when all of this was kind of the wild west, right? Like everybody was rushing to put micro controllers into a plastic box and have a the video console, I I love the idea of having the full game on the plugin cartage.

Funny enough, in that period where I grew up, we kind of missed out on the console thing because we had an enormous home computer boom, which was LED at the lower end by second life since layer with these exercise one. And then the spectrum, which really meant that IT was later in the decade with the cigarette in hindu, when consoles really took over. Because having a proper well is IT much as a spector is a proper computer.

Having a proper computer that was simply cheaper than buying in the three, two, six hundred or something. So I kind of missed out on this completely barwon up in the U. K. Just having a slightly different path through a home competing.

That's cool. Next stop, bit luni. A laser with mirrors makes A C R T like display.

And I don't know what to think about. This one is such a beautiful and product, right? Yeah.

it's a IT.

Looks like it's intended to look like a little scope. It's got a curved screen made out of three d printed glow in the dark filament that responds to being hit by A U. V.

laser. And then the back, he has two step motors trying to flip mirrors around like their govs. And shoot the laser out at the screen in kind of true, bit loni fashion.

He takes this idea and pushes IT as far as he possibly can. And the result is is three d printed. Its absolutely lovely. I saw this and i've played around with these are lighting systems before, and they have those stepless galvus that go incredibly fast.

And i've seen a bunch of hacker projects like this where they try to do the same thing with step motors and they're just ridiculously slow in comparison and they've got the steps in them. And there's this one beautiful scene where he's developing this and he gets IT to finally like, draw square and he's like, so stoke, he's like it's a square and you can see the steps from each individual step in there. But then he gets IT to do microsoft, slows IT down so the as enough control over IT and gets a fantastically good looking result out of IT. I think, yeah, have to say he plugged at IT so hard that if he made something that shouldn't look this good, look this good. And I just absolutely love .

that every time I see a project of his y boxes out of the park and this but empty here, there is, as I said, simply be useful .

for sure. It's totally cheating because he likes to play around with vector graphics and stuff. So he has this whole like backlot of experience to build on. And so he just like shoots up some cool looking images on IT. And but the the end product has like an entire menu system.

It's got everything is just it's such a cool little project that absolutely makes you want to build that and you could it's pretty straightforward, like he just uses an off the shelf pulu style plug in cnc multi access stepper driver. You can pick these up on ebay for like ten box and it's a regular laser pointer and it's a couple mirrors that he cut up out of. Scrappy, headlined around like this is totally something you could do.

You'd have to source the glow in the dark P, L, A to print out the screen with, but that's really about IT. The little b nc. Jack he puts on the front are just like such a nice touch. Yeah.

I like the way that the screen is curved. He didn't actually have to do that. He could have just pointed IT flat, but he he's gone to the effort to make IT curved, to reduce the distortion an, and to just make IT look makes he looked like a television .

to shirt bit. Luny ends this video saying, don't worry, if you want me to order some proper galvus i've done that already and that's going to be my next my next tag coming up and i'm super stock to see that .

trip is waiting to bring IT to hack the year up.

He's coming oh yeah, i'll have to see IT in the flash.

The next one touches on a peace I route as a bit of a run a while back in an O, C. IT concerns a fly back high votis generators. Now, very easy.

Where is to get hold of a high voltage transformer? Is the fly beat transformer from A T. V set. There are a lot of circuits out there which claim to be a fly back converter because they use a fly back transformer, but in fact, they're just driving the fair rites of this transformer with a free running, isolated with the pair enormous power transistors and dissipating vast amounts of heat, and the not a fly back converter at all.

Now, to explain what a fly back converter is, imagine that the core of a transformer is a store for magnetic tic field. And if you build up the current in the primary, the transformer very slowly, you build up an enormous semantic based field. And then if you can have the current, very suddenly that magnetics field collapses very quickly, and you ve got a huge pulse of energy.

And that's the so called fly back, is called a fly back, because IT was origin used in TV circuitry, and the collapse of the magnetic field happened to the spot, flew back across the screen. But it's a particular type of switch mode converter, which is designed to very efficiently make high voltage es without placing, wasting power and heat in the transistors and stuff or heating up the core by saturating IT. And it's been a bugler of mine for ages that they're only social fly back secrets.

We don't fly back at all. And along comes are gonna call alex longo, who has finally made up five back driver for T, V. Five back transformers.

And the waste on IT is he used a switchman passed chip, a texas instruments, U, C, three, eight, four, four, which is when i've come across before. That seems relatively conventional, driving the vibrate transformer through an igbt. I have to say that itself is interesting.

I would have probably nick to fly back transit from an old telly, but that's just me. The interesting thing is he's driving at twenty five killer urt as heming. It's a television one and not one out of a BGM monitor or or something.

I'd expect the transformer to be happy around fifteen or sixteen kilo hoot. I cannot off the top of my head remember the frequency for rentier c, but for pilots, fifteen point sixty five. I'd be interested to know whether twenty five killers is actually efficient.

But with those transforms on just my sort of part nerd interest there. But it's so nice to see an actual fly back board for driving a fly back transformer. Uh, so I on this one, and this made me happy, is the heartfelt right to somebody who grew up fixing all televisions from dumpsters.

My exact comes from, I don't actually know his name, but he is the guy behind stargate system. This is D I Y pipe inspector goes where no bot has gone before, starts off with a difficult story of home ownership is parents sewage pipe is blocked, and they sent the company out to clean IT and they do. And it's blocked up again a year later, and they sent him out again, and its blocked up a year again later.

And the reason is the pipe splits and the place that splits IT splits in two. One of them goes off at one hundred and twenty degree angle, so IT takes a rather steep curve. And the pipe inspection company, when they come out there, they run a camera on a cable.

And IT has a blind spot exactly where this tight band is, if you imagine, you know, trying push a spring through a pipe, right? And IT takes a little band, but then there's an even steeper band. The spring is gonna follow the radius of the outer band no matter what you do.

And I just never saw where the blockage was. Of course, the solution is to build your own little pipe inspection robots on threads that can drive in there. And I love this because this has the the weirdest constrains on IT little robot has to be waterproof.

IT has to send video back, so IT needs some kind of comes IT has to be small enough and Angel enough that I can make this hundred and twenty degree turn when IT comes to the right place in the pipe. And so those are kind of his constrains. He'd already had a small wheel robot that was almost the right size, and he converts IT to tracks.

In this video, there is a bunch of neat details here. It's got a razer pie zero in IT and a camera. He waterproof the thing.

It's got an e internet cable that connects IT back to his real computer back outside of the pipe. But I think is cool. He runs power, using power over the internet to this little thing.

So this one cable does IT all. Then he drives IT in there. And, you know, low behold, this closed off hundred and twenty degree blind, depending x is exactly what's been giving him the problem.

He then goes in there and traces IT with absolutely the scarious super cleaner, homemade super cleaner adapter thing i've ever seen, which is just a bunch of links of chain fun around on a spinning stick, a absolute nightmare. But he goes and gets rid of you all of the crowd. D, that had built up in the dead end and then goes expLoring in the rest of the pipes.

If you are a little bit cozy when you see these things, try not to think of IT being a sewage pipe. Other than that, it's an absolutely beautiful, very purpose built little rover build. And I just love the idea of sending these things into places you can't Normally see like he's testing IT out at an early part of the video in his kitchen and running and underneath the floor boards under like is under his dishwasher and stuff like that.

I would be particularly worried that I would break down and become a fresh blockage in the pipe. But yes, it's a beautiful ly bet machine.

I guess you could pull IT out by the theater net cable unless that's what broke right now. You have two problems. Excuse me, you have a robot stuck in your sewage pipe.

Yeah, i'm sure that would be a drain inspection and cleaning engineer with a taking a tale to tell. There was a story this week that tickled a fascination I have with integrated circuits from the first decade of mass market commercial integrated circuits. And there is a certain number, I mean, the five, five, five, or the seven, four, one, or the seventy three volt regulator, which has survived despite being massively outdated or superceded.

Another favor ever, I think I wrote up a peace about IT, is the seven four hundred quad gate. Now of course, the original seven four hundred be supercede ded by many chips that replicated. So you'll get a seven, four hundred and all sorts away and wonderful logic things.

But there's another one which you'll find in all sorts of places because it's just simply useful. And that's the tail for three one. If you haven't seen a tail for three one, it's a little three three terminal device looks like a transistor, but SHE a voltage reference is an adjustable voltage reference.

You can think of IT as a adjustability and a diode, which is usually how it's featured in in a psych diagram. And there's there's a guy, the any matic I called Kevin, he doesn't never signing, who has done a an investigation of the tail for three one. He sort of goes in how he uses IT for all sorts of places where you might use another more modern components.

And i'm totally within here. It's a very versatile part. The thing I like about all three, one, if you don't like the current database from T I, is very boring.

IT just talks about IT even use both reference one of early shit for IT, one from probably the nineties or before. You'll find the original day sheet, which is okay. It's got an old meter.

It's got all the power by things. But then of all things, it's got an audio amplifier, a switch, more supply wearing up. Part latter, if you care about the audio amplify, its square, old fashioned circuit being used in series with the primary of a hints transformer that drives alone, painting speaker. But, but somebody, when they were designing this circuit, writing the data, he thought, hey, I can use this is not amplify. I just love that the kind of thing you no longer see on data sheet.

But anyway, if you have the name for an accurate voltage reference, uh, take check out this article and if you're looking for a til force one to play with, and you can be able to order 的 for miles。 However, if you open up, uh, most slightly older P, C power lies will have one in somewhere. So then you go get get out a day. So dering.

I love the T, L, four, thirty one. It's funny. I actually wrote up an article ages ago oed to the T L. Four thirty one. Yeah, I throw the links to the show notes for you and everyone else can sure if also does a nice are down of one throw that into IT is like I like you say, it's a tremendously visible part.

I never understood this programmable scene dial thing for me it's much easy to just think about what the thing actually does, which is, you know IT compares two two point five votes and if it's higher IT conduct and if it's lower IT doesn't conduct, you know, that's the scene action, right? And programmable means you can put a voltage divider. They are on the two point five part and you know, knocked your five vote threshold down to two point five to fit IT. Or you, if you want me to turn on at nine votes, you by whatever that is in your divider string, like it's always been a strange to call that as inner is always been really kind of.

well, kind of .

strange to me. And a bunch of people shop in the comments. And gree, what I think of IT as and what can share if shows IT to be by having a look at the die is exactly what IT is, right? It's it's a bang gap reference and a comparator.

And then IT compares IT to the voltage spit in that kind of defies that a little bit in in my mind. But IT also makes you realized just how useful the thing is. Actually, the circuit I pointed to in my article was a all in one battery charger that uses IT to bring a lithium iron false fate battery up to its charge voltage in the same circuit.

Lights up in L, E, D. When the charge has been reached, right? When it's charging, the battery IT robs the L, D of its current, basically.

And then once it's done, boom. L, D lights up three parts. I think four parts may be counting a couple resisters to set the charge at the end of charge voltage. And that's IT really sweet, really cool apart. And like you said, you can make an amplifier out of IT.

Yeah, i'm not sure i'd like to make the switching converter though. I suspect that would produce vast amounts of R, F, in places he would not want IT .

back in the day you could get away with that. My first quick act this week comes from l calm, tough home brew foss for essence detector looks for glow in everyday objects. This is on one hand, a really simple idea. It's, uh, bunch U V L E D and a photo dial in a light proof metal.

Can you trying the light on IT and you look through the photo dial and see how IT glows? This puts some really nice low noise circuitry, gives them a sensor that can tell kind of in a millisecond resolution how much things glow after they get hit by uv and goes around looking for household objects that you can put in there. And of course, finds only the usual suspects glow in the dark things.

It's A A, but it's really nice because IT gives this beautiful kind of exponential decay, even over the shortest time scale on whatever, on common globe things. Fun, fun project next up, Donald, pp road, a piece for us. Your undocumented project may also baffle people someday.

He's ripping on the georgia county historical society in maryland had this machine and they we're specular what IT is and that looks like it's a particular kind of biscuit do rolling machine. But I love to take here that you know, if you've also fail to document your projects, maybe someday a historical society will be looking at the thing. What is that thing? And last up on the eating screen combined with animal dial, is epic win.

This is just a fun little hack. If you think about those old school analog like leaders or whatever, where you have a little red needle that goes back and forth. The background is usually a piece of paper with the scale written on IT.

Here he replaces that with e ink so that you can have the display configure in what units is displaying in or whatever the dial mechanism is still analogue e, but the background scale is on e ink. I just to get such a funny idea and such a blend of the two, you could have this be analog dial meter for anything you want, and you can change IT on the fly. Not the need I have, but the need I want.

Okay, my first quick hack is piece on, I picked up friend, mind, dominic morrow, talking about how to get started in later cutting. It's interesting talk. And you should definitely watch IT because a lot of us, we see lays cutters in our hacker spaces, but because they are quite a complex place to get to your extraction and the many of us don't have one at home.

And he has tried to diversify IT and telling, how can get started. We all know that the hacking camps, we have camps in the summer. They have lots and lots talks, and they record them.

And sometimes they can take them a very long time to get them all edited. I don't blame them that they volunteer run. It's a huge task.

Very pleased to see the electronic atic field now at the moment, uploading a whole loaded ones from last summer. So keeping I on that, if you we want to find any talks, I know I will. The next one was one that rather interested me.

And those I have made printed circuit. I've all made mistakes. We've got the wrong footprint, all the footprint the wrong way round.

Also, like that, few among us have not, at some point, how to do a rework or a second spin of the board, and it's gratified, find that can happen to the best of us, the most accomplished electronic designers. And for that, I D give you the apple L. C.

Three, which was a macintosh from the early ninety ninety, actually. Remember, I worked on the site that had a whole load of these, is rather nicer, designed little series of them that used the same cases. You opened up like a pizza box, and inside all the parts were laid out like A T, V.

Dinner, is just very well designed. But the L, C, three, which memory serves me, had a sixty eight o thirty. I'm sure people in the governments will correct me if that's wrong.

I had three pastors for the supply rails. I think they were plus twelve, plus five and minus five. And there was a legend that apple had got one of them the wrong way around.

What the apple engineer had done is that put the three footprints next to each other all the same way round, with the negative side going to the ground, as you would expect, and then hook them up to the supply lines and walked away. And of course, one would hope, to the minus five line. And so that capacity was the long round, and on pretty much every mark l sea three at leaks.

Now the interesting thing that courses that if every mak l three had a leaky capacity on the line five outline, how come every mark L C three or they worked? I remember using mak L C three, and they were, they were the fastest computer the day. But that they worked.

I suspect what was probably happening there was that the month five outline had enough capacity, so where to before medical smooth. So the circuitry wasn't too compromised by IT. And presumably the failure mode of the capacity was something that didn't grab too much current and pull IT down and didn't otherwise kill the computer.

But my entire life have been told that if you connect a around, around, very bad things, apparently very good things, in this case, finally, a very nice little pieces, three printing kind of couples in nicely to the unlock matter with the 1 paper display behind IT。 If you've ever had to mount one of those little low LED screens on the front panel, you'll know that cutting out the hole for IT can be rather difficult unless you have some cnc machine to do a perfect hole. And somebody came up with a beautiful hack for IT, which was to make a 3d printed enclosure for IT， which mounted a very similar way to a outstart panel meter, which you only have to draw a relatively easy single round hole, which you can do with A A drill press or similar. I rather like that. I don't know when i'm gonna use IT, but I know if I have a project that uses one of those displays, I will certainly look very hunger at this particular thing and most of them like quick tax.

And that brings us to our camp, this articles. These are long form pieces written by a fantastic hagee writing staff. This week I wanted to pick area of over S U S, B C for hackers reusing cables.

And I to pick this because I have been doing a bunch of cool, deep dives into the U. S. B. C, where he goes into the signal protocols. And if you want to use the power delivery, how the cables have tags and them negotiate with the device to say how much current they're capable of Carrying, and then the devices talk to each other and say what voltage they want down the line, and it's got active signal thing. So even if you're not asking for an esoteric voltage, the device still has to be able to talk back to the host that forget all that.

This is a really need look at, just using the cables as what they are, cables, because USB c cables are kind of ubiquitous, and we can get USB sockets everywhere. And they make just a great simple cable if you're willing to reuse flash, completely abuse the U. S.

space. And red, if you need five or six lines between here, there. And I really like that idea, and I can't believe we don't see more people abusing IT.

And then I thought, oh, but wait, we have way back when and I remember being absolutely appalled by this. The cardio bar from bar, which camp was that twenty nineteen CS communication camp, was using the extra lines in U. S, B, C.

To hook up to, uh, sensors. IT was the the badge had the functionality where I could do heart beat detection, and they were actually hooking up those gel pad chest sensors and ARM sensors to the extra wires in IT. And I at the time I was like, this is totally wrong.

This is an abuse. And now i'm one hundred percent behind IT. I think it's absolutely fantastic. And yeah, so i've come around. But artie's point is that some of these cables are meant to Carry, you know lots of current.

And so if you need five, six or you know two hundred and forty, what it's amazing you can push that much through these little things there. IT is you've got the cable, you've got a connector that's meant to connect to IT. It's all there for you.

Just cut them up and use them. I just think that such a lovely, sweet hacking idea that it's fantastic. That is something that i'm probably can end up using because you know those big pin headers back, you can make your own special cable of those pin hatters, but is just stupid U S, B C everywhere.

Lovely SHE ends up with passing HDMI over U S, B, C cables and some other dirty hacks, which point out the other thing that you c cables are good at, which is some of them are designed for extremely high band with data transmission. So on one hand, you've got, you have five or six connectors if you need them, you've got high band with if you need that, and you ve power, you've got the ability to transmit a pretty reasonable amount of power over the cables too, if that's what you look at. And all three of these, plus the fact that you've probably got a bunch of you spc cables in your junk box right now, makes this a really cool idea.

Maybe we is proved the famous X K C D cartoon about fifteen competing standards. wrong. The new standards does do everything.

I will know a bunch of the people in the comments do come in and say, this isn't U S, B. C. anymore.

And I you mentioned that in the article, you totally want to label them if it's not USB c, you want to label this otherwise. Because the U. S, B, C standard has this negotiation thing.

They are meant to be flipped right upside down. And that's all done tonics. That's all done with multiplexers on the device. And so it's not like the wires magically reorient themselves or anything.

And so if you're using IT in a way that is flip safe, you really need to mark the top in the bottom of this thing. And you know, R A has all of these complex solutions. I would just take like a White sharpie and mark the White side top on the socket you're plugging IT into and up on the cable. Just remember red to plug in, right? I know .

somebody in command who produce A U S, B, C device from hell that if you put the cable in one way, IT appears, I believe, as a disservice. And he put IT in the other way as a cereal. what? Which is end less fun.

I have to say, if people are complaining that this isn't U, S, B, C, they are, of course, right. IT isn't U. S.

B. C. But they maybe should look again at the definition of the word hacker. This is the essence king.

absolutely. And but use .

your USB tables however you want.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Now, my hacker day colleagues will all know that i've suffered from audio ic shoes on my linux install in the past, because every week we have, I have the editors meeting, and frequently I have appeared either with no audio, with far too much audio, or I can barehead them. And this week took a look at linux audio, which I hope i'm not going to try the toes if I say it's a bit of a mess.

There are many different competing standards and pieces of software designed to make sense of IT. And obviously, for some people, that works very, very well. In fact, the really annoying thing is on my main machine, IT doesn't work.

But on the machine I take around portable with me. When I get around the to hackers basin hack camps, IT works perfectly. So that's a very interesting read. If you two are suffering from the same linux audio problems as I am, you can either get angry and buy yourself a windows machine, in which case to work, or our soldier on with open source, and hope that something will get best with the software situation.

the future I disagree and time clearly. I find linux audio to be absolutely fantastic and lovely. And I think your pipeline is part of IT. Actually, I used to use jack think so.

What kind of brings us up in the article there? There is a higher archy also is the lowest level driver that talks directly the sound card. And above that, there's kind of some user space drivers in the linux sound world.

One of them that was aimed at look latency and music applications was called jack. I don't use IT anymore, but IT still exists. IT follows the kind of patch bay style idea that is, you can take the audio from here and plug IT into there and split IT into this stream and that dream.

And that's kind of what pipe wire took over there was. For a while, there was pulse audio. And if you hate linux audio, and linux audio utilities are, here's my rant.

It's Paulas dio, for i've had problems with post audio like you could never believe. And so I always just run everything on jack, because IT was rock solid, if crazy, of tools to can figure. But at least IT always worked or straight on the sound card itself using altha.

And these days I am totally happy with pipe wire. You can do all the same tricks. IT pretends to be a pulse audio server as well.

So all of your software that wants to talk to pulse audio can be completely happily fooled into working with pipeline e. And then if you want to do something, you have kind of the flexibility that you did with jack before. You can root the sound from here to there and from there to there.

And you know, every once in a while, like you run into these websites where they won't let you record dio from a video or something like that. I remember having to do that using funny also conflicts crp back in the day. And IT was horrible.

You have to make a perfect device and do that in the loop back. IT was awful. There are like happy guy. Little interfaces make doing that absolutely simple these days with, among other things, pipe wire. So i'm as happy as I could be with the state of linux audio right now.

I think I have been down every rabbit hole of getting pipeline to work all the interfaces and tweak tools. And I run a fairly vanilla majo linux distribution and is on the thing, I think you would work. But for some reason I have had nothing but pain on this machine.

Everything else is great. I ve used linux for a couple of decades now, and I been at first install the linux distroyed the early nineties for god sake, but everything else is great. But some reason, linux idea I was a world of pain as far as i'm concerned.

When you say laptops and all the IBM thinkpad S I had one, they had some crazy idea in their head that IT was a good idea to have the microphone. They have one headphone input on IT. And IT does double duty as a microphone input, and IT does some kind of on the fly switching between the two of those. And until people had kind of reverse engineer, that whole mess like that was a disaster on my old laptop.

In this particular case, some I I don't use the building channel on this laptop is external, some card and big and mix, but I am still in pain on this one. So proving case you needed IT that hacked day writers are not gurus. When IT comes to everything we write about, we have probably worse problems than many readers do in some cases.

Well, that's IT for this week's hack day podcast. Thanks very much for listening. If you want to follow the links, head on over to hacket outcome splash podcast and if you see anything cool or do anything cool, should just A N tips at hacked day dot com and until .

next a sleep hack repeat. Okay, well, let's give this try. See what happens. Okay, i'm ready going .

to the first thing, huh? I just sometimes you just got to know when to hold the no interface to and i'm gonna take my next tag here. What is he got if you put .

them around something?