TechyMagThings

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,” but if you need to plug in the CHS values yourself, well, it’ll feel just like old times. Seeing is believing, so check it out in the demo video embedded below.

Though the custom PCB has a USB-C connector, and the USB-C standard could provide enough power for ye olde spinning rust drives, [JJ] didn’t include any power delivery with ATABoy. If you’re using it with a desktop, you can use the PSU in the box; MOLEX hasn’t changed. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll need another power supply– perhaps this USB-C powered benchtop unit.

If you’re using a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC, go ahead and skip USB entirely–the GIPO can do PATA IDE.

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.

In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock. Sometimes known as “ceiling clocks” or “night clocks,” these devices often have a regular clock visible as well as a way to project the time. In the old days, this was often an image of a translucent analog clock lit up by light bulbs. In the modern era, it is almost always either LEDs or an LCD with a halogen backlight. Of course, there are many variations. A clock might use numbers on a rotating drum with a lamp behind it, for example.

Development

It isn’t hard to imagine someone putting a pocket watch in a magic lantern as a prototype. In general, some bright light source has to pass through a condenser lens. The light then travels through the LCD or translucent clock face. Finally, a projector lens expands the image.

We couldn’t find much about the actual history of old projection clocks outside of [Roger’s] defunct website. But if you can project an image and build a clock, all you need is the idea to combine them.

Teardowns

Want to get one and tear it open to see how it works? You don’t have to since [Soudnmisen] and [svetnovinek.cz] already did that for you, as you can see in the videos below.

Of course, what you project doesn’t have to be just the time. We’ve seen clocks that can project the weather, for example. But, usually, all you need in the middle of the night is the time.

DIY

Clocks are always a fun project, and a projection clock is certainly in the realm of a homebrew project. You could use a lot of methods to form the clock face, or, like [OSO POLAR MOVIES] did in the video below, just shine a light on your analog clock. Sure, that’s cheating, but it is certainly a hack.

If you prefer, try an LCD. Or a VFD. If you want to go analog and can’t put together a translucent clock face, try making a clock face from a mirror. You can remove the marks and numbers so they don’t reflect, and then use normal clock hands, which will block light just fine. You’ll just have to reverse the clock movement to run backwards, but that’s easy, too.

How about you? What strange method would you use to draw the time on the ceiling? A laser and a galvo come to mind. A tiny CRT? Then again, you could just mount a giant display on your ceiling. That’s how they did it at a Kentucky library. Let us know your plans in the comments, and when you have it done, send us a tip.

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 trying to decode the output.

The printf function can even play tic-tac-toe. If you think considering printf as Turing-complete is weird, we wouldn’t disagree. But we also think it isn’t the weirdest thing we’ve seen, either.

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 breaking point. This involves pumping water into a few test blocks until they fail, using the test rig that you can see above.

First the big GPU water block was tested, with the acrylic version breaking at around 8-9 bar, while the glass plate shattered at around 5 bar. The failure mode was also interesting, with the glass plate shattering into fragments, while the two acrylic plates tested failed in a completely different location and manner.

A smaller water block with glass window failed at about 10 bar, demonstrating mostly that smaller glass windows are a lot sturdier. Effectively glass windows in water cooling loops are viable, and they also do not suffer from e.g. discoloration, but you do give up a big chunk of your safety margin if your water cooling loop suffers a major pressurization event. Which of course should never happen, but we’re definitely looking forward to the upcoming field trials of these new water blocks.

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 to launch, but sending humans into space isn’t the sort of thing you can cut corners on.

Well, you’d think so at least. This week NASA also released a scathing report detailing the multitude of technical issues that came up during the 2024 test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. While astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually made it back home safely aboard a SpaceX Dragon, the space agency has still categorized it as a Type A mishap — their highest incident classification and the same rating given to the losses of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.

On the subject of companies we love to hate, a recent post by Brian Merchant on his blog Blood in the Machine (awesome band name, called it) points out the precipitous rise in Flock attacks. That is, folks are taking matters into their own hands and destroying the surveillance devices all over the US. Now Hackaday certainly isn’t condoning the destruction of anyone’s property, but we definitely appreciate the rebellious cyberpunk vibe.

Before you go out hunting for Flocks, keep in mind that at least one person has caught a charge already. In fact Jefferey Sovern picked up thirteen charges, as that’s how many Flock cameras he managed to bag before the law caught up to him. According to reports, he also admitted to “keeping some of the wiring, batteries and solar panels taken from the cameras.” Sounds like Jeff would fit in just fine around these parts.

Looking for some new wheels? Got a handy source of hydrogen? If so, you might be in luck. According to CarBuzz, the resale value of Toyota’s Mirai has absolutely cratered. When they were sitting on the lot a new Mirai would have cost you a bit more than $50,000, but on the second-hand market you can get last year’s model for as little as $15,000. If you’re not too picky, you can get one even cheaper. We did a little searching of our own, and found a 2021 Mirai with less than 40K miles for just $9,000. That’s an insane price for a mid-size luxury car, but of course it doesn’t really matter how cheap the car is if you can’t find anywhere to fill the thing up.

Finally, the folks at F-Droid have sounded the alarm about some concerning changes Google has planned for Android. As we first covered back in October, anyone looking to develop applications for the world’s most popular mobile operating system will soon have to register with Google through a process which is still not entirely clear. Although the search giant has hinted that the system will feature some special consideration for students and hobbyists, F-Droid isn’t convinced. Until there is more transparency, they are urging developers and Android users to push back via keepandroidopen.org.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

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 ESP32 LoRa module which is set up to publish messages out on the Meshtastic communications channel. A second module is connected to the WiFi at the house which is communicates with his Home Assistant server.

Integrating Meshtastic devices into Home Assistant can be pretty straightforward thanks to the various integrations already available, but there is some configuration to get these specific modules working as an alarm. One of the pins on the remote module had to be set up to watch the light bar, and although sending the alarm message out when this triggered worked well, the received signal never passed through to Home Assistant until [GreatScott!] switched to using the RadioLib library an an MQTT integration instead. But with perhaps more configuration than he planned for out of the way, [GreatScott!]’s alarm is up and running. Meshtastic projects often balloon into more than we had originally planned though, in more ways than one. You can follow along as our own [Tom Nardi] attempts to connect all of New Jersey with this new protocol.

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-reinforced polyurethane belt. Although with the Pinion gearbox the inability to use a derailleur gearing system is no big deal, [Tristan] found that the ‘zero maintenance’ part of the belt was not true for less hospitable roads

A big issue was that of abrasive dust, which created a very noisy coating on the belt that’d have to be regularly cleaned off with precious water, or by having silicone lubricant sprayed on the belt. Even with all that care he found that the belt would snap after about 8,000 km, well below the rated endurance.

When it came to super-sticky mud, called peanut butter mud for good reasons, he found that chains also cope much better with this, as the mud will just squeeze out of the chain and be forced off the sprocket, whereas the belt will happily keep compacting the mud onto the contact surfaces, increasing belt tension and requiring constant cleaning to not become hopelessly stuck.

The Utah breakdown also showed why these belts are actually very fragile: the replacement belt had been packed away folded-up for a few months at that point in the luggage, and during storage the carbon fibers had become compromised to the point where the belt just snapped after a few minutes of use. A metal chain will happily be stored away for as long as you can keep it away from corrosion, and fold up very compactly.

Another awesome feature of roller chains is that they’re super-modular, allowing you to carry spare links and such with you for in-the-field repairs, while even the most remote bicycle store in any country can help you out with maintenance and repairs, unlike the special and highly custom belts that need to be shipped in by courier.

Of all the bicycle technologies that [Tristan] has used, it seems that only this drive belt has been an outright disappointment. The sealed gearbox would seem to be a massive improvement over finicky derailleurs, and hydraulic brakes are reliable and common enough that they haven’t been an issue so far.

His conclusion is that bicycle drive belts are fine if you do city driving, where they probably will last the rated kilometers, but they rapidly fall apart in even slightly adverse conditions.