Hardware Archive
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Having used a wide range of field device communications busses from simple 4-20mA, classic serial busses like UART and Modbus, and more modern CAN bus, native USB, and Ethernet options I’m always playing with different transports and protocols to see what solutions make sense in my grab-bag of designs for hardware projects. I first became aware of Single Pair Ethernet when I was mindlessly browsing Sparkfun’s new products announcements a while ago, but didn’t jump in because I felt the real utility was the ability to power devices over the same cable. More than a year later, Sparkfun’s Single Pair Ethernet Design Challenge gave me the excuse to create the hardware I originally wanted, offering a power budget that can handle non-trivial hardware with data rates to match. Some light reading for the weekend.
The computer on Keegan McNamara’s desk is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The machine sits on a light wood table, bathed in the sunlight coming into the second floor of McNamara’s Los Angeles house. McNamara, tall and blonde in jeans and a light khaki Carhartt jacket, walks over to the desk, sits down, and reaches over to hit the power button. Then he pauses. He forgot something. He digs into his pants pocket, pulls out his keys, picks a silver one, sticks it into a cylinder just to the right of the computer’s 8-inch screen, and turns. A light on the left side of the device turns red. Then McNamara reaches up and flips a silver switch just above the keyhole, the lights on the left turn to yellow and then green, and his computer comes to life. Like I said, this is not your average computer. This sure is interesting.
ARM Ltd has been dominating the Android world for the better part of the last decade, with their 7-series cores at the forefront of their success. Throughout the late 2010s, the Cortex A73, A75, and A76 steadily iterated on performance while maintaining excellent energy efficiency. Qualcomm, and then Samsung decided licensing ARM’s cores would be easier than trying to outdo them. Apple remained a notable rival, but their core designs were not available outside a closed-off ecosystem. By the time Cortex A78 came around, ARM had no real competition. ARM’s Cortex A710 continues that dominance. It takes A78’s successful formula and tweaks it to improve performance and efficiency. Efficiency is especially prioritized, with the core seeing cuts in some areas as ARM tries to get more done with less power. A710 claims to provide a 30% uplift in power efficiency or a 10% performance increase within a fixed power envelope when compared to a A78 core with half as much L3 cache. Alongside these improvements, A710 gains Armv9-A and SVE support. A deep dive into ARM’s latest core.
It’s 2023, and those who have Framework’s first generation of laptops, containing Intel’s 11th-generation Core processor) might be itching to upgrade, especially with an AMD model around the corner. Or maybe, like me, they find that system’s middling battery life and tricky-to-tame sleep draining (since improved, but not entirely fixed) make for a laptop that doesn’t feel all that portable. Or they’re just ready for something new. What can you do with these old internal organs? You can always list them for sale. Or, like me, you could buy a custom-printed Cooler Master case (or 3D-print your own), transfer your laptop’s mainboard, memory, and storage over, and create a desktop that easily fits on top of your actual desk. I can’t recommend it enough as a small weekend project, as a way to get more value out of your purchase, and as a thought experiment in what kind of job you can give to a thin little slab of Framework. Framework is one of the good ones. For now.
The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time, we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 into packet sniffing mode and got packet captures, learned about PD VDMs (vendor-defined messages), and successfully replayed the captured messages to switch a USB-C port into the DisplayPort altmode. Today, we will go through the seven messages that summon the DisplayPort altmode, implement them, and tie them all into a library – then, figure out the hardware we need to have DisplayPort work in the wild. USB-C might have its problems, but it’s also incredibly cool and versatile.
Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm’s biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm’s press release says is “aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development.” At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an “eventual expansion” to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm’s biggest market. Statements of intent are easily written, so let’s hope this is more than a fart in the wind.
A chrultrabook is a modified Chromebook designed to run Windows, Linux, or even macOS by utilizing MrChromebox coreboot firmware. The purpose of this site is to provide comprehensive and user-friendly documentation on hardware, firmware, and operating systems. This is a cool project to make it easy to run Windows, regular desktop Linux, or even macOS on your Chromebook. Excellent documentation, too.
If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a “clicker,” it’s because of Robert Adler’s 1956 creation. The elegant Star Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debuting the Flash-Matic in 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith’s engineers tried an even simpler approach that didn’t require batteries at all, using sound instead of light. This is from well before my time – and I have no idea if devices like this even ever made it to The Netherlands, where I’m originally from – but this is such a cool solution to the technical problem they were facing. I had no idea early remote controls were sound-based.
A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That’s where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must’ve been an absolutely fascinating time to live through. I know we have quite a few old-timers in the audience here, so there’s bound to be folks here who used this. Amazing
Turns out Intel’s NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you’re into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.
The Framework Laptop 16, available for preorder today starting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company’s first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component — not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. There’s more and more companies taking repairability seriously, and the EU, too, is flexing its legal muscle in this area. We’re getting there. Slowly.
Onyx Boox has just done something exciting; they have taken a page from the Hisense playbook and released a dedicated e-reader with the familiar candy bar shape as a smartphone, except it is a dedicated e-reader. You can do phone calls with this unit and talk to people on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or WeChat with dual microphones. However, it does not support SIM cards or eSim, and you must be on a WIFI connection to do anything useful. The most significant advantage of the Onyx Boox Palma is carrying an e-reader around with you in your pocket; you can’t do this with the vast majority of e-readers on the market. The Palma is available as a pre-order for $249; when it launches, the price will go up to $279.99.Only a small batch of units are available as a first come, first serve basis and will ship out sometime in August 2023. I don’t really have a use for something like this, but the price is interesting, and if it can indeed do smooth scrolling as they claim, I might actually be interested out of sheer curiosity. It’s kind of like if Apple released an iPod Touch, but with an e-ink display.
A few weeks ago we reported that the European Union wanted to force device makers to make batteries user-replaceable, and today it’s been confirmed and made official. The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement. This is an important provision for consumers. Light means of transport batteries will need to be replaceable by an independent professional. Excellent.
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort’s sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn’t just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days. Back when I bought my current 144Hz 1440p monitor with G-Sync for my gaming PC, DisplayPort was the only way to hook it all up, since HDMI wasn’t yet supported. Ever since, out of a baseless sense of caution, I’ve always preferred DisplayPort for all my PC video connection needs, and as it turns out – yes, DisplayPort is definitely better than HDMI, and this article will tell you why.
Truth be told, this was the first time I heard of an Addressograph. So what does it do? What was the motivation behind its creation? And how does it work? Let’s take a dive into an Addressograph. I had never heard of this machine either – it’s designed to imprint things like names, addresses, and other information onto envelopes and forms. It’s one of the many, many innovations we’ve lost along the way in the 20th century that I’d love to see in the real world sometime.
Instead, they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord servers, and Patreon channels where retro tech collectors hid. But then, a well-known tech YouTuber, Adrian Black, did a video about them, and these eBay machines, slapped with the logo of a company called NABU, were anonymous no more. The NABU is an incredibly interesting story, but I would like to take this time to highlight Adrian Black, one of the very finest retro computing YouTubers out there. He’s incredibly knowledgeable and capable, kind, calm, and takes his time to fix and showcase the hardware he works on. He’s the Mister Rogers of retro computing, and living proof that no, not all YouTubers are flashy, algorithm-chasing airheads.
The European Union (EU) is set to usher in a new era of smartphones with batteries that consumers can easily replace themselves. Earlier this week, the European Parliament approved new rules covering the design, production, and recycling of all rechargeable batteries sold within the EU. For “portable batteries” used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras, consumers must be able to “easily remove and replace them.” This will require a drastic design rethink by manufacturers, as most phone and tablet makers currently seal the battery away and require specialist tools and knowledge to access and replace them safely. This should’ve been mandated more than a decade ago, but better late than never. Faulty batteries is one of the primary reasons people eventually upgrade, even when their device is otherwise still perfectly functional. Device owners should be able to easily open their device and replace the battery, and of course, said batteries should not be hindered by patents, trademarks, or any other artificial monopolies – anybody should be able to produce them. The battery in my 2018 Dell XPS 13 9370 bulged a few years ago, but since the laptop is easily opened, it took me about 5 minutes to replace the faulty battery with a brand new one, and it only cost me about €100 – on a laptop that originally cost about €2200, I think that’s an amazing deal to keep the machine going. It’s otherwise in tip-top shape, and its 8th Gen i7, 16GB of RAM and 4K display can easily last me another ten years, especially since, as a Linux user, I won’t have to worry about my operating system killing off support. Smartphones should be the same.
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86+ is a board which uses a Teensy 4.1 to emulate a microprocessor in C code as well as use its GPIOs to emulate the local bus of the Intel 8088. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Intel 8088 and can be cycle accurate as well as run in accelerated modes. That’s a neat trick.
The other day I was asked an interesting question: What was the first BIOS with support for ROM shadowing? In the 1990s, ROM shadowing was common, at first as a pure performance enhancement and later as a functional requirement; newer firmware is stored compressed in ROM and must be decompressed into RAM first, and firmware may also rely on writing to itself before being locked down and write protected. Old PCs did not use ROM shadowing because it made no sense. ROMs were only marginally slower than RAM, if at all, and RAM was too precious to waste on mirroring the contents of existing ROMs. Over the years, RAM speeds shot up while ROM remained slow. By about 1990, executing BIOS code from ROM incurred a noticeable performance penalty, and at the same time devoting 64 or 128 KB to ROM shadowing was no longer prohibitively expensive. But who did it first? The OS/2 Mussum’s content never fails to be deeply interesting. And the answer to the question is the same answer it always is when it comes to who did something first in the early years of the PC platform. It’s always the same.
