In most natural environments, fish are able to feed themselves. However, if you wanted to help them out with some extra food, you could always build a 3D-printed boat to do the job for you, as [gokux] did.

The concept is simple enough—it’s a small radio-controlled boat that gets around the water with the aid of two paddle wheels. Driven together, the paddle wheels provide thrust, and driven in opposite directions, they provide steering. A SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32 is the brains of the operation. It listens into commands from the controller and runs the paddle drive motors with the aid of a DRV8833 motor driver module. The custom radio controller is it itself running on another ESP32, and [gokux] built it with a nice industrial style joystick which looks very satisfying to use. The two ESP32s use their onboard wireless hardware to communicate, which keeps things nicely integrated. The boat is able to potter around on the water’s surface, while using a servo-driven to deliver small doses of food when desired.

It’s a neat build, and shows just what you can whip up when you put your 3D printer to good use. If you’d like to build a bigger plastic watercraft, though, you can do that too. Video after the break.

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A long-term project of mine is the the Sony Vaio new mainboard project. A year ago, I used it as an example to show you the cool new feature in KiCad 8, known as “background bitmaps”.

There are a heap of cool aspects to this specific Sony Vaio. It’s outrageously cute and purse-sized, the keyboard is nice enough for typing, motherboard schematics are available (very important!), and it’s not too terribly expensive. Of course, the most motivating aspect is that I happen to own one, its mainboard is not in the best state, and I’ve been itching to make it work.

It turned out to be a pretty complicated project, and, there was plenty to learn – way more than I expected in the beginning, too. I’m happy to announce that my v1 PCB design has been working wonders so far, and there are only a few small parts of it left untested.

I know that some of you might be looking to rebuild a lovely little computer of your choice. Hell, this particular laptop has had someone else rebuild it into a Pi-powered handheld years ago, as evidenced by this majestic “mess of wires” imgur build log! In honor of every hacker who has gotten their own almost-finished piece of hardware waiting for them half-assembled on the shelf, inside a KiCad file, or just inside your mind for now, let’s go through the tricks and decisions that helped made my board real.

Barely Any Space? Plan It Out Well

I recently finished and tested the first revision of this motherboard. It’s a tightly packed four-layer board, populated from both sides, and I want to show it off – describe how I designed it, the various low-level and high-level decisions that went into it, and strategies that I used to make sure this board became real and workable despite the odds.

First of all, the original article has helped in more than one way. Most importantly, I was lucky be contacted by [Exentio], a hacker who was also looking at remaking this particular Vaio with a Compute Module. He had designed two crucial blocks: a display parallel RGB to LVDS converter and a keyboard controller board. From my side, I could help and design review these boards, and design the backlight circuit, uhhh, eventually. Having these blocks was instrumental in me feeling comfortable enough to start the Vaio board design!

At some point in May, I realized I had the board outline and two of the crucial building blocks tested and ready to go, thanks to [Exentio]’s effort – there was barely anything else left that could hold me back. I started playing with the design by throwing these blocks into the schematic and copy-pasting some of my own general building blocks in, for instance, a PAM2306 dual-channel buck regulator, a USB hub, and two simple powerpaths for initial power management.

One trick that’s definitely helped from the start, is planning out locations for the building blocks using empty squares on the silkscreen, ensuring I’d keep space for everything. It didn’t have to be the perfect kind of planning, and I still had to move things here and there during layout, but it’s definitely helped in that I didn’t end up requiring any giant moves and rearrangements.
The silkscreen separations turned out to be super helpful for starting the board. Half of them ended up moving, but they did serve as a helpful “what to expect and where” TODO list
If you want to make your estimates more precise or make more educated layout guesses, don’t limit yourself to squares – just throw footprints (“Add Footprint”) onto the board before you even get to their schematic – any little bit of pre-planning that helps you avoid moving large chunks of your layout later. This applies doubly to connectors – you might not have the symbols for them wired up or even ready yet, but if you make sure the required external connectors are present on the board from the start, it will help you avoid some nasty moves.

Another crucial trick was spending about an hour-two on this board every day, for a week or two. A large project like this will take a fair bit of time, so you’ll want to make sure you can put tons of effort into it, and be emotionally prepared that it won’t happen in an evening’s time – this one took about two weeks. I also kept a TODO list in the schematic – you really want a place to note even the smallest things, from features, to potentially problematic spots that you’ll want to pay extra attention.

Space Constraints

When planning out a board with a large amount of passives, you want to make sure they’re as uniform as possible, so you have less to worry when ordering. In particular – what’s the size of passives you can afford in terms of board space? If you pick too large ones, you might run out of board space way way too quickly, becoming unable to route tracks

I standardized on 0402 components, which also meant I’d certainly be stenciling this board. It gets tiring to hand-solder parts given that this board has a thousand or two solder pads to touch. I opted to use 0805 for larger-value bulk capacitors for switching regulators and power rail purposes because 0402 10uF and 22uF capacitors get expensive if you want to get reliable ones, as we’ve discussed previously. In a few spots, though, I had to switch some 0805 capacitors to 0603, purely due to space constraints.

There are about a hundred resistors and a hundred capacitors on this board – remember, at some point, you can get a PCB fab to assemble just the passives for you, purely to spare yourself all the resistor and capacitor placement. You won’t get to stencil the ICs together with the passives, though, which is why I didn’t bother, because the RP2040 QFNs alone are annoying to handle without solder paste. Have you heard of Interactive HTML BOM for KiCAD? Make sure to use that, it’s simply wonderful and will prevent assembly errors of the kind that burn your board up before it’s even placed into the case.
This was one of the high-power inductors for which I didn’t estimate physical size early enough, and as a result, I had to somewhat bend reality around it
Inductors in the switching regulator can be an unexpected contribution to board space – if you need a 4.7 uH inductor and you need it to pass 5 A or more, take a look at online marketplaces before you even start designing the circuit, and see what the average size is for an inductor that fits your parameters. In my case, I got lucky, but only barely – some inductors definitely didn’t fit as well as I would’ve had hoped.

For this specific board, expected to fit inside the thin Sony Vaio’s shell, I had one more different thing to consider – component height. The original Vaio board was definitely designed in a way where all switching regulator components were placed on only one side, with plenty of height room for inductors and capacitors specifically. I placed all the switching regulators on one side, except one – the PAM2306 for the display 2.5 V and mod board extra 3.3 V rail.

In the end, I mis-estimated the inductor height, and had to shop for lower-profile inductors for that regulator. Thankfully, I found some decent lower-height inductors – they work wonders for powering the screen, and the only problem is that the inductor heats up more than I’d expect, but not too badly.

Source Considerations

Ordering the components for your board? Missing a position or two will really suck, and could delay your project by a week or two easily. My advice is to make sure that all component values are assigned and correct, and to pay the most attention to configuration and feedback resistors! Then, optimize the BOM, export the BOM out of the board into a .csv, and go through it line by line as you’re ordering. Alternatively, you can use the checkboxes in the InteractiveHTLMBoM – just that you’ll have to keep it open all throughout.

When it comes to resistors, remember that you might have to improvise them on the spot – again, you don’t want to wait on them, so get a collection of resistor values. I bought a $15 book of 0402 resistors from Aliexpress, and it proved instrumental – especially given it lets you adjust values during bringup, and, it let me basically not worry at all about missing resistor values at all during sourcing. The earlier you order, the more likely will it be that one IC won’t go out – which has very much prevented me from testing out the display properly.

Apart from that, the book let me be a little more lazy and figure out switching regulator feedback circuits during assembly – and there’s nothing like being able to adjust your USB boost regulator to 5.25 V post-factum, or increasing backlight current in case you figure out the calculated resistors result in a dim screen.

Hacks For Routability, Bootstrap, Motivation

This board’s switching regulators are probably worth their ownr article. There were two power hacks I ended up doing. The first one was having a separate always-on linear regulator for the EC, avoiding chicken-and-egg power problems. This one was certainly a success, and if you’re planning a motherboard that will also have to go low-power at times, you might really want a separate regulator for your EC.

The second one was making use of the Pi Zero’s 3.3 V regulator for powering a ton of stuff, like the keyboard controller chip, the LVDS transmitter, the USB hub, and – basically, everything that would only need to run once the Pi would be powered. This constrains the Zero’s onboard 3.3 V regulator, sure, but it’s not too much of a problem – I’ve powered tons of stuff from the Pi Zero’s 3.3 V rail in the past. It also has helped quite a bit, because the less switching regulators I have to design and keep track of, the better.

A big problem was making use of board layers correctly. I went for four layers on this board, with one 3.3 V layer which carries the output 3.3V rail from the Pi Zero, and one GND layer: SIG-GND-PWR-SIG. Later on, I took a look at the 3.3 V polygon, and realized that nothing used 3.3 V on a big chunk of the board. I deliberated some, and added an extra GND polygon covering a good third of the 3.3 V layer on the path where all the switching regulators were concentrated, and specifically, the path where the DC input jack current would flow into the switching regulator providing 5 V. It’s a plane split, sure, which is not great as far as signal return currents go, but there was one continuous GND layer right next to it already. Fingers crossed it works out for me long-term!

I kept inner layers as clean as possible generally – however, some tracks still had to go on inner layers. My compromise for having good inner polygons was keeping the inner layer traces as close as possible to the edge of the board, ensuring that there’s the least amount of plane splitting possible.

The cherry on top of the cake? I used KiCad board image generation hook for GitHub that I covered this year, and, it’s added a surprising source of motivation to the project. Each time I’d push changes to the repository after a day of board design work, the board image would regenerate, showing off my changes – a lovely conclusion to my work and a reminder that I’ve done well with it. Also, I could demonstrate the board additions to my friends, including [Exentio] – can’t deny, having a social element to this design has really helped in getting this board completed!

There are a few fundamental aspects left – like power management, making plans for board assembly and bringup before you send off the board to manufacturing, and giving yourself the best chances for success when assembly and bringup time comes. That’s within a week – together with a report on how the board is working out so far!

hackaday.com/2024/12/16/sony-v…

The Red Ring of Death (RROD) was the bane of many an Xbox 360 owner. The problem was eventually solved, mostly, but memories of that hellish era lurk in the back of many a gamer’s mind. For a more cheery use of those same status lights, you might appreciate “Lightshow” from [Derf].

The concept is simple enough. It’s a small application that runs on an Xbox 360, and allows you to test the individual LEDs that make up the Ring of Light indicator, along with the main power LED. If you want to test the lights and see each segment correctly lights up as green, yellow and red, you can.

Alternatively, you can have some fun with it. [Derf] also programmed it to flash along to simple four-channel MIDI songs. Naturally, Sandstorm was the perfect song to test it with. It may have been the result of a simple throwaway joke, but [Derf] delivered in amusing fashion nonetheless.

Lightshow is an entry for Xbox Scene Modfest 2024; it’s nice to see the community is still popping off even in this era of heavily-locked-down consoles. We’ve featured some other useful 360 hacks in recent months, too. Video after the break.

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CYFIRMA ha analizzato un’applicazione Android dannosa progettata per attaccare risorse nell’Asia meridionale. L’esempio è stato creato utilizzando lo strumento di amministrazione remota SpyNote. Si presume che l’obiettivo possa essere oggetto di interesse per un gruppo APT. I dettagli sulle vittime e sulle regioni specifiche non sono stati divulgati.

Si è scoperto che l’applicazione dannosa veniva distribuita tramite WhatsApp. Alla vittima sono state inviate quattro versioni del file denominate “Best Friend”, “Best-Friend 1”, “Friend” e “best”. Tutte le applicazioni avevano un server di gestione. I programmi venivano installati segretamente e cominciavano a funzionare in background utilizzando l’offuscamento del codice.

SpyNote utilizza una serie di autorizzazioni per accedere ai dati chiave del dispositivo: geolocalizzazione, contatti, SMS, memoria del dispositivo e fotocamera. L’applicazione può anche intercettare chiamate, raccogliere dati di sistema e persino utilizzare funzionalità speciali del sistema per monitorare lo schermo e inserire testo.

Il codice dannoso mirava a raccogliere dati come numero IMEI, carta SIM, versione di Android e tipo di rete. I dati ricevuti sono stati immediatamente inviati al server di controllo. Inoltre, l’applicazione ha acquisito screenshot e copiato i dati utente come contatti, messaggi e foto.

SpyNote e le sue modifiche, tra cui SpyMax e Crax RAT, vengono utilizzate attivamente da hacker e gruppi APT come OilRig (APT34) e APT-C-37. Questi strumenti aiutano gli aggressori a spiare le comunicazioni, rubare dati e mantenere l’accesso ai sistemi delle vittime.

Gli incidenti di SpyNote hanno già colpito agenzie governative, ONG, media e istituzioni finanziarie. Il caso attuale indica il probabile coinvolgimento di un gruppo APT sconosciuto o di un altro attore criminale informatico.

SpyNote rimane una seria minaccia a causa della sua disponibilità sui forum clandestini e sui canali Telegram. Gli attacchi che utilizzano questo strumento confermano la preferenza degli aggressori per strumenti comprovati e potenti per compromettere obiettivi di alto profilo.

L'articolo SpyNote colpisce ancora: malware Android distribuito via WhatsApp nell’Asia meridionale proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

What do you get when you combine a Raspberry Pi 4B, a Kaypro keyboard, and a 9″ Apple ], you get the coolest AVR development workstation I’ve seen in a while.

Image by [John Anderson] via Hackaday.IOAs you may have guessed, I really dig the looks of this thing. The paint job on the display is great, but the stripes on the keyboard and badging on are on another level. Be sure to check out the entire gallery on this one.

About that keyboard — [John] started this project with two incomplete keyboards that each had a couple of broken switches. Since the two keyboards were compliments of each other parts-wise, they made a great pair, and [John] only had to swap out three switches to get it up and clacking.

In order to make it work with the Pi, [John] wrote a user-mode serial driver that uses the uinput kernel module to inject key events to the kernel. But he didn’t stop there.

Although the Pi supports composite video out, the OS doesn’t provide any way to turn off the chroma color signal that’s modulated on top of the basic monochrome NTSC signal, which makes the picture look terrible. To fix that, he wrote a command-line app that sets up the video controller to properly display a monochrome NTSC signal. Happy AVRing on your amazing setup, [John]!

Check Out This Refreshingly Small Keyboard

Image by [AnnaRooks] via redditUsually when we see keyboards this small, they have tiny keys that are fully intended for thumb presses and thumb presses only. But what about something ultra-portable that has full-size keys?

Although it might be hard to believe, [AnnaRooks] only uses about 20 of the 24 keys that make up this mint tin keyboard. She has a keymap for typing, gaming, and Diablo II.

Personally, and my feelings about layers aside, I don’t think I could use a keyboard without thumb clusters at this point. Although you know what? It would make a great traveling macropad.

The Centerfold: A Close Look At Force Curves

Image by [ThereminGoat] via redditWell, boys and girls, we’ve got a smart beauty this time around. This here is an industrial key switch force tester. [ThereminGoat] is gonna tell you all about force curves and how to read them.

What even is a force curve, and why is it so important? It refers to the graphical representation of the force required to press a key to the actuation point (y) versus the distance traveled during the press (x). So, it’s only critical to evaluating key switch performance. Key points along the force curve include the starting force, the actuation point, the tactile bump if present, the bottom-out force, and the return curve.

So, why does it actually matter? Force curves help us understand how light or heavy a switch feels, the actuation behavior, and help with customization. I’ll let [ThereminGoat] take it from here.

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: My IBM Wheelwriter 5

You know, I kind of can’t believe that I’ve now gone 47 Keebins without spotlighting my daily driver, which takes up most of my second desk. She may not look like much, but she types like the wind, and has that legendary buckling-spring keyboard to boot.

Sure, the Selectrics get all the love, and rightfully so. But if you actually want to use a typewriter day in and day out, you really can’t beat its successor, the Wheelwriter. IBM produced these machines from 1984 to 1991, and Lexmark took over, cranking them out until 2001. Mine shows an install date of 4/22/85.

The Wheelwriter was IBM’s first daisy wheel typewriter, which replaced the golf ball type element that signified the Selectric. Arguably even easier to swap than the golf ball, these slim cartridges lay flat for easy storage.

Whereas the Selectric used a mainspring and an escapement like traditional machines, the Wheelwriter has a stepper motor that moves the print head and a solenoid that strikes the daisy wheel against the paper. It makes a delightfully frightening noise on startup as it tests the stepper and solenoid and spins the daisy wheel with alarming swiftness. I love this machine!
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ICYMI: Updated Mouse Ring Now Uses Joystick

Are you tired of traditional mouse and keyboard input, even though you’ve got a sweet ergo split and a trackball? Maybe you’re just looking to enhance your VR setup. Whatever you’re into, consider building [rafgaj78]’s Mouse Ring.

As you might be able to discern from the picture, this baby is based on the Seeed Xiao nRF52840 and uses a tiny battery pack. This is version two of the ring mouse, so if you prefer buttons to a joystick, then the first iteration may be more your style. Keep in mind that version two is easier to assemble and comes in more ring sizes.

There are two modes to this mouse ring. In the first mode, the joystick does left and right mouse click and wheel up-down, and pushing will wake it from deep sleep. In the second mode, the joystick acts as the mouse pointer, and you push down to left click.

I love the elegant design of the ring itself, and it looks great in yellow. Hmm, maybe I need one of these…

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.

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