We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s understandable, because the man behind the first computer BBS wasn’t much for the spotlight. Along with Randy Suess and in response to the Blizzard of ’78, which kept their Chicago computer club from meeting in person, Christensen created an electronic version of a community corkboard. Suess worked on the hardware while Christensen provided the software, leveraging his XMODEM file-sharing protocol. They dubbed their creation a “bulletin board system” and when the idea caught on, they happily shared their work so that other enthusiasts could build their own systems.

BBSs were the only show in town for a long time, and the happy little modem negotiation tones were like a doorbell you rang to get into a club where people understood your obsession. Perhaps it’s just the BBS nostalgia talking, but despite the functional similarities to today’s social media, the BBS experience seemed a lot more civilized. It’s not that people were much better behaved back then; any BBS regular can tell you there were plenty of jerks online then, too. But the general tone of BBS life was a little more sedate, probably due in part to the glacial pace of dial-up connections. Even at a screaming 2,400 baud, characters scrolled across your screen slower than you could read them, and that seemed to have a sedating effect on your passions. By the time someone’s opinion on the burning issues of the day had finally been painted on your monitor, you’d had a bit of time to digest it and perhaps cool down a bit before composing a reply. We still had our flame wars, of course, but it was like watching slow-motion warfare and the dynamic was completely different from today’s Matrix.

Speaking of yearning for a probably mythical Golden Age, Casio has announced a smart ring that looks like a miniature version of their classic sports chronograph wristwatch. The ring celebrates Casio’s 50th anniversary of making watches, and features a stainless steel case made by metal injection molding. The six-digit LCD is pretty limited in what it can display, and the ring doesn’t do much other than tell the time and date and sound alarms. So we’re not sure where the smarts are here, except for the looks, of course.

We got a tip recently on a series of really interesting videos that you might want to check out, especially if you’re into EMC simulations. Panire’s channel is chock full of videos showing how to use openEMS, the open-source electromagnetic field solver, with KiCad EDA software to simulate the RF properties of high-speed circuits. He’s got some in-depth videos on getting things set up plus some great tutorials on creating simulations that let you see how your PCB designs are radiating, allowing you to make changes and see the results right away. Very useful stuff, and pretty fun to look at, too.

Here at Hackaday, we get a surprising and disappointingly regular stream of projects that claim to finally have beaten the laws of thermodynamics. So the words “Perpetual Motion” are especially triggering to us, but we instantly put that aside when we saw the title card on this video about the Atmos Clock. No, it’s not perpetual motion, but since as the name suggests, being powered by atmospheric pressure and temperature changes, it’s about as close as you can get. We remember one of these beautiful timepieces on the mantle in our grandparents’ house, gifted to “Grampy” for years of faithful service by his employer. It was a delicate machine and fascinating to watch work, which it only briefly did once we grandkids got near it. Still, watching how the mechanism worked is pretty interesting stuff.

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And finally, if you haven’t checked out The Analog, you really should. It’s a weekly newsletter written by our friend Mihir Shah and is full of interesting tidbits from the world of electronics and technology. This time around he gifted us with a video that looks inside optical sorting in food processing. You’ve probably seen these in action before, where cascades of objects — grapes in this case, obviously in a winery — are spread out on a high-speed conveyor belt under the watchful gaze of a computer vision system, which spots the bad grapes and yeets them into oblivion with a precisely controlled jet of compressed air. The mind boggles on the control loops needed to get the jet and the bad grape to meet up at just the right time so that good grapes stay in the game.

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These days, oscilloscope hacking is all about enabling features that the manufacturer baked into the hardware but locked out in the firmware. Those hacks are cool, of course, but back in the days of analog scopes, unlocking new features required a decidedly more hardware-based approach.

For an example of this, take a look at this oscilloscope beam splitter by [Lockdown Electronics]. It’s a simple way to turn a single-channel scope into a dual-channel scope using what amounts to time-division multiplexing. A 555 timer is set up as an astable oscillator generating a 2.5-kHz square wave. That’s fed into the bases of a pair of transistors, one NPN and the other PNP. The collectors of each transistor are connected to the two input signals, each biased to either the positive or negative rail of the power supply. As the 555 swings back and forth it alternately applies each input signal to the output of the beam splitter, which goes to the scope. The result is two independent traces on the analog scope, like magic.

More after the break…

If you’re wondering how this would work on a modern digital scope, so was [Lockdown Electronics]. He gave it a go with his little handheld scope meter and the results were surprisingly good and illustrative of how the thing works. You can clearly see the 555’s square wave on the digital scope sandwiched between the two different input sine waves. Analog scopes always have trouble showing these rising and falling edges, which explains why the beam splitter looks so good on the CRT versus the LCD.

Does this circuit serve any practical purpose these days? Probably not, although you could probably use the same principle to double the number of channels on your digital scope. Eight channels on a four-channel scope for the price of a 555? Sounds like a bargain to us.

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A common part used to create a high voltage is a CRT flyback transformer, having been a ubiquitous junk pile component. So many attempts to use them rely on brute force, with power transistors in simple feedback oscillators dropping high currents into hand-wound primaries, so it’s refreshing to see a much more nuanced approach from [Alex Lungu]. His flyback driver board drives the transformer as it’s meant to be used, in flyback mode relying on the sudden collapse of a magnetic field to generate an output voltage pulse rather than simply trying to create as much field as possible. It’s thus far more efficient than all those free running oscillators.

On the PCB is a UC3844 switch mode power supply controller driving the transformer at about 25 kHz through an IGBT. We’d be curious to know how closely the spec of the transformer is tied to the around 15 kHz it would have been run at in a typical TV, and thus what frequency would be the most efficient for it. The result as far as we can see it a stable and adjustable high voltage source with out all the high-current and over heating, something of which we approve.

Need to understand more about free running versus flyback? Read on.

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Un esperimento insolito è stato condotto nella chiesa più antica di Lucerna, in Svizzera, la Cappella di Pietro, installando un’intelligenza artificiale (AI) che rappresenta Gesù. Il progetto, chiamato Deus in Machina, permetteva ai visitatori di comunicare con un’immagine digitale in grado di dialogare in 100 lingue.

L’idea è nata come parte di una collaborazione a lungo termine tra la cappella e il laboratorio di ricerca sulla realtà virtuale dell’università. Dopo aver sperimentato le tecnologie virtuali e aumentate, si è deciso di creare un avatar di Gesù. Per fare ciò è stato installato un computer nel confessionale e collegate le apparecchiature necessarie, sostituendo il sacerdote con un sistema digitale. L’intelligenza artificiale veniva addestrata su testi teologici e l’interazione avveniva attraverso uno schermo con un’immagine di Gesù.

I visitatori sono stati avvertiti che questa non era una confessione, ma un dialogo sperimentale con un avatar. La comunicazione è avvenuta in forma anonima ed è stato vietato condividere informazioni personali.

Nel corso di due mesi, più di mille persone, tra cui turisti provenienti dalla Cina e dal Vietnam, hanno colto l’occasione per porre domande sull’immagine digitale. Secondo i dati preliminari, circa due terzi di loro hanno descritto la loro esperienza come spirituale.

Le opinioni dei partecipanti erano divise. Alcuni hanno trovato le risposte stimolanti e sorprendentemente penetranti, mentre altri le hanno criticate perché superficiali e ricordano i cliché del calendario. C’era anche chi credeva che fosse impossibile avere una conversazione sincera con una macchina. Inoltre, l’iniziativa ha suscitato critiche da parte dei rappresentanti delle comunità religiose, soprattutto per l’utilizzo del confessionale e di un’immagine di Gesù.

Gli organizzatori hanno sottolineato di aver testato a fondo il sistema prima del lancio e di aver fornito supporto continuo agli utenti. Tuttavia, non era garantito il controllo completo sulle risposte dell’IA, e questo è stato uno dei motivi per cui il progetto è rimasto un esperimento.

L’uso costante di un avatar, secondo gli organizzatori, è irto di rischi, poiché l’intelligenza artificiale può svolgere interpretazioni incompatibili con gli insegnamenti della Chiesa.

Nonostante i suoi aspetti controversi, il progetto ha dimostrato un crescente interesse per nuove forme di interazione con la religione. Gli ideatori credono che tali tecnologie possano diventare uno strumento per il dialogo sul cristianesimo, offrendo alle persone nuovi modi di comprendere la fede

L'articolo L’AI Gesù digitale risponde ai fedeli in 100 lingue. L’esperimento in Svizzera che fa Discutere proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Interessante... per i fans...

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I Genesis pubblicheranno una versione espansa di ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’

L’occasione è il mezzo secolo dell’album del 1974, l’ultimo con Peter Gabriel, ma la riedizione uscirà nel 2025. Conterrà tra le altre cose demo inediti e un concerto allo Shrine Auditorium di Los Angeles

^{Rolling Stone It (Rolling Stone Italia)}

Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his latest project isn’t any more practical, but we suspect an 8-bit RISC CPU was easier to implement in Excel and probably runs faster, too. The new machine uses a stack architecture with a simplified instruction set of ten instructions. You can follow along with his Excel adventure in the video below.

If you think about it, you may decide that doing something like this in Excel is easy because you could just script it and use Excel as the user interface. That’s true, but that’s now how [Inkbox] does it. He won’t use scripts or IF statements in a cell. That makes things much harder.

If you are curious about what goes on in a CPU, this is worth watching, even if you don’t expect you’ll use it. If you really want to become a CPU designer, we’d suggest skipping Excel and go straight into Verilog, VHDL, or something similar that you could actually use.

Don’t get us wrong. Seeing it done in Excel can be very educational, but no one designs CPUs like this in practice.

If you want to see the 16-bit version, we covered that, too. We always say that building the CPU is the easy part of developing a new architecture.

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