Open Hardware/Modding Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 14, 2023

• my homelab

  I have always found the term "homelab" a little confusing. It's a bit like the residential version of "on-premises cloud," in that it seems to presuppose that a lab is the normal place that you find computer equipment. Of course I get that "homelab" is usually used by those who take pride in the careful workmanship of their home installation, and I am not one of those people.

  Welcome to Computers Are Bad - in color.

  Note: if you get this by email, the images may or may not work right. We're going to find out together! I don't plan to make a habit of including images and they don't look that good anyway, so I'm not too worried about it.

• Here’s an open source smart home energy management solution

  On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a call from our podcast hotline about smart home energy management. Thomas is looking for a whole home energy management solution but he has a specific requirement. He wants it to be open source.

• Make a Tide Tracker with APIs and an e-ink display

  Tides are predictable, but it’s still easy to lose track of the times for high and low water. As a result, you might pull up at high tide to find the beach has disappeared… or at low tide, and found your boat grounded. Put an end to that once and for all with our handy tide tracker, which uses an API to download tidal forecasts for more than 600 monitoring stations around the UK. The results shouldn’t be used for navigation or other water-borne activities, but they may be just what you need to save yourself a wasted journey, or to keep an eye on the tide cycles however far you live from the coast.

• Reverse engineering an e-ink display

  The person who bought the pricetags wanted to use them in a project, but didn’t find any documentation on how to communicate with them to display things on the screen. They donated three to Zeus with the challenge to get communication working and to draw something on the screen. This is the perfect number of devices according to bunnie’s book ‘The Hardware Hacker’ 1: [...]

• Inside the amazingly mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer

  Determining the airspeed and altitude of a fighter plane is harder than you'd expect. At slower speeds, pressure measurements can give the altitude, air speed, and other "air data". But as planes approach the speed of sound, complicated equations are needed to accurately compute these values. The Bendix Central Air Data Computer (CADC) solved this problem for military planes such as the F-101 and the F-111 fighters, and the B-58 bomber.1 This electromechanical marvel was crammed full of 1955 technology: gears, cams, synchros, and magnetic amplifiers. In this blog post I look inside the CADC, describe the calculations it performed, and explain how it performed these calculations mechanically.

• Raspberry Pi Powered Compute Blade Makes the Cut

  We've been tracking this project since mid 2021, and the time has been well spent. Ivan Kuleshov's Compute Blade is a thin PCB that packs a plethora of storage options for your Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (or compatible). Kuleshov's kickstarter has smashed its $522,209 funding goal, reaching $673,365 at the time of writing.