In the search for more exciting broken electronics to repair, [Hugh Jeffreys] bought a GoPro Hero 10 for US$100 with an apparently rather common issue of no camera input, along with a cracked display. This particular camera issue is rather obvious, with just darkness where the camera’s input should appear on the display. Since [Hugh] already needed a spare display, he figured that he might as well get an even more broken GoPro Hero 10 for parts.

Another US$40 later, [Hugh] found himself the proud owner of a second GoPro, this one being water damaged and no longer turning on. Getting to the internals requires removing the glued-in display, which is even trickier than with a smartphone. By inserting a thin blade, adding solvents and not prying, you can slowly work it loose.

With two disassembled GoPros it was now possible to swap modules. After a factory reset and firmware update had failed to fix the first GoPro, the camera module from the donor unit was inserted, but this made no difference. Amusingly, after cleaning the water-damaged unit’s PCBs, it was found to be in good working condition, so ultimately the second GoPro was repaired, leaving the ‘no camera input’ issue undiagnosed.

It’s possible that a board-level repair on the first unit can address the original issue, but without schematics this would likely entail a lot of blindly poking around, in the hope of finding a damaged MLCC or other obvious fault. There is also the possibility that this is a firmware issue, with some reporting luck mashing the report button, but others disagree.

Since [Hugh] did do the firmware reset and updating steps, and even inserted a whole new working camera module, it would seem to narrow the problem down to a board-level issue. Whatever the case may be, it’s a frustrating issue with a rather expensive device.

Aside from nostalgia, people claim to like CRTs because they’re apprehendable– the technology just makes more sense than the arcane wibbly-wobbly solid-state madness going on inside the driver chip of your new OLED. CRTs weren’t the first technology used to display moving images though, and their mechanical forebears were even easier to understand. For that reason we suppose it was only a matter of time before one of The Youths– in this case a British YouTuber by the name of [smill]–tried gaming on a mechanical television display.

The game in question was Minecraft— because of course it was, that’s the new generation’s DOOM–and the mechanical TV in question is not a priceless 1920s antique but a commercial kit that reproduces [John Logie Baird]s 1925 televisor. If you’re not familiar, it uses a flat disk– called a Nipkow disk after its inventor– with a series of holes in a spiral to demodulate a single lamp’s brightness variations into monochrome image made of scan-lines. As you might imagine, the resolution depends both on the size of the disk and its speed, so with a tabletop example you’re not going to get much– in this case, 32 holes for 32 lines. At least they’re not interlaced this time.

Getting a video signal from the computer to the LED in the televisor kit was the hard part of the hack. Aside from actually playing on the diminutive monochrome display, that is. There is a “video2NBTV” tool that can do the job, as the Narrow Band TV signal used by amateur radio enthusiasts still has the compatible timing values and modulation as what the televisor kit uses. We suspect that’s because the Televisor people used the modern NBTV standard as a starting point for their electronics, since [Baird]’s device reportedly ran 30 lines at only 5 frames per second, compared to the 32 lines at 15 FPS here.

Some of you may turn your nose up at this as a mere YouTube stunt, which is fair enough. At the same time, we cannot wait for the eventual arms race. Imagine when someone decides to go for 4K cred? Staring through a supersonic Nipkow disk makes pointing a particle accelerator at your face downright mundane. The kit [smill] used was monochrome, but if you want to repeat his antics in glorious colour, you can 3D print your own TV.

In the time Hackaday has been in existence we must have brought you plenty of projects housed in Altoids tins, as well as a sizeable number of cyberdecks. But until today with [Exercising Ingenuity]’s build, we’ve never brought you a project that combines the two. It’s a fully functional computer that runs Linux, and with its Altoids tin enclosure, looks for all the world like a miniature clamshell laptop.

Hardware wise it’s a Pi Zero with a UPS PHAT and an SPI display, but perhaps it’s arguably the home-made keyboard that really sets it apart. There’s a full-size USB port as well, and a selection of GPIOs are broken out to a header. It wasn’t all plain sailing though, the Altoids hinges needed modifying to make it close, and he driver for the SPI screen required an older version of Raspberry Pi OS. We will forgive it those foibles.

It’s fair to say we’ve not seen anything quite like this, in that there have been plenty of tiny laptops but never one as integrated as this. There’s a demo video with details of the build, that we’ve placed below.

With Hackaday Europe no more than two days away, we want to help you wrap up all of the last loose ends. And that means last-minute changes in the workshop schedule, details on the Friday night pre-party, and more! Some tickets for the event itself, the workshops, and the pre-party (reservations required) are still available right here.

Pre-Party, Friday May 15th

Kick off the weekend with us at the official Hackaday Europe pre-party at Soqquadro Restaurant, Piazza Era 7, 23900 Lecco, Italy. Enjoy the Italian aperitivi on the gorgeous Lago di Lecco waterfront. Your ticket includes two drinks and an array of delicious snacks. It’s the Italian way to pregame the weekend ahead. Bring a hack, or just relax and hang out. Your choice. Either way, make sure you pre-register. (On the preregistration page, scroll all the way down past the workshops.)

Workshops

Unfortunately, the Let’s Mesh workshop has been canceled, but the good news, thanks to our incredible sponsors, we’ve added two great new workshops to the lineup. On Saturday, May 16th, we’ll have Tiny Tapeout, When Code Needs a Body, and Fault Injection 101. Sunday features EchoGlow: Arduino UNO Q Workshop with the brand-new Arduino Q devices, from 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM.

Tickets and full descriptions are available at registration.

Lightning Talks

On Sunday afternoon, we’ll dedicate some time to Lightning Talks. These are short, seven-minute talks, with or without slides, on whatever interests you at the moment. If you’ve got hacks or deep thoughts to share with us, you’ll never find a more receptive audience. Register now! Talk slots are FIFO.

Thanks, and See You Soon!

If you’ve never attended a Hackaday event before, we’re excited to see you. Half the fun is the crowd that convenes. If you want to bring along a hack to informally show-and-tell, it’s a great icebreaker. You won’t have to bring food or drinks – we’ve got that covered all weekend.

If you’re an old Hackaday hand, we’re stoked to see you again! A first at Hackaday Europe is going to be whatever large fraction of our SAO collection fits into carry-on luggage, and a sweet-looking SAO wall made by Hackaday Superfriend [Thomas Flummer]. If you have an SAO that you’d like to add to our pile, bring it along! It’s about time for us to do a photo gallery and write-up of everything we’ve got.

And we can’t leave without thanking our broad array of sponsors who make Hackaday Europe possible:

• element14
• Makera
• Espressif
• Arduino
• iFixit
• Edge Impulse
• FibreSeek
• Tiny Tapeout
• And as always, Supplyframe!

If you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history in a video you can watch below.

James Lansing started Lansing Manufacturing, offering high-end speakers for the fledgling “talkie” movie industry. It had some success, but the depression put them on shaky footing. Meanwhile, a company named All Technical Service Company, or Altec, was a large organization that serviced Western Electric movie theater equipment. Flush with cash, they merged with Lansing Manufacturing to form Altec Lansing. With a large infrastructure and Lansing’s engineering, they became a significant supplier to the military during World War II.

After the war, the company produced a landmark theater speaker system that became the gold standard in theater audio. However, Lansing didn’t like the big company environment and left to found a company that bore his full name, James B. Lansing, which you may know as JBL.

Altec Lansing continued to grow. However, a series of mergers and sales starting in 1969 caused the Altec Lansing company to decline. By the 1990s, Altec Lansing was making cheap PC speakers. A far cry from the gold-standard massive speakers made by the company during its heyday.

We love the history of technology and the people that drove them. Bing Crosby, for example. Or the lesser-known heroes like Edwin Armstrong.

The quest for true randomness has roots in cryptography and is a rabbit hole that gets surprisingly deep with alarmingly rapidity. Still, the generation of random-enough numbers is a popular hacker project. Part of the appeal is the way these devices strive to incorporate physical phenomena, and in [Joshua Coleman]’s case, his Neon Entropy (Pseudo) Random Number Generator uses a trio of vintage neon lamps.

[Joshua] chose neon lamps in part because the discharge rate of an energized lamp is a variable, physical process that makes a good source of entropy. They also have an attractive visual appeal that fits the concept [Joshua] had in mind. Unlike random number generators that kick off by measuring radiation or some other imperceptible thing, it’s possible — at least in a sense — to see this one working.

The small variations in the three neon lamps are measured optically by three TEPT4400 ambient light sensors (isolated from the neon lamps themselves) and turned into analog signals. A Raspberry Pi Pico W reads these signals, then uses them in a process that culminates in SHA-256 64-bit values that can be used as random seeds.

There’s also a web dashboard that shows everything live, furthering the “watch it work” concept [Joshua] is aiming for. The video below shows the project in action if you want to see how the sausage gets made.

Earlier we mentioned how random number generators are popular projects among hackers, and here are a few selected ones. Don’t miss the stylish glow and slick enclosure of this Nixie tube RNG, or the lava lamp RNG which is in fact not a gimmick. And while it is commonly understood that meaningful randomness must come from outside a digital chip, uninitialized internal volatile RAM — if accessed correctly — can be a remarkably good source of entropy.

As the foremost boffins of Europe toil deep underneath the border between Switzerland and France in their never-ending quest to truly understand the fabric of the Universe, they rely on a vast amount of electronics. The PCB layout team at the particle accelerator thus work with a huge array of parts, for which of course they create KiCad libraries. Now the folks at CERN have made those libraries available as open source, so you can benefit from their work.

The libraries themselves can be found in a GitLab repository, and at the moment are offered only for KiCad version 9.x. We tried installing it in our KiCad 10.0 installation and it refused — complaining of a missing JSON file — but we’re assuming that with more time and effort we could have made it happen. We’re told official 10.x compatibility is on the way.

Browsing the repository shows what a multiplicity of parts are included, so we can see this becoming a standard install for many people and the CERN footprints turning up in many projects featured here.

Thanks [Daniel] for the tip!