Sony Vaio Revived: Power, The Second 80%A bit ago, I’ve told you about how the Sony Vaio motherboard replacement started, and all the tricks I used to make it succeed on the first try. How do you plan out the board, what are good things to keep in mind while you’re sourcing parts, and how do you ensure you finish the design? This time, I want to tell you my insights about what it takes for your new board revision to stay on your desk until completion, whether it’s helping it not burn up, or making sure the bringup process is doable.
Uninterrupted, Granular Power
Power was generally comfortable to design, but I did have to keep some power budgets in mind. A good exercise for safeguarding your regulators is keeping a .txt file where you log consumers and their expected current consumption on each board power rail, making sure all of your power regulators, connectors, and tracks, can handle quite a bit more than that current. Guideline: increase current by 20%-50% when figuring out the specs for switching regulators and inductors, and, multiply by 10-20% when figuring out conversion losses going between downstream and upstream rails.
I did have a blunder in this department – not accounting for track current early on enough. I laid out the board using 0.5mm wide tracks for power – it looked spacious enough. Then, I put “0.5mm” into a track current calculator and saw a harrowing temperature increase for the currents I was expecting. At that point in routing, it took some time to shift tracks around to accomodate the trace width I actually needed, which is to say, I should’ve calculated it all way way earlier. Thankfully, things went well in the end.

Apart from this, the power rails are a crucial aspect for bringup. How are you going to bringup your board? Which power rails need to be powered on so that the board can boot? Which signals do you need for every power rail, and what power rails do those signals depend on? What are the minimum required parts for the board to “boot”, and how quickly can you test every part before getting the next revision? My strategy was: I flash the EC with MicroPython, and hack at the code part by part I go. It worked surprisingly well for lowering the debugging entry level, and I will tell more about it later.
A lot of bringup preparations are done during design, though. You have to think about typical usecases, and think how your hardware is going to react to them. What kind of state will the board enter after you insert the battery, or apply power from an external charger? Will you need to find a charger after you swap the battery? Is battery hotswap possible? The best way to understand all of it is to look through fundamental blocks of the circuit, and ask questions about their behaviour.
The questions can be pretty simple. Is the EC always powered no matter the input source? Can you detect when the power sources are too low, or too high? What’s the default states of the EN pins of every switching regulator, and what are the default state of GPIOs that control your regulator EN pins? Are any of these pins connected to GPIOs that might oscillate during your MCU’s boot? Is the input DC-DC enabled by default? What about the battery charger?
In the end, I went through all the switching regulator datasheets, taking note of the EN pins. Closer to the end, I’ve noticed that I’d need to invert the EN pin of the input DC-DC with help of a FET if I wanted that regulator to be powered on by default – otherwise, I’d get a chicken-and-egg problem if I were to try and power the board through its charger with missing or fully discharged battery. The FET barely fit on the board, but I massaged the tracks until it did.
Double-Sided Assembly
Here’s tips for bringup – you want to make sure you can access your EC at all times. In my case, I decided to mux the EC RP2040’s USB onto the external port, allowing for a “debug mode” with a USB A-A cable – a cool feature, but I have definitely regretted restricting myself with it. Essentially, I locked myself into USB plug-unplug cycle during the early development, and it was hell to solve problems as a result. My advice is – plan for an extra USB-C connector or just USB testpoints on your board, so you can have a permanent unshakeable USB/SWD/UART/etc. link during the period while you’re not quite sure how well your board works. In the end, I had to tombstone the two 0402 D+/D- resistors of the RP2040 EC and pull an external “debug” USB-C connector on three magnet wires – a finicky endeavour, worth avoiding if you can.
Other than that hurdle, the bringup has been seamless, in no small part because I used the MicroPython REPL to probe through the board as I enabled parts of it. The REPL flow let me enable/disable power rails and query GPIOs dynamically during early bringup, mocking up code on the fly and immediately testing it on my hardware, and dynamically debug features like onboard shift registers, or buttons and LEDs on the Vaio’s case, wrapping them into code and putting them into the main.py file – the EC firmware grew larger and larger as I experimented. There’s something special about having a list of power rails at your fingertips, switching them off one by one, quickly tying program states into switches/buttons/LEDs as needed – it was a joy of a bringup experience.
How do you assemble such a double-sided board – really, how do you even stencil it? I planned for stenciling it from the very beginning, and, I distributed the components in a way that one side had way less components than the other – including more intricate components, like multi-pin ICs. One thing that’s really helped, is using the JLCPCB stencil shipping cardboard to make a jig for the board with cutouts in it, letting me stencil the less-populated side once the more-populated side already had components soldered onto it. In a different life, I used to lasercut frames for this kind of endeavour – KiCad SVG export should be all you need.
The more-populated side got assembled using one of those tiny $20 hotplate, in the comfort of my home – I’d hot air it, but my hot air gun fell and broke. I did have to borrow a hot air gun for assembling the second side, though – and assemble it very carefully. The main problem was the plastic connector on the less-populated side – I had to hot air it from the bottom, through the RP2040 EC and its supporting circuitry.
Learning, Achievements, Expansion
I’ve had some fun failure modes happen on this board. One, the failing 5V boost with subpar layout, which I’ve already described in the switching regulator patch board article a couple months ago. Fun fact – it’s also verified a RPi SD card corruption theory of mine, confirming that noise on the input power rail easily propagates into the 3.3V rail powering the SD card, and results in SD card corruption; if you’re getting SD card corruption issues, make sure to check the DC-DCs involved in your project!
Another one was specifically the output pin of the 3.3V EC regulator not getting soldered properly – somehow, it had a cold solder joint, and the EC was getting powered with around 1.23V, again, somehow; it might’ve been due to my incessant multimeter probing, in hindsight. I’m glad that this was the cold solder joint I had to figure out – as far as cold solder joints go, this one was seriously easy to debug, since just moving the probe between the 3.3V reg leg and an EC power capacitor was enough to find the spot the voltage drop happened.
Again, any burnt components on such an assembled board get expensive – not just monetarily, it’s also that you don’t want to repeat the assembly effort. So, keep all metal and solder away during bringup, check all the connectors for accidental solder blobs many times over, and be very careful to. Tempted to hotplug internal connectors? Don’t do it unless you’ve designed them to hotplug, or if the original manufacturer has – there’s always pinout and connector considerations you have to mind. This goes doubly for high-current and high-voltage connectors.

Expansion slots are wonderful if you can afford them – there’s usually leftover GPIOs and some power rail capacity that you might want to later tap, and in my case, there’s also heaps of free space inside of the laptop. I managed to fit two FFC sockets on this particular board, which have plenty of high-current power rails and GPIOs – my plan, personally, is to make a board that takes SATA or NVMe SSDs, and maybe even has expansions like GPS or extra WiFi – the case internals are spacious enough for all of those.
Looking to put a new powerful motherboard into an old lovely chassis? Chances are, you can certainly do it – even if it takes time, trial-and-error, and help from some friends or internet strangers. I hope this project walkthrough can help you lots along the way, especially in being comfortable to take the first steps! Got a project stuck on the mental shelf? Get on with it – you will learn new cool things, and find new tricks to improvise. Me, I’m getting a friendly device to carry in my pocket, and that alone is a wonderful experience.

Just a Sample is a FREE Sampler Made for Ease of Use
Binyamin Friedman released Just a Sample, a free and open-source audio sampler. The plugin is a macOS, Windows, and Linux release for VST3 and AU formats. Friedman describes Just a Sample as a modern sampler focused on simplicity and ease of use.  Just a Sample integrates an effects chain with verb, chorus, distortion, and EQ [...]
View post: Just a Sample is a FREE Sampler Made for Ease of Use

IconDrum from GForce Software GForce say that their recreation of Linn Instruments' iconic drum machine offers “a tribute to the machine that defined an era and a gateway to the rhythms of tomorrow.”

Austin Daboh, Jackie Hyde, Jasmine Dotiwala, Steve Lamacq amongst those recognised in UK New Year’s Honours listBroadcasters and record label execs named in prestigious New Year's Honours roll call
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Why is XRP price down today?XRP price continues to decline as several metrics point to a bearish outlook from the altcoin.

ByteDance appears to be skirting US restrictions to buy Nvidia chips: ReportTikTok parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025 — despite U.S. restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chips in 2025, according to reporting from The Information, citing inside sources. If ByteDance follows through, it will become one of the world’s top owners of Nvidia chips, despite U.S. efforts […]
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38C3: Save Your Satellite with These Three Simple TricksBEESAT-1 is a 1U cubesat launched in 2009 by the Technical University of Berlin. Like all good satellites, it has redundant computers onboard, so when the first one failed in 2011, it just switched over to the second. And when the backup failed in 2013, well, the satellite was “dead” — or rather sending back all zeroes. Until [PistonMiner] took a look at it, that is.
Getting the job done required debugging the firmware remotely — like 700 km remotely. Because it was sending back all zeroes, but sending back valid zeroes, that meant there was something wrong either in the data collection or the assembly of the telemetry frames. A quick experiment confirmed that the assembly routine fired off very infrequently, which was a parameter that’s modifiable in SRAM. Setting a shorter assembly time lead to success: valid telemetry frame.
Then comes the job of patching the bird in flight. [PistonMiner] pulled the flash down, and cobbled together a model of the satellite to practice with in the lab. And that’s when they discovered that the satellite doesn’t support software upload to flash, but does allow writing parameter words. The hack was an abuse of the fact that the original code was written in C++. Intercepting the vtables let them run their own commands without the flash read and write conflicting.
Of course, nothing is that easy. Bugs upon bugs, combined with the short communication window, made it even more challenging. And then there was the bizarre bit with the camera firing off after every flash dump because of a missing break in a case statement. But the camera never worked anyway, because the firmware didn’t get finished before launch.
Challenge accepted: [PistonMiner] got it working, and after fifteen years in space, and ten years of being “dead”, BEESAT-1 was taking photos again. What caused the initial problem? NAND flash memory needs to be cleared to zeroes before it’s written, and a bug in the code lead to a long pause between the two, during which a watchdog timeout fired and the satellite reset, blanking the flash.
This talk is absolutely fantastic, but may be of limited practical use unless you have a long-dormant satellite to play around with. We can nearly guarantee that after watching this talk, you will wish that you did. If so, the Orbital Index can help you get started.

Release Your Inner Ansel Adams With The Shitty Camera ChallengeSocial media microblogging has brought us many annoying things, but some of the good things that have come to us through its seductive scrolling are those ad-hoc interest based communities which congregate around a hashtag. There’s one which has entranced me over the past few years which I’d like to share with you; the Shitty Camera Challenge. The premise is simple: take photographs with a shitty camera, and share them online. The promise meanwhile is to free photography from kit acquisition, and instead celebrate the cheap, the awful, the weird, and the wonderful in persuading these photographic nonentities to deliver beautiful pictures.
Where’s The Hack In Taking A Photo?
Of course, we can already hear you asking where the hack is in taking a photo. And you’d be right, because any fool can buy a disposable camera and press the shutter a few times. But from a hardware hacker perspective this exposes the true art of camera hacking, because not all shitty cameras can produce pictures without some work.
The #ShittyCameraChallenge has a list of cameras likely to be considered shitty enough, they include disposables, focus free cameras, instant cameras, and the cheap plastic cameras such as Lomo or Holga. But also on the list are models which use dead film formats, and less capable digital cameras. It’s a very subjective definition, and thus in our field everything from a Game Boy camera or a Raspberry Pi camera module to a home-made medium format camera could be considered shitty. Ans since even the ready-made shitty cameras are usually cheap and unloved second-hand, there’s a whole field of camera repair and hacking that opens up. Finally, here’s a photography competition that’s fairly and squarely on the bench of Hackaday readers.

A Whole World Of Shitty Awesomeness Awaits!
Having whetted your appetite, it’s time to think about the different routes into camera hacking. Perhaps the simplest is to take a camera designed for an obsolete film format, and make a cartridge or spool that takes a commonly available film instead. Perhaps resurrecting an entire home movie standard is a little massochistic, but Thingiverse is full of 3D-printable adapters for more everyday film. Or you could make your own, as I did for my 1960s Agfa Rapid snapshot camera.
If hacking film cartridges seems a little low-tech, a camera whether film or digital is a simple enough device mechanically that making your own is not out of the question. At its simplest a pinhole camera can be made from trash, but we think if you’re handy with a CAD package and a 3D printer you should be able to do something better. Don’t be afraid to combine self-made parts with those from manufactured cameras; when every second hand store has a pile of near-worthless old cameras for relative pennies it makes sense to borrow lenses or other parts from this boanaza. And finally, you don’t need to be a film lover to join the fun, if a Raspberry Pi or an ESP cam module floats your boat, you can have a go at the software side too. As a hint, take a look on AliExpress for a much wider range of camera modules and lenses than the ones supplied with either of these boards.
This Polaroid is a lot of camera for ten quid!
If I’m exhorting readers to have a go with a shitty camera then, perhaps I should lead by example. Past entries of mine have come from that Agfa Rapid cartridge I mentioned, but for their current outing I’ve gone for a mixture of new and old. The new isn’t a hack, I just like those toy cameras with the thermal printers, but the old one has been quite a project. Older consumer grade Polaroid pack film instant cameras are particularly unloved, so I’ve 3D-printed a new back for mine that takes a 120 roll film. It’s an ungainly camera to take to the streets with, but now I’ve finished all that 3D printing I hope I’ll get those elusive dreamy black and white landscapes on my poll of FomaPan 100.
If you want to try the #ShittyCameraChallenge, hack together a shitty camera and get shooting. Its current iteration lasts until the 1st of February, so you should have some time left to post your best results on Mastodon. Good luck!

BlepFX Drops FREE Crunchrr Digital Degrader Plugin
On Monday, BlepFX released the free Crunchrr digital degrader plugin for macOS, Windows, and Linux. This VST3 and CLAP plugin has a simple interface that allows you to add digital artifacts to an audio source. Crunchrr modulates a small fractional delay line at an audio rate at high frequency, providing a bitcrush, erosion, and sample [...]
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“I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back” Fatboy Slim says he “just don’t seem to feel like” making music anymoreRetirement may not be on the cards for Fatboy Slim just yet, but you’d be hard pressed to find the 61-year-old DJ and producer putting on his music-making hat ever again.
The musician, real name Norman Cook, recently told The Sun’s Bizarre column that he’ll much rather focus his energies on DJing than release new music because “you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it”.

READ MORE: Behringer launches the Phara-o Mini, a synth inspired by “the mystical sounds of ancient Egypt”

“My last two singles just came out of a live show. They were both things that I made just to play on the side,” says Cook, who earlier this year released the single Bus Stop Please along with Daniel Steinberg.
“I had tunes that nobody else had in my set. And that kind of caught on with people when we worked out that we could clear the samples and release them. The thing is, you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it and it drives you from the moment you wake up in the morning.”
“I just don’t seem to feel like that any more,” Cook admits. “I feel like that about DJing and about putting on things like this, but I’ve kind of lost my passion for making music.”
“For five years, I tried to beat myself up about it and go, ‘You should be doing this’. But then I thought, ‘Well, everybody likes my DJing and I enjoy that more, so I’ll do that.’”
“I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back,” he says.
Meanwhile, Fatboy Slim recently shared some DJing tips for the holidays, noting how it’s not so much about getting people dancing as much as it is about “unifying people”.
“The dance floor is like an organism, and when it’s all working together, it’s lovely, but sometimes you lose the dancefloor,” he said. “There’s sort of different pockets of people and they’re not really united. Or some people are dancing, some people aren’t, and it’s that feeling of bonding everybody together that you need to do, and recognition of a song that everybody likes is kind of that thing.”
“For me, if I really had to rescue a dance floor I’d play Right Here, Right Now or Praise You. They would be my get-out-of-jail records.”
The post “I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back” Fatboy Slim says he “just don’t seem to feel like” making music anymore appeared first on MusicTech.

Ewan Bristow Releases FREE EB-Diøne Creative Sampler for Audio Manipulation via Plugdata
On Friday, Ewan Bristow released the free EB-Diøne sampler, which is capable of some radical audio manipulation techniques.  As we’ve come to expect from Bristow’s work, EB-Diøne runs in the free Plugdata programming environment. You can run Plugdata on macOS, Windows, Linux, and more, either as a standalone app or plugin (VST3, LV2, CLAP, AU). [...]
View post: Ewan Bristow Releases FREE EB-Diøne Creative Sampler for Audio Manipulation via Plugdata

Mark Williamson: Trends driving the Music Business in 2025We asked a select group of our favorite pros to help identify the music business trends that will drive the industry in 2025. Mark Williamson, the founder and CEO of live music industry trade Rostr, offers four trends that he sees from his unique vantage point.
The post Mark Williamson: Trends driving the Music Business in 2025 appeared first on Hypebot.

Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game in VRBerklee Online has launched a free training game in virtual reality, to making ear training more accessible, immersive and fun than ever before. Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game. Continue reading
The post Berklee Online offers free Ear Training Game in VR appeared first on Hypebot.

SOS Podcast: Emulator II 40th Anniversary In episode 57 of our Electronic Music podcast, Rob Puricelli talks to Dave Rossum, Kevin Monahan and Paul...

AI data centers could be ‘distorting’ the US power gridThe proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the […]
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