Keeping Alive The Future Of Cars, 1980s StyleHere at Hackaday we’re a varied bunch of writers, some of whom have careers away from this organ, and others whose work also appears on the pages of other publications in different fields. One such is our colleague [Lewin Day], and he’s written a cracking piece for The Autopian about the effort to keep an obscure piece of American automotive electronic history alive. We think of big-screen control panels in cars as a new phenomenon, but General Motors was fitting tiny Sony Trinitron CRTs to some models back in the late 1980s. If you own one of these cars the chances are the CRT is inoperable if you’ve not encountered [Jon Morlan] and his work repairing and restoring them.
Lewin’s piece goes into enough technical detail that we won’t simply rehash it here, but it’s interesting to contrast the approach of painstaking repair with that of replacement or emulation. It would be a relatively straightforward project to replace the CRT with a modern LCD displaying the same video, and even to use a modern single board computer to emulate much of a dead system. But we understand completely that to many motor enthusiasts that’s not the point, indeed it’s the very fact it has a frickin’ CRT in the dash that makes the car.We’ll probably never drive a 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado. But we sure want to if it’s got that particular version of the future fitted.
Lewin’s automotive writing is worth watching out for. He once brought us to a motorcycle chariot.

Tesla layoffs, Cybertruck recalls and Serve Robotics goes publicWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Tesla is back in the news cycle and our crystal ball says it’s one of those long-term affairs. The […]
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Manual Supports for 3D Printing[MakerSpace] wanted to 3D print an RFID card holder. On one side is a slot for a card and on the other side has recesses for the RFID antenna. They used these to control access to machines and were milling them out using a CNC machine. Since there were no flat surfaces, he had to turn on supports in the slicer, right? No. He does use supports, but not in the way you might imagine.
Inspired by creating cast iron using sand casting, he decided to first 3D print a reusable “core” using PETG. This core will support future prints that use PLA. When printing the actual item, the printer lays down the first few layers and pauses. This allows you to stick the core in and resume the print. After the print completes, you can remove the core, and the results look great, as you can see in the video below.

While the PLA doesn’t stick well to the PETG, it can stick a little, but using a glue coating as a release agent solved that problem. This is one of those ideas that once you see it, it seems obvious, but it probably isn’t something you’ve thought about doing until you see it at least once.
There are a few other tricks in the video. For example, the core is a little larger than necessary, so there is a tab that sticks out. This makes it easy to tape down to the bed and also helps when you try to remove it from the PLA print. The results are great, and it makes us want to revisit our abandoned badge holder project from years ago.
Some people never print flat. Others do very specific support structures at key points. It seems there’s always multiple ways to print the seemingly unprintable.

After $1.5bn takeover proposal, Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s board tells Blackstone: We’re listening…Bring on a firm offer, HSF's board tells private investment giant
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This camera trades pictures for AI poetryThe Poetry Camera takes the concept of photography to new heights by generating poetry based on the visuals it encounters.
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Relatively Universal ROM Programmer Makes Retro Tech Hacking AccessibleThere’s treasures hidden in old technology, and you deserve to be able to revive it. Whether it’s old personal computer platforms, vending machines, robot arms, or educational kits based on retro platforms, you will need to work with parallel EEPROM chips at some point. [Anders Nielsen] was about to do just that, when he found out that a TL866, a commonly used programmer kit for such ROMs, would cost entire $70 – significantly raising the budget of any parallel ROM-involving hacking. After months of work, he is happy to bring us a project – the Relatively Universal ROM Programmer, an open-source parallel ROM programmer board that you can easily assemble or buy.
Designed in the Arduino shield format, there’s a lot of care and love put into making this board as universal as reasonably possible, so that it fits any of the old flash chips you might want to flash – whether it’s an old UV-erasable ROM that wants a voltage up to 30 V to be written, or the newer 5 V-friendly chips. You can use ICs with pin count from 24 to 32 pins, it’s straightforward to use a ZIF socket with this board, there’s LED indication and silkscreen markings so that you can see and tweak the programming process, and it’s masterfully optimized for automated assembly.
You can breadboard this programmer platform as we’ve previously covered, you can assemble our own boards using the open-source files, and if you don’t want to do either, you can buy the assembled boards from [Anders Nielsen] too! The software is currently work in progress, since that’s part of the secret sauce that makes the $70 programmers tick. You do need to adjust the programming voltage manually, but that can be later improved with a small hardware fix. In total, if you just want to program a few ROM chips, this board saves you a fair bit of money.

Green Day Pop Up at the EchoplexPhotos by Greg Schneider

Since the release of their third album, Dookie, in 1994, Green Day have arguably been the most popular punk band on the planet. So if you didn't catch them during the 924 Gilman Street days, the opportunities to see Green Day in venues that aren't enormous have been extremely rare.

As a result, it's been tough for many to view Green Day as a punk band at all, so much as an arena rock outfit. A really fucking good one, armed with a ton of rapid-fire, catchy tunes. But a festival-headlining arena rock outfit all the same. So this Hella Tiny Tour of smaller venues, which already saw them play the House of Blues in Anaheim in March, is priceless because we get to see Green Day in an environment where, to be completely honest, they thrive. It's like they're still in the Kerplunk era, fighting for their lives. The youthful energy is there in mountains -- snotty, joyful and very punk!

These guys connect with their crowd like few others. Peers such as the Offspring are full of on-stage banter, but Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool make it their business to make every single person in the Echoplex feel like they're a bonafide part of the show. Green Day does that even when they're playing an enormodome, as they will this summer when they play the SoFi Stadium with the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and the Linda Lindas. But it hits so much more intensely in a relatively intimate room.

All of these shows -- the Hella Tiny ones and the big gigs that will follow -- are a three-part celebration. Dookie is 30 years old, the American Idiot album is 20 years old, and they have a new album too -- Saviors was released in January.

So at the Echoplex we got both Dookie and American Idiot played in their entirety, plus a handful from Saviors. Each and every song sounded glorious in this environment. Dookie classics including (but not limited to) "Longview" and "Basket Case" allow us to imagine for a moment that we're catching this superb band in the moments before they explode onto the global stages.

The likes of "American Idiot" and "Jesus of Suburbia" prove that, even when the band had achieved insane levels of success, they were at their peak when it came to socially conscious, intelligent and politically aware songwriting.

And the new songs, particularly "The American Dream is Killing Me," are clear evidence that this timeless, apparently ageless band are still filled with fire, energy, and tunes.

"We can't wait to see you this summer," Armstrong says as the band leaves the stage. Ditto, fellas.

Let the Solder Scroll Take Care of Your Feed Needs[Victor]’s nifty tool the Solder Scroll is a handheld device that lets one feed solder out simply by turning something a little like a scroll wheel. It looks like an intuitive and comfortable design that can adapt to a wide variety of solder thicknesses, and is entirely 3D printed.
One part we particularly like is the feed system. One rolls a wheel which feeds solder out using a mechanism a lot like extrusion gears in many 3D printer hot ends. Both wheels have ridged surfaces that grip and feed the solder; their gears mesh with one another so that moving one moves both in unison.
Solder feed tools like this have seen all kinds of interesting designs, because while the problem is the same for everyone, there are all kinds of different ways to go about addressing it. We love this one, and we have seen many other takes that range from a powered, glove-mounted unit to an extremely simple tool with no moving parts. We’ve even seen a method of hacking a mechanical pencil into a new role as a solder feeder.

Strap in. Blackstone is ready to bid $1.5 billion for Hipgnosis Songs Fund.To paraphrase Pink Floyd, Will the sun (Concord Chorus) be eclipsed by the moon (Blackstone)?
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Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to book better gigs, release new music, use TikTok as a tool, and much more.....
The post Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: The new music industry’s week in reviewIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception. The DoJ eyed Live Nation and Ticketmaster, new National Recordings Registry inductees were announced, songwriters fought for expression in China, and more.....
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s week in review appeared first on Hypebot.

Steinberg release VST Live Pro 2 With the launch of VST Live Pro 2, Steiberg's live performance software gains a new Flex Loops system, DMX and MIDI plug-ins, enhanced automation features and more. 

CesiumAstro claims former exec spilled trade secrets to upstart competitor AnySignalCesiumAstro alleges in a newly filed lawsuit that a former executive disclosed trade secrets and confidential information about sensitive tech, investors, and customers to a competing startup. Austin-based Cesium develops active phased array and software-defined radio systems for spacecraft, missiles, and drones. While phased array antenna systems have been used on satellites for decades, Cesium […]
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Roboticizing An Etch-a-SketchThe Etch-a-Sketch was a popular toy, but a polarizing one. You were either one of those kids that had the knack, or one of the kids that didn’t. [Micah] was pretty firmly in the latter group, so decided to roboticize the Etch-a-Sketch so a computer could draw for him instead.
The build uses a pair of stepper motors attached to the Etch-a-Sketch’s knobs via 3D-printed adapters. It took [Micah] a few revisions to get the right design and the right motors for the job, but it all came together. A Raspberry Pi is charged with driving the motors to draw the desired picture.
Beyond the mechanics, [Micah] also does a great job of explaining the challenges around drawing and the drive software. Namely, the Etch-a-Sketch has a major limitation in that there’s no way to move the stylus without drawing a line. He accounts for this in his code for converting and drawing images.
The robot draws slowly but surely. The final result is incredibly impressive, and far exceeds what most of us could achieve on by hand. We’ve seen some similar builds in the past, too. Video after the break.

Crystal Radio Kit from the 1970sIf you read the December 1970 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, you’d be treated to [Len Buckwalter]’s crystal radio build. He called out Modern Radio Labs as the supplier for parts. That company, run by [Elmer Osterhoudt], got so many inquiries that he produced a kit, the #74 crystal set. [Michael Simpson] found an unopened kit on eBay and — after a bidding war, took possession of the kit. The kit looked totally untouched. The crystal detector was still in the box, and there were period-appropriate newspaper wrappings.
The kit itself isn’t that remarkable, but it is a classic. An oatmeal box serves as a coil form. There’s a capacitor, a crystal detector, and headphones. The original cost of the parts was $7, but we imagine the eBay auction exceeded that by a large amount.
If the name [Len Buckwalter] sounds familiar, he was quite prolific in magazines like Electronics Illustrated and also wrote several books about transistors. [Michael] also shows off his innovative coil winder made from plastic cups and a coat hanger.
We’d love to find some old kits like this, although, from one way of thinking, it is almost a shame to build them after all these years. With an added audio amplifier and fiddling with the cat whisker, it sounded just fine.
If you don’t like oatmeal, you could fire up the 3D printer. While the basic circuit is simple, you can make it more complex if you like.