[TriEmbed] Hacking a fake vintage radio (with Arduino + Pi 0)

[Kevin McClaning]

Excellent write up, Huan.

Speaking of "silly" and "No one cares about," I once bought a scrolling 
LED sign at
a ham fest but couldn't find documentation. I reverse-engineered the 
hardware so
I could directly access the LED matrix with an Arduino, then set it 
about displaying
humorous/motivational messages (of the kind you see at the bottom of 
slashdot),
along with some random numbers and graphics.

No, it doesn't stop there. I used the Arduino random number generator to 
select the individual
messages to display but, I noticed that it always produced the same 
"random" order of messages.
This annoyed me, so I added a temperature sensor and used its output to 
increase the entropy
of the Arduino. Since I was in the "increase the entropy" neighborhood, 
I build two audio oscillators,
with crappy stability and ran them into the AD converters of the 
Arduino. I sampled the waveforms
every now and then and fed that into the Arduino's random seed as well.

Yeah, "silly" but it was a fun diversion. Did all this in the 
before-the-pandemic timeframe.

Kevin

On 6/24/20 12:43 PM, Huan Truong via TriEmbed wrote:
> This has taken me way more time than I thought, but finishing this
> retrofit is a big achievement for me. It's really silly and serves
> exactly no purpose other than RE'ing something no one cares about.  So
> I just want to share for some shits and giggles.
>
> http://www.tnhh.net/posts/adventures-hacking-fake-vivitar-vintage-radio.html
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