Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday

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This is not your normal Sunday links post. This is Superconference Sunday, and right now there are dozens of awesome projects floating around our conference in Pasadena. This links post will be mostly the projects from Supercon, but before that there’s some stuff we need to clear out of the queue:

Concerning other conferences, the Sparklecon site is up. Why go to Sparklecon? It’s a blast.

Tindie is worldwide! There were a bunch of Tindie sellers at the Maker Faire Adelaide this weekend. YouTuber MickMake is a friend of Tindie and we’re teaming up to give away a few prizes from Australian Tindie sellers. You can check out the full details here.

There’s an Internet of Things thing from 4D Systems. It’s an ESP8266 and a nice small display.

Well, crap. It might have finally happened. [Maxim Goryachy] and [Mark Ermolov] have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI. What the hell does that mean? It means you can plug something into the USB port of a computer, and run code on the Intel Management Engine (for certain Intel processors, caveats apply, but still…). This is doom. The Intel ME runs below the operating system and has access to everything in your computer. If this is real — right now we only have a screenshot — computer security is screwed, but as far as anyone can tell, me_cleaner fixes the problemAlso, Intel annoyed [Andy Tanenbaum].

With that out of the way, here’s some stuff from this weekend’s Supercon:

These are normal Supercon happenings.

State of the art in PCB art

A while back, we had a few thousand Tindie blinky badges manufactured, and right now someone is hacking a few of these together into a cybernetic Cerberus at the Hackaday Supercon. I never stopped working on these badges, and now it’s time to show off the latest development in PCB art. Full color PCBs. This is a full-color PCB, that has gradients and other cool color processing. This is, right now, the state of the art in PCB art.

The Aladdin Sane Tindie, next to a Mk. 2 Tindie PCB

Here’s how the diamond dog went down: [Kevin Lau] is the founder of Makernet, and he thinks there’s a market for a full-color PCB service. This business is just starting up, he needs a few boards for experiments, and I just happened to have an idea for a great Tindie badge. The experiment worked. On my half of the build, the only thing I did was send over some Gerbers and an Illustrator file — registration and color matching happened automagically with whatever process Makernet is using. I have no idea how the color is applied (I think it’s a UV printer), and I have no idea how much the cost per board is. Sign up to the Makernet mailing list for more info. I’m going to write something about this when I get some more info, so stay tuned.

The OG-style Tindie badges are now rated to 12,000 VAC. This is because there are no traces, only copper pours.

A month or so ago, OSH Park announced they were experimenting with flex PCBs. They were looking for experiments, and [Trammell] took them up on the offer. Those flex PCBs showed up at Supercon. The result? A PCB D20. The sides are held in place with just bits of wire, and it’s sized to fit a coin cell in the middle. It looks like custom flex PCBs are about to be very easy to acquire.

Here’s a not-tazer in a water bottle, made at Supercon. Lulz. We can’t call it a Tazer because Tazer International will send us a cease and desist. Lulz. By the way, here’s a video of a Hackaday editor (emeritus) getting Tazed.

You know that fingerprint sensor in your laptop that you don’t use? Turn it into something useful like an ARM JTAG.

Got the FOMO regret because you didn’t go to Supercon? We livestreamed everything, and it’s all still up. It’s not a replacement, but it’s something.

11 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday

  1. Heyyyy, if me_cleaner clobbers the management engine, I wonder if that means that you can install de-supported CPUs like in celeron and pentium laptops that “only” take those chips and if you put an i3 or i5 in them you get a 30 minute hard shutdown.

  2. Would have ordered one of those ESP8266 gedgets, if the shipping weren’t 36USD for a 19$ device… (to europe, but still, the chinese send their stuff pretty much for free these days…) 36$ for a small package is no longer tolerable in any kind of way.

  3. Well, essentially JTAG over USB… so what says it can’t go in reverse: Direct spying on USB irrespective of DMA attacks or the like?
    Either way, sounds like another huge hole blasted through the IME crud: Should of been optional with an external strap pin anyway.

    1. Agreed. Forcing a “feature” such as this down users’ throats (one with such catastrophic security implications) is really indefensible and smacks of an abuse of near monopoly conditions. (Yes, there is AMD, but they have not been competitive in a real sense in a couple years).

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