Everything You Want To Know About The Cheapest Processors Available

August 28, 2019 by Jenny List 48 Comments

Those of us who use microprocessors in our work will be familiar with their cost, whether we are buying one or two for a project or ten million on reels for a production run. We’re used to paying tens of cents or maybe even a dollar for a little microcontroller in single quantities, and these are probably the cheapest that we might expect to find.

There is a stratum of cheaper devices though, usually from Chinese manufacturers with scant data in English and difficult to source in Europe or the Americas. These chips cost under ten cents each, a figure which seems barely credible. To shed some light upon this world, [cpldcpu] has produced a run-down of some of the available families that even if you will never work with such an inexpensive option still makes for a fascinating read.

These processors are not the type of component you would use for high intensity tasks so it’s probable that you will not be mining cryptocurrency on a brace of them. Thus their architecture is hardly cutting-edge, with the venerable PIC12 being their inspiration and in some cases their direct copy. These are all write-once devices and some of their toolchains are variable in accessibility, but perhaps they aren’t as terrible as some would have you believe. If you are looking for inspiration, we’ve featured one of them before.

TL;DR: the Padauk PFS173, at just under $0.09, has an open-source toolchain and a decent set of peripherals.

Thanks [WilkoL] for the tip.

Image: A real PIC12 die shot. ZeptoBars [CC BY 3.0]

Kilopower: NASA’s Offworld Nuclear Reactor

August 28, 2019 by Tom Nardi 107 Comments

Here on Earth, the ability to generate electricity is something we take for granted. We can count on the sun to illuminate solar panels, and the movement of air and water to spin turbines. Fossil fuels, for all their downsides, have provided cheap and reliable power for centuries. No matter where you may find yourself on this planet, there’s a way to convert its many natural resources into electrical power.

But what happens when humans first land on Mars, a world that doesn’t offer these incredible gifts? Solar panels will work for a time, but the sunlight that reaches the surface is only a fraction of what the Earth receives, and the constant accumulation of dust makes them a liability. In the wispy atmosphere, the only time the wind could potentially be harnessed would be during one of the planet’s intense storms. Put simply, Mars can’t provide the energy required for a human settlement of any appreciable size.

The situation on the Moon isn’t much better. Sunlight during the lunar day is just as plentiful as it is on Earth, but night on the Moon stretches for two dark and cold weeks. An outpost at the Moon’s South Pole would receive more light than if it were built in the equatorial areas explored during the Apollo missions, but some periods of darkness are unavoidable. With the lunar surface temperature plummeting to -173 °C (-280 °F) when the Sun goes down, a constant supply of energy is an absolute necessity for long-duration human missions to the Moon.

Since 2015, NASA and the United States Department of Energy have been working on the Kilopower project, which aims to develop a small, lightweight, and extremely reliable nuclear reactor that they believe will fulfill this critical role in future off-world exploration. Following a series of highly successful test runs on the prototype hardware in 2017 and 2018, the team believes the miniaturized power plant could be ready for a test flight as early as 2022. Once fully operational, this nearly complete re-imagining of the classic thermal reactor could usher in a whole new era of space exploration.

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Secret Messages Could Be Hiding In Your Server Logs

August 28, 2019 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

[Ryan Flowers] writes in with a clever little hack that can allow you to hide data where nobody is going to go looking for it. By exploiting the fact that a web server will generally log all HTTP requests whether or not it’s valid, he shows how you can covertly send a message by asking the server for a carefully crafted fictitious URL.

We aren’t talking about requesting “yousuck.txt” from the server that hosts your least favorite website, either. As [Ryan] demonstrates, you can compress a text file, encode it with uuencode, and then send it line by line to the destination server with curl. He shows how the process, which he calls “CurlyTP” can be done manually on the command line, but it would be a simple matter of wrapping it up in a Bash script.

To get the message back, you just do the opposite. Use grep to find the lines in the log file that contain the encoded data, and then put them through uudecode to get the original text back. Finding the appropriate lines in the log file is made easier by prepending a prearranged keyword to the beginning of the URL requests. The keyword can be changed for each message to make things easier to keep track of.

If you’re still wondering why anyone would go through the trouble to do this, [Ryan] provides an excellent example: a covert “dead drop” where people could leave messages they’d rather not send through the usual channels. As long as the sender used a service to mask their true IP address, they could anonymously deliver messages onto the server without having to use any special software or protocol they might not have access to. Even the most restrictive firewalls and security measures aren’t likely to be scanning URLs for compressed text files.

We’ve seen web-based dead drops done with Python in the past, and even purpose built “PirateBoxes” that allow people to covertly exchange files, but we like how this method doesn’t require any special configuration on the server side. You should check your server logs, somebody might be trying to tell you something.

Finely Machined Valve Controls Miniature RC Hydraulics

August 28, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Hydraulic components are the industrial power transmission version of LEGO. Pumps, cylinders, valves – pretty much everything is standardized, and fitting out a working system is a matter of picking the right parts and just plumbing everything together. That’s fine if you want to build an excavator or a dump truck, but what if you want to scale things down?

Miniature hydraulic systems need miniature components, of which this homebrew hydraulic valve made by [TinC33] is a great example. (Video embedded below.) If you’re curious about why anyone would need these, check out the tiny hydraulic cylinders he built a while back, wherein you’ll learn that miniature RC snowplows are a thing. The video below starts with a brief but clear explanation about how hydraulic circuits work, as well as an explanation of the rotary dual-action proportional valve he designed. All the parts are machined by hand in the lathe from aluminum and brass stock. The machining operations are worth watching, but if you’re not into such things, skip to final assembly and testing at 13:44. The valve works well, providing very fine control of the cylinder and excellent load holding, and there’s not a leak to be seen. Impressive.

[TinC33] finishes the video with a tease of a design for multiple valves in a single body. That one looks like it might be an interesting machining challenge, and one we’d love to see.

Thanks to [mgsouth] for the tip.

Fixing A Cheap UPS HAT For Your Raspberry Pi With A Tiny Daemon

August 27, 2019 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) isn’t something solely to have hooked up to your desktop PC. Your Raspberry Pi SBC might also benefit from it. Yet the available options aren’t too great, or are too expensive. This leads folk including [Joachim Baumann] to modify cheerfully cheap Chinese UPS HAT boards such as the Geekworm UPS HAT to fix its myriad of issues and missing features.

Inspired by a number of other hacks on this board which fixed things like needing to push a button on the UPS to boot the Raspberry Pi, [Joachim] set out to make a similar ATtiny-based solution that would address all issues, above all the fact that this Geekworm UPS does not detect when the connected SBC has turned off and will happily run the lithium battery pack dry. Finding a blog post by Simon who had reverse-engineered the board previously was immensely helpful. Continue reading “Fixing A Cheap UPS HAT For Your Raspberry Pi With A Tiny Daemon” →

New Cray Will Reach 1.5 ExaFLOPS

August 27, 2019 by Al Williams 61 Comments

It wasn’t that long ago when hard drives that boasted a terabyte of capacity were novel. But impressive though the tera- prefix is, beyond that is peta and even further is exa — as in petabyte and exabyte. A common i7 CPU currently clocks in at about 60 gigaflops (floating point operations per second). Respectable, but today’s supercomputers routinely turn in sustained rates in the petaflop range, with some even faster. The Department of Energy announced they were turning to Cray to provide three exascale computers — that is, computers that can reach an exaflop or more. The latest of these, El Capitan, is slated to reach 1.5 exaFLOPS and will reside at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

The $600 million price tag for El Capitan seems pretty reasonable for a supercomputer. After all, a Cray I could only do 160 megaflops and cost nearly $8 million in 1977, or about $33 million in today’s money. So about 20 times the cost gets them over 9,000 times the compute power.

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Another Way To Make PCBs At Home

August 27, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 32 Comments

One of the more popular ways of rolling out your own custom PCB is to simply create the model in your CAD program of choice and send it off to a board manufacturer who will take care of the dirty work for you. This way there is no need to deal with things like chemicals, copper dust, or maintaining expensive tools. A middle ground between the board manufacturer and a home etching system though might be what [igorfonseca83] has been doing: using an inexpensive laser engraver to make PCBs for him.

A laser engraver is basically a low-power laser CNC machine that’s just slightly too weak to cut most things that would typically go in a laser cutter. It turns out that the 10W system is the perfect amount of energy to remove a mask from a standard PCB blank, though. This in effect takes the place of the printer in the old toner transfer method, and the copper still has to be dissolved in a chemical solution, but the results are a lot more robust than trying to modify a printer for this task.

If you aren’t familiar with the days of yore when homebrew PCBs involved a standard desktop printer, many people still use this method, although the results can be mixed based on printer reliability. If you want to skip the middleman, and the need for a chemical bath, a more powerful laser actually can cut the traces for you, too.

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