First Space Cookies: Cosmic Cooking Is Half-Baked

February 11, 2020 by Kristina Panos 52 Comments

For decades, astronauts have been forced to endure space-friendly MREs and dehydrated foodstuffs, though we understand both the quality and the options have increased with time. But if we’re serious about long-term space travel, colonizing Mars, or actually having a restaurant at the end of the universe, the ability to bake and cook from raw ingredients will become necessary. This zero-gravity culinary adventure might as well start with a delicious experiment, and what better than chocolate chip cookies for the maiden voyage?

That little filtered vent lets steam out and keeps crumbs in. Image via Zero-G Kitchen

The vessel in question is the Zero-G Oven, built in a collaboration between Zero-G Kitchen and Nanoracks, a Texas-based company that provides commercial access to space. In November 2019, Nanoracks sent the Zero-G oven aloft, where it waited a few weeks for the bake-off to kick off. Five pre-formed cookie dough patties had arrived a few weeks earlier, each one sealed inside its own silicone baking pouch.

The Zero-G Oven is essentially a rack-mounted cylindrical toaster oven. It maxes out at 325 °F (163 °C), which is enough heat for Earth cookies if you can wait fifteen minutes or so. But due to factors we haven’t figured out yet, the ISS cookies took far longer to bake.

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Xbox Controller Provides Intro To SWD Hacking

February 11, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

It’s amazing to see how much technology is packed into even the “simple” devices that we take for granted in modern life. Case in point, the third party Xbox controller that [wrongbaud] recently decided to tear into. Not knowing what to expect when he cracked open its crimson red case, inside he found an ARM Cortex microcontroller and a perfect excuse to play around with Serial Wire Debug (SWD).

Though even figuring out that much took a bit of work. As is depressingly common, all the interesting components on the controller’s PCB were locked away behind a black epoxy blob. He had no idea what chip was powering the controller, much less that debugging protocols it might support. But after poking around the board with his multimeter, he eventually found a few test points sitting at 3.3 V which he thought was likely some kind of a programming header. After observing that pulling the line labelled “RES” low reset the controller, he was fairly sure he’d stumbled upon a functional JTAG or SWD connection.

As [wrongbaud] explains in his detailed blog post, SWD is something of a JTAG successor that’s commonly used by ARM hardware. Using just two wires (data and clock), SWD provides hardware debugging capabilities on pin constrained platforms. It allows you to step through instructions, read and write to memory, even dump the firmware and flash something new.

For the rest of the post, [wrongbaud] walks the reader through working with an SWD target. From compiling the latest version of OpenOCD and wiring an FTDI adapter to the port, all the way to navigating through the firmware and unlocking the chip so you can upload your own code.

To prove he’s completely conquered the microcontroller, he ends the post by modifying the USB descriptor strings in the firmware to change what it says when the controller is plugged into the computer. From here, it won’t take much more to get some controller macros like rapid fire implemented; a topic we imagine he’ll be covering in the future.

This post follows something of a familiar formula for [wrongbaud]. As part of his continuing adventures in hardware hacking, he finds relatively cheap consumer devices and demonstrates how they can be used as practical testbeds for reverse engineering. You might not be interested in changing the ROM that a Mortal Kombat miniature arcade cabinet plays, but learning about the tools and techniques used to do it is going to be valuable for anyone who wants to bend silicon to their will.

Classic Toy Helicopter Flies Again As DIY Version

February 11, 2020 by Dan Maloney 31 Comments

For many of us who grew up in the 1970s, “VertiBird”, the fly-it-yourself indoor helicopter, was a toy that was begged for often enough that it eventually appeared under the Christmas tree. And more than a few of the fascinating but delicate toys were defunct by Christmas afternoon, victims of the fatal combination of exuberant play and price-point engineering. But now a DIY version of the classic toy flies again, this time with a more robust design.

To be fair to the designers at Mattel, the toy company that marketed VertiBird, the toy was pretty amazing. The plastic helicopter was powered by a motor located in the central base, which rotated a drive rod that ran through a stiff tether. Small springs in the base and at the copter acted as universal joints to transmit power to the rotor. These springs were the weak point in the design, especially the one in the base, often snapping in two.

[Luke J. Barker]’s redesign puts a tiny gear motor in the aircraft rather than in the base, something that wouldn’t have been feasible in the original. To address the problem of getting electrical power from the base to the aircraft, [Luke] eschewed an expensive slip ring and instead used a standard 3.5-mm audio jack and plug. The plug serves as an axle for the main gear in the base that powers the copter’s rotation; sadly, this version doesn’t tilt the aircraft mechanically to control backward and forward flight like the original. A pair of pots with 3D-printed levers control throttle and flight direction through an Arduino; see it in action in the video below.

These pages abound with rotorcraft builds, both helicopters and multirotor. We appreciate all manner of flying machines, but this one really takes us back.

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