The dulcet tones of a modem handshake may be a thing of the distant past for most of us, but that hasn’t stopped there being a lively hacking scene in the world of analogue telephones. Often that’s achieved using old devices resurrected from a parts bin, but sometimes, as with [Brian]’s USB modem, the devices are entirely new.
A surprise is that modem chips are still available, in this case the SkyWorks IsoModem chips. It uses an M.2 module format to allow the modem and support circuitry to be separated enough to place it in another project if necessary, along with a clear warning on the PCB not to put it in the identical-looking PC slot. It also comes with tips for experimenting if you don’t have access to a landline too, given that POTS is fast becoming a thing of the past itself in so many places.
If you’ve got nowhere to show off your modem, we’d like to suggest you try a hacker camp. There you’ll often find a copper network you’re positively expected to hack.
Although battery fires in electric cars and two-wheeled vehicles are not a common phenomenon, they are notoriously hard to put out, requiring special training and equipment by firefighters. Although the full scope of the issue is part of a contentious debate, [Aarian Marshall] over at Wiredrecently wrote an article about how the electric car industry has a plan to make a purportedly minor issue even less of an issue. Here the questions seem to be mostly about what the true statistics are for battery fires and what can be done about the primary issue with batteries: thermal runaway.
While the Wired article references a study by a car insurance company about the incidence of car fires by fuel type (gas, hybrid, electric), its cited sources are dubious as the NTSB nor NHTSA collect statistics on these fires. The NFPA does, but this only gets you up to 2018, and they note that the data gathering here is spotty. Better data is found from European sources, which makes clear that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) catch fire less often than gasoline cars at 25 per 100,000 cars sold vs 1529/100k for ICE cars, but when BEVs do burn it’s most often (60%) from thermal runaway, which can be due to factors like a short circuit in a cell, overcharging and high ambient temperatures (including from arson or after-effects of a car crash). Continue reading “Thermal Runaway: Solving The Bane Of Electric Vehicles”→
For as useful as computers are in the modern ham shack, they also tend to be a strong source of unwanted radio frequency interference. Common wisdom says applying a few ferrite beads to things like Ethernet cables will help, but does that really work?
It surely appears to, for the most part at least, according to experiments done by [Ham Radio DX]. With a particular interest in lowering the noise floor for operations in the 2-meter band, his test setup consisted of a NanoVNA and a simple chunk of wire standing in for the twisted-pair conductors inside an Ethernet cable. The NanoVNA was set to sweep across the entire HF band and up into the VHF; various styles of ferrite were then added to the conductor and the frequency response observed. Simply clamping a single ferrite on the wire helped a little, with marginal improvement seen by adding one or two more ferrites. A much more dramatic improvement was seen by looping the conductor back through the ferrite for an additional turn, with diminishing returns at higher frequencies as more turns were added. The best performance seemed to come from two ferrites with two turns each, which gave 17 dB of suppression across the tested bandwidth.
The question then becomes: How do the ferrites affect Ethernet performance? [Ham Radio DX] tested that too, and it looks like good news there. Using a 30-meter-long Cat 5 cable and testing file transfer speed with iPerf, he found no measurable effect on throughput no matter what ferrites he added to the cable. In fact, some ferrites actually seemed to boost the file transfer speed slightly.
Ferrite beads for RFI suppression are nothing new, of course, but it’s nice to see a real-world test that tells you both how and where to apply them. The fact that you won’t be borking your connection is nice to know, too. Then again, maybe it’s not your Ethernet that’s causing the problem, in which case maybe you’ll need a little help from a thunderstorm to track down the issue. Continue reading “Ferrites Versus Ethernet In The Ham Shack”→
We’ve previously covered the PiEEG, an affordable brain-computer interface (BCI) shield designed to connect to the Raspberry Pi. The open source project developed by [Ildar Rakhmatulin] is intended to allow students and hobbyists to experiment with detecting electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG) biosignals — unlocking a wide array of applications ranging from assistive tech to gaming.
Now, the PiEEG hardware has been upgraded to detect sixteen channels via either wet or dry electrodes. The new board, referred to as the PiEEG-16, offers up the same ease of use and features as its predecessor, including the ability to read out signals from the device using Python scripts. Compared to the eight channels supported by the previous generation of hardware, the PiEEG-16 promises to provide the fine-grain data required for more complex operations.
Since we last checked in with the PiEEG back in 2023, [Ildar] says the project has attracted plenty of attention. To help document how the community is using the capability offered by these BCIs, he’s added a page on the project’s site to show off what folks are building with the technology.
Inevitably, some express concern when talking about non-professionals working with brain interfacing hardware. But the project’s documentation is quick to point out that efforts have been taken to make the endeavour as risk-free as possible. The most important thing to remember is that the Raspberry Pi and PiEEG are intended to be powered by batteries so as to remain completely isolated. Similarly, there’s no need to connect the devices to a mains-powered computer, as everything happens on the Pi itself.
Even still, it’s made clear that the PiEEG-16 is not a medical device, and has received no formal certifications. If you want to experiment with this technology, you do so at your own risk. Just something to keep in mind…no pun intended.
In a world that has no shortage of macropads, the duckyPad still managed to set itself apart. The open source mechanical pad offered an incredible array of customization options, and thanks to its onboard OLED display, you never had to wonder which key did what. But there’s always room for improvement.
Announced earlier today, the duckyPad Pro is the culmination of everything creator [dekuNukem] learned from developing, marketing, and supporting the original duckyPad. Much hasn’t changed — it looks largely the same, offers the same RGB-backlit mechanical switches, and the trademark OLED is still there, although it’s gotten a little larger. The obvious changes are the addition of five more keys, and a pair of rotary encoders.
Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ve got a stellar slate of speakers this year — way too many to feature in one post. So here’s your first taste, and a reminder that Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late.
In addition to the full-length talks, we’ve got a series of Lightning Talks, so if you want to share seven minutes’ of insight with everyone there, please register your Lightning Talk idea now.
But Supercon has a lot more than just talks! The badge heavily features Supercon Add-Ons, and we want to see the awesome SAOs you are working on. There will be prizes, and we’ll manufacture four of our favorite designs in small batches for the winners, and make a full run for Hackaday Europe in 2025. Want to know more about SAOs? They’re the ideal starter PCB project.
Continuing the series on floppy copy protection, [GloriousCow] examines Electronic Arts’ Interlock system. This was used from 1984 to 1987 for at least fourteen titles released on both 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppies. Although not officially advertised, in the duplication mark sector the string ELECTRONIC ARTS IBM INTERLOCK. appears, hence the name. Compared to other copy protection systems like Softguard Superlok this Interlock protection poses a number of somewhat extreme measures to enforce the copy protection.
The disk surface of Side #0 of the 1984 mystery-adventure title, Murder on the Zinderneuf (Credit: GloriousCow)
Other than the typical issues that come with copying so-called ‘booter’ floppies that do not use DOS but boot directly into the game, the protection track with Interlock is rather easy to spot, as seen on the right. It’s the track that lights up like a Christmas tree with meta data, consisting out of non-consecutive sector IDs. Of note is the use of ‘deleted’ sector data marks (DDAM), which is a rarity in normal usage. Along with the other peculiarities of this track it requires an exact query-response from the disk to be accepted as genuine, including timings. This meant that trying to boot a straight dump of the magnetic surface and trying to run it in an emulated system failed to work.
Reverse-engineering Interlock starts with the stage 0 bootloader from the first sector, which actually patches the End-of-Track (EOT) table parameter to make the ridiculous number of sectors on the special track work. The bootloader then loads a logo, which is the last thing you’ll see if your copy is imperfect.
Decrypting the second stage bootloader required a bit of disassembly and reverse-engineering, which uncovered some measures against crackers. While the actual process of reverse-engineering and the uncovered details of Interlock are far too complex to summarize here, after many hours and the final victory over the handling of an intentional bad CRC the target game (Murder on the Zinderneuf from 1984) finally loaded in the emulator.
After confirming the process with a few other titles, it seems that Interlock is mostly broken, with the DOS-based title ArcticFox (1987) the last hurdle to clear. We just hope that [GloriousCow] is safe at this point from EA’s tame lawyers.
