M.2 For Hackers – Connectors

November 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

In the first M.2 article, I’ve described real-world types and usecases of M.2 devices, so that you don’t get confused when dealing with various cards and ports available out there. I’ve also designed quite a few M.2 cards and card-accepting adapters myself. And today, I’d like to tell you everything you need to know in order to build M.2 tech on your own.

There’s two sides to building with M.2 – adding M.2 sockets onto your PCBs, and building the PCBs that are M.2 cards. I’ll cover both of these, starting with the former, and knowing how to deal with M.2 sockets might be the only thing you ever need. Apart from what I’ll be describing, there’s some decent guides you can learn bits and pieces from, like the Sparkfun MicroMod design guide, most of which is MicroMod-specific but includes quite a few M.2 tips and tricks too.

First, Let’s Talk About The Y-Key

What could you do with a M.2 socket on your PCB? For a start, many tasty hobbyist-friendly SoMs and CPUs now have a PCIe interface accessible, and if you’re building a development board or a simple breakout, an M.2 socket will let you connect an NVMe SSD for all your high-speed low-power storage needs – many Raspberry Pi Compute Module mainboards have M.2 M-key sockets specifically for that, and there’s NVMe support in the RPi firmware to boot. Plus, you can always plug a full-sized PCIe adapter or an extender into such a socket and connect a PCIe network card or other much-needed device – even perhaps, an external GPU! However, as much as PCIe-equipped SoMs are tasty, they’re far from the only reason to use M.2 sockets.

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Infrastructure diagram of [Stefan]'s network at the end of his fiber optics journey

Say No To Obsolescence, Wire Up Your House With Fiber

November 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 105 Comments

These days, if you wire your house with anything less than gigabit, you might end up throttling your Internet connection. If you wired things up using two pairs per device back in 100BASE-T days, however, you’ll want to redo your cabling before you buy new switches. Now, some of us are already starting to equip ourselves with 2.5G hardware — which may require new cabling once again. Would you like to opt out of the Ethernet cabling upgrade rat race, at least for a while? Do like [Stefan Schüller] did, and use fiber optics for your home networking needs!

[Stefan] walks you through everything you’d need to know if you ever choose to look into fiber for your networking needs, and explains the design decisions he’s made — from splicing fiber optics himself, to building a PC to do routing instead of getting a hardware Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) equipped router. He also describes pitfalls, like SFP modules requiring reconfiguration to work with different router brands, and having to buy a fiber splicer with an eye-watering pricetag.

In the end, he shows a cost breakdown, and says he’s quite happy with the upgrade. While the costs might seem prohibitive compared to running Ethernet, upgrading to fiber will have your equipment function at top speed whenever you need it – who knows, perhaps in a few years time, 2.5G will no longer suffice for new advancements in home technology needs, and we’ll see more SFP modules in hackers’ hands. After all, modern TVs already use fiber optics for video data transfer.

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Your Car Has Driving Profiles – Here’s How To Change Them

November 2, 2022 by Arya Voronova 24 Comments

Just like mobile phones of yesteryear, modern cars have profiles. They aren’t responsible for the sounds your car produces, however, as much as they change how your car behaves – for instance, they can make your engine more aggressive or tweak your steering resistance. On MQB platform cars, the “Gateway” module is responsible for these, and it’s traditionally been a black box with a few user-exposed profiles – not as much anymore, thanks to the work of [Jille]. They own a Volkswagen hybrid car, and had fun changing driving modes on it – so naturally, they decided to reverse-engineer the configuration files responsible.

Now, after two years of experimentation, tweaking values and observing changes, there’s quite some sense made of the configuration binaries. You can currently edit these binaries, also referred to as datasets, in a hex editor – there’s profiles for the 010 hex editor that make sense of the data you load, and explanation of the checksums involved. With this, you are no longer limited by profiles the manufacturer composed – if a slightly different driving combination of parameters makes more sense to you, you can recombine them and have your own profile, unlock modes that the manufacturer decided to lock out for non-premium cars, and even fix some glaring oversights in factory modes.

This is pretty empowering, and far from ECU modifications that introduce way more fundamental changes to how your car operates – the parameters being changed are within the range of what the manufacturer has implemented. The smarter our cars become, the more there is for us hackers to tweak, and even in a head unit, you can find things to meaningfully improve given some reverse-engineering smarts.

Breakers for the system on a DIN rail, with markings like 48V and 24V and 12V and so on on the bottom, and two hefty devices of some kind on the bottom, probably MPTT controllers, with hefty wires running from them.

Low-Voltage DC Network Build Incited By Solar Panels

November 2, 2022 by Arya Voronova 56 Comments

Nowadays, some people in Europe worry about energy prices climbing, and even if all the related problems disappear overnight, we’ll no doubt be seeing some amounts of price increase. As a hacker, you’re in a good position to evaluate the energy consuming devices at your home, and maybe even do something about them. Well, [Peter] put some solar panels on his roof, but couldn’t quite figure out a decent way to legally tie them into the public grid or at least his flat’s 220V network. Naturally, a good solution was to create an independent low-voltage DC network in parallel and put a bunch of devices on it instead!

He went with 48V, since it’s a voltage that’s high enough to be efficient, easy to get equipment like DC-DCs for, safe when it comes to legal matters concerned, and overall compatible with his solar panel setup. Since then, he’s been putting devices like laptops, chargers and lamps onto the DC rail instead of having them be plugged in, and his home infrastructure, which includes a rack full of Raspberry Pi boards, has been quite content running 24/7 from the 48V rail. There’s a backup PSU from regular AC in case of overcast weather, and in case of grid power failures, two hefty LiFePO4 accumulators will run all the 48V-connected appliances for up to two and a half days.

The setup has produced and consumed 115kWh within the first two months – a hefty contribution to a hacker’s energy independence project, and there’s enough specifics in the blog post for all your inspiration needs. This project is a reminder that low-voltage DC network projects are a decent choice on a local scale – we’ve seen quite viable proof-of-concept projects done at hackercamps, but you can just build a small DC UPS if you’re only looking to dip your feet in. Perhaps, soon we’ll figure out a wall socket for such networks, too.

A Raspberry Pi 3 with a black Raspberry Pi Camera PCB on top of it, looking at the camera taking this picture. There's a Jolly Wrencher in the background.

Make Your Pi Moonlight As A Security Camera

November 2, 2022 by Arya Voronova 22 Comments

A decade ago, I was learning Linux through building projects for my own needs. One of the projects was a DIY CCTV system based on a Linux box – specifically, a user-friendly all-in-one package for someone willing to pay for it. I stumbled upon Zoneminder, and those in the know, already can tell what happened – I’ll put it this way, I spent days trying to make it work, and my Linux skills at the time were not nearly enough. Cool software like Motion was available back then, but I wasn’t up to the task of rolling an entire system around it. That said, it wouldn’t be impossible, now, would it?

Five years later, I joined a hackerspace, and eventually found out that its CCTV cameras, while being quite visually prominent, stopped functioning a long time ago. At that point, I was in a position to do something about it, and I built an entire CCTV network around a software package called MotionEye. There’s a lot of value in having working CCTV cameras at a hackerspace – not only does a functioning system solve the “who made the mess that nobody admits to” problem, over the years it also helped us with things like locating safety interlock keys to a lasercutter that were removed during a reorganization, with their temporary location promptly forgotten.

Being able to use MotionEye to quickly create security cameras became quite handy very soon – when I needed it, I could make a simple camera to monitor my bicycle, verify that my neighbours didn’t forget to feed my pets as promised while I was away, and in a certain situation, I could even ensure mine and others’ physical safety with its help. How do you build a useful always-recording camera network in your house, hackerspace or other property? Here’s a simple and powerful software package I’d like to show you today, and it’s called MotionEye.

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The project's wrist-worn heartrate sensor shown on someone's hand, Caption: Our device has three main components: watch electronics (arrow to watch display), organism enclosure (arrow to the 3D-printed case of the watch) and our living organism physarum polycephalum a.k.a slime mold.

What If Your Day-To-Day Devices Were Alive?

November 2, 2022 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

We take advantage of a variety of devices in our day-to-day life, and we might treat them as just pieces of hardware, elements fulfilling a certain purpose — forgotten about until it’s time to use them. [Jasmine Lu] and [Pedro Lopes] believe that these relationships could work differently, and their recent paper describes a wearable device that depends on you as much as you depend on it. Specifically, they built wrist-worn heart rate sensors and designed a living organism into these, in a way that it became vital to the sensor’s functioning.

The organism in question is Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold that needs water to stay alive and remain conductive — if you don’t add water on a regular basis, it eventually dries out and hibernates, and adding water then will revive it. The heart rate sensor’s power rail is controlled by the mold, meaning the sensor functions only as long as you keep the mold alive and healthy. In their study, participants were asked to wear this device for one-two weeks, and the results go way beyond what we would expect from, say, a Tamagotchi — with the later pages describing participant reactions and observations being especially impressive.

For one, the researchers found that the study participants developed a unique sense of connection towards the slime mold-powered device, feeling senses of responsibility and reciprocity, and a range of other feelings you wouldn’t associate with a wearable. Page 9 of the paper tells us how one participant got sick, but still continued caring for the organism out of worry for its well-being, another participant brought her “little pet mold friend” on a long drive; most participants called the slime a “friend” or a “pet”. A participant put it this way:

[…] it’s always good to be accompanied by some living creature, I really like different, animals or plants. […] carrying this little friend also made me feel happy and peaceful.

There’s way more in the paper, but we wouldn’t want to recite it in full — you should absolutely check it out for vivid examples of experiences that you’d never have when interacting with, say, your smartphone, as well as researchers’ analysis and insights.

With such day-to-day use devices, developing a nurturing relationship could bring pleasant unexpected consequences – perhaps, countering the “kept on a shelf since purchase” factor, or encouraging repairability, both things to be cherished. If you’ve ever overheard someone talking about their car or laptop as if it were alive, you too might have a feeling such ideas are worth exploring. Of course, not every device could use a novel aspect like this, but if you wanted to go above and beyond, you could even build a lamp that needs to be fed to function.

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A small widescreen laptop repeating the ThinkPad style. It looks cute; sadly, it does not exist.

[Dana Sibera] Creates Devices That Don’t Exist

November 1, 2022 by Arya Voronova 43 Comments

[Dana Sibera], known as [@NanoRaptor] on Twitter, makes us wonder about devices that could have been, and wince about devices that must never see the light of day – summoned into existence by her respectable photo editing and 3D modeling skills. Ever wanted to see a Model M with a small green-tinted CRT built into its side? Now you have. Perhaps, a “self-tapping” DE-9 plug with wood screws for pins? Tough luck, here it is anyway, but you can have a palate cleanser if it was too much to bear. Having started over a year ago with the classic “spicy pillows, but actually pillows” design, she keeps gracing us with portrayals of tech and tech-adjacent objects straight from the depths of her imagination.

None of the things she shows exist in real life, some regretfully and some thankfully so, but that’s not the first thing on your mind when you stumble upon a cube-shaped iPod with a built-in equalizer in your Twitter feed. Pictures like this “cassette ROM” or the deluxe woodgrain 386DX are quite apparent in what they are. On the other hand, devices like this “Mini VGA” dongle or the amber CRT-adorned TI92 Plus might have you reach for your wallet before you realize what’s up, and the photographic-proof-accompanied assertion about early floppy drives being punchcard-based might have you believe you are just not up to date on your retrocomputing trivia. Continue reading “[Dana Sibera] Creates Devices That Don’t Exist” →