Author: Dan Maloney

3373 Articles

PicoEMP EMFI tool

Glitch Your Way To Reverse-Engineering Glory With The PicoEMP

January 15, 2022 by 9 Comments

Most of our projects are, to some extent, an exercise in glitch-reduction. Whether they’re self-inflicted software or hardware mistakes, or even if the glitches in question come from sources beyond our control, the whole point of the thing is to get it running smoothly and predictably.

That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes inducing a glitch on purpose can be a useful tool, especially when reverse engineering something. That’s where this low-cost electromagnetic fault injection tool could come in handy. EMFI is a way to disrupt the normal flow of a program running on an embedded system; properly applied and with a fair amount of luck, it can be used to put the system into an exploitable state. The PicoEMP, as [Colin O’Flynn] dubs his EMFI tool, is a somewhat tamer version of his previous ChipSHOUTER tool. PicoEMP focuses on user safety, an important consideration given that its business end can put about 250 volts across its output. Safety features include isolation for the Raspberry Pi Pico that generates the PWM signals for the HV section, a safety enclosure over the HV components, and a switch to discharge the capacitors and prevent unpleasant surprises.

In use, the high-voltage pulse is applied across an injection tip, which is basically a ferrite-core antenna. The tip concentrates the magnetic flux in a small area, which hopefully will cause the intended glitch in the target system. The video below shows the PicoEMP being used to glitch a Bitcoin wallet, as well as some tests on the HV pulse.

If you’re interested in the PicoEMP and glitching in general, be sure to watch out for [Colin]’s 2021 Remoticon talk on the subject. Until that comes out, you might want to look into glitching attacks on a Nintendo DSi and a USB glitch on a Wacom tablet.

Continue reading “Glitch Your Way To Reverse-Engineering Glory With The PicoEMP” →

NTP server heated with Bitcoin mining dongles

Bitcoin Mining ASICs Repurposed To Keep NTP Server On Track

January 12, 2022 by 27 Comments

They say time is money, but if that’s true, money must also be time. It’s all figurative, of course, but in the case of this NTP server heater powered by Bitcoin mining dongles, money actually does become time.

This is an example of the lengths to which Network Time Protocol aficionados will go in search of slightly better performance from their NTP servers. [Folkert van Heusden], having heard that thermal stability keeps NTP servers happy, used a picnic cooler as an environmental chamber for his  Pi- and GPS-based NTP rig. Heat is added to the chamber thanks to seven Block Erupter ASIC miner dongles, which are turned on by a Python script when a microcontroller sends an MQTT message that the temperature has dropped below the setpoint.

Each dongle produces about 2.5 Watts of heat when it’s working, making them pretty effective heaters. Alas, heat is all they produce at the moment — [Folkert] just has them working on the same hash over and over. He does say that he has plans to let the miners do useful work at some point, not so much for profit but to at least help out the network a bit.

This seems like a bit of a long way around to solve this problem, but since the mining dongles are basically obsolete now — we talked about them way back in 2013 — it has a nice hacky feeling to it that we appreciate.

Miniature Space Invaders game

Arduino And An OLED Make This Space Invaders Cabinet Tiny

January 12, 2022 by 15 Comments

For as simple as it appears now, Space Invaders was one machine from the Golden Age of video games that always seemed to have a long line waiting for a chance to lose a couple of quarters. And by way of celebrating the seminal game’s influence, [Nick Cranch] has executed what might just be the world’s smallest Space Invaders replica.

It appears that this started mainly as an exercise in what’s possible with what’s on hand, which included a couple of quite small OLED displays. For the build photos it looks like there’s an Arduino Nano running the show; [Nick] relates that the chosen hardware proved challenging, and that he had to hack the driver library to make it work. Once he got a working game, [Nick] didn’t rest on his laurels. Rather, he went the extra mile and built a miniature cabinet to house everything in.

The video quality below may be poor, but it’s more than enough to see how much work he put into detailing the cabinet. The graphics of the original US release of the game cabinet are accurately represented, right down to the art on the front glass. The cabinet itself is made from 1.5 mm plywood which he cut by hand. It even looks like he recreated the original scheme of cellophane overlays on the monochrome screen to add a little color to the game. Nice touch!

We really appreciate the attention to detail here, with our only quibble being no schematics or code being posted. Hopefully, we’ll see those later, but for now, this looks like a fun project and a nice trip down memory lane. But if you think it’s too small, no worries — we’ve got a much, much bigger version of the game too.

Continue reading “Arduino And An OLED Make This Space Invaders Cabinet Tiny” →

An Oil Diffusion Vacuum Pump From Thrift Store Junk

January 12, 2022 by 13 Comments

It seems like creating a vacuum should be a pretty easy job, but it turns out that sucking all the air out of something is harder than it seems. A cheap vacuum pump will get you part of the way there, but to really pull a hard vacuum, you need an oil diffusion pump that costs multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

Or, you need a bunch of thrift store junk, a TIG welder, and a can of WD-40. At least that’s what [Lucas] put into his homebrew oil diffusion pump. The idea of such a contraption is to vaporize oil in a chamber such that the oil droplets entrain any remaining gas molecules toward an exhaust port. His low-budget realization of this principle involved a lot of thrift store stainless steel cookware, welded together with varying degrees of success, with liberal applications of epoxy to seal up any leaks. And an electric smores cooker for the heating element, which was a nice touch. The low-budget approach extended even to the oil for the pump; rather than shelling out for expensive specialty oil, [Lucas] distilled some from a WD-40 silicone spray lubricant.

The video below details all the travails [Lucas] encountered along the way, plus the testing process. The results were at least encouraging — the diffusion pump was pulling vacuum far in excess of what the roughing pump was capable of. He clearly still has some work to do, but getting as far as he did with the scrap heap of parts he cobbled together is pretty impressive.

[Lucas]’ goal with all this? A fusion reactor. No, not that kind. This kind. Continue reading “An Oil Diffusion Vacuum Pump From Thrift Store Junk” →

Haber-Bosch And The Greening Of Ammonia Production

January 11, 2022 by 47 Comments

We here on Earth live at the bottom of an ocean of nitrogen. Nearly 80% of every breath we take is nitrogen, and the element is a vital component of the building blocks of life. Nitrogen is critical to the backbone of proteins that form the scaffold that life hangs on and that catalyze the myriad reactions in our cells, and the information needed to build these biopolymers is encoded in nucleic acids, themselves nitrogen-rich molecules.

And yet, in its abundant gaseous form, nitrogen remains directly unavailable to higher life forms, unusably inert and unreactive. We must steal our vital supply of nitrogen from the few species that have learned the biochemical trick of turning atmospheric nitrogen into more reactive compounds like ammonia. Or at least until relatively recently, when a couple of particularly clever members of our species found a way to pull nitrogen from the air using a combination of chemistry and engineering now known as the Haber-Bosch process.

Haber-Bosch has been wildly successful, and thanks to the crops fertilized with its nitrogenous output, is directly responsible for growing the population from a billion people in 1900 to almost eight billion people today. Fully 50% of the nitrogen in your body right now probably came from a Haber-Bosch reactor somewhere, so we all quite literally depend on it for our lives. As miraculous as Haber-Bosch is, though, it’s not without its problems, particularly in this age of dwindling supplies of the fossil fuels needed to run it. Here, we’ll take a deep dive into Haber-Bosch, and we’ll also take a look at ways to potentially decarbonize our nitrogen fixation industry in the future.

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Vacuum tube Atari Punk Console

The Atari Punk Console, Now With More Vacuum Tubes

January 11, 2022 by 7 Comments

Most of us have beheld the sonic glory of an Atari Punk Console, that lo-fi synth whose classic incarnation is a pair of 555 timers set up to warble and bleep in interesting ways. Very few of us, however, have likely seen an APC built from 555s that are made from vacuum tubes.

It’s little surprise to regular readers that this one comes to us by way of [David] at Usagi Electric, who hasn’t met a circuit that couldn’t be improved by realizing it in vacuum tubes. His “hollow-state” Atari Punk Console began with the 18-tube version of the 555 that he built just for fun a while back, which proved popular enough that he’s working on a kit version, the prototype of which served as the second timer for the synth. With 32 tubes aglow amid a rats-nest of jumpers, the console managed to make the requisites sounds, but lacked a certain elegance. [David] then vastly simplified the design, reducing the BOM to just four dual-triode tubes. Housed on a CNC milled PCB in a custom wood box, the synth does a respectable job and looks good doing it. The video below shows both versions in action, as well as detailing their construction.

As cool as a vacuum tube synth may be, we realize that not everyone goes for the hot glass approach. No worries — plenty of silicon Atari Punk Consoles to choose from here. There’s one built into a joystick, a circuit sculpture version complete with mini-CRT, or even eight APCs teamed up with MIDI control.

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Mining And Refining: Copper, The Metal That Built Technology

January 10, 2022 by 16 Comments

It’s hard to reckon exactly when in history humans became a technological species. Part of that is because the definition of technology is somewhat subjective; if you think making a stick pointy enough to grub roots from the dirt or to poke enough holes in an animal to convince it to let you eat it is technology, then our engineered world goes back a long, long way indeed.

But something about pointy sticks just doesn’t seem transformative enough, in the sense of fundamentally changing a naturally occurring material, to really count as a technological line in the sand. To cross that line, it really seems like the use of metals should be part of the package. Even if that’s the case, our technological history still goes pretty far back. And copper ends up being one of the metals that started it all, about 11,000 years ago, when our ancestors discovered natural deposits of the soft, reddish metal and began learning how to fashion it into the tools and implements that lifted us out of the Stone Age.

Our world literally cannot run without copper, forming as it does not only the electric-motor muscles of civilization, but also the wires and cables that form the power and data grids that stitch us together. Ironically, we are just as dependent on copper now as we were when it was the only metal we could make tools from, and perhaps more so. We’ll take a look at what’s involved in extracting and purifying copper, and see how the methods we today use are not entirely different from those developed over seven millennia ago.

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