Author: Dan Maloney

3212 Articles

Chip Mystery: The Case Of The Purloined Pin

April 25, 2024 by 29 Comments

Let’s face it — electronics are hard. Difficult concepts, tiny parts, inscrutable datasheets, and a hundred other factors make it easy to screw up in new and exciting ways. Sometimes the Magic Smoke is released, but more often things just don’t work even though they absolutely should, and no amount of banging your head on the bench seems to change things.

It’s at times like this that one questions their sanity, as [Gili Yankovitch] probably did when he discovered that not all CH32V003s are created equal. In an attempt to recreate the Linux-on-a-microcontroller project, [Gili] decided to go with the A4M6 variant of the dirt-cheap RISC-V microcontroller. This variant lives in a SOP16 package, which makes soldering a bit easier than either of the 20-pin versions, which come in either QFN or TSSOP packages.

Wisely checking the datasheet before proceeding, [Gili] was surprised and alarmed that the clock line for the SPI interface didn’t appear to be bonded out to a pin. Not believing his eyes, he turned to the ultimate source of truth and knowledge, where pretty much everyone came to the same conclusion: the vendor done screwed up.

Now, is this a bug, or is this a feature? Opinions will vary, of course. We assume that the company will claim it’s intentional to provide only two of the three pins needed to support a critical interface, while every end user who gets tripped up by this will certainly consider it a mistake. But forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and hats off to [Gili] for taking one for the team and letting the community know.

More Mirrors (and A Little Audio) Mean More Laser Power

April 24, 2024 by 10 Comments

Lasers are pretty much magic — it’s all done with mirrors. Not every laser, of course, but in the 1980s, the most common lasers in commercial applications were probably the helium-neon laser, which used a couple of mirrors on the end of a chamber filled with gas and a high-voltage discharge to produce a wonderful red-orange beam.

The trouble is, most of the optical power gets left in the tube, with only about 1% breaking free. Luckily, there are ways around this, as [Les Wright] demonstrates with this external passive cavity laser. The guts of the demo below come from [Les]’ earlier teardown of an 80s-era laser particle counter, a well-made instrument powered by a He-Ne laser that was still in fine fettle if a bit anemic in terms of optical power.

[Les] dives into the physics of the problem as well as the original patents from the particle counter manufacturer, which describe a “stabilized external passive cavity.” That’s a pretty fancy name for something remarkably simple: a third mirror mounted to a loudspeaker and placed in the output path of the He-Ne laser. When the speaker is driven by an audio frequency signal, the mirror moves in and out along the axis of the beam, creating a Doppler shift in the beam reflected back into the He-Ne laser and preventing it from interfering with the lasing in the active cavity. This forms a passive cavity that greatly increases the energy density of the beam compared to the bare He-Ne’s output.

The effect of the passive cavity is plain to see in the video. With the oscillator on, the beam in the passive cavity visibly brightens, and can be easily undone with just the slightest change to the optical path. We’d never have guessed something so simple could make such a difference, but there it is.

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Mining And Refining: Uranium And Plutonium

April 24, 2024 by 40 Comments

When I was a kid we used to go to a place we just called “The Book Barn.” It was pretty descriptive, as it was just a barn filled with old books. It smelled pretty much like you’d expect a barn filled with old books to smell, and it was a fantastic place to browse — all of the charm of an old library with none of the organization. On one visit I found a stack of old magazines, including a couple of Popular Mechanics from the late 1940s. The cover art always looked like pulp science fiction, with a pipe-smoking father coming home from work to his suburban home in a flying car.

But the issue that caught my eye had a cover showing a couple of rugged men in a Jeep, bouncing around the desert with a Geiger counter. “Build your own uranium detector,” the caption implored, suggesting that the next gold rush was underway and that anyone could get in on the action. The world was a much more optimistic place back then, looking forward as it was to a nuclear-powered future with electricity “too cheap to meter.” The fact that sudden death in an expanding ball of radioactive plasma was potentially the other side of that coin never seemed to matter that much; one tends to abstract away realities that are too big to comprehend.

Things are more complicated now, but uranium remains important. Not only is it needed to build new nuclear weapons and maintain the existing stockpile, it’s also an important part of the mix of non-fossil-fuel electricity options we’re going to need going forward. And getting it out of the ground and turned into useful materials, including its radioactive offspring plutonium, is anything but easy.

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No Active Components In This Mysterious Audio Oscillator

April 23, 2024 by 39 Comments

What’s the simplest audio frequency oscillator you can imagine? There’s the 555, of course, and we can think of a few designs using just two transistors or even a few with just one. But how about an oscillator with no active components? Now there’s a neat trick.

Replicating [Stelian]’s “simplest audio oscillator on the Internet” might take some doing on your part, since it relies on finding an old telephone. Like, really old — you’ll need one with the carbon granule cartridge in the handset, along with the speaker. Other than that, all you’ll need is a couple of 1.5-volt batteries, wiring everything in one big series loop, and placing the microphone and speaker right on top of each other. Apply power and you’re off to the races. [Stelian]’s specific setup yielded a 2.4-kHz tone that could be altered a bit by repositioning the speaker relative to the mic. On the oscilloscope, the waveform is a pretty heavily distorted sine wave.

It’s a bit of a mystery to [Stelian] as to how this works without something to provide at least a little gain. Perhaps the enclosure of the speaker or the mic has a paraboloid shape that amplifies the sound just enough to kick things off? Bah, who knows? Let the hand-waving begin!

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Reverse Engineering The Quansheng Hardware

April 23, 2024 by 11 Comments

In the world of cheap amateur radio transceivers, the Quansheng UV-K5 can’t be beaten for hackability. But pretty much every hack we’ve seen so far focuses on the firmware. What about the hardware?

To answer that question, [mentalDetector] enlisted the help of a few compatriots and vivisected a UV-K5 to find out what makes it tick. The result is a complete hardware description of the radio, including schematics, PCB design files, and 3D renders. The radio was a malfunctioning unit that was donated by collaborator [Manuel], who desoldered all the components and measured which ones he could to determine specific values. The parts that resisted his investigations got bundled up along with the stripped PCB to [mentalDetector], who used a NanoVNA to characterize them as well as possible. Documentation was up to collaborator [Ludwich], who also made tweaks to the schematic as it developed.

PCB reverse engineering was pretty intense. The front and back of the PCB — rev 1.4, for those playing along at home — were carefully photographed before getting the sandpaper treatment to reveal the inner two layers. The result was a series of high-resolution photos that were aligned to show which traces connected to which components or vias, which led to the finished schematics. There are still a few unknown components, The schematic has a few components crossed out, mostly capacitors by the look of it, representing unpopulated pads on the PCB.

Hats off to the team for the work here, which should make hardware hacks on the radio much easier. We’re looking forward to what’ll come from this effort. If you want to check out some of the firmware exploits that have already been accomplished on this radio, check out the Trojan Pong upgrade, or the possibilities of band expansion. We’ve also seen a mixed hardware-firmware upgrade that really shines.

Ancient Cable Modem Reveals Its RF Secrets

April 22, 2024 by 27 Comments

Most reverse engineering projects we see around here have some sort of practical endpoint in mind. Usually, but not always. Reverse-engineering a 40-year-old cable modem probably serves no practical end, except for the simple pleasure of understanding how 1980s tech worked.

You’ll be forgiven if the NABU Network, the source of the modem [Jared Boone] tears into, sounds unfamiliar; it only existed from 1982 to 1985 and primarily operated in Ottawa, Canada. It’s pretty interesting though, especially the Z80-based computer that was part of the package. The modem itself is a boxy affair bearing all the hallmarks of 1980s tech. [Jared]’s inspection revealed a power supply with a big transformer, a main logic board, and a mysterious shielded section with all the RF circuits, which is the focus of the video below.

Using a signal generator, a spectrum analyzer, and an oscilloscope, not to mention the PCB silkscreen and component markings, [Jared] built a block diagram of the circuit and determined the important frequencies for things like the local oscillator. He worked through the RF section, discovering what each compartment does, with the most interesting one probably being the quadrature demodulator. But things took a decidedly digital twist in the last compartment, where the modulated RF is turned into digital data with a couple of 7400-series chips, some comparators, and a crystal oscillator.

This tour of 80s tech and the methods [Jared] used to figure out what’s going on in this box were pretty impressive. There’s more to come on this project, including recreating the original signal with SDRs. In the mean time, if this put you in the mood for other videotext systems of the 80s, you might enjoy this Minitel terminal teardown.

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Hackaday Links: April 21, 2024

April 21, 2024 by 12 Comments

Do humanoid robots dream of electric retirement? Who knows, but maybe we can ask Boston Dynamics’ Atlas HD, which was officially retired this week. The humanoid robot, notable for its warehouse Parkour and sweet dance moves, never went into production, at least not as far as we know. Atlas always seemed like it was intended to be an R&D platform, to see what was possible for a humanoid robot, and in that way it had a heck of a career. But it’s probably a good thing that fleets of Atlas robots aren’t wandering around shop floors or serving drinks, especially given the number of hydraulic blowouts the robot suffered. That also seems to be one of the lessons Boston Dynamics learned, since Atlas’ younger, nimbler replacement is said to be all-electric. From the thumbnail, the new kid already seems pretty scarred and battered, so here’s hoping we get to see some all-electric robot fails soon.

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