The New Hotness

May 6, 2023 by Elliot Williams 35 Comments

If there’s one good thing to be said about the chip shortage of 2020-2023 (and counting!) it’s that a number of us were forced out of our ruts, and pushed to explore parts that we never would have otherwise. Or maybe it’s just me.

Back in the old times, I used to be a die-hard Atmel AVR fan for small projects, and an STM32 fan for anything larger. And I’ll freely admit, I got stuck in my ways. The incredible abundance of dev boards in the $2 range also helped keep me lazy. I had my thing, and I was fine sticking with it, admittedly due to the low price of those little blue pills.

And then came the drought, and like everyone else, my stockpile of microcontrollers started to dwindle. Replacements at $9 just weren’t an option, so I started looking around. And it’s with no small bit of shame that I’ll admit that I hadn’t been keeping up with the changes as much as I should have. Nowadays, it’s all ESP32s and RP2040s over here, and granted there’s a bit of a price bump, but the performance is there in abundance. But I can’t help feeling like I’m a few years back of the cutting edge.

So when I see work like what [CNLohr] and [Bitluni] are doing with the ultra-cheap CH32V003 microcontrollers, it makes me think that I need to start filling in gaps in my comfortable working-set of chips again. But how the heck am I supposed to keep up? And how do you? It took a global pandemic and silicon drought to force me out of my comfort zone last time. Can the simple allure of dirt-cheap chips get me out? We’ll see!

Thinking Inside The Box

April 29, 2023 by Elliot Williams 144 Comments

Last week, I wrote about NASA’s technology demonstrator projects, and how they’ve been runaway successes – both the Mars rovers and the current copter came from such experimental beginnings. I argued that letting some spirit of experimentation into an organization like NASA is probably very fruitful from time to time.

And then a few days later, we saw SpaceX blow up a rocket and completely shred its launch platform in the process. Or maybe it was the other way around, because it looks like the concrete thrown up by the exhaust may have run into the engines, causing the damage that would lead to the vehicle spinning out of control. SpaceX was already working on an alternative launch pad using water-cooled steel, but it ran what it had. They’re calling the mission a success because of what they learned, but it’s clearly a qualified success. They’ll rebuild and try again.

In comparison, the other US-funded rocket run by Boeing, the SLS suffered years of delays, cost tremendous amounts of money, and has half the lift of SpaceX’s Super Heavy. But it made it to space. Science was done, many of the CubeSats onboard got launched, the unmanned capsule orbited the moon, and splashed down safely back on earth. They weren’t particularly taking any big risks, but they got the job done.

The lore around SpaceX is that they’re failing forward to success. And it’s certainly true that they’ve got their Falcon 9 platform down to a routine, at a lower cost per launch than was ever before possible, and that their pace has entirely shaken up the conservative space industry. They’ll probably get there with their Starship / Super Heavy too. SLS was an old-school rocket, and they had boring old flame diverters on their launch pad, which means that SLS will never take off from Mars. On the other hand, one of the two systems has put a payload around the Moon.

Maybe there’s something to be said for thinking inside the box from time to time as well?

Hackaday Podcast 216: FETs, Fax, And Electrochemical Fab

April 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

In this week’s podcast, non-brothers Elliot Williams and Al Williams talk about our favorite hacks of the week. Elliot’s got analog on the brain, courtesy of the ongoing Op Amp Contest, and Al is all about the retrocomputers, from a thrift-store treasure to an old, but still incredibly serviceable, voice synthesizer. Both agree that they love clever uses of mechanical parts and that nobody should fear the FET.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download your own personal copy!

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The Freedom To Fail

April 22, 2023 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

When you think of NASA, you think of high-stakes, high-cost, high-pressure engineering, and maybe the accompanying red tape. In comparison, the hobby hacker has a tremendous latitude to mess up, dream big, and generally follow one’s bliss. Hopefully you’ll take some notes. And as always with polar extremes, the really fertile ground lies in the middle.

[Dan Maloney] and I were thinking about this yesterday while discussing the 50th flight of Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter. Ingenuity is a tech demo, carrying nothing mission critical, but just trying to figure out if you could fly around on Mars. It was planned to run for five flights, and now it’s done 50.

The last big tech demo was the Sojourner Rover. It was a small robotic vehicle the size of a microwave oven that they hoped would last seven days. It went for 85, and it gave NASA the first taste of success it needed to follow on with 20 years of Martian rovers.

Both of these projects were cheap, by NASA standards, and because they were technical demonstrators, the development teams were allowed significantly more design freedom, again by NASA standards.

None of this compares to the “heck I’ll just hot-air an op-amp off an old project” of weekend hacking around here, but I absolutely believe that a part of the tremendous success of both Sojourner and Ingenuity were due to the risks that the development teams were allowed to take. Creativity and successful design thrives on the right blend of constraint and freedom.

Will Ingenuity give birth to a long series of flying planetary rovers as Sojourner did for her rocker-bogie based descendants? Too early to tell. But I certainly hope that someone within NASA is noticing the high impact that these technical demonstrator projects have, and also noting why. The addition of a little bit of hacker spirit to match NASA’s professionalism probably goes a long way.

VCF East 2023: Andy Geppert Talks Core Memory

April 20, 2023 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Do you know core memory? Our prehistoric predecessors would store data in the magnetic fields of ferrite rings, reading out the ones and zeroes by setting the magnetic field and detecting if a small current is induced in a sense wire, indicating that the bit flipped, or not detecting the current, in which case it didn’t. Core memory is non-volatile, rad hard, and involved a tremendous amount of wire weaving to fabricate. And it’s pretty cool.

[Andy Geppert] wants to get you hands-on with this anachronistic memory, and builds kits to demo how it works. [Tom Nardi] and [Bil Herd] caught up with him at the Vintage Computer Festival East last weekend, and got him to demo his Core64 project for them. (Video, embedded below.)

The design of Core64 displays its state in lights at all times. And this means that you can write to it using either the onboard Pi Pico, for a blinky light show, or with a magnetic stylus, setting each bit’s magnetic state by hand. This turns it into a magnetic memory tablet and is a sweet demonstration of the principles that make it all work. Or, if you pulse the lines at just the right frequency, you can make the cores spin!

Watch [Andy] explaining it in our interview here, and stay tuned for more coming from VCF East 2023 soon.

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Last Chance To Re-engineer Education For The 2023 Hackaday Prize

April 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

The first round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize closes next Tuesday, ~~March~~ April 25th. If you’ve got an educational project – whether that’s a robot technique you just need to share, or an instructional radio build – you’ve got this weekend left to get your project into shape, whip up a Hackaday.io page in support, and enter. The top 10 projects get a $500 prize award, and a chance to win the big prizes in the final round. You want to get your project in now.

We’ve already seen some great entries into this first round of the Prize. Ranging from a trainer robot for First Robotics teams, through a complete learn-electronics kit on a PCB, building radios in High Schools, and all the way to an LED-and-lightpipe map to help teachers and students with their geography lessons, we’ve got a broad range of educational projects so far.

ElectroLab

FRC Trainer

The World is Mine!

High Schoolers Build a Radio Receiver

But there is still room for your project! And with the deadline closing in, your best bet at the $500 prize money relies on you burning a bit of the midnight oil this weekend, but Hackaday glory awaits those who do.

Sufficiently Advanced Tech: Has Bugs

April 15, 2023 by Elliot Williams 74 Comments

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He was a sci-fi writer, though, and not a security guy. Maybe it should read “Any sufficiently advanced tech has security flaws”. Because this is the story of breaking into a car through its headlight.

In a marvelous writeup, half-story, half CAN-bus masterclass, [Ken Tindell] details how car thieves pried off the front headlight of a friend’s Toyota, and managed to steal it just by saying the right things into the network. Since the headlight is on the same network as the door locks, pulling out the bulb and sending the “open the door” message repeatedly, along with a lot of other commands to essentially jam some other security features, can pull it off.

Half of you are asking what this has to do with Arthur C. Clarke, and the other half are probably asking what a lightbulb is doing on a car’s data network. In principle, it’s a great idea to have all of the electronics in a car be smart electronics, reporting their status back to the central computer. It’s how we know when our lights are out, or what our tire pressure is, from the driver’s seat. But adding features adds attack surfaces. What seems like magic to the driver looks like a gold mine to the attacker, or to car thieves.

With automotive CAN, security was kind of a second thought, and I don’t mean this uncharitably. The first goal was making sure that the system worked across all auto manufacturers and parts suppliers, and that’s tricky enough. Security would have to come second. And more modern cars have their CAN networks encrypted now, adding layers of magic on top of magic.

But I’m nearly certain that, when deciding to replace the simple current-sensing test of whether a bulb was burnt out, the engineers probably didn’t have the full cost of moving the bulb onto the CAN bus in mind. They certainly had dreams of simplifying the wiring harness, and of bringing the lowly headlight into the modern age, but I’d bet they had no idea that folks were going to use the headlight port to open the doors. Sufficiently advanced tech.