So. What’s Up With All These Crazy Event Networks Then?

November 11, 2021 by Jenny List 21 Comments

As an itinerant Hackaday writer I am privileged to meet the people who make up our community as I travel the continent in search of the coolest gatherings. This weekend I’ve made the trek to the east of the Netherlands for the ETH0 hacker camp, in a camping hostel set in wooded countryside. Sit down, connect to the network, grab a Club-Mate, and I’m ready to go!

Forget the CTF, Connecting To WiFi Is The Real Challenge!

There no doubt comes a point in every traveling hacker’s life when a small annoyance becomes a major one and a rant boils up from within, and perhaps it’s ETH0’s misfortune that it’s at their event that something has finally boiled over. I’m speaking of course about wireless networks.

While on the road I connect to a lot of them, the normal commercial hotspots, hackerspaces, and of course at hacker camps. Connecting to a wireless network is a simple experience, with a level of security provided by WPA2 and access credentials being a password. Find the SSID, bang in the password, and you’re in. I’m as securely connected as I reasonably can be, and can get on with whatever I need to do. At hacker camps though, for some reason it never seems to be so simple.

Instead of a simple password field you are presented with a complex dialogue with a load of fields that make little sense, and someone breezily saying “Just enter hacker and hacker!” doesn’t cut it when that simply doesn’t work. When you have to publish an app just so that attendees can hook up their phones to a network, perhaps it’s time to take another look . Continue reading “So. What’s Up With All These Crazy Event Networks Then?” →

The Hackaday Remoticon 2 Badge: An Exercise In Your Own Ingenuity

November 10, 2021 by Jenny List 7 Comments

The twin challenges of the pandemic and now the semiconductor shortage have been particularly hard on the designers of event badges, as events have been cancelled and uncertain supply issues render their task impossible. When an event goes virtual, how do you even start to produce a badge for it? Make the badge and rely on enough stalwarts buying one? Or maybe produce a badge that’s a fancy take on a prototyping board?

For Hackaday Remoticon 2021, [Thomas Flummer] has produced a novel take on the second option by distributing a badge as a set of KiCAD files that can either be ordered from a PCB fab as a prototyping board or used as the canvas for a PCB to use whatever components are to hand. To demonstrate this, he’s produced an example badge that’s a MicroMod carrier.

So if you’d like to chase the full Remoticon experience with a badge there should still be enough time to order a set of boards, but to design your own electronics you’ll need to get a move on. What you might build upon it is up to you, but if you have an ESP32 module lying around you might wish to consider cloning the SHA2017 badge or its successors with the badge.team platform.

We’ve seen Thomas’ work before more than once on these pages, most notably as the man behind the BornHack badges.

NFC Performance: It’s All In The Antenna

November 10, 2021 by Jenny List 15 Comments

NFC tags are a frequent target for experimentation, whether simply by using an app on a mobile phone to interrogate or write to tags, by incorporating them in projects by means of an off-the-shelf module, or by designing a project using them from scratch. Yet they’re not always easy to get right, and can often give disappointing results. This article will attempt to demystify what is probably the most likely avenue for an NFC project to have poor performance, the pickup coil antenna in the reader itself.

The tags contain chips that are energised through the RF field that provides enough power for them to start up, at which point they can communicate with a host computer for whatever their purpose is.

“NFC” stands for “Near Field Communication”, in which data can be exchanged between physically proximate devices without their being physically connected. Both reader and tag achieve this through an antenna, which takes the form of a flat coil and a capacitor that together make a resonant tuned circuit. The reader sends out pulses of RF which is maintained once an answer is received from a card, and thus communication can be established until the card is out of the reader’s range. Continue reading “NFC Performance: It’s All In The Antenna” →

Reballing And A Steady Hand Makes A Raspberry Pi 800

November 8, 2021 by Jenny List 41 Comments

The all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 computer is a capable device, but those seeking its maximum power may be disappointed by its 4 GB of memory. When the Pi 4 and Compute Module 4 have double that figure, surely the Pi 400 could catch up! A reddit user called [Pi800] rose to the challenge by replacing the 4 GB chip from the Pi 400 with the 8 GB chip from a Pi Compute Module, resulting in the so-called Pi 800, a working 8 GB all-in-one Pi.

As a piece of work it’s a deceptively straightforward yet extremely fiddly piece of soldering that requires a steady hand for even the most skilled of solderers. What takes it beyond the norm though is the reballing process. A ball-grid-array chip has a grid of small balls of solder on its underside that make the contacts, and these melt when it is soldered so require replacement before reworking. This is normally done with a template of carefully aligned holes to line up balls of solder in a stream of hot air, but lacking the template in this case the job was done by hand, laboriously ball by ball. A soldering task we’d hesitate to take on ourselves, so we’re impressed.

The result is an 8 GB all-in-one Pi, and it’s honestly not beyond the realms of possibility that an official version of this mod could be a future Raspberry Pi product. Perhaps we’ll wait for that, but should you be impatient then at least it’s possible to roll your own. It’s certainly not the first BGA memory swap we’ve brought you.

The Raspberry Pi CM4 Begets A Form Factor

November 8, 2021 by Jenny List 34 Comments

It has become the norm for single-board computers to emerge bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Raspberry Pi, as the board from Cambridge sets the hardware standard for its many competitors. This trend has taken an interesting new turn, as a new board has emerged that doesn’t sport the familiar 40-pin connector of the Pi Model B, but the more compact from factor of the Compute Module 4. The Radxa CM3 sports a Rockchip RK3566 quad core Cortex-A55 running at 2.0 GHz, and is to be made available in a variety of memory specifications topping out at 8 GB. It is hardware compatible with the Pi CM4, and should be usable with carrier boards made for that module.

We’ve looked at the CM4 as the exciting face of the Raspberry Pi because the traditional boards have largely settled into the same-but-faster progression of models since the original B+ in 2014. The compute module offers an accessible way to spin your own take on Raspberry Pi hardware, and it seems that this new board will only serve to broaden those opportunities. Radxa are the company behind the Rock Pi series of more conventional Raspberry Pi clones, so there seems every chance that it will reach the market as promised.

Will it make sense to buy one of these as opposed to the Pi CM4? On paper it may have some hardware features to tempt developers, but like all Pi clones it will have to bridge the software gap to be a real contender. The Raspberry Pi has never been the fastest board on the market at any given time, but it has gained its position because it comes with a well-supported and properly updated operating system. For this board and others like it that will be a tough standard to match.

Curious as to what the first Raspberry Pi form factor clone was? We think it’s the SolidRun Carrier-one from 2013.

Via CNX Software.

Got Anything To Talk About? These Dutch Hackers Want You To Say It To Them

November 7, 2021 by Jenny List 2 Comments

As we head into another Northern Hemisphere pandemic winter and hope that things won’t be quite as bad this year, next summer seems an extremely long time away in the future. But it will be upon us sooner than we might think, and along with it will we hope come a resumption of full-scale hacker camps. One of the biggest will be in the Netherlands, where MCH 2022 will take lace at the end of July, and if you’re up to casting your minds ahead far enough for that then they’re inviting submissions to their Call for Participation. Their events are always a memorable and relaxed opportunity to spend a few days in the sun alongside several thousand other like-minded individuals, so we’d urge you to give it some consideration.

If you’ve never delivered a conference talk before then it can be a daunting prospect, but in fact a hacker camp can be an ideal place to give it a first try. Unlike a more traditional technology conference where most of the attendees file into the auditorium, at hacker camps there is so much else on offer that many talks are delivered to only that sub group of attendees for whom the subject is of real interest. So there is less of the huge auditorium of anonymous crowds about it, and more of the small and friendly crowd of fellow enthusiasts. The great thing about our community is that there are as many different interests within it as there are individuals, so whatever your product, specialism, or favourite hobby horse might be, you’ll find people at a hacker camp who’d like to hear what you have to say.

If you’re still seeking inspiration, of course you might find it by looking at the schedule from SHA, the last Dutch camp.

ETH0 Autumn 2021: Tiny Camp Manages COVID Precautions Indoors

November 5, 2021 by Jenny List 13 Comments

It’s tempting despite news of stubbornly higher-than-ideal COVID infection figures, to imagine that just maybe the world might be returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality. Where this is being written we’re a largely vaccinated population long out of lockdown, and though perhaps some of the pandemic pronouncements of our politicians are a bit suspect we’re cautiously able to enjoy most of life’s essentials. Visiting the supermarket and having a beer might be one thing, but the effect of the pandemic is still being felt in our community’s gatherings. BornHack went ahead this summer, but the headline MCH hacker camp was put off until 2022 and the upcoming CCC Congress in Germany is once more to be a virtual event.

But some events manage to put together the right mix of precaution and size. Such was the case with ETH0, a hacker camp which I was happy to attend last weekend.

Continue reading “ETH0 Autumn 2021: Tiny Camp Manages COVID Precautions Indoors” →