For readers in the American Northeast that are looking for something to do this weekend, may we humbly suggest a day trip to attend the 2022 Philadelphia Maker Faire on Saturday, October 15th. After taking the last two years off due to COVID-19, the event has moved to the Independence Seaport Museum for its grand return, and is sure to attract plenty of hackers and makers who are eager to show off their pandemic projects.
Of course, the nature of these events is that you never really know what you’re going to see until you actually get there. But just browsing the list of confirmed projects that will have dedicated tables set up, we can tell there’s some very interesting stuff on tap — from fighting robots and hologram printers, to plasma physics and electric hydrofoils. While the deadline to submit projects for official inclusion has long since passed, we can tell you from experience that’s not going to stop folks from showing up with their own gadgets to show off to the captive audience. Especially if they’re of the wearable variety; it’s not really a Maker Faire unless somebody is wearing something that’s blinking.
Olympia and Becuna
Naturally the Faire itself is obviously the main event, but don’t forget that the Independence Seaport Museum itself is worth checking out while you’re there. You can tour the 130-year-old USS Olympia, as well as the USS Becuna, one of the last surviving WWII Balao-class submarines.
While the community might never truly recover from the loss of the flagship Maker Faires in New York and California, we do take some comfort in knowing that smaller regional shows like this one have been growing over the last few several years. They’re not only a great way to connect with like-minded folks in your area, but can help you connect with maker-friendly vendors and organizations which you might otherwise be unaware of.
While the x86 architecture certainly isn’t going away anytime soon, it seems that each year more and more of our computing is done on ARM processors. It started with our smartphones, spread into low-cost Chromebooks, and now Apple’s gone all-in with their M1/M2 chips. But so far we haven’t seen too much movement in the desktop space, a fact which has arguably slowed the development of ARM-compatible software and operating systems.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t options out there, and no, we don’t mean using a Raspberry Pi. [Wooty-B] has been documenting their efforts to switch over to a ARM desktop, which makes for fascinating reading even if you’re currently comfortable with your architecture choices. The key is the HoneyComb LX2K, a Mini-ITX ARM development board that offers enough expansion and raw power to meet most daily computing needs…assuming you’re willing to put in the effort. Continue reading “Exploring The Cutting Edge Of Desktop ARM Hardware”→
After laying low during the height of the pandemic, the East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) is just days away from making its triumphant return to Bel Air, Maryland. This two-day celebration of all things extruded is packed with talks, exhibits, and demonstrations that you won’t want to miss if you’ve got even a passing interest in 3D printing. You can purchase advance tickets now — adult admission for both days (Oct 8 & 9) will set you back just $10 USD, while anyone under 17 gets in for free.
When we visited in 2019, ERRF was only in its second year, but it was already obvious that it was becoming a major event in the 3D printing world. The schedule included talks from 3D printing luminaries such as Adrian Bowyer, Josef Průša was on hand to personally unveil the Prusa Mini, and it seemed everyone who ever squirted out a bit of hot plastic on YouTube was there to stream live from the show floor. But then COVID-19 came around and jammed the extruder, as it were.
We’re glad to see that an event as young as ERRF managed to weather the pandemic and return to an in-person show. There was naturally a risk of loosing momentum, especially as the organizers opted not to go the virtual route these last two years — but with palpable online buzz about the event and a stacked lineup of speakers, vendors, and exhibitors, it seems like even a global pandemic couldn’t hold these hackers and makers down for long.
If you make the trip to Maryland this weekend and happen to run into a roving Hackaday writer, there just might be some special edition swag in it for you. But for those who can’t make it to ERRF in person, don’t worry. As always, we’ll make sure to bring you plenty of pictures and details from the show.
In a perfect world, all of our electronic devices would come with complete documentation, and there’d be open source libraries available for interfacing them with whatever we wanted. There’d never be arbitrary lockouts preventing us from using a piece of hardware in a way the manufacturer didn’t approve of, and the “cloud” wouldn’t be a black-box server in some data center on the other side of the planet, but a transparent and flexible infrastructure for securely storing and sharing information.
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. What’s worse, rather than moving towards that electronic utopia, the industry appears to be heading in the opposite direction. It seems like every month we hear about another service shutting down and leaving viable hardware to twist in the wind. Just yesterday Google announced they’d be retiring their Stadia game streaming service early next year — leaving users with unique Internet-connected controllers that will no longer have a back-end to communicate with.
Matthew Alt
Luckily for us, there’s folks like Matthew [wrongbaud] Alt out there. This prolific hacker specializes in reverse engineering, and has a knack not just for figuring out how things work, but in communicating those findings with others. His conquests have graced these pages many times, and we were fortunate enough to have him helm the Introduction to Reverse Engineering with Ghidra class for HackadayU back in 2020. This week, he stopped by the Hack Chat to talk about the past, present, and future of reverse engineering.
Matthew got his start in reverse engineering during college, when he was working in a shop that specialized in tuning engine control units (ECUs). He was responsible for figuring out how the ECUs functioned, which ultimately would allow them to be modified to improve engine performance beyond the vehicle’s stock configuration. Sometimes that involved uploading modified calibration data, or disabling functions that were detrimental to engine performance. These software changes could potentially increase engine output by as much as 50 HP, though he says that sometimes the goal was to simply increase throttle response so the vehicle would feel more aggressive on the road.
Moving on to the tools of the trade, Matthew explained why he prefers using Ghidra for embedded targets over classic reverse engineering tools like IDA Pro. As an example he points to a recent project where he used Ghidra’s API and intermediary language PCode to crack passwords in Game Boy Advance games. Though he does mention that IDA still has its place if you’re looking to peek into some Windows C++ software.
Matthew also pointed to new techniques and tools for working with fault injection which have opened up a lot of exciting possibilities over the last few years. In fact, he says tools like ChipWhisperer will become invaluable as newer devices adopt advanced security features. When gadgets are using secure boot and encrypted firmware, gaining access is going to take a bit more than just finding an unleaded serial port on the board. Glitching attacks will become more commonplace, so you might as well get up to speed now.
Colin O’Flynn’s ChipWhisperer makes side-channel power analysis and glitching attacks far more accessible.
We’d like to thank Matthew Alt for not just stopping by the Hack Chat, but for being such a good friend to the Hackaday community. His work has been inspirational for all of us here, and it’s always exciting when he’s penned a new blog post detailing another challenge bested. The next time your favorite MegaCorp releases some anti-consumer gadget, you can take some comfort in knowing he’s still out there bending hardware to his will.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
It’s taken years to perfect them, but desktop 3D printers that uses a conveyor belt instead of a traditional build plate to provide a theoretically infinite build volume are now finally on the market. Unfortunately, they command a considerable premium. Even the offering from Creality, a company known best for their budget printers, costs $1,000 USD.
But if you’re willing to put in the effort, [Adam Fasnacht] thinks he might have the solution. His open source modification for the Ender 3 Pro turns the affordable printer into a angular workhorse. We wouldn’t necessarily call it cheap; in addition to the printer’s base price of $240 you’ll need to source $200 to $300 of components, plus the cost of the plastic to print out the 24 components necessary to complete the conversion. But it’s still pretty competitive with what’s on the market. Continue reading “Infinite Axis Printing On The Ender 3”→
Got any plans for tonight? No? Well then you’re in luck, because NASA is just a few hours from intentionally smashing a probe into the minor planet Dimorphos as part of Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — marking the first time humanity has ever intentionally tried to knock a space rock off-course. If it works, we’re one step closer to having a viable planetary defense system in case we ever detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. If it doesn’t work. . . well, we’ve still got time to come up with another plan.
To be clear, the 170 meter (560 feet) wide Dimorphos DOES NOT pose any threat to us, nor will it after NASA smacks it around with an ion-propelled spacecraft. This is simply a test to see if a small spacecraft impacting an asteroid head-on can slow it down enough to appreciably change its orbital trajectory. We won’t know for a week or so if the impact did the trick, but it should still be fascinating to watch the crash happen live.
We’ve embedded the two NASA streams below. The first one will start about a half an hour before impact and is going to show live navigational images of Dimorphos as the DART spacecraft zeros in on its target, and the second stream will cover the main event. Keep in mind this isn’t a Hollywood film we’re talking about — don’t expect any dramatic explosions when the clock hits zero. When the telemetry stops coming back, that means it was a bullseye.
A self-destructing storage device that vaporizes its contents at the first sign of trouble would be an invaluable tool for many people, but good luck getting your hands on such a thing if you don’t work for a three-letter agency. Or at least, that’s what we would have said before [Walker] got on the case. He’s working on an open source self-destructing USB flash drive for journalists, security researchers, whistleblowers, or anyone else who really values their privacy.
When we previously covered this project in July, [Walker] had only planned to make the flash drive hide its contents unless you knew to wet your fingers before plugging it in. We admit it sounds a little weird, but as far as clandestine methods of activating something goes, it’s pretty clever. But based on the feedback he received, he decided to go all-in and make the USB drive literally trash itself should it be accessed by somebody who doesn’t know the secret.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
But how exactly do you pull that off? Sure we’d love to see a small thermite charge or vial of acid packed in there, but obviously that’s not very practical. It needs to be safe to carry around, and just as importantly, unlikely to get you into even more trouble with whoever is searching through your belongings. To that end, [Walker] thinks he’s come up with an elegant solution.
The datasheet for his flash memory chip says the maximum voltage it can handle before releasing the Magic Smoke is a meager 4.6 V. So he figures running a voltage doubler on the nominal 5 V coming from a USB port should disable the chip nicely with a minimum of external drama. Will it be enough to prevent the data from being recovered forensically? We don’t know, but we’re eager to find out.
In the write-up, [Walker] takes readers through the circuit designs he’s come up so far, and shows off the source code that will run on the ATtiny25 to determine when it’s time to toast the flash. He says by the next post he should have the entire flash drive built and documented, so stay tuned.
