A Power Supply With Ultra High Resolution Current Measurement Built In

October 10, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 11 Comments

Need to do some real fine power consumption measurements? [Gero Müller] was in that exact situation, and wasn’t happy with the expensive off-the-shelf tools for doing the job. Thus, he built his own. Meet nanoTracer.

*nanoTracer measures small current draws in very high resolution.*

The concept of the device is simple. It’s a power supply that measures current on a nanoampere scale, and on microsecond intervals. It can deliver from 0 to 5.125 volts in 256 steps, and up to 100 mA of current. It has a sampling bandwidth of 1 MHz, at 2 million samples per second, with effective dynamic range from 100 mA all the way down to 100 nA. For capturing microscopic changes in current draw, that’s invaluable. The device also features a UART for talking to an attached project directly, and additional pins for taking further ADC measurements where needed.

Right now, it’s at an early prototype stage, and [Gero] tells us the software is “very basic” right now. Still, it’s easy to see how this device would be very useful to anyone working to optimize power consumption on low-power projects. One wonders if there are some applications in power-based side-channel attacks, too.

We’re hoping to learn more about nanoTracer from [Gero] soon—how it was built, how it works, and what it’s really like to use. Perhaps one day down the line, the design might even become available for others that could use such a nifty tool. There’s no mucking about when you get down to nanoamps, after all. If you’ve cooked up something similar in your own lab, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Building A Sound Camera For Under $400

October 10, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 23 Comments

[Benn Jordan] had an idea. He’d heard of motion amplification technology, where cameras are used to capture tiny vibrations in machinery and then visually amplify it for engineering analysis. This is typically the preserve of high-end industrial equipment, but [Benn] wondered if it really had to be this way. Armed with a modern 4K smartphone camera and the right analysis techniques, could he visually capture sound?

The video first explores commercially available “acoustic cameras” which are primarily sold business-to-business at incredibly high prices. However, [Benn] suspected he could build something similar on the cheap. He started out with a 16-channel microphone that streams over USB for just $275, sourced from MiniDSP, and paired it with a Raspberry Pi 5 running the acoular framework for acoustic beamforming. Acoular analyses multichannel audio and visualizes them so you can locate sound sources. He added a 1080p camera, and soon enough, was able to overlay sound location data over the video stream. He was able to locate a hawk in a tree using this technique, which was pretty cool, and the total rig came in somewhere under $400.

The rest of the video covers other sound-camera techniques—vibration detection, the aforementioned motion amplification, and some neat biometric techniques. It turns out your webcam can probably detect your heart rate, for example.

It’s a great video that illuminates just what you can achieve with modern sound and video capture. Think SIGGRAPH-level stuff, but in a form you can digest over your lunchbreak. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Building A Sound Camera For Under $400” →

Supercon 2023: Receiving Microwave Signals From Deep-Space Probes

October 10, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

Here’s the thing about radio signals. There is wild and interesting stuff just getting beamed around all over the place. Phrased another way, there are beautiful signals everywhere for those with ears to listen. We go about our lives oblivious to most of them, but some dedicate their time to teasing out and capturing these transmissions.

David Prutchi is one such person. He’s a ham radio enthusiast that dabbles in receiving microwave signals sent from probes in deep space. What’s even better is that he came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about how it’s done!

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Meet The Optical Data Format You’ve Never Heard Of Before

October 10, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 80 Comments

You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re diligent for a home gamer, and that gets you done.

The above paragraph could describe any number of Hackaday readers, but what of bigger operations? Universities, businesses, and research institutions all have data budgets far in excess of what the individual could even imagine. What might shock you is that some of them are relying on optical media—just not the kind you’ve ever heard of before. Enter Sony’s Optical Disc Archive.

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The Internet Archive Has Been Hacked

October 10, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 33 Comments

There are a great many organizations out there, all with their own intentions—some selfish, some selfless, some that land somewhere in between. Most would put the Internet Archive in the category of the library—with its aim of preserving and providing knowledge for the aid of all who might call on it. Sadly, as [theresnotime] reports, it appears this grand institution has been hacked.

On Wednesday, users visiting the Internet Archive were greeted with a foreboding popup that stated the following:

Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!

The quote appears to refer to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), a site that collates details of security breaches so individuals can check if their details have been compromised.

According to founder Brewster Kahle, the site was apparently DDOS’d, with the site defaced via a JavaScript library. It’s believed this may have been a polyfill supply chain attack. As for the meat of the hack, it appears the individuals involved made off with usernames, emails, and encrypted and salted passwords. Meanwhile, as Wired reports, it appears Have I Been Pwned first received the stolen data of 31 million users on September 30.

At the time of writing, it appears the Internet Archive has restored the website to some degree of normal operation. It’s sad to see one of the Internet’s most useful and humble institutions fall victim to a hack like this one. As is always the way, no connected machine is ever truly safe, no matter how much we might hope that’s not the case.

[Thanks to Sammy for the tip!]

Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry

October 8, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 33 Comments

Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t.

Indeed, the world currently produces an immense amount of polyethylene and polypropylene waste. These materials are used for everything from plastic bags to milk jugs and for microwavable containers—and it’s all really hard to recycle. However, a team at UC Berkeley might have just figured out how to deal with this problem.

Continue reading “Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry” →

Interactive Project Teaches Lessons About Electromagnets And Waves

October 4, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

Whether you’re a kid or a nerdy adult, you’ll probably agree that the interactive exhibitions at the museum are the best. If you happened to get down to the Oregon Science Festival in the last couple of years, you might have enjoyed “Catch The Wave!”—a public education project to teach people about electromagnets and waves. Even better, [Justin Miller] has written up how he built this exciting project.

Catch The Wave! consists of four small tabletop cabinets. Each has physical controls and a screen, and each plays its role in teaching a lesson about electromagnets and sound waves, with a context of audio recording and playback.

The first station allows the user to power up an electromagnet and interact with it using paper clips. They can also see the effect it has on a nearby compass. The second illustrates how reversing current through an electromagnet can reverse its polarity, and demonstrates this by using it to swing a pendulum. The third station then ties this to the action of a speaker, which is effectively a fancy electromagnet—and demonstrates how it creates sound waves in this way. Finally, the fourth station demonstrates the use of a microphone to record a voice, and throws in some wacky effects for good fun.

If you’ve ever tried to explain how sound is recorded and reproduced, you’d probably have loved to had tools like these to do so. We love a good educational project around these parts, too.