Researchers Hack An Airline Analog

August 16, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie No comments

Modern airliners are rather complicated feats of engineering. Innumerable safety-critical components are connected with tens of miles of wiring, complex digital buses, and dozens (perhaps hundreds) of computers. But, as hackers, we know that any computer can be hacked and, of course, aircraft avionics are no different.

Modern aircraft typically use the ARINC 429 protocol. This differs from many protocols we see where multiple transmitters are allowed. ARINC 429 has a single transmission source. This makes a transmission-override attack hypothetically difficult, as an attacker was thought to need to physically replace a legitimate transmitter (like a flight management computer), a rather daunting task. However, the ARINC 429 transmitters sit behind a pair of 37.5 ohm resistors, so by transmitting on the same line, an attack device can simply override the legitimate transmitter’s power.

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Machine Learning COFFIES “Hears” Sunspots Before We Can See Them

August 15, 2026 by Tyler August 1 Comment

In this age of neural net “AI”, even the most skeptical of Butlerians have to agree that these machine learning models can be very, very good at pattern recognition if nothing else. NASA is on the same page, and to take advantage of that pattern recognition, they’ve built a machine learning module called COFFIES, which stands for Consequence Of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun, because at NASA everything is an acronym, or at least a backronym. Like most such names, this one is at least vaguely descriptive: the model is trying to predict what’s going on in the material flows and magnetic fields deep within our local star, and using those inferences is able to predict active regions– that’s sunspots to us chickens — up to 12 hours before they visibly form.

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Turning Energy Drinks Into Rocket Fuel

August 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Sometimes claimed to give you wings, energy drinks can, at the very least, be used to make rockets fly. This is what [Nate Scovill] did in a recent video, where cans of the sugary stuff are processed to give a rocket its proverbial wings.

The basic concept is so-called rocket candy, which uses the fact that sugar is a pretty decent fuel type that — when combined with an oxidizer like potassium nitrate — can be turned into solid rocket fuel. Naturally it’d be easiest to start off with a pure source of sucrose or sorbitol for the sugar, but what if you only have access to cans of sugary soda?

Removing the moisture from the energy drink was the obvious first step, as water and rocket fuel aren’t a great mix. Adding and mixing potassium nitrate to the resulting thick syrup created the fuel-oxidizer mixture, also known as rocket fuel. This did take a detour involving removing the carbonation using a vacuum chamber, as CO₂ and fire do not really like each other either.

We previously covered making your own rocket candy, though it’s far from the only rocket fuel that can be made at home using products bought at the local supermarket. Obviously, doing so comes with a whole heap of risks, not least of which is the notion that the difference between a rocket and a bomb is a pretty thin and fuzzy line that you do not want to accidentally cross.

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Peeling Fruit With The Power Of Steam

August 15, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 3 Comments

Steam power is a staple of the steampunk aesthetic, thermodynamics, and a checkpoint for the budding mechanical engineer studying heat cycles. But because food is largely made of water, steam is also common in the culinary arts. So it’s no surprise that when thermodynamics is applied to cooking, exciting things can happen.

This particular example of steam-powered culinary happenings is inspired by industrial potato-peeling machines. By adding high-pressure, high-temperature steam to a pressure vessel with potatoes inside, heat can transfer more easily to the inside of the potatoes. Because the pressure is so high, however, the water in the skin won’t boil. This is fundamentally the same concept as a pressure cooker. However, what’s different is that instead of a pressure cooker’s slow release, these industrial peeling machines rely on explosive decompression, flash boiling the water underneath the potato’s skin. This rapidly expanding steam rips away the skin in a nice clean sheet.

But, to [Stuff Made Here’s] disappointment, there were no videos of the process on the internet. But, fortunately for us, being an engineer of complicated machines means that there is one now that you can watch below.

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Scanning For Lifesigns With ESP32 And Raspberry Pi

August 15, 2026 by Tyler August 15 Comments

It’s a sci-fi trope that you can ‘scan for life signs’ and detect if there are humans — or suspiciously human-shaped aliens — present, but in real life it’s harder than that. [The Masked Bear]’s wifisense-pi project isn’t really scanning for signs of life, either, unless you happen to consider breathing a sign of life. Even then, it’s not detecting breathing per se, but the subtle motion that goes with it: it’s a very sensitive motion detector that relies on the fact that we fleshy bags of goo disturb WiFi signals with our presence, and motion alters those disturbances.

We’d probably waste a lot of time watching the signal graphs on the WifiSense-Pi dashboard.

The device uses an ESP32-S3 to measure the radio channel 100 times per second, while a Raspberry Pi 4 provides the signal processing muscle. It can detect the slightest motions, and even determine the presence of a perfectly still human by their breathing, though you can hide your presence for as long as you can hold your breath. A single sensor, no matter how sensitive, cannot give position information, and while multiple humans will distort WiFi more than a single one, [The Masked Bear] reports you cannot reliably extract that signal. So this project answers the question: “are there humans in this room?” Or, even more likely, “are there any large breathing animals in this room?” We can’t imagine a 50 kg Mastiff looking any different to this sensor than an equivalent mass of quivering human flesh.

Before you dismiss this as just another motion sensor, keep in mind that it is sniffing the signals already present on the 2.4 GHz band, and, like the WiFi signals themselves, it can work through walls. So we think it’s pretty nifty. Of course, there are many other ways to detect humans, from machine-learning cameras to millimeter-wave sensors to a simple PIR. This isn’t the first project we’ve seen that uses WiFi like this. It isn’t even the first with an ESP32, but it’s an interesting implementation worth checking out.

Radio Shack Toy Returns To Life

August 15, 2026 by Al Williams 18 Comments

[The Modern Rogue] found an old childhood friend in a closet: a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic kit. Along with [Josh Nass], he put it through its paces and made a few repairs along the way. As you might expect, the batteries had long ago leaked out their magic juice.

If you missed these, they were a host of real electronic components with springs connected to the leads. To make a circuit, you bend the spring over, insert a wire, and let go of the spring. By changing the wiring, you could make radios, alarms, computer circuits, and more

There were dozens of these kits, some more capable than others. This was a particularly nice one with a loaded front panel and several exotic components. In the end, they made a code practice oscillator, and it worked.

While you can’t find kits exactly like these anymore, you can make your own. Or try Snap Circuits and print your own modules. You take solderless breadboards for granted today, but they haven’t always been around or affordable.

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Fully Characterized Systems

August 15, 2026 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the system?” It’s a good, if lofty, goal, but it also became an inside joke around the hackerspace because YOLO was our MO about 95% of the time. Head crashes on the 3D printer – “not fully characterized”. Forgot to take out the trash last weekend? Was the system fully characterized?

It’s maybe also the difference between theory and practice: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, and all systems can be fully characterized. But in practice, it’s hard to fully characterize a system that you don’t yet fully understand.

Case in point: we have nine small saplings growing in our front yard, and I have to water them. It’s boring moving the hose from tree to tree, so I thought I’d take a length of hose, stopper it at one end, and drill enough holes in it so that it could irrigate all of the trees at once. I kinda characterized the system: I figured out how much water flows per minute through our hose, and divided that up into a reasonable outflow in my mind, and drilled holes that ended up being way too large.

Why? Because a length of hose has a resistance to flow, and the water came pouring out of the first few holes, while the last few were dry. It wasn’t a constant pressure system like I thought it would be. I hadn’t even thought that the drag in the hose would matter, so there was no way I would have tried to measure it. But how would I characterize this resistance anyway? You could make a hose with too-large holes and measure the falloff. (Oops, that’s exactly what I did.)

In retrospect, professional drip irrigation systems always have holes that are tiny relative to the pipe diameter, which avoids this pressure-drop phenomenon, which means that they don’t have to worry about characterizing the hose resistance. So that’s what I ended up doing. I cut the hole size in half, and later widened up some of the downstream holes until it looked about right. Not even close to fully characterized, but it works.

So now, in addition to the engineer’s “have you fully characterized the system?”, I have the hacker’s “can you avoid characterizing parts of the system?” in my mind. And a holey chunk of hose in the trashcan.