Retrotechtacular: A Closer Look At The VT Proximity Fuze

June 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Here at Hackaday, our aim is to bring you only the freshest of hacks, which carries the burden of being Johnny-on-the-spot with our source material. So if something of obvious interest to our readers goes viral, we might just choose to skip covering it ourselves, figuring you all have probably seen it already. But, if we can dig a little deeper and bring extra value over and above what the viral content provides — well then that’s another story.

That’s pretty much the story behind the excellent video recently released by [Real Engineering] about “The Secret Weapon That Changed World War 2.” It concerns the VT series of proximity fuzes — it’s a legitimate alternate spelling of “fuse” if a somewhat archaic one — that were used for artillery shells and spin-stabilized rockets in World War II. The video gives an excellent overview of the development of the VT, which was used primarily in anti-aircraft artillery (AAA). The details about the development of the American VT fuze are excellent, although curiously there’s no mention that British experiments with a radio proximity fuze were part of the goldmine of information brought to America at great risk by the Tizard mission in 1940. While there has been plenty of contention about the exact role the British work played, it’s fair to say that it at least informed the development and fielding of the American VT fuze.

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Hackaday Podcast 222: VCF East Special Edition

June 9, 2023 by Tom Nardi No comments

Editor in Chief Elliot Williams is spending the week communing with nature, which under normal circumstances would mean no podcast — after all, he’s the one who puts each episode together. But since your weekend would obviously be ruined without a dose of lo-fi Hackaday beats to kick things off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi made a valiant attempt to go it alone and produce…something.

This shortened episode will briefly go over the news, including updates about Hackaday’s various ongoing contests and the recent unearthly conditions in the US Northeast due to the Canadian wildfires, before diving into the results of last week’s What’s that Sound challenge. Listeners will then be treated to a special Quick Hacks segment from Jenny List, before settling in for the main event: a pair of fascinating interviews recorded during the 2023 Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, NJ.

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!

Feel free to download the MP3 directly for safe keeping.

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This Weekend: VCF Swap Meet In Wall, NJ

June 9, 2023 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

There was a time where you could regularly find local swap meets to pick up computer hardware, ham radios, and other tech gear at the sort of cut-rate prices so often produced by a sense of camaraderie. But with the rise of websites like Craigslist and eBay, meeting up in person to buy and sell used hardware started to fall out of style. The fact that the prices had to go up due to the considerable cost of shipping such large and heavy objects was an unfortunate side-effect, but it wasn’t enough to stem the tide.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever truly return to those early days. But if you’re within driving distance of Wall, New Jersey, you can take a step back in time on Saturday and experience a proper swap meet in all its glory. Hosted by the Vintage Computer Federation, the modest $5 entry fee goes to help support their worthy goal of preserving vintage computing history. After the swap meet officially wraps up at 2 PM, a short walk will take you over to their permanent exhibit located within the sprawling InfoAge Science and History Museum.

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This Week In Security: Minecraft Fractureiser, MOVEit, And Triangulation

June 9, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

Modded Minecraft is having a security moment, to match what we’ve seen in the Python and JavaScript repositories over the last few months. It looks like things started when a handful of burner accounts uploaded malicious mods to Curseforge and Bukkit. Those mods looked interesting enough, that a developer for Luna Pixel Studios (LPS) downloaded one of them to test-run. After the test didn’t pan out, he removed the mod, but the malicious code had already run.

Where this gets ugly is in how much damage that one infection caused. The virus, now named fractureiser, installs itself into every other Minecraft-related .jar on the compromised system. It also grabs credentials, cookies, cryptocurrency addresses, and the clipboard contents. Once that information was exfiltrated from the LPS developer, the attacker seems to have taken manual actions, using the purloined permissions to upload similarly infected mod files, and then marking them archived. This managed to hide the trapped files from view on the web interface, while still leaving them exposed when grabbed by the API. Once the malware hit a popular developer, it began to really take off.

It looks like the first of the malicious .jar files actually goes all the way back to mid-April, so it may take a while to discover all the places this malware has spread. It was first noticed on June 1, and investigation was started, but the story didn’t become public until the 7th. Things have developed rapidly, and the malware fingerprints has been added to Windows Defender among other scanners. This helps tremendously, but the safe move is to avoid downloading anything Minecraft related for a couple days, while the whole toolchain is inspected. If it’s too late and you’ve recently scratched that voxel itch, it might be worth it to take a quick look for Indicators of Compromise (IoCs).

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They Used To Be A Big Shot, Now Eagle Is No More

June 9, 2023 by Jenny List 246 Comments

There once was a time when to make a PCB in our community was to use CadSoft EAGLE, a PCB design package which neatly filled the entry level of that category with a free version for non-commercial designs. Upgrading it to the commercial version was fairly inexpensive, and indeed that was a path which quite a few designers making the step from hobby project to small production would take.

Then back in 2017, CadSoft were bought by Autodesk, and their new version 8 of the software changed its licensing model from purchase to rental. It became a product with a monthly subscription and an online side, and there began an exodus of users for whom pay-to-play meant too much risk of losing access to their designs. Now six years later the end has come, as the software behemoth has announced EAGLE’s final demise after a long and slow decline. Continue reading “They Used To Be A Big Shot, Now Eagle Is No More” →

Gesture Sensor Teardown Reveals Intel Heritage

June 9, 2023 by Al Williams 5 Comments

A few years ago, there was a rush of products on the market to detect motion. The idea being you could interact with your computer like they do on science fiction movies, with giant expressive hand motions in the air. Most of these were aimed at desktop computer users but one company, YouSpace, wanted to bring this technology to retail stores. [IMSAI Guy] got one of their sensor devices and decided to see what was inside it. You can see, too, in the video below.

The device appeared to have a laser inside, which motivated the teardown. We aren’t sure exactly what YouSpace had planned, but you can see their now-defunct website on the Wayback machine. The use cases listed didn’t really help us get a clear picture, so maybe that was part of the problem.

Getting into the device was the first challenge. Like many modern smartphones, there didn’t appear to be any fasteners, so you simply had to pry the case apart. Inside the case: a tiny circuit board and a metal assembly containing the laser and cameras that were easy to remove. The main PCB appears to be an Intel off-the-shelf board that was in many Intel RealSense products, and currently go for about $50 on eBay. The camera assembly looks a bit like an Intel D430, so it is possible the entire thing was off-the-shelf hardware. Even the little connector board is, technically, a D400 Interposer.

The peek into the structured light project under the microscope was interesting. We expected it would look different, and [IMSAI Guy] clearly didn’t expect its appearance either. The chip was made to beam a known pattern that the cameras would use to deduce the shape of the surfaces it hits.

If you can find these on the surplus market, they would probably be a good deal if you need this hardware which is typically pretty expensive. Just beware, though. Intel announced in late 2021 they were “winding down” RealSense. We don’t know if there will be third-party support in the future or if the whole product line will just be orphaned.

We’ve seen the occasional project that uses structured light. The technique can be very precise.

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Using Excel To Manage A Commodore 64

June 8, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

The “save” icon for plenty of modern computer programs, including Microsoft Office, still looks like a floppy disk, despite the fact that these have been effectively obsolete for well over a decade. As fewer and fewer people recognize what this icon represents, a challenge is growing for retrocomputing enthusiasts that rely on floppy disk technology to load any programs into their machines. For some older computers that often didn’t have hard disk drives at all, like the Commodore 64, it’s one of the few ways to load programs into computer memory. And, rather than maintaining an enormous collection of floppy discs, [RaspberryPioneer] built a way to load programs on a Commodore using Microsoft Excel instead.

The Excel sheet that manages this task uses Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), an event-driven programming language built into Office, to handle the library of applications for the Commodore (or Commodore-compatible clone) including D64, PRG, and T64 files. This also includes details about the software including original cover art and any notes the user needs to make about them. Using VBA, it also communicates to an attached Arduino, which is itself programmed to act as a disk drive for the Commodore. The neceessary configuration needed to interface with the Arduino is handled within the spreadsheet as well. Some additional hardware is needed to interface the Arduino to the Commodore’s communications port but as long as the Arduino is a 5V version and not a 3.3V one, this is fairly straightforward and the code for it can be found on its GitHub project page.

With all of that built right into Excel, and with an Arduino acting as the hard drive, this is one of the easiest ways we’ve seen to manage a large software library for a retrocomputer like the Commodore 64. Of course, emulating disk drives for older machines is not uncommon, but we like that this one can be much more dynamic and simplifies the transfer of files from a modern computer to a functionally obsolete one. One of the things we like about builds like this, or this custom Game Boy cartridge, is how easy it can be to get huge amounts of storage that the original users of these machines could have only dreamed of in their time.