Undersea Cable Repair

July 30, 2024 by 6 Comments

The bottom of the sea is a mysterious and inaccessible place, and anything unfortunate enough to slip beneath the waves and into the briny depths might as well be on the Moon. But the bottom of the sea really isn’t all that far away. The average depth of the ocean is only about 3,600 meters, and even at its deepest, the bottom is only about 10 kilometers away, a distance almost anyone could walk in a couple of hours.

Of course, the problem is that the walk would be straight down into one of the most inhospitable environments our planet has to offer. Despite its harshness, that environment is home to hundreds of undersea cables, all of which are subject to wear and tear through accidents and natural causes. Fixing broken undersea cables quickly and efficiently is a highly specialized field, one that takes a lot of interesting engineering and some clever hacks to pull off.

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Vintage Ribbon Cable Repair Saves Poqet PC

July 26, 2024 by 19 Comments

It sometimes seems as though computing power in your pocket is a relatively new phenomenon, but in fact there have been ultraportable computers since the 8-bit era. They started to become useful around the end of the 1980s though as enterprising manufacturers started cramming full-fat PC XTs into pocket form factors. Of these the one to own was the Poqet PC, a slim clamshell design that would run for ages on a pair of AA cells . If you have one today you’d be lucky if its display ribbon cable is without faults though, and [Robert’s Retro] is here with a fix previously thought impossible.

A large proportion of the video below the break is devoted to dismantling the unit, no easy task. The cable once exposed is found to have delaminated completely, and he takes us through the delicate task of attaching a modern equivalent. We particularly like the way in which the cable’s own springiness is used to retract it. The result has a white cable rather than the original black, but that’s a small price to pay for a machine that works rather than a broken paperweight.

If early pocket computing is your thing, it’s a subject we’ve covered before.

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A 3D-printed puzzle for the visually impaired. The pieces have both a texture and a slant.

A Puzzle For The Visually Impaired, Or Blindfolded

July 24, 2024 by 8 Comments

There’s no reason why a visually impaired person can’t enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It just needs to look a little different. Or, in this case, feel different.

16-year-old [feazellecw] has come up with just the solution — a puzzle with pieces that have both a defining texture and a slant in the z-height to them. While there is no picture on the puzzle face to speak of, instead there is a satisfying end result. You could change it up and add a relief image if you wanted, as long as you still observed the diagonal lines, the z-slant, and the little hole in the bottom that helps differentiate it from the top.

As [feazellecw] says, it’s important to find a box to help keep the pieces together during assembly; a 3D-printed box would be a nice touch. Files for this 15-piece puzzle are available if you’d like to make one for yourself or someone else, but just the idea might inspire you to make your own variant.

Don’t like putting puzzles together? Build a robot to do it for you.

Reverse-Engineering A Shahed-136 Drone Air Data Computer

July 15, 2024 by 22 Comments
Top of the air data computer module, with pressure sensors, RS232 driver and DC-DC converter visible. (Credit: Le Labo de Michel, YouTube)

An air data computer (ADC) is a crucial part of an avionics package that can calculate the altitude, vertical speed, air speed and more from pressure (via pitot tubes) and temperature inputs. When your airplane is a one-way attack drone like Iran’s Shahed-136, you obviously need an ADC as well, but have to focus on making it both cheap and circumvent a myriad of sanctions. As [Michel] recently found out while reverse-engineering one of these ADCs. Courtesy of the Russo-Ukrainian war, hundreds of these Shahed drones are being destroyed every month, with some making it back down again intact enough for some parts to end up on EBay.

The overall design as captured in the schematic is rather straightforward, with the component choice probably being the most notable, as it uses an STM32G071 MCU and Analog Devices ADM3232 RS-232 driver, in addition to the two pressure sensors (by Silicon Microstructures Inc., now owned by TE). The DC-DC converter is a Mornsun URB24055-6WR3.

With the board in working condition, [Michel] hooks it up to a test setup to see the output on the serial interface when applying different pressures to the pressure sensor inputs. This results in a lot of ASCII data being output, all containing different values that were calculated by the firmware on the STM32 MCU. In the drone this data would then be used by the flight computer to make adjustments. Overall it’s a rather basic design that doesn’t seem to have a dedicated temperature sensor either, though [Michel] is still analyzing some details. A firmware dump would of course be rather fascinating as well.

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Five Ways To Repair Broken PCB Traces

July 14, 2024 by 23 Comments

When everything used wires, it was easy to splice them or replace them. Not so much with PC boards, but everyone has their favorite method for repairing a broken trace. [Mr. SolderFix] has his five favorite ways, as you can see in the video below.

Of course, before you can repair a trace, you probably have to expose it since most boards have solder mask now. Unless you plan to shut the trace at both ends, exposing the actual trace is probably the first step.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 279: Solar Flares, Flash Cells, And Free Airline WiFi

July 12, 2024 by 1 Comment

Get your weekly fix of great hacks with your guides, Elliot Williams and Al Williams. This week, the guys talk about hacking airline WiFi, vanishing cloud services, and hobbies adjacent to hacking, such as general aviation. Things go into the weird and wonderful when the topic turns to cavity filters, driving LEDs with a candle, and thermite.

Quick hacks? Everything from vintage automated telescopes to home fusion reactors and ham radio mobile from a bicycle. Then there’s the can’t miss articles about the Solar Dynamics Observatory and an explainer about flash memory technology.

Check out the links below and leave your favorite hack of the week in the comments below!

As always, this week’s episode is freeze-dried as an MP3 for your convenience.

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Hacking Airline WiFi The Hard Way

July 10, 2024 by 28 Comments

We’ve all been there. You are on a flight, there’s WiFi, but you hate to pay the few bucks just to watch dog videos. What to do? Well, we would never suggest you engage in theft of service, but as an intellectual exercise, [Robert Heaton] had an interesting idea. Could the limited free use of the network be coopted to access the general internet? Turns out, the answer is yes.

Admittedly, it is a terrible connection. Here’s how it works. The airline lets you get to your frequent flier account. When there, you can change information such as your name. A machine on the ground can also see that change and make changes, too. That’s all it takes.

It works like a drop box. You take TCP traffic, encode it as fake information for the account and enter it. You then watch for the response via the same channel and reconstitute the TCP traffic from the remote side. Now the network is at your fingertips.

There’s more to it, but you can read about it in the post. It is slow, unreliable, and you definitely shouldn’t be doing it. But from the point of view of a clever hack, we loved it. In fact, [Robert] didn’t do it either. He proved it would work but did all the development using GitHub gist as the drop box. While we appreciate the hack, we also appreciate the ethical behavior!

Some airlines allow free messaging, which is another way to tunnel traffic. If you can connect to something, you can probably find a way to use it as a tunnel.