Bambu Lab To Allow Installing Open Firmware After Signing Waiver

January 12, 2024 by 28 Comments

On January 10th Bambu Lab published a blog post in which they address the issue of installing custom firmware on your Bambu Lab X1 3D printer. This comes hot on the heels of a number of YouTube channels for the first time showing off the X1Plus firmware that a number of X1 users have been working on as an open source alternative to the closed, proprietary firmware. Per the Bambu Lab blog post, there is good and bad news for those wanting to use X1Plus and similar projects that may pop up in the future.

After Bambu Lab consulted with the people behind X1Plus it was decided that X1 users would be provided with the opportunity to install such firmware without complaints from Bambu Lab. They would however have to sign a waiver that declares that they agree to relinquish their rights to warranty and support with the printer. Although some details are left somewhat vague in the blog post, it appears that after signing this waiver, and with the target X1 printer known to Bambu Lab, it will have a special firmware update (‘Firmware R’) made available for it.

This special firmware then allows for third-party firmware to be installed, with the ability to revert to OEM firmware later on. The original exploit in pre-v1.7.1 firmware will also no longer be used by X1Plus. Hopefully Bambu Lab will soon clarify the remaining questions, as reading the Reddit discussion on the blog post makes it clear that many statements can be interpreted in a variety of ways, including whether or not this ‘Firmware R’ is a one-time offer only, or will remain available forever.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a 3D printer manufacturer give users this sort of firmware ultimatum. Back in 2019 Prusa added a physical “appendix” to their new 32-bit control board that the user would have to snap off before they could install an unsigned firmware, which the company said signified the user was willing to waive their warranty for the privilege.

Thanks to [Aaron] for the tip.

Linux Fu: Name That Tune

January 11, 2024 by 9 Comments

If you aren’t old enough to remember, the title of this post refers to an old game show where contestants would try to name a tune using the fewest possible notes. What can we say? Entertainment options were sparse before the Internet. However, using audio fingerprinting, computers are very good at pulling this off. The real problem is having a substantial library of fingerprints to compare with. You can probably already do this with your phone, and now you can do it with your Linux computer.

In all fairness, your computer isn’t doing the actual work. In fact, SongRec — the program in question — is just a client for Shazam, a service that can identify many songs. While this is mildly interesting if you use a Linux desktop, we could also see using the same technique with a Raspberry Pi to get some interesting projects. For example, imagine identifying a song playing and adjusting mood lighting to match. A robot that could display song information could be the hit of a nerdy party.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 251: Pluto, Pinball, Speedy Surgery, And DIY GPS

January 5, 2024 by 7 Comments

Welcome to 2024! This time around, Elliot and Dan ring in a new year of awesome hacks with quite an eclectic mix. We kick things off with a Pluto pity party and find out why the tiny ex-planet deserved what it got. What do you do if you need to rename a bunch of image files? You rope a local large-language model in for the job, of course. We’ll take a look at how pinball machines did their thing before computers came along, take a fractal dive into video feedback, and localize fireworks with a fleet of Raspberry Pi listening stations. Ever wonder what makes a GPS receiver tick? The best way to find out might be to build one from scratch. Looking for some adventure? A ride on an electroluminescent surfboard might do, or perhaps a DIY “Vomit Comet” trip would be more your style. And make sure you stick around for our discussion on attempts to optimize surgery efficiency, and our look back at 2023’s top trends in the hardware world.

 

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Diagram from the blog post, showing how GATT communication capture works

Hacking BLE To Liberate Your Exercise Equipment

January 4, 2024 by 17 Comments

It’s a story we’ve heard many times before: if you want to get your data from the Domyos EL500 elliptical trainer, you need to use a proprietary smartphone application that talks to the device over Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE). To add insult to injury, the only way to the software will export your workout information is by producing a JPG image of a graph. This just won’t do, so [Juan Carlos Jiménez] gives us yet another extensive write-up, which provides an excellent introduction to practical BLE hacking.

He walks us through BLE GATT (Generic Attribute Profile), the most common way such devices work, different stages of the connection process, and the tools you can use for sniffing an active connection. Then [Juan] shows us a few captured messages, how to figure out packet types, and moves into the tastiest part — using an ESP32 to man-in-the-middle (MITM) the connection.

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PCIe For Hackers: External PCIe And OCuLink

December 13, 2023 by 23 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of PCIe hacks on Hackaday, and a fair few of them boil down to hackers pulling PCIe somewhere it wasn’t meant to be. Today, we routinely can find PCIe x1, x2 and x4 links sitting around in our tech, thanks to the proliferation of things like NVMe SSDs, and powerful cheap SoCs that make PCIe appear at your fingertips.

In the PCIe For Hackers series, we’ve talked about PCIe and how cool it is, all the benefits it has for hackers, gave you layout and interconnection rules, and even went into things like PCIe switches and bifurcation. However, there’s one topic we didn’t touch much upon, and that’s external PCIe links.

Today, I’d like to tell you about OCuLink – a standard that hackers might not yet know as an option whenever we need to pull PCIe outside of your project box, currently becoming all that more popular in eGPU space. Essentially, OCuLink is to PCIe is what eSATA is to SATA, and if you want to do an eGPU or an external “PCIe socket”, OCuLink could work wonders for you.

Respectable Capabilities

Just like any high-speed standard, PCIe has some tight requirements when things get fast. Even though PCIe is known to be not as sensitive to lower-quality links due to its link training and generation downgrade abilities, at higher link speeds, even through-hole vs SMD sockets can make a difference. So, if you want to go high-throughput, you want proper cabling and connectors, intended for out-of-chassis use – and OCuLink gives you all of this, at a low price.

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The Deere Disease Spreads To Trains

December 6, 2023 by 37 Comments

If the right-to-repair movement has a famous story, it’s the familiar green and yellow John Deere tractor. Farmers and mechanics have done their own repairs as long as there have been tractors, but more recent Deeres have been locked down such that only Deere-authorised agents can fix them. It’s a trend that has hurt the value of a second-had Deere, but despite that it appears to be spreading within the machinery world. Now there’s a parallel on Polish railways, as Polish-made Newag electric passenger trains have been found to give errors when serviced by non-Newag workshops.

At the heart of the problem are the PLCs which control all aspects of a modern rail traction system, which thanks to a trio of Poland and Germany based researchers have been found to play a range of nasty tricks. They’ll return bogus error codes after a set date which would presumably be reset by the official service, if the train has been laid up for a while, or even if they are detected via GPS to have visited a third-party workshop. Their work will be the subject of a talk at 37C3 which should be worth watching out for.

It will be especially interesting to juxtapose the reaction to this revelation with cases such as the Deere tractors, because of course Poland is part of the European Union. We’re not specialist EU competition lawyers, but we know enough to know that the EU takes a dim view of these types of practices and has been strong on the right to repair. Who knows, Polish trains may contribute further to the rights of all Europeans.

Finally! A Typeface For Hardware People

December 4, 2023 by 11 Comments

When it comes to novelty typefaces there is no shortage of weird and wonderful fonts to be found when you have finally tired of Comic Sans. Everything from bananas forming letters to Wild West saloon lettering can be yours, plus of course our favourite, the embossed Dymo label. But there’s a new kid on the novelty typeface block, and for us it sweeps all before it.

Scopin’ Sans is as its creator [Guy Dupont] calls it “A typeface for hardware people”, and its party trick is that it doesn’t produce letters. Instead it forms an oscilloscope trace that displays what it would look like as serial data. Instantly your text jumps straight to 1337, and you win the internet.

We have shamefacedly to admit that we don’t know binary ASCII by sight, so we’ll have to take his word for it. But for the curious there’s a demo from which you can amuse yourself creating traces, and if you can’t recognize serial ASCII then the chances are few of the people around you can either. We take our hats off to [Guy], and it’s something we’re sure we’ll use at some point to delight and confuse our friends. It’s not the first font we’ve brought you, here are some more if you come from the bitmap era.