Fnirsi IPS3608: A Bench Power Supply With Serious Flaws

September 20, 2025 by 22 Comments

Fnirsi is one of those brands that seem to pop up more and more often, usually for portable oscilloscopes and kin. Their IPS3608 bench power supply is a bit of a departure from that, offering a mains-powered PSU that can deliver up to 36 VDC and 8 A in a fairly compact, metal enclosure. Recently [Joftec] purchased one of these units in order to review it and ended up finding a few worrying flaws in the process.

One of the claims made on the product page is that it is ‘much more intelligent than traditional power supplies’, which is quite something to start off with. The visual impression of this PSU is that it’s somewhat compromised already, with no earth point on the front next to the positive and negative banana plug points, along with a tilting screen that has trouble staying put. The USB-C and -A ports on the front support USB-PD 3.0 and a range of fast charge protocols

The ‘intelligence’ claim seems to come mostly from the rather extensive user interface, including a graphing function. Where things begin to fall apart is when the unit locks up during load testing presumably due to an overheating event. After hooking up an oscilloscope, the ripple at 1 VDC was determined to be about 200 mV peak-to-peak at 91 kHz. Ripple increased at higher voltages, belying the ’10 mV ultra-low ripple’ claim.

A quick teardown revealed the cause for the most egregious flaw of the unit struggling to maintain even 144 Watt output: a very undersized heatsink on the SMPS board. The retention issues with the tilting issue seemed to be due to a design choice that prevents the screen from rotating without breaking plastic. While this latter issue could be fixed, the buggy firmware and high ripple on the DC output make this €124 ‘285 Watt’ into a hard pass.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 338: Smoothing 3D Prints, Reading CNC Joints, And Detecting Spicy Shrimp

September 19, 2025 by 8 Comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

In Hackaday news, we’ve got a new contest running! Read all about the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, sponsored by DigiKey, and check out the contest page for all the details. In sad news, American Science & Surplus are shuttering online sales, leaving just the brick and mortar stores in Wisconsin and Illinois.

On What’s That Sound, it’s a results show, which means Kristina gets to take a stab at it. She missed the mark, but that’s okay, because [Montana Mike] knew that it was the theme music for the show Beakman’s World, which was described by one contestant as “Bill Nye on crack”.

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a really cool way to smooth your 3D prints in situ. JWe take a much closer look at that talking robot’s typewriter-inspired mouth from about a month ago. Then we discuss several awesome technological feats such as running code on a PAX credit card payment machine, using the alphabet as joinery, and the invention of UTF-8 in general. Finally, we discuss the detection of spicy shrimp, and marvel at the history of email.

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!

 

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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Getting The Most Out Of ISM Transceivers Using Math

September 17, 2025 by 7 Comments

WiFi is an excellent protocol, but it certainly has its weaknesses. Its range in even a normal home is relatively limited, so you could imagine the sort of performance you’d expect through the hundred meters of dense woodland that [DO3RB] is trying to penetrate. So naturally the solution was to develop a new wireless transceiver for the ISM band. 

Of course, getting reliable packet transmission is tough. In a building with brick walls, WiFi will get around five to ten percent packet loss. For TCP to remain reliable, one percent packet loss is the maximum designed loss of this wireless protocol. In reality, the transceiver achieves 0.075% packet loss real world.

The crux of the magic behind this excellent reliability is the extended binary Golay code. By halving the bitrate, the Golay code is able to correct for up to four errors per codeword. While a more complicated scheme could have been used, the Golay code allowed for easy porting to an MCU thus simplifying the project. All this is encoded with frequency shift keying in the ISM band.

This magic is tied up inside an tiny SAMD21 paired with a RFM12BP wireless front end. Using TinyUSB, the interface shows up to the host as a USB Ethernet adapter making for seamless networking setups. With reliable bi-directional communication, you could theoretically use this as a home networking solution. However, this is realistically best for IoT devices as the speeds are around 56 kbit/s.

While this is an incredibly simple system, harking back to 90s networking, it certainly gets the job done in a neat and tidy manner. And if you too wish hark back to 90s radio communications, make sure to check out this satellite imagery hack next! 

Thanks [Bernerd] for the tip!

Forgotten Internet: The Story Of Email

September 17, 2025 by 25 Comments

It is a common occurrence in old movies: Our hero checks in at a hotel in some exotic locale, and the desk clerk says, “Ah, Mr. Barker, there’s a letter for you.” Or maybe a telegram. Either way, since humans learned to write, they’ve been obsessed with getting their writing in the hands of someone else. Back when we were wondering what people would do if they had a computer in their homes, most of us never guessed it would be: write to each other. Yet that turned out to be the killer app, or, at least, one of them.

What’s interesting about the hotel mail was that you had to plan ahead and know when your recipient would be there. Otherwise, you had to send your note to their home address, and it would have to wait. Telegrams were a little better because they were fast, but you still had to know where to send the message.

Early Days

An ad from the 1970s with a prominent Telex number

In addition to visiting a telegraph office, or post office, to send a note somewhere, commercial users started wanting something better at the early part of the twentieth century. This led to dedicated teletype lines. By 1933, though, a network of Teletype machines — Telex — arose. Before the Internet, it was very common for a company to advertise its Telex number — or TWX number, a competing network from the phone company and, later, Western Union — if they dealt with business accounts.

Fax machines came later, and the hardware was cheap enough that the average person was slightly more likely to have a fax machine or the use of one than a Telex.

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Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape

September 15, 2025 by 54 Comments

For the past years people have been collecting disposable vapes primarily for their lithium-ion batteries, but as these disposable vapes have begun to incorporate more elaborate electronics, these too have become an interesting target for reusability. To prove the point of how capable these electronics have become, [BogdanTheGeek] decided to turn one of these vapes into a webserver, appropriately called the vapeserver.

While tearing apart some of the fancier adult pacifiers, [Bogdan] discovered that a number of them feature Puya MCUs, which is a name that some of our esteemed readers may recognize from ‘cheapest MCU’ articles. The target vape has a Puya PY32F002B MCU, which comes with a Cortex-M0+ core at 24 MHz, 3 kB SRAM and 24 kB of Flash. All of which now counts as ‘disposable’ in 2025, it would appear.

Even with a fairly perky MCU, running a webserver with these specs would seem to be a fool’s errand. Getting around the limited hardware involved using the uIP TCP/IP stack, and using SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol), along with semihosting to create a serial device that the OS can use like one would a modem and create a visible IP address with the webserver.

The URL to the vapeserver is contained in the article and on the GitHub project page, but out of respect for not melting it down with an unintended DDoS, it isn’t linked here. You are of course totally free to replicate the effort on a disposable adult pacifier of your choice, or other compatible MCU.

Reverse-Engineering Aleratec CD Changers For Archival Use

September 14, 2025 by 15 Comments

Handling large volumes of physical media can be a bit of a chore, whether it’s about duplication or archiving. Fortunately this is a perfect excuse for building robotic contraptions, with the robots for handling optical media being both fascinating and mildly frustrating. When [Shelby Jueden] of Tech Tangents fame was looking at using these optical media robots for archival purposes, the biggest hurdle turned out to be with the optical drives, despite these Aleratec units being primarily advertised for disc duplication.

Both of the units are connected to a PC by USB, but operate mostly standalone, with a documented protocol for the basic unit that makes using it quite easy to use for ripping. This is unlike the larger, triple-drive unit, which had no documented protocol. This meant having to sniff the USB traffic that the original, very limited, software sends to the robot. The protocol has now been documented and published on the Tech Tangents Wiki for this Aleratec Auto Publisher LS.

Where [Shelby] hit a bit of a brick wall was with mixed-media discs, which standalone DVD players are fine with, but typical IDE/SATA optical drives often struggle with. During the subsequent search for a better drive, the internals of the robot were upgraded from IDE to SATA, but calibrating the robot for the new drives led [Shelby] down a maddening cascade of issues. Yet even after making one type of drive work, the mixed-media issue reared its head again with mixed audio and data, leaving the drive for now as an imperfect, but very efficient, ripper for game and multimedia content, perhaps until the Perfect Optical Drive can be found.

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This Week In Security: NPM, Kerbroasting, And The Rest Of The Story

September 12, 2025 by 9 Comments

Two billion downloads per week. That’s the download totals for the NPM packages compromised in a supply-chain attack this week. Ninety-nine percent of the cloud depends on one of the packages, and one-in-ten cloud environments actually included malicious code as a result of the hack. Take a moment to ponder that. In a rough estimate, ten percent of the Internet was pwned by a single attack.

What extremely sophisticated technique was used to pull off such an attack? A convincing-looking phishing email sent from the newly registered npmjs.help domain. [qix] is the single developer of many of these packages, and in the midst of a stressful week, fell for the scam. We could refer to the obligatory XKCD 2347 here. It’s a significant problem with the NPM model that a single developer falling for a phishing email can expose the entire Internet to such risk. Continue reading “This Week In Security: NPM, Kerbroasting, And The Rest Of The Story” →