Add An Extra 8GB Of VRAM To Your 2070

January 29, 2021 by 31 Comments

Most of us make do with the VRAM that came with our graphics cards. We can just wait until the next one comes out and get a little more memory. After all, it’d be madness to try and delicately solder on new components of something so timing-sensitive as RAM chips, right?

[VIK-on] took it upon himself to do just that. The inspiration came when a leaked diagram suggested that the RTX 2000 line could support 16 GB of RAM by using 2GB chips. NVIDIA never did release a 16GB version of the 2070, so this card is truly one of a kind. After some careful scouring of the internet, the GDDR6 chips were procured and carefully soldered on with a hot air gun. A few resistors had to be moved to accommodate the new RAM chips. During power-on, [VIK-on] saw all 16 GB enumerate and was able to run some stress tests. Unfortunately, the card wasn’t stable and started having black screen issues and wonky clocks. Whether it was a bad solder joint or firmware issues, it’s hard to say but he is pretty convinced it is a BIOS error. Switching the resistors back to the 8GB configuration yielded a stable system.

While a little more recent, this isn’t the only RAM upgrade we’ve covered in the last few months. Video after the break (it’s not in English but captions are available).
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Adding Remote Control To An Old Stereo

January 29, 2021 by 17 Comments

Sometimes, the best hifi gear is the gear you’ve already got. This is particularly the case in the cassette world, as high quality decks are long out of production. [Nick] liked his current rig, but wanted to be able to use it with a remote from across the room. Naturally, he set to hacking the feature in.

The cassette deck in question, a Yamaha K-220, was old enough to lack a remote, but thankfully new enough to use a computer-controlled tape transport. This meant that the basic features of play, stop, rewind and fast forward can all be controlled with simple digital buttons rather than mechanical ones. This made it easy to interface an ATmega328P to the stereo’s original circuitry. Digital IO pins are hooked up to the buttons, held as high-impedance inputs most of the time, only toggling to ground when necessary to trigger a button press. It was then a simple job to hook up an IR receiver to the chip and program it with some Arduino libraries to work with a typical stereo remote control [Nick] had laying around.

It’s a tidy build, and with more cool cassette releases coming out every year, we’re sure [Nick]’s going to put some miles on the setup. If you find IR too cumbersome though, you can go a step further and replace it with a web app instead. If you’ve been tinkering with similar things in your own workshop, be sure to drop us a line!

Proofing Press Proves DIY Is A-OK

January 29, 2021 by 17 Comments

Back in the day when most people read the news on wood pulp, newspaper outfits would run off a test print on a small proofing press. This gave them a chance to check for typos before printing off thousands of newspapers on the real press.

These presses can be used for more than letterpress proofing, as [Paul] proves with this DIY version (YouTube, embedded below). They are simple machines that use a heavy roller on bearings to provide uniform pressure, so they’ll work for lino-cut printmaking and aquatint etchings, too.

The roller is the most important bit and is easily the most expensive part of a build like this one. [Paul]’s was fashioned by a UK machinist that he found through ebay. The total cost was £220 (~$300 USD), which is well below the thousand-pound mark where commercial machine prices start.

[Paul] made the base and handle out of plywood and CNC’d the side panels out of aluminium. These side panels contain bearings that hold the roller’s ends in place. As the roller moves back and forth, it slides along on another set of bearings the underside of the press. These bearings ride thin metal rails on the underside of the press so they don’t wear grooves into the wood over time.

[Paul]’s press looks fantastic and looks like it does a great job with everything he throws at it. Some uses require raising up the surface to be printed on to get a good transfer, so [Paul] might make it adjustable in the z-direction at some point in the future. Check out the build and walk-through video after the break.

If [Paul] looks familiar, it’s because we featured his equally impressive large-format book press last spring.

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Why Blobs Are Important, And Why You Should Care

January 29, 2021 by 53 Comments

We are extraordinarily fortunate to live at a time in which hardware with astounding capabilities can be had for only a few dollars. Systems that would once have taken an expensive pile of chips and discretes along with months of development time to assemble are now integrated onto commodity silicon. Whether it is a Linux-capable system-on-chip or a microcontroller, such peripherals as WiFi, GPUs, Bluetooth, or USB stacks now come as part of the chip, just another software library rather than a ton of extra hardware.

Beware The Blob!

An ESP-01 module
The cheapest of chips still comes with a blob.

If there is a price to be paid for this convenience, it comes in the form of the blob. A piece of pre-compiled binary software that does the hard work of talking to the hardware and which presents a unified API to the software. Whether you’re talking to the ESP32 WiFi through an Arduino library or booting a Raspberry Pi with a Linux distribution, while your code may be available or even maybe open source, the blob it relies upon to work is closed source and proprietary. This presents a challenge not only to Software Libre enthusiasts in search of a truly open source computer, but also to the rest of us because we are left reliant upon the willingness of the hardware manufacturer to update and patch their blobs.

An open-source advocate would say that the solution is easy, the manufacturers should simply make their blobs open-source. And it’s true, were all blobs open-source then the Software Libre crowd would be happy and their open-source nature would ease the generation of those updates and patches. So why don’t manufacturers release their blobs as open-source? In some cases that may well be due to a closed-source mindset of never releasing anything to the world to protect company intellectual property, but to leave it at that is not a full answer. To fully understand why that is the case it’s worth looking at how our multifunctional chips are made.

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Hackaday Podcast 103: Antennas For Everyone, A Clock Made Of Chains, Magic Eye Tubes, And A Little Google Bashing

January 29, 2021 by 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and  Elliot Williams discuss the greatest hacks of the week that was. Antennas aren’t rocket science, so this week we really enjoyed a video that demystifies antenna designs and a project that tunes up the antennas on cheap wireless modules in the simplest of ways. Google’s in the news this week with the end to project Loon, and a dust-up with the volunteer package maintainers who have spent years making sure Chromium browser is in the Linux repos. Elliot is gaga for magic eye tubes and crazy musical instruments, while Mike is over the moon for a chain-based clock display. We close up the episode talking about the Concorde, and the math behind cable mechanisms.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~65 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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The Last Few Analogue TV Stations In North America

January 29, 2021 by 40 Comments

Analogue TV is something that most of us consider to have been consigned to the history books about a decade ago depending on where in the world we are, as stations made the transition to much more power and frequency efficient digital multiplexes. However some of them still cling on for North American viewers, and [Antenna Man] took a trip to Upstate New York in search of some of them before their final switch-off date later this year.

What he reveals can be seen in the video below the break, an odd world of a few relatively low-power analogue TV stations still serving tiny audiences, as well as stations that only exist because their sound carrier can be picked up at the bottom of the FM dial. These stations transmit patterns or static photographs, with their income derived from the sound channel’s position as an FM radio station. While his journey is an entertaining glimpse into snowy-picture nostalgia it does also touch on some other aspects of the aftermath of analogue TV boradcasting. The so-called “FrankenFM” stations sound much quieter, we’re guessing because of the lower sound carrier deviation of the CCIR System M TV spec compared to regular FM radio. And we’re told that there are more stations remaining in Canada, so get out there if you still want to see an analogue picture before they’re gone forever. Where this is being written the switch to DVB was completed in 2013, and it’s still a source of regret that we didn’t stay up to see the final closedown.

Does your country still have an analogue TV service? Tell us in the comments.

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This Week In Security: Sudo, Database Breaches, And Ransomware

January 29, 2021 by 27 Comments
We couldn't resist, OK?
Obligatory XKCD

Sudo is super important Linux utility, as well as the source of endless jokes. What’s not a joke is CVE-2021-3156, a serious vulnerability around incorrect handling of escape characters. This bug was discovered by researchers at Qualys, and has been in the sudo codebase since 2011. If you haven’t updated your Linux machine in a couple days, you may very well be running the vulnerable sudo binary still. There’s a simple one-liner to test for the vulnerability:

sudoedit -s '\' `perl -e 'print "A" x 65536'`

In response to this command, my machine throws this error, meaning it’s vulnerable:

malloc(): corrupted top size
Aborted (core dumped)

To understand the problem with sudo, we have to understand escape characters. It really boils down to spaces in file and folder names, and how to deal with them. You want to name your folder “My Stuff”? That’s fine, but how do you interact with that directory name on the command line, when spaces are the default delimiter between arguments? One option is to wrap it in quotation marks, but that gets old in a hurry. The Unix solution is to use the backslash character as an escape character. Hence you can refer to your fancy folder as My\ Stuff. The shell sees the escape character, and knows to interpret the space as part of the folder name, rather than an argument separator. Escape characters are a common vulnerability location, as there are plenty of edge cases. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Sudo, Database Breaches, And Ransomware” →