JawnCon 0x0: A Strong Start With A Bright Future

November 13, 2023 by 9 Comments

Last month, I had the pleasure witnessing a birth. No, not of a child. What I’m talking about is something far rarer, though arguably, just as loud and danger fraught — the birth of a new hacker convention.

The very first JawnCon took place on October 19th and 20th at Arcadia University, just outside of Philadelphia. If you’re in the Northeast US and suddenly find yourself surprised to learn that a hacker con managed to slip under your radar, don’t be. The organizers, who previously helped launch the WOPR Summit back in 2019, wisely decided to keep the scale of this first outing in check. Just a single track of talks, a chill out room, and 130 or like-minded individuals.

Although, even if they’d hatched a more ambitious plan, it’s hard to imagine they’d have had enough time to pull it off. Due to various circumstances, JawnCon had to come together at a breakneck pace, with less than 100 days separating the con’s inception and kickoff. That an event such as this could not only be organized so quickly, but go off without a hitch, is a testament to the incredible folks behind the scenes.

As for what a Jawn is…well, that might take a bit more explaining. It’s regional slang that’s perhaps best described as a universal noun in that it can be used to refer to basically anything or anyone. Think “smurf” or “da kine”. According to organizer Russell Handorf, the all-encompassing nature of the word describes not only his personal ethos but the spirit of the event. Rather than focusing too closely on any one aspect of hacking, JawnCon set out to explore a diverse array of tech topics from both the new and old schools. It would be an event where you could listen to a talk on payphone remote management, try your hand at lock picking, and learn about the latest in anti-drone technology, all under the same roof.

To that end, the team did an incredible job. Everyone I spoke to, young or old, newbie or vet, had a fantastic time. What’s more, as revealed in the Closing Remarks, the con actually managed to stay in the black — no mean feat for a first attempt. With a little luck, it seems like JawnCon is well on its way to becoming one of the Northeast’s can’t-miss hacker events. Continue reading “JawnCon 0x0: A Strong Start With A Bright Future” →

Fastest Semiconductor May Also Be Most Expensive

November 9, 2023 by 26 Comments

Scientists have found what they think may be the fastest known semiconductor. Sounds great, right? But it happens to made from one of the rarest elements: rhenium. That rare element combines with selenium and chlorine to form a “superatom.” Unlike conventional semiconductor material, the superatom causes phonons to bind together and resist scattering. This should allow materials that can process signals in femtoseconds,

Rhenium was the last stable element to be found in 1925. It is primarily used in combination with nickel in parts of jet engines, although it is also known as a catalyst for certain reactions. It is very rare and has a high melting point, exceeded only by tungsten and carbon. When it was discovered, scientists extracted a single gram of the material by processing 660 kg of molybdenite. Because of its rarity, it is expensive, costing anywhere from $2,800 to $10,600 per kilogram.

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Flipped Transformer Powers Budget-Friendly Vacuum Tube Amp

November 7, 2023 by 31 Comments

If you’ve ever wondered why something like a radio or a TV could command a hefty fraction of a family’s yearly income back in the day, a likely culprit is the collection of power transformers needed to run all those hungry, hungry tubes. Now fast-forward a half-century or more, and affordable, good-quality power transformers are still a problem, and often where modern retro projects go to die. Luckily, [Terry] at D-Lab Electronics has a few suggestions on budget-friendly transformers, and even shows off a nice three-tube audio amp using them.

The reason transformers were and still are expensive has a lot to do with materials. To build a transformer with enough oomph to run everything takes a lot of iron and copper, the latter of which is notoriously expensive these days. There’s also the problem of market demand; with most modern electronics favoring switched-mode power supplies, there’s just not a huge market for these big lunkers anymore, making for a supply and demand equation that’s not in the hobbyist’s favor.

Rather than shelling out $70 or more for something like a Hammond 269EX, [Terry]’s suggestion is to modify an isolation transformer, specifically the Triad N-68X. The transformer has a primary designed for either 120 or 230 volts, and a secondary that delivers 115 volts. Turn that around, though, and you can get 230 volts out from the typical North American mains supply — good enough for the plate supply on the little amp shown. That leaves the problem of powering the heaters for the tubes, which is usually the job of a second 6- or 12-volt winding on a power transformer. Luckily, the surplus market has a lot of little 6.3-volt transformers available on the cheap, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

We have to say that the amp [Terry] put these transformers to work in sounds pretty amazing — not a hint of hum. Good work, we say, but we hope he has a plan in case the vacuum tube shortage gets any worse.

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Build An Easy Replica Of HAL 9000

October 27, 2023 by 31 Comments

Adafruit’s PropMaker Feather is a microcontroller board designed specifically for building props with electronic features. Thus, what better way to show it off than by building a nifty replica of the most menacing AI ever to roam this solar system? That’s right, it’s the Adafruit HAL9000 build!

Following the 80/20 rule, this version is intended to be reasonably authentic while remaining affordable and easy to build. It’s built around Adafruit’s existing Massive Red Arcade Button, which looks like a decent simulacra of HAL9000’s foreboding, perceptive lens. It’s placed in a case assembled from laser-cut acrylic, with a neat inkjet-printed label on top. Where previously, sound effects were courtesy of an Arduino Uno with a Wave Shield, this version uses the PropMaker Feather, based on the RP2040, instead. It’s actually possible to assemble with zero soldering thanks to quick-connect wires and screw terminals on the PropMaker Feather.

Fundamentally, if you’re building a simple prop that needs audio or LEDs, the PropMaker Feather could be a useful tool for the job. Alternatively, consider building a HAL replica with more capability, like controlling your home. Just don’t give it too much responsibility—we all know how that ends. Video after the break.

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Using Industrial CT To Examine A $129 USB Cable

October 24, 2023 by 77 Comments

What in the world could possibly justify charging $129 for a USB cable? And is such a cable any better than a $10 Amazon Basics cable?

To answer that question, [Jon Bruner] fired up an industrial CT scanner to look inside various cables (Nitter), with interesting results. It perhaps comes as little surprise that the premium cable is an Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro USB-C cable, which sports 40 Gb/s transfer rates and can deliver 100 Watts of power to a device. And it turns out there’s a lot going on with this cable from an engineering and industrial design perspective. The connector shell has a very compact and extremely complex PCB assembly inside it, with a ton of SMD components and at least one BGA chip. The PCB itself is a marvel, with nine layers, a maze of blind and buried vias, and wiggle traces to balance propagation delays. The cable itself contains 20 wires, ten of which are shielded coax, and everything is firmly anchored to a stainless steel shell inside the plastic connector body.

By way of comparison, [Jon] also looked under the hood at more affordable alternatives. None were close to the same level of engineering as the Apple cable, ranging as they did from a tenth to a mere 1/32nd of the price. While none of the cables contained such a complex PCB, the Amazon Basics cable seemed the best of the bunch, with twelve wires, decent shielding, and a sturdy crimped strain relief. The other cables — well, when you’re buying a $3 cable, you get what you pay for. But does that make the Apple cable worth the expense? That’s for the buyer to decide, but at least now we know there’s something in there aside from Apple’s marketing hype.

We’ve seen these industrial CT scanners used by none other than [Ken Shirriff] and [Curious Marc] to reverse engineer Apollo-era artifacts. If you want a closer look at the instrument itself, check out the video below

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Retrotechtacular: The $175,000 Laser Printer

October 23, 2023 by 38 Comments

Laser printers today are cheap and readily available. But in 1976, they were the height of printing technology. The IBM 3800 was the $175,000 printer to have in that year. (Video, embedded below.) But you couldn’t have one on your desktop. Even if you could afford it, the thing is the size of a car, and we don’t even want to guess what it weighs. The printer took tractor-fed continuous form paper and could do 167 pages a minute at about 150 dots per inch (actually 180 x 144). For the record, that was as much as 1.7 miles of paper an hour!

In those days, people who would use this printer traditionally had massive banks of noisy impact printers. We imagine this device saved many data processing person’s hearing. Compared to a modern laser printer, though, it needed a lot of maintenance. For example, the initial models needed a xenon flash lamp replaced every month, although later models could go years on one bulb. Looking at some of the hardware in the video, it was probably made closer to the end of life for these printers which were made through 1999.

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Is That A Record Player In Your Pocket Or…

October 23, 2023 by 26 Comments

If aliens visited the Earth, they might find our obsession with music hard to fathom. We have music in our homes, our cars, and our elevators. Musical performances draw huge crowds and create enormous fame for a select few musicians. These days, your music player of choice is probably the phone in your pocket. What our grandparents wouldn’t have done to have a pocket-sized music player. Wait…, it turns out they had them. [Rare Historical Photos] has pictures and other material related to the Mikiphone — a “pocket phonograph.” We don’t know how it sounded, but it is a fantastic piece of work visually. Actually, thanks to the [Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound], you can hear one of these rare machines playing in the video below. If only it were playing Toni Basil.

The device was made in the 1920s and had a decidedly strange tonearm. You wind it up with a gigantic key mechanism. There’s no electricity. A bakelite resonator became the speaker attached to the tone arm. The device was made in Switzerland by a company that started in music boxes. However, the design was the work of two brothers named Vadász.

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