Hackaday Prize 2023: The Gearing Up Challenge Finalists

September 5, 2023 by 3 Comments

If there’s more to life than just a workshop full of tools, it’s probably a workshop full of tools that you’ve built yourself. At least that was the thinking behind the recently concluded “Gearing Up” challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, which unsurprisingly generated quite a list of entries for our judges to review and whittle down to their top ten favorite tools, jigs, fixtures, and general labor-savers.

Having piqued the interest of our crack team of judges, these ten projects have not only earned a spot in the 2023 Hackaday Prize Finals, but they’ll also get a $500 cash prize to boot. But the heat is really on now; like all the finalists from the previous rounds, they’ve only got until October to get their projects as far along as they can before the final round. The grand prize is grand indeed — $50,000 in cash and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena!

We’re really getting down to the wire here, but it’s worth taking a little time out to look at some of the Gearing Up challenge winners, and what they came up with to make life in the shop a little easier. And don’t forget — the one who dies with the most tools wins!

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You’ve Got Mail: Straining The Limits Of Machine And Man

September 5, 2023 by 10 Comments

When we last left this subject, I told you all about Transorma, the first letter-sorting machine in semi-wide use. But before and since Transorma, machines have come about to perform various tasks on jumbled messes of mail — things like distinguishing letters from packages, making sure letters are all facing the same way before cancelling the postage, and the gargantuan task of getting huge piles of mail into the machines in the first place. So let’s dive right in, shall we?

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Labor Day BBQs May Feature NYPD

September 1, 2023 by 53 Comments

Planning to host a large backyard wingding in the NYC metro area this weekend? Be sure to watch the skies for uninvited guests. That’s right, the NYPD are deploying drones over “large” Labor Day events and yes, even private barbecues. The strategy was announced during a briefing about J’ouvert — that’s a yearly Caribbean festival that marks the end of slavery. It generally brings crowds of thousands and draws a strong police presence to Brooklyn.

While this particular invasion may come as a bit of a shock, this certainly isn’t the first time the NYPD has deployed drones in the name of public safety or in response to emergencies. Data shows they have used them 124 times this year, which is up a staggering 31 times from the four events in 2022.

As you may have guessed, this has invited backlash from privacy and civil liberties advocates. One pointed out that this action “flies in the face of the POST Act,” a city law that requires the NYPD to provide transparency about their various surveillance tactics. The advocates cite the fact that regulations have not kept up with the proliferation of technology.

No matter what happens in the future with regulations, the NYPD can always crash large parties the old fashioned way. Usually, the neighbors will complain at some point, unless they were all invited.

Photo via Unsplash.

Diving Into Starlink’s User Terminal Firmware

August 31, 2023 by 6 Comments

The average Starlink user probably doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about their hardware after getting the dish aligned and wiring run. To security researchers, however, it’s another fascinating device to tinker with as they reverse-engineer the firmware and try to both find out what makes it tick, as well as how to break it. This is essentially the subject of [Carlo Ramponi]’s article over at Quarkslab as he digs into the firmware architecture and potential weaknesses in its internal communication.

The user terminal hardware itself is a quite standard AArch64 ARM-based SoC, along with the proprietary communication interface, all of which is controlled by the Linux-based firmware. Dumping the firmware itself was made easy thanks to existing work by researchers at the KU Leuven, involving dumping the contents of the onboard eMMC storage. After this the firmware architecture could be analyzed, which turned out to consist out of mostly C++-based binaries, but with a single big binary for the user front-end written in Go.

Communication between these processes is handled through a custom inter-process protocol called ‘Slate Sharing’, all of which is coordinated via the core User Terminal Control process. It are these Slate IPC messages which form the most likely attack surface for a fuzzing attack, with the SoftwareUpdateRequest command being an interesting target as it would seem to not require authentication since it doesn’t address a specific user. This work is part of [Carlo]’s master’s thesis, and should form the basis of further research on the Starlink User Terminal firmware.

Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator

August 30, 2023 by 97 Comments

Humanity has been harvesting energy from the wind for centuries. The practice goes back at least to 8th century Persia where the first known historical records of windmills came, but likely extends even further back than that. Compared to the vast history of using wind energy directly to do things like mill grain, pump water, saw wood, or produce fabrics, the production of electricity is still relatively new. Despite that, there are some intriguing ways of using wind to produce electricity. Due to the unpredictable nature of wind from moment to moment, using it to turn a large grid-tied generator is not as straightforward as it might seem. Let’s take a look at four types of wind turbine configurations and how each deal with sudden changes in wind speeds. Continue reading “Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator” →

Close-up of a magnetic tentacle robot next to a phantom bronchiole (Credit: University of Leeds)

The Healing Touch Of Magnetic Tentacles In Photothermal Lung Cancer Therapy

August 28, 2023 by 11 Comments

Of the body’s organs, the lungs are among the trickiest to take a biopsy and treat cancer in, both due to how important they are, as well as due to their inaccessibility. The total respiratory surface within the average human lungs is about 50 to 75 square meters. Maneuvering any kind of instrument down the endless passages to reach a suspicious area, or a cancerous region to treat is nearly impossible. This has so far left much of the lungs inaccessible.

The standard of care for lung cancer is generally surgical: remove parts of the lung tissue. However, a proposed new method using magnetic tentacles may soon provide a more gentle approach, as described in Nature Engineering Communications by Giovanni Pittiglio and colleagues (press release).

The tentacles are made out of a silicone substrate with embedded magnets that allow for it to be steered using external magnetic sources. With an embedded laser fiber, the head of the tentacle can be guided to the target area, and the cancerous tissue sublimated using an external laser source. In experiments on cadavers with this system, the researchers found that they could enter 37% deeper into the lungs than with standard equipment. The procedure was also completed with less tissue displacement.

Considering the high fatality rate of lung cancers, the researchers hope that this approach could soon be turned into a viable therapy, as well as for other medical conditions where a gentle tentacle slithering into the patient’s body could effect treatments previously considered to be impossible.

Heading image: Close-up of a magnetic tentacle robot next to a phantom bronchiole (Credit: University of Leeds)

Kitchen Steganography With Turmeric

August 26, 2023 by 12 Comments

It is a classic rite of passage for nerdy kids to write secret messages using lemon juice. If you somehow missed that, you can’t see the writing until you heat the paper up with, say, an old-fashioned light bulb. If you were a true budding spy, you’d write a boring normal letter with wide spacing and then fill in the blanks between the lines with your important secrets written in juice. This is a form of steganography — encoding secret messages by hiding them in plain sight. [Randomona] shares a different technique that seems to be way cooler than lemon juice using, of all things, turmeric. This isn’t like the invisible ink of our childhood.

That’s probably a good thing. We doubt an LED bulb makes enough heat to develop our old secret messages. [Ranomona’s] ink doesn’t use heat, but it uses a developer. That means you must make two preparations: the ink and the developer. The results are amazing, though, as shown in the video below.

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