Why Stealing A Car With Flipper Zero Is A Silly Idea

February 15, 2024 by 27 Comments

In another regular installment of politicians making ridiculous statements about technology, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, [François-Philippe Champagne], suggested banning Flipper Zero and similar devices from sale in the country, while accusing them of being used for ‘stealing cars’ and similar. This didn’t sit right with [Peter Fairlie] who put together a comprehensive overview video of how car thieves really steal cars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main method is CAN bus injection, for which a Flipper Zero is actually a terribly clumsy device. Rather you’d use a custom piece of kit that automates the process.

You can also find these devices being sold all over the internet as so-called ‘Emergency Start’ devices for sale all over the internet, all of which use weaknesses in the car’s CAN bus network. The common problem appears to be that with these days even the lights on the car being part of the CAN network, an attacker can gain access for injection purposes. This way no key fob is needed, and the ignition system can be triggered with the usual safeties and lockouts being circumvented.

Ultimately, although the Flipper Zero is a rather cutesy toy, it doesn’t do anything that cannot be done cheaper and more effectively by anyone with a bit of CAN bus knowledge and a disregard for the law.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

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Brushless ESC Becomes Dual-Motor Brushed ESC With A Few Changes

February 15, 2024 by 14 Comments

What is a brushless ESC, really? Well, generally, it’s usually a microcontroller with a whole lot of power transistors hanging off it to drive three phases of brushless motor coils. [Frank Zhao] realised that with a little reprogramming, you could simply use a brushless ESC to independently run two brushed motors. Thus, he whipped up a custom firmware for various AM32-compatible ESCs to do just that.

The idea of the project is to enable a single lightweight ESC to run two brushed motors for combat robots. Dual-motor brushed ESCs can be hard to find and expensive, whereas single-motor brushless ESCs are readily available. The trick is to wire up the two brushed motors such that each motor gets one phase wire of its own, and the two motors share the middle phase wire. This allows independent control of both motors via the brushless ESC’s three half-bridges, by setting the middle wire to half voltage. Depending on how you set it up, the system can be configured in a variety of ways to suit different situations.

[Frank’s] firmware is available on Github for the curious. He lists compatible ESCs there, and notes that you’ll need to install the AM32 ESC firmware before flashing his version to make everything work correctly.

The VESC project has long supported brushed motor operation, too, though not in a tandem configuration. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own neat ESC hacks, don’t hesitate to hit us up on the tipsline!

Retrotechtacular: Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid Of A Nuclear Bomb

February 15, 2024 by 19 Comments

It may seem a bit obvious to say so, but when a munition of just about any kind is designed, little thought is typically given to how to dispose of it. After all, if you build something that’s supposed to blow up, that pretty much takes care of the disposal process, right?

But what if you design something that’s supposed to blow up only if things go really, really wrong? Like nuclear weapons, for instance? In that case, you’ll want to disassemble them with the utmost care. This 1993 film, produced by the US Department of Energy, gives a high-level overview of nuclear weapons decommissioning at the Pantex plant in Texas. Fair warning: this film was originally on a VHS tape, one that looks like it sat in a hot attic for quite a few years before being transferred to DVD and thence to YouTube. So the picture quality is lousy, in some points nearly unwatchably so. Then again, given the subject matter that may be a feature rather than a bug.

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Linux Fu: Curling C

February 15, 2024 by 11 Comments

Sometimes, it pays to read the man pages of commands you use often. There might be a gem hidden in there that you don’t know about. Case in point: I’ve used curl (technically, cURL, but I’m going to stick with curl) many times to grab data from some website or otherwise make a web request. But what happens if you want to do the same thing from a C program? Well, you could be lazy and just spawn a copy of curl. But it turns out curl has a trick up its sleeve that can help you. If only I’d read the man page sooner!

First Things

The simplest use of curl is to just name a URL on the command line. For example, consider this session:

$ curl http://www.hackaday.com 
<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>

This isn’t so useful because it is a 301 response (to send you to the https server, in this case). The -L option will make curl go get the page instead of the redirect. Try:

$ curl -L http://www.hackaday.com

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A 1960s PLC Gives Up Its Secrets

February 15, 2024 by 7 Comments

When it comes to process automation, the go-to part in most industrial settings is a Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC. These specialized computers will have a modern microcontroller running the show, but surprisingly the way they are programmed still has echoes of a time before electronic PLCs when such control would have been electromechanical.

[Thomas Scherrer] has an interesting design to tear down, it’s a Siemens electromechanical motor controller from the early 1960s. It’s not quite the huge banks of relays which would have made a fully-blown PLC back in those times, but it’s a half-way house with some simple programming capability in the form of several channels of adjustable time delay.

We’re partly sad to see this unit being subjected to a destructive teardown, but nevertheless it’s interesting to see all those very period components. The current sensor has a mechanism similar to a moving coil meter, and the four-channel timer is a mechanical sequencer with four adjustable cam-driven switches. We’re not sure we would be cracking open selenium rectifiers with such nonchalance though.

These units were built to a very high quality indeed, and though it’s obvious this one comes from a decommissioned installation it’s not beyond possibility to think there might be some of them still doing their job over six decades after manufacture. Have any of you seen one of these or something like it in operation recently? Let us know in the comments. Meanwhile the video is below the break.

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Electrical Steel: The Material At The Heart Of The Grid

February 15, 2024 by 32 Comments

When thoughts turn to the modernization and decarbonization of our transportation infrastructure, one imagines it to be dominated by exotic materials. EV motors and wind turbine generators need magnets made with rare earth metals (which turn out to be not all that rare), batteries for cars and grid storage need lithium and cobalt, and of course an abundance of extremely pure silicon is needed to provide the computational power that makes everything work. Throw in healthy pinches of graphene, carbon fiber composites and ceramics, and minerals like molybdenum, and the recipe starts looking pretty exotic.

As necessary as they are, all these exotic materials are worthless without a foundation of more familiar materials, ones that humans have been extracting and exploiting for eons. Mine all the neodymium you want, but without materials like copper for motor and generator windings, your EV is going nowhere and wind turbines are just big lawn ornaments. But just as important is iron, specifically as the alloy steel, which not only forms the structural elements of nearly everything mechanical but also appears in the stators and rotors of motors and generators, as well as the cores of the giant transformers that the electrical grid is built from.

Not just any steel will do for electrical use, though; special formulations, collectively known as electrical steel, are needed to build these electromagnetic devices. Electrical steel is simple in concept but complex in detail, and has become absolutely vital to the functioning of modern society. So it pays to take a look at what electrical steel is and how it works, and why we’re going nowhere without it.

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Make Your Bookshelf Clickable

February 15, 2024 by 21 Comments

We’ll confess that we have a fondness for real books and plenty of them. So does [James], and he decided he needed a way to take a picture of his bookshelves and make each book clickable to find more information. This is one of those things that sounds fairly simple until you decide to do it. You can try an example of the results and then go back and read about the journey it took to get there.

There are several subtasks involved. First, you want to identify each book’s envelope. It wouldn’t do to click on the Joy of Cooking and get information about Remembrance of Things Past.

The next challenge is reading the title of the book. This can be tricky. Fonts differ. The book could be upside down. Some titles go cross the spine, but most go vertically. The remainder of the task is fairly easy. If you know the region and the title, you can easily find a link (for Google Books, in this case) and build an SVG overlay that maps the areas for each book to the right link.

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