2024 Hackaday Supercon Workshop Tickets Go On Sale Now

September 24, 2024 by 8 Comments

Our workshop ticket sales go live today at 8 AM PDT! If you’re coming to Supercon, and you’re interested, go get your workshop ticket before they all sell out!

There will be a change to this year’s workshop ticket limits. We heard our community’s feedback, and in the spirit of giving as many people as possible the opportunity to enjoy a workshop, we are limiting sign up to one workshop per attendee. If there are extra tickets by October 18th, we will allow folks to sign up for additional workshops.

If you register for more than one workshop we will refund you the ticket for the others based on the timestamp that you registered for each ticket (leaving only the ticket for the first workshop you registered for). We hope everyone understands our goal is to allow more people to experience a Supercon workshop due to limited space.

And of course, you can’t join in the workshops at Supercon without coming to Supercon. So get your tickets now if you haven’t already.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more speaker announcements!

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Custom Mini-Neon Signs In 10 Minutes

September 23, 2024 by 22 Comments

Sometimes, you see a project that isn’t a technical powerhouse but just looks so good you can’t help but think about duplicating it. That’s how we felt with the mini-neon signs made by [makerverse]. From an electronics point of view, it is just some filament LEDs and a 3D-printed casing. But, as you’ll see in the video below, these look like little miniature neon signs, and they look great.

Although we might use a different set of tools to get there, the idea is to create your text in DXF, extrude it in CAD, and then print a dark shell with a light or translucent center using a filament change. Glow-in-the-dark filament is also an option. Obviously, if you are handy in any CAD tool, you could easily pull this off.

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The Surprising Effects Of Fast Food Kiosks

September 21, 2024 by 80 Comments

For as long as there have been machines, there have been fears of machines taking your job. One of the latest incarnations of this phenomenon is the fast-food ordering kiosk. No longer will you have some teenager asking you if you want fries with that. These days, you are more likely going to find the question on a touch screen. So, are those poor kids out of an entry-level job? Apparently not, according to a recent CNN story.

According to McDonald’s, a business that embraces the kiosks, the new technology increases sales and creates more jobs, albeit more jobs further behind the counter. Part of the reason is that while “Do you want fries with that” is a cliche, it is also a sound business practice. Cashiers should try to upsell but don’t always do so. The kiosk always remembers to offer you an apple pie or whatever else they want to move today.

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COBB Tuning Hit With $2.9 Million Fine Over Emissions Defeat Devices

September 20, 2024 by 109 Comments

Recently, the EPA and COBB Tuning have settled after the latter was sued for providing emissions control defeating equipment. As per the EPA’s settlement details document, COBB Tuning have since 2015 provided customers with the means to disable certain emission controls in cars, in addition to selling aftermarket exhaust pipes with insufficient catalytic systems. As part of the settlement, COBB Tuning will have to destroy any remaining device, delete any such features from its custom tuning software and otherwise take measures to fully comply with the Clean Air Act, in addition to paying a $2,914,000 civil fine.

The tuning of cars has come a long way from the 1960s when tweaking the carburetor air-fuel ratios was the way to get more power. These days cars not only have multiple layers of computers and sensor systems that constantly monitor and tweak the car’s systems, they also have a myriad of emission controls, ranging from permissible air-fuel ratios to catalytic converters. It’s little surprise that these systems can significantly impact the raw performance one might extract from a car’s engine, but if the exhaust of nitrogen-oxides and other pollutants is to be kept within legal limits, simply deleting these limits is not a permissible option.

COBB Tuning proclaimed that they weren’t aware of these issues, and that they never marketed these features as ’emission controls defeating’. They were however aware of issues regarding their products, which is why they announced ‘Project Green Speed’ in 2022, which supposedly would have brought COBB into compliance. Now it would seem that the EPA did find fault despite this, and COBB was forced to making adjustments.

Although perhaps not as egregious as modifying diesel trucks to ‘roll coal’, federal law has made it abundantly clear that if you really want to have fun tweaking and tuning your car without pesky environmental laws getting in the way, you could consider switching to electric drivetrains, even if they’re mind-numbingly easy to make performant compared to internal combustion engines.

2024 Hackaday Superconference Speakers, Round One

September 17, 2024 by 6 Comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ve got a stellar slate of speakers this year — way too many to feature in one post. So here’s your first taste, and a reminder that Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late.

In addition to the full-length talks, we’ve got a series of Lightning Talks, so if you want to share seven minutes’ of insight with everyone there, please register your Lightning Talk idea now.

But Supercon has a lot more than just talks! The badge heavily features Supercon Add-Ons, and we want to see the awesome SAOs you are working on. There will be prizes, and we’ll manufacture four of our favorite designs in small batches for the winners, and make a full run for Hackaday Europe in 2025. Want to know more about SAOs? They’re the ideal starter PCB project.

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A beige computer monitor with a green glow sits atop a flat, beige Apple IIc with a mouse next to it on a dark wooden table. A vase full of bright pink flowers is in the background.

G4 Mac Mini Is A Wolf In Apple IIc Clothing

September 15, 2024 by 4 Comments

Restomods let us relive some of the glory days of industrial design with internals that would blow the socks off the original device. [Mental Hygiene] decided to update an Apple IIc with a G4 brain.

Starting with a broken IIc, they pulled the internals, including the venerable 6502, and transplanted the parts from a G4 Mac mini into the case. There was plenty of room for the small desktop and its power supply. We love how they were able to repurpose the 5 1/4″ floppy access on the side of the IIc as a DVD drive.

A Mac OSX install DVD peeks out from the disc slot on a beige Apple IIc. You'd never guess this was originally a floppy drive.The original keyboard was adapted with an Arduino Teensy into a USB unit for the mini, but the internals of the mouse were replaced with a modern USB laser mouse running the signals over the original connector. What really sells this particular restomod is the “VGA adapter that outputs monochrome NTSC via RCA” allowing a vintage Apple CRT to make this look like a device that somehow upgraded all the way to OSX.

This mod looks to be from 2012, so we’re wondering if it’s time someone did this with an Apple Silicon mini? We’ve previously covered a few different minis inside G4 iMacs. We’ve even seen someone tackle the Compact Macintosh with an iPad mini.

This Week In Security: Malicious Rollback, WHOIS, And More

September 13, 2024 by 4 Comments

It’s time to talk about Microsoft’s patch Tuesday, and the odd vulnerability rollback that happened. CVE-2024-43491 has caught some attention, as it’s a 9.8 on the CVSS scale, is under active exploitation, and results in Remote Code Execution (RCE). Yikes, it sounds terrible!

First off, what actually happened? The official statement is that “build version numbers crossed into a range that triggered a code defect”. We don’t know the exact details, but it’s something like an unsigned integer that was interpreted as a signed integer. A build number could have rolled over 32767, and what was intended to be 32768 or higher suddenly became −32767. Lots of “if greater than or equal” logic breaks down in that situation. Because of a logic flaw like this, certain versions of Windows 10 were unintentionally opting out of some historical security fixes.

And that’s where the high CVSS score and active exploitation descriptor comes from. This is simply the highest score of the resurgent flaws, and an acknowledgement that they have been exploited in the past. The good news is that this only applies to Windows 10 build 1507, so either the original install without any of the major updates installed, or one of the Windows 10 Enterprise Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) versions. It seems that the March 2024 monthly security update introduced the problem, and it wasn’t fixed until this month’s updates. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Malicious Rollback, WHOIS, And More” →