Speakers Taking The Stage At Supercon Plus A Hint Of The Hacking To Come

October 18, 2019 by 3 Comments

Four weeks from today the Hackaday Superconference comes alive for the fifth year. From engineering in challenging environments to elevating the art form of electronics, here are nine more talks that will make this a year to remember.

In addition to the slate of speakers below there are three other announcements, plus workshops. Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM) is designing this year’s badge based around a beefy FPGA running a RISC-V core and using open source synthesis tools. We’ll have more on that soon, but if you just can’t wait, check out the expansion board spec he just published, and join the conference chat room for the inside track. Badge hacking is sure to be the liveliest we’ve ever seen.

Tickets are sold out but you can still get on the waiting list and hope that one becomes available. If you are holding onto one of these hot commodities but are unable to use it, please return your ticket so that we can get it to someone waiting with their fingers crossed.

The Talks (Part Four of Many)


  • Laurel Cummings

    When it Rains, It Pours

    Over the last two years my work has been beyond ordinary, building and prototyping in strange locations like being stranded on a sailboat in the Atlantic Ocean, teaching US Marines in Kuwait, and building fuel gauge sensors for generators for vital systems in North Carolina post hurricane Florence. Some of the big lessons I’ve learned are about how to source materials and supplies in weird places, like finding potentiometers in the backwoods of North Carolina when Amazon cannot physically deliver across flooded highways, how to find welding gas in Kuwait City (and how a local chef could possibly be your best bet), or how far you can get with an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store near the city docks. These situations help you really see the “engineer creep” that can happen to a project. I’ve learned that when you’re in high-risk situations, you really should stop caring about whether the edges of your 3D print are chamfered. In fact, version 1 of the hurricane fuel gauge sensor was demonstrated while being housed inside an elegant, tasteful sandwich baggie.


  • Angela Sheehan

    Building Whimsical Wearables: Leveling Up Through Playful Prototyping

    Whether it’s for a theme party, Halloween, cosplay, or That Thing in The Desert, designing wearables for whimsical self expression presents a great opportunity to challenge yourself as a maker, wearer, and collaborator. As an artist and designer who crash landed into a career in tech, I’ve found that imposter syndrome can often place limits on what feels personally achievable from an electronics and programming standpoint. Recontextualizing a project to shift the focus from ‘wearable tech hardware endeavor’ to ‘quirky mixed media experiment in personal styling’, I’ve created a safe space to play and try new things just outside my skill set and produced some of my most technically complex and polished personal work. Take a journey with me through the process of conceptualizing and building my Color Stealing Fairy project, an exercise in iterative design and upgrading an interactive wearable project over the course of two years and counting.


  • Michael Ossmann and Kate Temkin

    Software-Defined Everything

    The popularity of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has led to the emergence of powerful open source software tools such as GNU Radio that enable rapid development of real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques. We’ve used these tools for both radio and non-radio applications such as audio and infrared, and now we are finding them tremendously useful for diverse sensors and actuators that can benefit from DSP. In this talk we’ll show how we use the open source GreatFET platform to rapidly develop an SDR-like approach to just about anything.


  • Kelly Heaton

    “Hacking Nature’s Musicians” (or, “The Art of Electronic Naturalism”)

    The general lack of acceptance of electronic art results from a scarcity of critics, curators, collectors, and grantors who understand electronic media, compounded by a cultural gap between the artistic and engineering communities. In order to solve this problem, we must stretch our comfort zone and vocabularies to have a respectful, enlightening conversation with people with different educational backgrounds. In this talk I’ll discuss my wonderment at the simple, analog circuit designs that mimic life-like behavior such as chirping crickets and singing birds. This will include discussion of various schematics and demonstrations of a small. along with an abbreviated survey of my work to-date.


  • Jasmine Brackett

    Setting your Electronics Free

    In this panel we’ll discuss the key ways to get your projects from your workshop into the hands of the first few users, and what you can do to scale up from there. We’ll talk about common pitfalls, and also what are the best resources to draw upon.


  • David Williams

    MicroFPGA – The Coming Revolution in Small Electronics

    Big FPGA’s are awesome. They’re doing what they’ve always done, enabling AI, signal processing, military applications etc. However, there is a new possibility emerging – FPGA’s for small applications – which is quite possibly even more significant. Using open source tools, cheap flexible development boards, and new libraries, designers have a whole new set of options, creating incredibly high performance, flexible, low power projects and products.


  • Nick Poole

    Boggling the Boardhouse: Designing 3D Structures, Circuits, and Sensors from PCBs

    The presentation will be a series of design features or techniques with a few minutes of exploration into the ‘gotchas’ of each, as well as example layouts in EAGLE and physical examples. I’d like to cover as many different techniques as I can cram into 30 minutes, including bringing weird shapes into EDA, the inside corner problem caused by tab and slot, fillet soldering, stacking boards, imitating model sprues with mouse bites, manipulating the mask layer for custom displays, bendy tab buttons, working rotary encoder, and ergonomic design for handheld PCBs.


  • Ted Yapo

    Towards an Open-Source Multi-GHz Sampling Oscilloscope

    Tektronix designed a 14.5 GHz sampling oscilloscope in 1968. With the easy multi-layer PCB designs, tiny surface-mount parts, blazingly fast semiconductors, and computer horsepower available to the individual designer today, can a similar sampling head be re-created inexpensively with common, off-the-shelf components? Should be easy, right? It’s not. In this talk, I’ll discuss progress towards an open-source GHz+ sampling oscilloscope, including a lot of dead ends, plus some very promising leads.


  • Jeroen Domburg

    Building the Hackaday Superconference Badge

    The tradition of the Hackaday Supercon badge is to build something unlike any Supercon badge that came before. This year’s badge has an FPGA as its central component, and this comes with some extra challenges: the FPGA only comes in a BGA package with a whopping 381 pads to solder, and instead of just referring to the datasheet of the SoC to write the badge software, the SoC itself had to be written first.  I will discuss the development process of the badge, as well as the many challenges encountered along the way.

 

Keep Your Eye on Hackaday for the Livestream

The speakers you’ll see at Supercon have an amazing wealth of experience and we can’t wait to see their talks. But even if you couldn’t get a ticket, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. Keep your eye on Hackaday for a link to the livestream which will begin on Saturday, November 16th.

This Week In Security: A Digital Café Américain, The Linux Bugs That Weren’t, The Great Nation, And More

October 18, 2019 by 16 Comments

A government is going after a human rights activists in Morocco. It sounds familiar, but I don’t think Humphrey Bogart is running the gin joint this time around.

Questionable Casablanca references aside, Amnesty International has reported another attack against human rights workers. In this case, a pair of Moroccan activists were targeted with what appears to be NSO’s Pegasus malware suite. Researchers identified text message phishing that led to malicious web pages, as well as HTTP man in the middle attacks against their mobile devices. Once the target was successfully directed to the malicious site, A collection of zero-day vulnerabilities were used to compromise the phone with the NSO malware.

NSO is an Israeli company that specializes in building malware and other cybersecurity tools for governments. As you can imagine, this specialization has earned NSO the scorn of quite a few organizations. NSO claims to have a policy framework in place that allows them to evaluate and terminate the use of their software when it is deemed illegal or abusive, but due to the nature of their contracts, that process is anything but transparent. Continue reading “This Week In Security: A Digital Café Américain, The Linux Bugs That Weren’t, The Great Nation, And More” →

This Dry-Ice Powered Fog Machine Is Perfect For Halloween

October 14, 2019 by 19 Comments

The leaves are turning brown, and the spookier season is upon us. If you’re currently working up plans for a top-notch Halloween party, you would do well to consider building a fog machine like this unit from [DIY Machines]!

This fog machine is based around dry ice, so you’ll need to source that from an external supplier. The machine consists of a closed container filled with hot water, inside which is a movable bucket filled with dry ice. By lowering the dry ice into the water, fog is produced.

An Arduino is used to control the bucket, allowing the amount of fog produced to be controlled with a smartphone app. There are also controllable LEDs built in to give the fog a suitably eerie glow. The build relies on a series of 3D printed parts for the mechanism, and features several different nozzle designs for achieving different effects, such as a rising geyser or a thick low-lying fog.

The basic concepts are simple and it’s a build anyone could knock out in a weekend with a 3D printer and an Amazon account. It’s a great way to add to the ambience of Halloween, but of course, that’s not all fog can do. Video after the break.

Continue reading “This Dry-Ice Powered Fog Machine Is Perfect For Halloween” →

This Week In Security: Signal, WhatsApp, Oauth Fishing, And More State-Sponsored Attacks

October 11, 2019 by 10 Comments

A bug was recently fix in Signal that allowed a caller to force a call connection without any user interaction on the receiving side. We’ve seen this sort of problem in other chat applications, most recently the Zoom debacle.

The Signal client uses the same function to connect an outgoing call as an incoming call. This bit of code re-use allows a malicious client to initiate a call, and then send the “Accept Call” message. Because of the code re-use, this message triggers the same code as the accept call button on the receiving side. It’s as if the attacker uses reverse psychology to trick the other client into connecting.

It seems this bug only affected the Android client, and didn’t trigger a video call. It’s unclear whether the bug was discovered and exploited before it was fixed, but now that it has been announced, be sure to get Signal up to date. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Signal, WhatsApp, Oauth Fishing, And More State-Sponsored Attacks” →

This Week In Security: Is RSA Finally Broken? The Push For Cloud Accounts, Encrypted DNS, And More Mobile Mayhem

October 4, 2019 by 24 Comments

Ever wondered what “cyberwar” looks like? Apparently it’s a lot of guessing security questions and changing passwords. It’s an interesting read on its own, but there are some interesting clues if you read between the lines. A General in the know mentioned that Isis:

clicked on something or they did something that then allowed us to gain control and then start to move.

This sounds very similar to stories we’ve covered in the past, where 0-days are used to compromise groups or individuals. Perhaps the NSA supplied such an exploit, and it was sent in a phishing attack. Through various means, the U.S. team quietly compromised systems and collected credentials.

The article mentions something else interesting. Apparently the targets of this digital sting had also been compromising machines around the world, and using those machines to manage their efforts. The decision was made by the U.S. team to also compromise those machines, in order to lock out the Isis team. This might be the most controversial element of the story. Security researchers have wanted permission to do this for years. How should the third parties view these incursions?

The third element that I found particularly interesting was the phase 2 attack. Rather than outright delete, ban, and break Isis devices and accounts, the U.S. team installed persistent malware that emulated innocuous glitches. The internet connection is extremely laggy on certain days, certain websites simply don’t connect, and other problems. These are the sort of gremlins that networking pros spend all day trying to troubleshoot. The idea that it’s intentional gives me one more thing to worry about. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Is RSA Finally Broken? The Push For Cloud Accounts, Encrypted DNS, And More Mobile Mayhem” →

The Righteous Quest To Crack A Canon I9900

October 2, 2019 by 34 Comments

[Starhawk] is a man with a problem. More accurately, he’s a man whose mother has a problem, but ultimately that ends up being the same thing. Her wide-format Canon printer recently stopped working after better than a decade of reliable service, and he wants to know why. Rather than spend the money on buying a new printer, he’s determined to find out if she’s been the victim of planned obsolescence by reverse engineering the Canon i9900 to see what makes it tick (or stop ticking, as the case may be).

In the absence of any obvious hardware faults, [Starhawk] has suspicions that the machine’s QY6-0055 printhead has run over some internal “odometer” and simply turned itself off. We’ve all seen similar trickery at play when trying to use third party ink cartridges in our printers, so it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Canon i9900 is designed to reject heads once they’ve seen enough usage. Perhaps the biggest clue is that the QY6-0055 has a Seiko S93C56BR EEPROM on the board that’s keeping track of…something.

Right now, [Starhawk] is devoting his energies on trying to make sense of the data he pulled from the EEPROM using his TL866A programmer. But that’s no easy feat with a sample size of just one, which is why he’s looking for help. He’s hoping that other hackers with similar printers (and ideally ones that use the same QY6-0055 head) could submit their own EEPROM dumps and the community could get to work trying to decipher what’s stored on the chips. He’s really hoping that somebody at Canon might be willing to sneak him a couple tips on what he should be looking for, but at this point we think he’ll take whatever assistance he can get.

Now to be fair, there’s really no way to know definitively if there’s some flag stored on the EEPROM that’s keeping the printer from working. It could just be good old fashioned hardware failure, which would hardly be a surprise for a piece of consumer electronics from 2005. But even if the effort to understand the Canon’s EEPROM doesn’t get him any closer to a working printer, we still think it’s a fascinating example of real-world reverse engineering that’s worth it for the experience alone.

There’s a long history of hackers doing battle with their printers, from emulating an ink cartridge with a microcontroller to reinking the ribbon of a vintage 1980s behemoth. We’re interested in seeing where this project takes [Starhawk], but no matter what happens there are likely to be some interesting discoveries made along the way.

X-Printer Fits In A Backpack

October 2, 2019 by 16 Comments

3D printers are great for rapid prototyping, but they’re not usually what you’d call… portable. For [Malte Schrader], that simply wouldn’t do – thus, the X-printer was born!

The X-printer is a fused-deposition printer built around a CoreXY design. Its party piece is its folding concertina-style Z-axis, which allows the printer to have a build volume of 160x220x150mm, while measuring just 300x330x105mm when folded. That’s small enough to fit in a backpack!

Getting the folding mechanism to work took some extra effort, with the non-linear Z-axis requiring special attention in the firmware. The printer runs Marlin 1, chosen for its faster compile time over Marlin 2. Other design choices are made with an eye to ruggedness. The aluminium frame isn’t as light as it could be, but adds much needed rigidity and strength. We’d love to see a custom case that you could slide the printer into so it would be protected while stowed.

It’s a build that shows there’s still plenty to be gained from homebrewing your own printer, even in the face of unprecedented options on the market today. We’ve seen other unique takes on the portable printer concept before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “X-Printer Fits In A Backpack” →