HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along

October 4, 2024 by 5 Comments

I’m sitting at a table writing this in the centre of a long and cavernous industrial building, the former print works of a local newspaper, I’m surrounded by hardware and software hackers working at their laptops, around me is a bustling crowd admiring a series of large projects on tables along the walls, and the ambient sound is one of the demoscene, chiptunes, 3D-printed guitars, and improbably hurdy-gurdy music. Laser light is playing on the walls, and even though it’s quite a journey from England to get here, I’m home. This is Hackfest Enschede, a two-day event in the Eastern Dutch city which by my estimation has managed the near-impossible feat of combining the flavour of both a hacker event and a maker faire all in one, causing the two distinct crowds to come together.

The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place

To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s Printstruments with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and Nerdy Gurdy, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of Sound Force, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty. Continue reading “HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along” →

Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse

October 3, 2024 by 64 Comments

Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful of middlemen with a stranglehold on the way we interact with information, commerce, and even other people. Where’s the disintermediated future we were promised? More importantly, can we make a “new good web” that puts users first? [Cory Doctorow] has a plan to reverse what he’s come to call enshittification, or the lifecycle of the extractionist tech platform, and he shared it with us as the Supercon 2023 keynote.

As [Doctorow] sees it, there’s a particular arc to every evil platform’s lifecycle. First, the platform will treat its users fairly and provide enough value to accumulate as many as possible. Then, once a certain critical mass is reached, the platform pivots to exploiting those users to sell them out to the business customers of the platform. Once there’s enough buy-in by business customers, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to eke out every cent for their investors before collapsing in on itself.

Doctorow tells us, “Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” There have been tech platforms that rose and fell without it, but he describes a set of three criteria that make the process unavoidable.

  1. Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
  2. Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
  3. Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)

Continue reading “Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse” →

Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk

October 3, 2024 by 40 Comments

For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk. Not only would this be the first time anyone who wasn’t a professional astronaut would be opening the hatch of their spacecraft and venturing outside, but it would also be the first real-world test of SpaceX’s own extravehicular activity (EVA) suits. Whether you considered it a billionaire’s publicity stunt or an important step forward for commercial spaceflight, one thing was undeniable: when that hatch opened, it was going to be a moment for the history books.

But if you happened to have been watching the live stream of the big event earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for finding the whole thing a bit…abrupt. After years of training and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis both spent less than eight minutes outside of the Dragon capsule. Even then, you could argue that calling it a spacewalk would be a bit of a stretch.

Neither crew member ever fully exited the spacecraft, they simply stuck their upper bodies out into space while keeping their legs within the hatch at all times. When it was all said and done, the Dragon’s hatch was locked up tight less than half an hour after it was opened.

Likely, many armchair astronauts watching at home found the whole thing rather anticlimactic. But those who know a bit about the history of human spaceflight probably found themselves unable to move off of the edge of their seat until that hatch locked into place and all crew members were back in their seats.

Flying into space is already one of the most mindbogglingly dangerous activities a human could engage in, but opening the hatch and floating out into the infinite black once you’re out there is even riskier still. Thankfully the Polaris Dawn EVA appeared to go off without a hitch, but not everyone has been so lucky on their first trip outside the capsule.

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Laptop GPU Upgrade With Just A Little Reballing

October 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

Modern gaming laptops are in an uncomfortable spot – often too underpowered for newest titles, but too bulky to be genuinely portable. It doesn’t help they’re not often upgradeable, so you’re stuck with what you’ve bought – unless, say, you’re a hacker equipped some tools for PCB reflow? If that’s the case, welcome to [TechModLab]’s video showing you the process of upgrading a laptop’s soldered-on NVIDIA GPU, replacing the 3070 chip with a 3080.

You don’t need much – the most exotic tool is a BGA rework station, holding the mainboard steady&stiff and heating a specific large chip on the board with an infrared lamp from above. This one is definitely a specialty tool, but we’ve seen hackers build their own. From there, some general soldering tools like flux and solder wick, a stencil for your chip, BGA balls, and a $20 USB-C hotplate are instrumental for reballing chips – tools you ought to have.

Reballing was perhaps the hardest step of the journey – instrumental for preparing the GPU before the transplant. Afterwards, only a few steps were needed – poking a BGA ball that didn’t connect, changing board straps to adjust for the new VRAM our enterprising hacker added alongside the upgrade, and playing with the driver process install a little. Use this method to upgrade from a lower-end binned GPU you’re stuck with, or perhaps to repair your laptop if artifacts start appearing – it’s a worthwhile reminder about methods that laptop repair shops use on the daily.

Itching to learn more about BGAs? You absolutely should read this article series by our own [Robin Kearey]. We’ve mostly seen reballing used for upgrading RAM on laptop and Raspberry Pi boards, but seeing it being used for an entire laptop is nice – it’s the same technique, just scaled up, and you always can start by practicing at a smaller scale. Now, it might feel like we’ve left the era of upgradable GPUs on laptops, and today’s project might not necessarily help your worries – but the Framework 16 definitely bucks the trend.

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Supercon 2023: Thea Flowers Renders KiCad Projects On The Web

October 1, 2024 by 8 Comments

Last year’s Supercon, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Thea [Stargirl] Flowers, who told us about her KiCanvas project, with its trials, its tribulations, and its triumphs. KiCanvas brings interactive display of KiCad boards and schematics into your browser, letting you embed your PCB’s information right into your blog post or online documentation.

Give the KiCanvas plugin a URL to your KiCad file, and it will render your file in the browser, fully on the fly. There’s no .jpg to update and re-upload, no jobs to re-run each time you find a mistake and update your board – your files are always up to date, and your audience is always able to check it out without launching KiCad.

Images are an intuitive representation for schematics and PCB files, but they’re letting hackers down massively. Thea’s KiCanvas project is about making our KiCad projects all that more accessible to newcomers, and it’s succeeded – nowadays, you can encounter KiCanvas schematic embeds in the wild on various hackers’ blogs. The Typescript code didn’t write itself, and neither was it easy – she’s brought a fair few war stories to the DesignLab stage.

A hacker’s passion to share can move mountains. Thea’s task was a formidable one, too – KiCad is a monumental project with a decades-long history. There are quite respectable reasons for someone to move this particular mountain – helping you share your projects quickly but extensively, and letting people learn about your projects without breaking a sweat.

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IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch

September 30, 2024 by 11 Comments

It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an outstanding hack that adds a dual SIM slot to a US-sold eSIM iPhone 15/15 Pro, while preserving its exclusive mmwave module. No doubt, making use of the boardview files and schematics, it shows us that smartphone modding isn’t dead — it could be that we need to acknowledge the new tools we now have at our disposal.

When different hardware features are region-locked, sometimes you want to get the best of both worlds. This mod lets you go the entire length seamlessly, no bodges. It uses a lovely looking flexible printed circuit (FPC) patch board to tap into a debug header with SIM slot signals, and provides a customized Li-ion pouch cell with a cutout for the SIM slot. There’s just the small matter of using a CNC mill to make a cutout in the case where the SIM slot will go, and you’ll need to cut a buried trace to disable the eSIM module. Hey, we mentioned our skills needed to catch up, right? From there, it appears that iOS recognizes the new two SIM slots seamlessly.

The video is impressive and absolutely worth a watch if modding is your passion, and if you have a suitable CNC and a soldering iron, you can likely install this mod for yourself. Of course, you lose some things, like waterproofing, the eSIM feature, and your warranty. However, nothing could detract from this being a fully functional modkit for a modern-day phone, an inspiration for us all. Now, perhaps one of us can take a look at building a mod helping us do parts transplants between phones, parts pairing be damned.

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First Tentative Sales Of Tandem Perovskite-Silicon PV Panels

September 29, 2024 by 18 Comments

To anyone who has spent some time in photovoltaic (PV) power circles, the word ‘perovskite’ probably sounds familiar. Offering arguably better bandgap properties than traditional silicon cells, perovskite-based PV panels also promise to be cheaper and (literally) more flexible, but commercialization has been elusive. This is something which Oxford PV seeks to change, with the claim that they will be shipping the first hybrid perovskite-silicon panels to a US customer.

Although Oxford PV prefers to keep the details of their technology classified, there have been decades of research on pure perovskite PV cells as well as tandem perovskite-silicon versions. The reason for the tandem (i.e. stacked) construction is to use more of the solar rays’ spectrum and total energy to increase output. The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that you need to find ways to make each layer integrate in a stable fashion, with ideally the connecting electrodes being transparent. A good primer on the topic is found in this 2021 review article by [Yuanhang Cheng] and [Liming Ding].

The primary disadvantage of perovskites has always been their lack of longevity, with humidity, UV irradiation, temperature and other environmental factors conspiring against their continued existence. In a 2022 study by [Jiang Liu] et al. in Science it was reported that a perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell lost about 5% of its initial performance after 1,000 hours. A 2024 study by [Yongbin Jin] et al. in Advanced Materials measured a loss of 2% after approximately the same timespan. At a loss of 2%/1,000 hours, the perovskite layer would be at 50% of its initial output after 25,000 hours, or a hair over 2.85 years.

A quick glance through the Oxford PV website didn’t reveal any datasheets or other technical information which might elucidate the true loss rate, so it would seem that we’ll have to wait a while longer on real data to see whether this plucky little startup has truly cracked the perovskite stability issue.

Top image: Summary of tandem perovskite-silicon solar cell workings. (Credit: Yuanhang Cheng, Liming Ding, SusMat, 2021)