Russia’s New Mystery Shortwave Station

April 8, 2023 by 36 Comments

The Buzzer, also known as UVB-76 or UZB-76, has been a constant companion to anyone with a shortwave radio tuned to 4625 kHz. However, [Ringway Manchester] notes that there is now a second buzzer operating near in frequency to the original. Of course, like all mysterious stations, people try to track their origin. [Ringway] shows some older sites for the Buzzer and the current speculation on the current transmitter locations.

Of course, the real question is why? The buzzing isn’t quite nonstop. There are occasional voice messages. There are also jamming attempts, including one, apparently, by Pac Man.

Some people think the new buzzer is an image, but it doesn’t seem to be the same signal. The theory is that the buzzing is just to keep the frequency clear in case it is needed. However, we wonder if it isn’t something else. Compressed data would sound like noise.  Other theories are that the buzzing studies the ionosphere or that it is part of a doomsday system that would launch nuclear missiles. Given that the signal has broken down numerous times, this doesn’t seem likely.

What’s even stranger is that occasional background voices are audible on the signal. That implies that buzzing noise isn’t generated directly into the transmitter but is a device in front of a microphone.

We’ve speculated on the buzzer and the jamming efforts around it before. Not exactly a numbers station, but the same sort of appeal.

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Mechanical GIF Animates With The Power Of Magnets

April 8, 2023 by 16 Comments

It doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, because whichever way you choose to say “GIF” is guaranteed to cheese off about half the people listening. Such is the state of our polarized world, we suppose, but there’s one thing we all can agree on — that a mechanical GIF is a pretty cool thing.

What’s even better about this thing is that [Mitch], aka [Hack Modular], put some very interesting old aircraft hardware to use to make it. He came upon a set of cockpit indicators from a Cold War-era RAF airplane — sorry, “aeroplane” — that used a magnetically driven rack and pinion to swivel a set of prism-shaped pieces to one of three positions. Which of the three symbols displayed depended on which faces were turned toward the pilot; they were highly visible displays that were also satisfyingly clicky.

After a teardown in which [Mitch] briefly discusses the mechanism behind these displays, he set about customizing the graphics. Rather than the boring RAF defaults, he chose three frames from the famous Horse in Motion proto-motion picture by [Eadweard Muybridge]. After attaching vertical strips from each frame to the three sides of each prism, [Mitch] came up with a driver for the display; he could have used a 555, but more fittingly chose series-connected relays to do the job. Capacitors slow down the switching cascade and the frame rate; a rotary switch selects different caps to make the horse appear to be walking, trotting, cantering, or galloping — yes, we know they’re each physically distinct motions, but work with us here.

The whole thing looks — and sounds — great mounted in a nice plastic enclosure. The video below shows it in action, and we find it pretty amazing the amount of information that can be conveyed with just three frames. And we’re surprised we’ve never seen these displays before; they seem like something [Fran Blanche] or [Curious Marc] would love.

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Design For People

April 8, 2023 by 52 Comments

We all make things. Sometimes we make things for ourselves, sometimes for the broader hacker community, and sometimes we make things for normal folks. It’s this last category where it gets tricky, and critical. I was reminded of all of this watching Chris Combs’ excellent Supercon 2022 talk on how to make it as an artist.

“But I’m not making art!” I hear you say? About half of Chris’ talk is about how he makes his tech art worry-free for galleries to install, and that essentially means making it normie-proof – making sure it runs as soon as the power is turned on, day in, day out, without hacker intervention, because venues hate having you on site to debug. As Tom joked in the podcast, it’s a little bit like designing for space: it’s a strange environment, you can’t send out repair teams, and it has to have failsafes that make sure it works.

What is striking about the talk is that there is a common core of practices that make our hardware projects more reliable, whatever their destination. Things like having a watchdog that’ll reboot if it goes wrong, designing for modularity whenever possible, building in hanging or mounting options if that’s relevant, and writing up at least a simple, single-page info sheet with everything that you need to know to keep it running. Of course with art, aesthetics matters more than usual. Or does it?

So suppose you’re making a thing for a normal person, that must run without your babysitting. What is the common core of precautionary design steps you take?

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Your Fuji Digital Camera Is Hackable

April 8, 2023 by 9 Comments

There was a time when a digital camera was a surprisingly simple affair whose on-board processor didn’t have much in the way of smarts beyond what was needed to grab an image from the sensor and compress it onto some storage. But as they gained more features, over time cameras acquired all the trappings of a fully-fledged computer in their own right, including full-fat operating systems and the accompanying hackability opportunities.

Prominent among camera manufacturers are Fujifilm, whose cameras it turns out have plenty of hacking possibilities. There’s something of a community about them, with all their work appearing in a GitHub repository, and a cracking April Fool in which a Fujifilm camera appears able to be coaxed into running DOOM.

Correction: We’ve since heard from creator [Daniel] who assures us that not only was the DOOM hack very much real, but that he’s released the instructions on how to run the classic shooter on your own Fujfilm X-A2.

Fujifilm cameras past 2017 or so run the ThreadX real-time operating system on a variety of ARM SoCs, with an SQLite data store for camera settings and some custom software controlling the camera hardware. The hackability comes through patching firmware updates, and aside from manipulating the built-in scripting language and accessing the SQLite database, can include code execution.

Don’t have a Fujifilm? They’re not the only hackable camera to be found.

Reactivating A Harris RF-130 URT-23 Transmitter

April 8, 2023 by 13 Comments

If you enjoy old military hardware, you probably know that Harris made quite a few heavy-duty pieces of radio gear. [K6YIC] picked up a nice example: the Harris RF-130 URT-23. These were frequently used in the Navy and some other service branches to communicate in a variety of modes on HF. The entire set included an exciter, an amplifier, an antenna tuner, and a power supply and, in its usual configuration, can output up to a kilowatt. The transmitter needs some work, and he’s done three videos on the transmitter already. He’s planning on several more, but there’s already a lot to see if you enjoy this older gear. You can see the first three below and you’ll probably want to watch them all, but if you want to jump right to the tear down, you can start with the second video.

You can find the Navy manual for the unit online, dated back to 1975. It’s hard to imagine how much things have changed in 50 years. These radios use light bulbs and weigh almost 500 pounds. [Daniel] had to get his shop wired for 220 V just to run the beast.

It is amusing that some of this old tube equipment had a counter to tell you how many hours the tubes inside had been operating so you could replace them before they were expected to fail. To keep things cool, there’s a very noisy 11,000 RPM fan. The two ceramic final amplifier tubes weigh over 1.5 pounds each!

The third video shows the initial power up. Like computers, if you remember when equipment was like this, today’s lightweight machines seem like toys. Of course, everything works better these days, so we won’t complain. But there’s something about having a big substantial piece of gear with all the requisite knobs, switches, meters, and everything else.

We can’t wait to see the rest of the restoration and to hear this noble radio on the air again. You can tell that [Daniel] loves this kind of gear and you can pick up a lot of tips and lingo watching the videos.

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Pi Microcontroller Still Runs A Webserver

April 7, 2023 by 14 Comments

At first glance, the Raspberry Pi Pico might seem like a bit of a black sheep when compared to the other offerings from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. While most of the rest of their lineup can run Linux environments with full desktops, the Pico is largely limited to microcontroller duties in exchange for much smaller price tags and footprints. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be coerced into doing some of the things we might want a mainline Pi to do, like run a web server.

The project can run a static web page simply by providing the Pico with the project code available on the GitHub page and the HTML that you’d like the Pico to serve. It can be more than a static web page though, as it is also capable of running Python commands through the web interface as well. The server can pass commands from the web server and back as well, allowing for control of various projects though a browser interface. In theory this could be much simpler than building a physical user interface for a project instead by offloading all of this control onto the web server instead.

The project not only supports the RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico but can also be implemented on other WiFi-enabled microcontroller boards like the ESP8266 and ESP32. Having something like this on hand could greatly streamline smaller projects without having to reach for a more powerful (and more expensive) single-board computer like a Pi 3 or 4. We’ve seen some other builds on these boards capable of not only running HTML and CSS renderers, but supporting some image formats as well.

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The Sounds Emitted By Plants Are Real But They Are Still Not Talking

April 7, 2023 by 13 Comments

A recent paper published by researchers at the university of Tel Aviv in Cell on the sounds they captured from ‘stressed’ plants had parts of the internet abuzz with what this meant, with some suggesting that this was an early April Fools prank. The fun part here is the news item is not that plants make noise, but rather that this was the first time (apparently) that the noise made by plants was captured by microphones placed at some distance from a variety of plants.

This research is based on previous studies dating back decades, such as Tyree and Sperry who reported (PDF) in 1989 on the vulnerability of the plant xylem (water transporting tissue) to cavitation and embolism. Since the xylem’s function is to carry water and dissolved nutrients to the upper parts of the plant, having air bubbles form would be a negative thing for the plant’s survival. When and how cavitation occurs in the xylem is relevant as it directly impacts how well plants grow. Continue reading “The Sounds Emitted By Plants Are Real But They Are Still Not Talking” →