Fail Of The Week: This Flash Drive Will NOT Self-Destruct In Five Seconds

November 25, 2023 by 49 Comments

How hard can it be to kill a flash drive? Judging by the look of defeat on [Walker]’s face in the video below, pretty darn hard.

To bring you up to speed, and to give the “Mission: Impossible” reference in the title some context, it might be a good idea to look over our earlier coverage of [Walker]’s Ovrdrive project. It started way back in 2022 with the idea that some people might benefit from a flash drive that could rapidly and covertly render the data stored on it, err, “forensically unavailable.” This would require more than just erasing the data, of course, so [Walker] began looking at ways to physically kill a memory chip. First up was a voltage doubler to apply voltage much greater than the absolute maximum rating of 4.6 V for any pin on the chip. That corrupted some files on the flash chip, enough of a win to proceed to a prototype that actually succeeded in releasing the Magic Smoke.

But sadly, that puff of smoke ended up being a fluke. [Walker] couldn’t repeat the result, at least not with the reliability required by people for whom data privacy is literally a life-or-death matter. To increase the odds of a kill, he came up with an H-bridge circuit to reverse the polarity of the memory chip’s supply. Surely that would kill the chip, and from the thermal camera images, it sure looked promising. But apparently, even 167°C isn’t enough to forensically disable the chip, which kind of makes sense from the point of view of reflow survivability.

What’s next for [Walker]? He says he’s going to team up his overvoltage and reverse-polarity methods for one last shot, but after that, he’s about out of reasonable options. Sure, a thermite charge or a vial of superacid would do the trick, but neither is terribly covert. If you’re going to go that way, you might as well just buy a standard flash drive and throw it in the microwave or a blender. And we need to remember that this may be something the drive’s owner needs to do with jack-booted thugs kicking in the door, or possibly at gunpoint. It wouldn’t do to be too conspicuous under such circumstances. That’s why we like the “rapid power cycling” method of triggering the drive’s self-destruct sequence; it could easily be disguised as shaking hands in a stressful situation.

Who knew that memory chips were this robust? Kudos to [Walker] for getting the project as far as he did, and we’re still rooting for him to make it work somehow.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: This Flash Drive Will NOT Self-Destruct In Five Seconds” →

A 555 Can Even Make Your Car Indicator More Visible

November 25, 2023 by 42 Comments

Modern cars often come with white marker lights or daytime running lights that are on all the time, as a supplement to the primary headlights. The problem is that in some vehicle designs, these additional lights tend to make it harder to see the indicators when they’re on. [nibbler] had this very problem, and decided to solve it with a special interrupter circuit that cuts the daytime running light when the indicator is on. Even better, they used a 555 to do it!

The circuit is a simple monostable 555 circuit with an active low output. It’s triggered by the indicator signal. When the indicator is on, the circuit drives a relay to switch off the power to the daytime running light. Two copies of the circuit were built, one for the left side, and one for the right side of the car. This means that when the orange indicator is lit, it’s not being overwhelmed by the white daytime running light next to it. In fact, many automakers now program this behavior into their lighting by default.

It’s a nifty hack with a real positive safety impact. We’ve featured some other neat indicator hacks of late, like these tidy sequential indicators. Meanwhile, if you’re hacking on your own automotive lighting solutions, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks For Hacking

November 25, 2023 by 11 Comments

Hope you’re all having a great Thanksgiving weekend, and are getting your fill of family, food, and maybe even a little bit of fun. Aside from the cranberries, Thanksgiving is probably one of my favorite holidays because of the spirit behind it – thinking about what’s gone well, how you lucked out, and who has done you right over the year.

One of the most poignant expressions of thanks I’ve heard in a while came from Hackaday superfriend [Sprite_tm] in his Supercon talk this year, which he closed by thanking “you all” for pushing him on to keep making crazy projects. “I would never finish these projects without people who would be entertained by seeing all this. This is is effectively art – something that doesn’t make sense. The only way it makes sense is because I want it to exist, and because I know that you all love hearing and reading about stuff like this existing. So thank you very much for that.”

That same sentiment goes for all of us here at Hackaday: Thank you all very much for reading! Without this global community of crazy hackers to write for, we wouldn’t be able to keep doing what we do – it just wouldn’t make sense. And without your hacks, of course, we’d have nothing to write about.

Thanks for sharing, thanks for following along, thanks for inspiring us and for being inspired. Thanks for hacking.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Tesla Claims To Have Open Sourced The Roadster

November 25, 2023 by 38 Comments

In an interesting step for anyone who follows electric car technology, the automaker Tesla has released a trove of information about its first-generation Roadster car into the public domain. The documents involved include service manuals, circuit diagrams, and technical details, and Elon Musk himself Tweeted posted on X that “All design & engineering of the original @Tesla Roadster is now fully open source.”

We like the idea and there’s plenty of interesting stuff there, but we can’t find an open-source licence anywhere and we have to take issue with his “Whatever we have, you now have” comment. What we have is useful maintenance information and presents a valuable window into 2010’s cutting edge of electric vehicles, but if it’s everything they have then something must have gone very wrong in the Tesla archives. It’s possible someone might take a Lotus Elise and produce something close to a Roadster replica with this info, but it’s by no means enough to make a car from. Instead we’re guessing it may be a prelude to reducing support for what is a low-production car from over a decade ago.

When it comes to electric vehicle manufacturers open-sourcing their older models we already have a model in the form of Renault’s open-source version of their Twizy runabout. This is a far more credible set of information that can be used to make a fully open-source version of the car, rather than a set of workshop manuals.

Tesla Roadster, cytech, CC BY 2.0.

Turbocharge Your Transient Sensors With Math

November 25, 2023 by 19 Comments

If you’ve made a robot or played around with electronics before, you might have used a time-of-flight laser distance sensor before. More modern ones detect not just the first reflection, but analyze subsequent reflections, or reflections that come in from different angles, to infer even more about what they’re looking at. These transient sensors usually aren’t the most accurate thing in the world, but four people from the University of Wisconsin managed to get far more out of one using some clever math. (Video, embedded below.)

The transient sensors under investigation here sends out a pulse of light and records what it receives from nine angles in individual histograms. It then analyzes these histograms to make a rough estimate of the distance for each direction. But the sensor won’t tell us how it does so and it also isn’t very accurate. The team shows us how you can easily get a distance measurement that is more accurate and continues by showing how the nine distance estimates can even distinguish the geometry it’s looking, although to a limited extent. But they didn’t stop there: It can even detect the albedo of the material it’s looking at, which can be used to tell materials apart!

Overall, a great hack and we think this technology has potential – despite requiring more processing power. Continue reading “Turbocharge Your Transient Sensors With Math” →

Build Your Own Nanoleaf-Like Hex Lights

November 24, 2023 by 11 Comments

Nanoleaf makes a variety of beautiful LED lighting products, with their hexagon tiles particularly popular with gamers and streamers alike. However, they do come at a significant cost, particularly if you want to put together a larger display. [Giovanni Aggiustatutto] decided to build his own version from scratch, with a nice wooden finish to boot.

The benefit of the wooden design is that the panels look nice both when they’re switched on, and when they’re switched off. [Giovanni] selected attractive okumè plywood for the build, which is affordable and has a lovely grain. The hexagons were then fitted on their back side with strips of WS2812B LEDs. The first hexagon is fitted with an ESP32 that runs the lights, with the other hexagons having their LEDs daisychained from there. 3D printed frames were then fitted to each hexagon to allow them to be connected together into a larger wall-hanging piece.

Ultimately, building your own wall lights lets you customize them to operate exactly as you want, and often lets you save a lot of money, too. We’ve featured other similar builds before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Build Your Own Nanoleaf-Like Hex Lights” →

Mystery Signal! Are You Ready For Your Mystery Signal?

November 24, 2023 by 2 Comments

Like many people [Dan Greenall] spent a lot of time in the 1970s listening to shortwave radio. While you often think of that as a hobby involving listening to broadcast stations, some people like to listen to other communications such as airliners, ships, military, and even spy stations. These days, if you hear a strange signal you are probably only one internet search away from identifying what it is. But back then, you had to depend on word-of-mouth or magazines to figure things like that out. [Dan] found a recording of a mysterious military-like signal he made in 1971 on 14.85 MHz. He decided that maybe now, all these years later, he could finally identify it.

The operator in the recording is counting and mentions “Midway Island,” famous for a World War II battle and part of the Leeward Islands in the Pacific. Thanks to the internet and the law of six degrees of separation, [Dan] found [Chuck Kinzer] who was a Midway Navy vet.

Continue reading “Mystery Signal! Are You Ready For Your Mystery Signal?” →