Better Living Through Hackery

August 10, 2024 by 11 Comments

Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova] has been on a multi-year kick to make technology more personal by making it herself, and has just now started writing about it. Her main point rings especially true in this day and age, where a lot of the tech devices we could use to help us are instead used to spy on us or are designed to literally make us addicted to their services.

The project is at the same time impossible and simple. Of course, you are not going to be able to build a gadget that will bolster all of your (perceived or otherwise) personal weaknesses in one fell swoop. But what if you start looking at them one at a time? What if you start building up the good habits with the help of a fun DIY project?

That’s where [Arya]’s plan might just be brilliant. Because each project is supposed to be small, it forces you to focus on one specific problem, rather than getting demoralized at the impossibility of becoming “better” in some vague overall sense. Any psychologist would tell you that introspection and dividing up complex problems are the first steps. And what motivates a hacker to take the next steps? You got it, the fun of brainstorming, planning, and building a nice concrete DIY project. It’s like the ultimate motivation, Hackaday style.

And DIY solutions are a perfect match to personal problems. Nothing is so customizable as what you design and build yourself from the ground up. DIY means making exactly what you need, or at least what you think you need. Iteration, improvement, and the usual prototyping cycle applied to personal growth sounds like the ideal combo, because that’s how the tech works, and that’s also how humans work. Of course, even the coolest DIY gadget can’t instantly make you more mindful, for instance, but if it’s a tool that helps you get there, I don’t think you could ask for more.

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Video Game Preservation – Stop Killing Games!

August 10, 2024 by 60 Comments

It’s been an ongoing issue for years now. People who buy video games, especially physical copies, expect to be able to play that game at their leisure, no matter how old their console gets. This used to be a no-brainer: think about the SNES or Genesis/Mega Drive from the late 80s and early 90s. You can still buy one today and play the games without any issues. Not so with many modern, internet-connected games that rely on communication with servers the publishers own, whether or not the online features are necessary for gameplay. Stop Killing Games is a new initiative in the EU and worldwide to get enough valid petition signatures to force the issue to be brought up in parliaments all over the world, including the EU Parliament.

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.

StopKillingGames.com

Why now? Well, Ubisoft recently killed a popular videogame called The Crew by taking down the servers that support the game. Without these servers, the game is completely useless. France and many other European countries have strong consumer protection laws which, in theory, should prevent companies from pulling stunts like this, but this particular situation has never been tested in court. Besides this, the group are also petitioning governments around the world, including France (where Ubisoft is based), Germany, Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, and Brazil, and also options for anywhere else in the EU/world.

If you’re a gamer, and especially if you play video games which use online components, it’s definitely worth reading through their website. The FAQ section in particular answers a lot of questions. In any case, we wish them luck as the preservation of media is a very important topic!

[Thanks to Jori for the tip!]

What Is SystemVerilog, Really?

August 10, 2024 by 7 Comments

[Mark] starts a post from a bit ago with: “… maybe you have also heard that SystemVerilog is simply an extension of Verilog, focused on testing and verification.” This is both true and false, depending on how you look at it. [Mark] then explains what the differences are. It’s a good read if you are Verilog fluent, but just dip your toe into SystemVerilog.

Part of the confusion is that until 2009, there were two different things: Verilog and SystemVerilog. However, the SystemVerilog 2009 specification incorporates both languages, so modern Verilog is SystemVerilog and vice versa.

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The Luminiferous Theremin

August 9, 2024 by 5 Comments

[Extreme Kits] asks the question: “What the hell is a luminiferous theremin?” We have to admit, we know what a thermin is, but that’s as far as we got. You’ve surely seen and heard a theremin, the musical instrument developed by Leon Theremin that makes swoopy music often associated with science fiction movies. The luminiferous variation is a similar instrument that uses modern time of flight sensors to pick up your hand positions.

The traditional instrument uses coils, and your hands alter the frequency of oscillators. Some versions use light sensors to avoid the problems associated with coils. While the time of flight sensors also use light, they are immune to many false readings caused by stray light.

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Laser Fault Injection On The Cheap

August 9, 2024 by 8 Comments

One can only imagine the wonders held within the crypto labs of organizations like the CIA or NSA. Therein must be machines of such sophistication that no electronic device could resist their attempts to defeat whatever security is baked into their silicon. Machines such as these no doubt bear price tags that only a no-questions-asked budget could support, making their techniques firmly out of reach of even the most ambitious home gamer.

That might be changing, though, with this $500 DIY laser fault injection setup. It comes to us from Finnish cybersecurity group [Fraktal], who have started a series of blog posts detailing how they built their open-source reverse-engineering rig. LFI is similar to other “glitching” attacks we’ve covered before, such as EMP fault injection, except that a laser shining directly on a silicon die is used to disrupt its operation rather than a burst of electromagnetic energy.

Since LFI requires shining the laser very precisely on nanometer-scale elements of a bare silicon die, nanopositioning is the biggest challenge. Rather than moving the device under attack, the [Fraktal] rig uses a modified laser galvanometer to scan an IR laser over the device. The galvo and the optical components are all easily available online, and they’ve started a repo to document the modifications needed and the code to tire everything together.

Of course, this technique requires the die in the device under study to be exposed, but [Fraktal] has made that pretty approachable too. They include instructions for milling away the epoxy from the lead-frame side of a chip, which is safer for the delicate structures etched into the top of the die. The laser can then shine directly through the die from the bottom. For “flip-chip” packages like BGAs, the same milling technique would be done from the top of the package. Either way, we can imagine a small CNC mill making the process safer and quicker, even though they seem to have done pretty well with a Dremel.

This looks like a fantastic reverse engineering tool, and we’re really looking forward to the rest of the story.
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The Waveguide Explanation You Wish You’d Had At School

August 9, 2024 by 13 Comments

Anyone who has done an electronic engineering qualification will at some point have had to get to grips with transmission lines, and then if they are really lucky, waveguides. Perhaps there should be one of those immutable Laws stating that for each step in learning about these essential parts, the level of the maths you are expected to learn goes up in an exponential curve, for it’s certainly true that most of us breathe a hefty sigh of relief when that particular course ends. It’s not impossible to understand waveguides though, and [Old Hack EE] is here to slice through the formulae with some straightforward explanations.

First of all we learn about the basics of propagation in a waveguide, then we look at the effects of dimension on frequency. Again, there’s little in the way of head-hurting maths, just real-world explanations of cutt-off frequencies, and of coupling techniques. For the first time we’ve seen, here are simple and understandable explanations of the different types of splitter, followed up by the famous Magic T. It’s all in the phase, this is exactly the stuff we wish we’d had at university.

The world needs more of this type of explanation, after all it’s rare to watch a YouTube video and gain an understanding of something once badly taught. Take a look, the video is below the break.

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The First Fitbit: Engineering And Industrial Design Lessons

August 9, 2024 by 7 Comments

It could happen to anyone of us: suddenly you got this inkling of an idea for a product that you think might just be pretty useful or even cool. Some of us then go on to develop a prototype and manage to get enough seed funding to begin the long and arduous journey to turn a sloppy prototype into a sleek, mass-produced product. This is basically the story of how the Fitbit came to be, with a pretty in-depth article by [Tekla S. Perry] in IEEE Spectrum covering the development process and the countless lessons learned along the way.

Of note was that this idea for an accelerometer-based activity tracker was not new in 2006, as a range of products already existed, from 1960s mechanical pedometers to 1990s medical sensors and the shoe-based Nike+ step tracker that used Apple’s iPod with a receiver. Where this idea for the Fitbit was new was that it’d target a wide audience with a small, convenient (and affordable) device. That also set them up for a major nightmare as the two inventors were plunged into the wonderfully terrifying world of industrial design and hardware development.

One thing that helped a lot was outsourcing what they could to skilled people and having solid seed funding. This left just many hardware decisions to make it as small as possible, as well as waterproof and low-power. The use of the ANT protocol instead of Bluetooth saved a lot of battery, but meant a base station was needed to connect to a PC. Making things waterproof required ultrasonic welding, but lack of antenna testing meant that a closed case had a massively reduced signal strength until a foam shim added some space. The external reset pin on the Fitbit for the base station had a low voltage on it all the time, which led to corrosion issues, and so on.

While much of this was standard development and testing  fun, the real challenge was in interpreting the data from the accelerometer. After all, what does a footstep look like to an accelerometer, and when is it just a pothole while travelling by car? Developing a good algorithm here took gathering a lot of real-world data using prototype hardware, which needed tweaking when later Fitbits moved from being clipped-on to being worn on the wrist. These days Fitbit is hardly the only game in town for fitness trackers, but you can definitely blame them for laying much of the groundwork for the countless options today.