Arsenijs Tears Apart Your Laptop

March 17, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

Hackaday’s own [Arsenijs Picugins] has been rather busy hacking old laptops apart and learning what can and cannot be easily reused, and presents for the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, a heavily meme-loaded presentation with some very practical advice.

Full HD, IPS LCD display with touch support, reused with the help of a dedicated driver board

What parts inside a dead laptop are worth keeping? Aside from removable items like RAM stick and hard drives, the most obvious first target is the LCD panel. These are surprisingly easy to use, with driver boards available on the usual marketplaces, so long as you make sure to check the exact model number of your panel is supported.

Many components inside laptops are actually USB devices, things like touch screen controllers, webcams and the like are usually separate modules, which simply take power and USB. This makes sense, since laptops already have a fair amount of external USB connectivity, why not use it internally too? Other items are a bit trickier: trackpads seem to be either PS/2 or I²C and need a bit more hardware support. Digital microphones mostly talk I²S, which means some microcontroller coding.

Some items need a little more care, however, so maybe avoid older Dell batteries, with their ‘spicy pillow’ tendencies. As [Arsenijs] says, take them when they are ripe for the picking, but not too ripe. Batteries need a little care and feeding, make sure you’ve got some cell protection, if you pull raw cells! Charging electronics are always on the motherboard, so that’s something you’ll need to arrange yourself if you take a battery module, but it isn’t difficult, so long as you can find your way around SMBus protocol.

These batteries are too ripe. Leave them alone.

Older laptops were much more modular and some even designed for upgrade or modification, and this miniaturization-driven trend of shrinking everything — where a laptop now needs to be thin enough to shave with — is causing some manufacturers to move in a much more proprietary direction regarding hardware design.

This progression conflicts with our concerns of privacy, repairability and waste elimination, resulting in closed boxes filled with unrepairable, non-reusable black boxes. We think it’s time to take back some of the hardware, so three cheers to those taking upon themselves the task to reverse engineer and publish reusability information, and long may it be possible to continue.

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Remoticon 2021 // Vaibhav Chhabra And The M19 Collective Make One Million Faceshields

March 10, 2022 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

[Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker’s Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base – not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing “what can we do” and “what should we do” inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.

When the very first two weeks of the Infinite Two Week Quarantine Of 2020 were announced in India, a group of people decided to wait it out at the hackerspace instead of confining themselves to their homes. As various aspects of our society started crashing after the direct impact of COVID-19, news came through – that of a personal protective equipment shortage, especially important for frontline workers. Countries generally were not prepared when it came to PPE, and India was no different. Thus, folks in Maker’s Asylum stepped up, finding themselves in a perfect position to manufacture protective equipment when nobody else was prepared to help.

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Remoticon 2021 // Jay Bowles Dips Into The Plasmaverse

March 3, 2022 by Lewin Day No comments

Every hacker out there is familiar with the zaps and sizzles of the Tesla coil, or the crash and thunder of lighting strikes on our hallowed Earth. These phenomena all involve the physics of plasma, a subject near and dear to Jay Bowles’s heart. Thus, he graced Remoticon 2021 with a enlightening talk taking us on a Dip Into the Plasmaverse.

Jay’s passion for the topic is obvious, having fallen in love with high voltage physics as a teenager. He appreciated how tangible the science was, whether it’s the glow of neon lighting or the heating magic of the common microwave. His talk covers the experiments and science that he’s studied over the past 17 years and in the course of running his Plasma Channel YouTube channel. Continue reading “Remoticon 2021 // Jay Bowles Dips Into The Plasmaverse” →

Modules described in the article (two copies of the challenge shown, so, two lines of modules)

Spaceship Repair CTF Covers Hardware Hacker Essentials

March 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 15 Comments

At even vaguely infosec-related conferences, CTFs are a staple. For KernelCon 2021, [Tyler Rosonke] resolved to create a challenge breaking the traditions, entertaining and teaching people in a different way, while satisfying the constraints of that year’s remote participation plans. His imagination went wild in all the right places, and a beautifully executed multi-step hardware challenge was built – only in two copies!

Story behind the challenge? Your broken spaceship has to be repaired so that you can escape the planet you’re stuck on. The idea was to get a skilled, seasoned hacker solving challenges for our learning and amusement – and that turned out to be none other than [Joe “Kingpin” Grand]!

The modules themselves are what caught our attention. Designed to cover a wide array of hardware hacker skills, they cover soldering, signal sniffing, logic gates, EEPROM dumping and more – and you have to apply all of these successfully for liftoff. If you thought “there’s gotta be a 555 involved”, you weren’t wrong, either, there’s a module where you have to reconfigure a circuit with one!

KernelCon is a volunteer-driven infosec conference in Omaha, and its 2022 installment starts in a month – we can’t wait to see what it brings! Anyone doing hardware CTFs will have something to learn from their stories, it seems. The hacking session, from start to finish, was recorded for our viewing pleasure; linked below as an hour and a half video, it should be a great background for your own evening of reverse-engineering for leisure!

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered [Tyler]’s handiwork, either. In 2020, he programmed a batch of KernelCon badges while employing clothespins as ISP clips. Security conferences have most certainly learned just how much fun you can have with hardware, and if you ever need a case study for that, our review of 2019 CypherCon won’t leave you hanging.

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Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks

February 24, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Segmented liquid crystal displays are considered quite an old and archaic display technology these days. They’re perhaps most familiar to us from their use in calculators and watches, where they still find regular application. [Joey Castillo] decided that he could get more out of these displays with a little tinkering, and rocked up to Remoticon 2021 to share his findings.

[Joey’s] talk is a great way to learn the skills needed to reverse engineer a typical segment LCD.

[Joey] got his start hacking on these displays via his Sensor Watch project – a board swap for the venerable Casio F-91W wristwatch, with the project now available on CrowdSupply. It kits out the 33-year-old watch design with a modern, low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz that completely revolutionizes what the watch can do. Most importantly, however, it repurposes the watches original segmented monochrome LCD.

Segment LCDs are usually small monochrome devices made out of glass, that have the benefit of using very little power in their operation. They come with a fixed layout, which cannot be changed – so they’re often designed specifically for a given purpose. A calculator will have segments laid out to display numbers, often in the usual 7-segment fashion, while a watch may add dedicated segments for displaying things like “AM,” “PM,” or “ALARM.” Continue reading “Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks” →

Remoticon 2021 // Matt Venn Helps You Make ASICS

February 17, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 12 Comments

What would you make if you were given about ten square millimeters of space on a silicon wafer on a 130 nm process? That’s the exact question that the Open MPW program asks, and that [Matt Venn] has stepped up to answer. [Matt] came to Remoticon in 2020 to talk about his journey from nothing to his own ASIC, and he came back in 2021 to talk about what has happened in a year.

image of the metal layers of an IC — [maxiborga] has been making beautiful renders of his and others’ chip designs

We expected great designs, but the variety of exciting and wonderful designs that have been submitted we think exceeded our expectations. [Matt] goes through quite a few of them, such as an analog neuron, a RISC-V Arduino-compatible microprocessor, and a satellite transceiver. Perhaps an unexpected side effect has been the artwork. Since the designs are not under an NDA, anyone can take the design and transform it into something gorgeous.

Of course, all of this hardware design isn’t possible without an open toolchain. There is an SRAM generator known as OpenRAM that can generate RAM blocks for your design. Coriolis2 is an RTL to GDS tool that can do placement and routing in VLSI. Finally, FlexCell is a cell library that tries to provide standard functions in a flexible, customizable way that cuts down on the complexity of the layout. There are GitHub actions that can run tests and simulations on PRs to keep the chip’s HDL in a good state.

However, it’s not all roses, and there was an error on the first run (MPW1). Hold time violations were not detected, and the clock tree wasn’t correct. This means that the GPIO cannot be set up, so the designs in the middle could be working, but without the GPIO, it is tricky to determine. With a regular chip, that would be the end, but since [Matt] has access to both the layout and the design, he can identify the problem and come up with a plan. He’s planning on overriding the IO setup shift register with an auxiliary microcontroller. (Ed Note: [tnt] has been making some serious progress lately, summarized in this video.)

It is incredible to see what has come from the project so far, and we’re looking forward to future runs. If this convinces you that you need to get your own ASIC made, you should check out [Matt]’s “Zero to ASIC” course.

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Sergiy Nesterenko giving his Remoticon 2021 talk

Remoticon 2021 // Sergiy Nesterenko Keeps Hardware Running Through Lightning And Cosmic Rays

February 10, 2022 by Robin Kearey 1 Comment

Getting to space is hard enough. You have to go up a few hundred miles, then go sideways really fast to enter orbit. But getting something into space is one thing: keeping a delicate instrument working as it travels there is quite another. In his talk at Remoticon 2021, [Sergiy Nesterenko], former Radiation Effects Engineer at SpaceX, walks us through all the things that can destroy your sensitive electronics on the way up.

The trouble already starts way before liftoff. Due to an accident of geography, several launch sites are located in areas prone to severe thunderstorms: not the ideal location to put a 300-foot long metal tube upright and leave it standing for a day. Other hazards near the launch pad include wayward wildlife and salty spray from the ocean.

Those dangers are gone once you’re in space, but then suddenly heat becomes a problem: if your spacecraft is sitting in full sunlight, it will quickly heat up to 135 °C, while the parts in the shade cool off to -150 °C. A simple solution is to spin your craft along its axis to ensure an even heat load on all sides, similar to the way you rotate sausages on your barbecue.

But one of the most challenging problems facing electronics in space is radiation. [Sergiy] explains in detail the various types of radiation that a spacecraft might encounter: charged particles in the Van Allen belts, cosmic rays once you get away from Low Earth orbit, and a variety of ionized junk ejected from the Sun every now and then. The easiest way to reduce the radiation load on your electronics is simply to stay near Earth and take cover within its magnetic field.

For interplanetary spacecraft there’s no escaping the onslaught, and the only to survive is to make your electronics “rad-hard”. Shielding is generally not an option because of weight constraints, so engineers make use of components that have been tested in radiation chambers to ensure they will not suddenly short-circuit. Adding redundant circuits as well as self-monitoring features like watchdog timers also helps to make flight computers more robust.

[Sergiy]’s talk is full of interesting anecdotes that will delight the inner astronaut in all of us. Ever imagined a bat trying to hitch a ride on a Space Shuttle? As it turns out, one aspiring space bat did just that. And while designing space-qualified electronics is not something most of us do every day, [Sergiy]’s experiences provide plenty of tips for more down-to-earth problems. After all, salt and moisture will eat away cables on your bicycle just as they do on a moon rocket.

Be sure to also check out the links embedded in the talk’s slides for lots of great background information.

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