Supercon 2022: All Aboard The SS MAPR With Sherry Chen

January 17, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 8 Comments

How do you figure out what is in a moving body of water over a mile wide? For those in charge of assessing the water quality of the Delaware river, this is a real problem. Collecting the data required to evaluate the water quality was expensive and time-consuming, taking over six years. Even then, the data was relatively sparse, with just a few water quality stations and only one surface sample for every six miles of river.

Sherry Chen, Quinn Wu, Vanessa Howell, Eunice Lee, Mia Mansour, and Frank Fan teamed up to create a solution, and the SS MAPR was the result. At Hackaday Supercon 2022, Sherry outlined the mission, why it was necessary, and their journey toward an autonomous robot boat. What follows is a fantastic guide and story of a massive project coming together. There are plans, evaluations, and tests for each component.

Sherry and the team first started by defining what was needed. It needed to be cheap, easy to use, and able to sample from various depths in a well-confined bounding box. It needed to run for four hours, be operated by a single person, and take ten samples across a 1-mile (2 km) section of the river. Some of the commercial solutions were evaluated, but they found none of them met the requirements, even ignoring their high costs. They selected a multi-hull style boat with off-the-shelf pontoons for stability and cost reasons.
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AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You

January 12, 2023 by Kristina Panos 45 Comments

Surely we have all at least heard of Twitch by now. For the as-yet uninitiated: imagine you had your own TV channel. What would you do on it? Although Twitch really got going as a place for gamers to stream the action, there are almost as many people jamming out on their guitars, or building guitars, or just talking about guitars. And that’s just the example that uses guitars — if you can think of it, someone is probably doing it live on Twitch, within the Terms of Service, of course.

Along with the legions of people showing their faces and singing their hearts out, you have people in partial disguise, and then you have v-tubers. That stands for virtual tubers, and it just means that the person is using an anime avatar to convey themselves.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s digest the following item together: there’s a v-tuber on Twitch that’s controlled entirely by AI. Let me run that by you again: there’s a person called [Vedal] who operates a Twitch channel. Rather than stream themselves building Mad Max-style vehicles and fighting them in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or singing Joni Mitchell tunes, [Vedal] pulls the strings of an AI they created, which is represented by an animated character cleverly named Neuro-sama. Not only does Neuro-sama know how to play Minecraft and osu!, she speaks gamer and interacts regularly with chat in snarky, 21st century fashion. And that really is the key behind Twitch success — interacting with chat in a meaningful way.

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Ask Hackaday: What’s Your Worst Repair Win?

January 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 191 Comments

Like many of you, I’ve become the designated “fix-it” person for my family and friends. While it can be a lot of work — I just finished an oil change that required me to lay in a cold, wet driveway and I can’t mention in polite company the substances I was bathed in while fixing a clogged pipe last week — I generally relish my role. I enjoy solving problems, I love working with my hands and my head, and who doesn’t like saving money and time?

But for me, the best part of being the fix-it guy is the satisfaction that comes from doing something others can’t do. I find this especially true with automotive repairs, which conventional wisdom says is strictly the province of factory-trained experts. A little bit of a hero complex, perhaps? Absolutely! After all, I don’t get paid for my repairs, so I’ve got to get a little something for the effort.

This is why a recent pair of unrelated fixes left me feeling thoroughly unsatisfied. Neither of these jobs was a clear win, at least in terms of getting the rush of being able to do something that nobody else could. At best, these were qualified wins, which both still left me feeling a little defeated. And that got me thinking that I’m probably not the only one who has had marginal repair wins like these.

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The Surprisingly Simple Way To Steal Cryptocurrency

January 6, 2023 by Jenny List 78 Comments

In the news a few days ago, the revelation that Luke Dashjr, a core Bitcoin developer, had his wallet compromised, and lost 200 BTC. A small fortune, and something of a shock. I’m guessing that someone with that expertise would not have left his private key lying around, so as a cryptocurrency non-enthusiast I’m left curious as to how the attackers might have done it. So I phoned a few friends who do walk those paths for an explanation, and the result was a fascinating conversation or two. The most probable answer is still that someone broke into his computer and copied the keys — straight-up computer theft. But there’s another possible avenue that doesn’t involve stealing anything, and is surprisingly simple. Continue reading “The Surprisingly Simple Way To Steal Cryptocurrency” →

Excuse Me, Your Tie Is Unzipped

January 5, 2023 by Al Williams 102 Comments

If you ask your typical handyperson what’s the one thing you need to fix most things, the answer might very well be duct tape. But second place — and first place in some circles — would have to be zip ties. These little wonders are everywhere if you look for them. But they are a relatively recent invention and haven’t always had the form they have today.

The original zip tie wasn’t called a zip tie or even a cable tie. In 1958 they were called Ty-Raps and produced by a company called Thomas and Betts. Originally meant to improve aircraft wiring harnesses, they found their way into various electronic equipment and packaging uses. But they’ve also become helpful in very unusual places too. A policeman trying to round up rioters would have problems carrying more than a few conventional handcuffs. But flexible cuffs based on zip ties are lightweight and easy to carry. Colon surgeons sometimes use a modified form of zip tie during procedures.

History

Maurus Logan worked for the Thomas and Betts company. In 1956, he was touring an aircraft manufacturing plant. Observing a wiring harness being put together on a nail board, similar to how car harnesses are made, he noted that the cables were bundled with waxed twine or nylon cord. A technician had to tie knots in the cord, sometimes cutting their fingers and often developing calluses. In addition, the twine was prone to fungal growth, requiring special treatment.

Logan kept turning the problem over in his mind and tried various approaches. By 1958, he had a patent for the Ty-Rap. The tie was lightweight, easy to install, easy to remove, and inexpensive.

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All About USB-C: Resistors And Emarkers

January 4, 2023 by Arya Voronova 21 Comments

If you’ve been following along our USB-C saga, you know that the CC wire in the USB-C cables is used for communications and polarity detection. However, what’s not as widely known is that there are two protocols used in USB-C for communications – an analog one and a digital one. Today, let’s look at the analog signalling used in USB-C – in part, learn more about the fabled 5.1 kΩ resistors and how they work. We’ll also learn about emarkers and the mysterious entity that is VCONN!

USB-C power supply expects to sense a certain value pulldown on the CC line before it provides 5 V on VBUS, and any higher voltages have to be negotiated digitally. The PSU, be it your laptop’s port or a charger, can detect the pulldown (known as Rd) because it keeps a pullup (known as Rp) on the CC line – it then checks if a voltage divider has formed on CC, and whether the resulting voltage is within acceptable range.

If you plug a device that doesn’t make a pulldown accessible through the CC wire in the cable, your device will never get power from a USB-C port, and would only work with a USB-A to USB-C cable. Even the smarter devices that can talk the digital part of USB-C are expected to have pulldowns, it’s just that those pulldowns are internal to the USB-C communication IC used. A USB-C port that wants to receive power needs to have a pulldown.

This part is well-known by now, but we’ve seen lack-of-resistor failures in cheap devices aplenty, and the colloquial advice is “add 5.1 kΩ resistors”. You might be afraid to think it’s so simple, but you’d be surprised. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Resistors And Emarkers” →

2022: As The Hardware World Turns

January 3, 2023 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

Well folks, we made it through another one. While it would be a stretch to call 2022 a good year for those of us in the hacking and making community, the light at the end of the tunnel does seem decidedly brighter now than it did this time 365 days ago. It might even be safe to show some legitimate optimism for the year ahead, but then again I was counting on my Tesla stocks to be a long-term investment, so what the hell do I know about predicting the future.

Eh, my kids probably weren’t going to college anyway.

Thankfully hindsight always affords us a bit of wisdom, deservedly or otherwise. Now that 2022 is officially in the rearview mirror, it’s a good time to look back on the highs (and lows) of the last twelve months. Good or bad, these are the stories that will stick out in our collective minds when we think back on this period of our lives.

Oh sure, some might wish they could take the Men in Black route and forget these last few years ever happened, but it doesn’t work that way. In fact, given the tumultuous times we’re currently living in, it seems more likely than not that at some point we’ll find ourselves having to explain the whole thing to some future generation as they stare up at us wide-eyed around a roaring fire. Though with the way this timeline is going, the source of said fire might be the smoldering remains of an overturned urban assault robot that you just destroyed.

So while it’s still fresh in our minds, and before 2023 has a chance to impose any new disasters on us, let’s take a trip back through some of the biggest stories and themes of the last year.

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