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All About USB-C: Pinecil Soldering Iron

January 31, 2023 by 79 Comments

As many people have pointed out, what matters with USB-C isn’t just the standard, it’s the implementations. After all, it’s the implementations that we actually have to deal with, and it’s where most of the problems with USB-C arise. There is some fault to the standard, like lack of cable markings from the get-go, but at this point, I’m convinced that the USB-C standard is a lot better than some people think.

I’d like to walk you through a few USB-C implementations in real, open-source, adjacent, and just interesting products. They’re all imperfect in some way – it can’t be otherwise, as they have to deal with the messy real world, where perfection is a rarity.

Today, let’s check out the Pinecil. A soldering iron by Pine64, released a few years ago, keeping the price low and quality high. It sports both a barrel jack and a USB-C port for its power input – a welcome departure from the Miniware iron strategy, where neither the barrel-jack-only TS100 nor the low-power proprietary-tip TS80 irons quite did it. And, given its design around TS100 T12-style tips, it’s no wonder Pinecil took a well-deserved spot in hobbyist world.

Can’t Just Pull The Trigger

Now, you might be thinking that Pinecil ought to be a simple device. The usual way to get high power out of a USB-C port is a Power Delivery (PD) trigger IC, and you could merely use that. However, if you’ve read the USB-C power article, you might remember the 45 W vs 60 W charger scenario, where such an arrangement would fail immediately. Overall, the configurability of trigger ICs is quite low, and when encountering a PD compatibility problem with some PSU, you can’t do anything about it except replace the IC with a slightly-different-logic IC- if a replacement even exists, and it usually does not. This is costly and limiting for a real-world use product. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Pinecil Soldering Iron” →

Retro Gadgets: The CB Cell Phone

January 30, 2023 by 45 Comments

There was a time when one of the perks of having a ham radio in your car (or on your belt) was you could make phone calls using a “phone patch.” In the 1970s, calling someone from inside your parked car turned heads. Now, of course,  it is an everyday occurrence thanks to cell phones. But in 1977, cell phones were nowhere to be found. Joseph Sugarman, the well-known founder of JS&A, saw a need and wanted to fill it. So he offered the “PocketCom CB” which was billed as the “world’s smallest citizens band transceiver.” You can see the full-page ad from 1977 below.

Remember that this is from an era when ICs that could operate at 30 MHz were not the norm, so you have to temper your expectations. The little unit was 5.5 in by 1.5 in and less than an inch thick. That’s actually not bad, but you had — optimistically — 100 mW of output power. They claimed the N cell batteries would last two weeks with average use, but we imagine a lot less as soon as you start transmitting. The weight was 5 oz, but we suspect that is without the batteries.

Continue reading “Retro Gadgets: The CB Cell Phone” →

What Losing Everything Taught Me About Backing Up

January 30, 2023 by 128 Comments

Backing up. It’s such a simple thing on paper – making a copy of important files and putting them in a safe place. In reality, for many of us, it’s just another thing on that list of things we really ought to be doing but never quite get around to.

I was firmly in that boat. Then, when disaster struck, I predictably lost greatly. Here’s my story on what I lost, what I managed to hang on to, and how I’d recommend you approach backups starting today.

Continue reading “What Losing Everything Taught Me About Backing Up” →

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Hackaday Links: January 29, 2023

January 29, 2023 by 22 Comments

We’ve been told for ages that “the robots are coming for our jobs!” It’s true that we’ve seen robots capable of everything from burger flipping to bricklaying being demonstrated, and that’s certainly alarming for anyone employed in such trades. But now it looks like AI has set its sights set on the white-collar world, with the announcement that ChatGPT has managed a passing grade on a Wharton MBA exam.

For those not in the know, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is in the major league of business schools; earning a Master’s in Business Administration from that august institution is no mean feat, and is likely to put the budding executive on a ballistic career trajectory. So the fact that ChatGPT could pass the exam is significant. But before you worry about a world in which our best and brightest business leaders are replaced with soulless automatons, relax. The exam presented to ChatGPT was just a final exam for one course, Operations Management, so it’s not like it aced everything an MBA is expected to know, and it took a lot of hints from a human helper to get it that far. It’s also reported that it made a lot of simple math mistakes, too, so maybe a Wharton MBA isn’t that much of a big deal after all.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 29, 2023” →

Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex

January 27, 2023 by 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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This Week In Security: GTA, Apple And Android, And Insecure Boot

January 27, 2023 by 11 Comments

When we first saw tweets about a security issue in Grand Theft Auto V, it sounded a bit like a troll. “Press ‘alt and f4’ to unlock a cheat mode”, or the hacker that claims to be able to delete your character. [Tez2]’s warning tweet that you shouldn’t play GTA Online without a firewall sounds like another of these online urban legends. But this one actually seems legit. NIST is even in on the fun, assigning CVE-2023-24059 for the exploit.

When playing an online game, other users send a “join request” to join the active session. This packets can contain malformed data which has been observed to crash the game client remotely. It’s believed, though not publicly confirmed, that it’s also a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. It seems likely that this aspect will be added to some of the various cheat panels that are already widely used for this 10-year-old game. So now, rather than just giving your own character infinite ammo and health, you can inflict some havoc on other players, possibly up to corrupting their character files and getting them banned.

But why stop there? If we have code execution inside the game, what stops another player from launching a real attack? A video game isn’t sandboxed like a browser, and there’s nothing preventing a disk wiper attack or even a worm from compromising a bunch of players. The worst part is that it’s an old game, and even though there’s a large playerbase, it’s not guaranteed to get a fix. There’s at least one project aiming to be a firewall to prevent the issue. Continue reading “This Week In Security: GTA, Apple And Android, And Insecure Boot” →

All About USB-C: Framework Laptop

January 26, 2023 by 28 Comments

Talking about high-quality USB-C implementations, there’s a product that has multiple selling points designed around USB-C, and is arguably a shining example of how to do USB-C right. It’s the Framework laptop, where the USB-C expansion cards take the center stage.

Full disclosure – this article is being typed on a Framework laptop, and I got it free from Framework. I didn’t get it for Hackaday coverage – I develop Framework-aimed hardware as hobby, specifically, boards that hack upon aspects of this laptop in fun ways. As part of their community developer support effort, they’ve provided me with a laptop that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get for such a hobby. By now, I’m part of the Framework community, I have my own set of things I like about this laptop, and a set of things I dislike.

This is not an article about how I’m satisfied or dissatisfied with the Framework laptop – there’s plenty of those around, and it would not be fair for me to write one – I haven’t paid for it in anything except having lots of fun designing boards and hanging out with other people designing cool things, which is something I do willingly. I’m an all-things-laptops enthusiast, and the reason I’d like to talk about Framework is that there is no better example of USB-C, and everything you can do with it, in the wild. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Framework Laptop” →