The Lunar Odyssey: Moon Landings From The 1960s To Today’s Attempts

March 20, 2024 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

With the recent string of lunar landing attempts, it’s interesting to consider how much things have changed – or stayed the same – since the first soft landing attempts in the 1960s with the US Ranger and USSR Luna landers. During the 1950s the possibility of landing a spacecraft on the Moon’s surface was investigated and attempted by both the US and USSR. This resulted in a number of lunar lander missions in the 1960s, with the US’s Ranger 3 and 5 missing the Moon, Ranger 4 nearly missing it but instead crashing into the far side of the Moon, and eventually the USSR’s Luna 9 making the first touchdown on the lunar surface in 1966 after a string of USSR mission failures.

What’s perhaps most interesting was how these first US and USSR spacecraft managed to touch down, with Luna 9 opting to inflate a landing airbag and bounce until it came to a halt. This approach had doomed Luna 8, as its airbag got punctured during inflating, causing a hard crash. Meanwhile the US’s Surveyor 1 was the first US spacecraft to land on the Moon, opting to use a solid-fuel retrorocket to slow the craft down and three liquid-fueled vernier thrusters to prepare it for a drop down from 3.4 meters onto the lunar surface.

Now, nearly 60 years later, the landers we sent regularly make it to the lunar surface, but more often than not end up crashing or toppling over into awkward positions. How much have lunar landings really changed?

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PCB Design Review: ESP32-S3 Round LCD Board

March 19, 2024 by Arya Voronova 6 Comments

For our next installment, I have a lovely and daring PCB submitted by one of our readers, [Vas]. This is an ESP32-S3 board that also has an onboard round TFT display, very similar to the one we used on the Vectorscope badge. The badge is self-sufficient – it has an ESP32, it has a display, a programming connector, two different QWIIC ports you could surely use as GPIOs – what’s not to love?

This is a two-layer board, and I have to admit that I seriously enjoy such designs. Managing to put a whole lot of things into two layers is quite cool in my book, and I have great fun doing so whenever I get the opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with taking up more layers than needed – in fact, if you’re concerned about emitted/received noise or you have high-speed interfaces, four-layer is the way to go. But making complex boards with two layers is a nice challenge, and, it does tend to make these boards cheaper to manufacture as a very nice bonus.

Let’s improve upon it, and support [Vas]’s design. From what I can see looking at this board, we can help [Vas] a lot with ease of assembly, perhaps even help save a hefty amount of money if they go for third-party PCBA instead of sitting down with a stencil – which you could do with this board pretty easily, since all of the components on it, save for the display, are the ones you’d expect JLCPCB to stock.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Offset-Stem Keycaps

March 18, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Love it or hate it, I think this is a really cool idea. [Leo_keeb] has designed a new set of keycaps for the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB). The keycaps’ stems are offset to the left or right in order to turn this once-staggered keyboard into an ortholinear object.

So, how do they feel? There is a slight wobble to them, according to [Leo_keeb] — it’s a bit like pressing the left or right side of Tab. But the actuation is smooth, they say.

As you can see, these resin keycaps weren’t designed with the typical Cherry MX profile in mind, they are made for the Topre capacitive key switches of the HHKB. (No, those aren’t weird rubber domes.)

When I asked about sharing the STLs, [Leo_keeb] advised me that they might be willing to release STLs for Cherry MX switches in the US layout if there is enough interest.

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Hackaday Links: March 17, 2024

March 17, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

A friend of ours once described computers as “high-speed idiots.” It was true in the 80s, and it appears that even with the recent explosion in AI, all computers have managed to do is become faster. Proof of that can be found in a story about using ASCII art to trick a chatbot into giving away the store. As anyone who has played with ChatGPT or its moral equivalent for more than five minutes has learned, there are certain boundary conditions that the LLM’s ~~creators~~ lawyers have put in place to prevent discussion surrounding sensitive topics. Ask a chatbot to deliver specific instructions on building a nuclear bomb, for instance, and you’ll be rebuffed. Same with asking for help counterfeiting currency, and wisely so. But, by minimally obfuscating your question by rendering the word “COUNTERFEIT” in ASCII art and asking the chatbot to first decode the word, you can slip the verboten word into a how-to question and get pretty explicit instructions. Yes, you have to give painfully detailed instructions on parsing the ASCII art characters, but that’s a small price to pay for forbidden knowledge that you could easily find out yourself by other means.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 262: Wheelchair Hacking, Big Little Science At Home, Arya Talks PCBs

March 15, 2024 by Tom Nardi No comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their favorite hacks and stories from the past week. This episode starts off with an update on Hackaday Europe 2024, which is now less than a month away, and from there dives into wheelchairs with subscription plans, using classic woodworking techniques to improve your 3D printer’s slicer, and a compendium of building systems. You’ll hear about tools for finding patterns in hex dumps, a lusciously documented gadget for sniffing utility meters, a rare connector that works with both HDMI and DisplayPort, and a low-stress shortwave radio kit with an eye-watering price tag. Finally, they’ll take a close look at a pair of articles that promise to up your KiCAD game.

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!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

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This Week In Security: Apple Backdoors Curl, Tor’s New Bridge, And GhostRace

March 15, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

OK, that headline is a bit of a cheap shot. But if you run the curl binary that Apple ships, you’re in for a surprise if you happen to use the --cacert flag. That flag specifies that TLS verification is only to be done using the certificate file specified. That’s useful to solve certificate mysteries, or to make absolutely sure that you’re connecting to the server you expect.

What’s weird here is that on a MacOS, using the Apple provided curl binary, --cacert doesn’t limit the program to the single certificate file. On an Apple system, the verification falls back to the system’s certificate store. This is an intentional choice by Apple, but not one that’s aimed particularly at curl. The real magic is in Apple’s SSL library, which forces the use of the system keychain.

The current state of things is that this option is simply not going to do the right thing in the Apple provided binary. It’s documented with the note that “this option is supported for backward compatibility with other SSL engines, but it should not be set.” It’s an unfortunate situation, and we’re hopeful that a workaround can be found to restore the documented function of this option. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Apple Backdoors Curl, Tor’s New Bridge, And GhostRace” →

Retrotechtacular: Air Mail For The Birds

March 14, 2024 by Al Williams 9 Comments

Today, if you want to send a message to a distant location, you’ll probably send an e-mail or a text message. But it hasn’t always been that easy. Military commanders, in particular, have always needed ways to send messages and were early adopters of radio and, prior to that, schemes like semaphores, drums, horns, Aldis lamps, and even barrels of water to communicate over distances.

One of the most reliable ways to pass messages, even during the last world war, was by carrier pigeon. Since the U.S. Army Signal Corps handled anything that included messages, it makes sense that the War Department issued TM 11-410 about how to use and care for pigeons. Think of it as the network operations guide of 1945. The practice, though, is much older. There is evidence that the Persians used pigeons in the 6th century BC, and Julius Caesar’s army also used the system.

You wouldn’t imagine that drawing an assignment in the Signal Corps might involve learning about breeding pigeons, training them, and providing them with medical attention, but that’s what some Signal Corps personnel did. The Army started experimenting with pigeons in 1878, but the Navy was the main user of the birds until World War I, when the U.S. Pigeon Intelligence Service was formed. In World War II, they saw use in situations where radio silence was important, like the D-Day invasion.

The Navy also disbanded its earlier Pigeon Messenger Service. It then returned to avian communications during the World Wars, using them to allow aviators to send messages back to base without radio traffic. The Navy had its own version of the pigeon manual.

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