Satellite Hunting Hack Chat

September 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, September 20 at noon Pacific for the Satellite Hunting Hack Chat with Scott Tilley!

From the very first beeps of Sputnik, space has primarily been the domain of nations. It makes sense — for the most part, it takes the resources of a nation to get anything of appreciable size up out of the gravity well we all live in, but more importantly, space is the highest of high ground, and the high ground has always been a place of advantage to occupy. And so a lot of the hardware we’ve sent upstairs in the last 70 years has been in the national interest of this or that country.

A lot of these satellites are — or were, at least — top secret stuff, with classified payloads, poorly characterized orbits, and unknown communications protocols. This can make tracking them from the ground a challenge, but one that’s worth undertaking. Scott Tilley has been hunting for satellites for years, writing about his exploits on the Riddles in the Sky blog and sometimes being featured on Hackaday. After recently putting his skills to work listening in on a solar observation satellite as its orbit takes it close to Earth again, we asked him to stop by the Hack Chat to share what he’s learned about hunting for satellites, both long-lost and intentionally hidden. Join us as we take a virtual trip into orbit to find out just what’s going on up there.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 20 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Links: September 17, 2023

September 17, 2023 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

OK, it’s official — everyone hates San Francisco’s self-driving taxi fleet. Or at least so it seems, if this video of someone vandalizing a Cruise robotaxi is an accurate reflection of the public’s sentiment. We’ve been covering the increasingly fraught relationship between Cruise and San Franciscans for a while now — between their cabs crashing into semis and being used for — ahem — non-transportation purposes, then crashing into fire trucks and eventually having their test fleet cut in half by regulators, Cruise really seems to be taking it on the chin.

And now this video, which shows a wannabe Ninja going ham on a Cruise taxi stopped somewhere on the streets of San Francisco. It has to be said that the vandal doesn’t appear to be doing much damage with what looks like a mason’s hammer; except for the windshield and side glass and the driver-side mirror — superfluous for a self-driving car, one would think — the rest of the roof-mounted lidars and cameras seem to get off lightly. Either Cruise’s mechanical engineering is better than their software engineering, or the neo-Luddite lacks the upper body strength to do any serious damage. Or maybe both.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 17, 2023” →

Inspiration

September 16, 2023 by Elliot Williams 55 Comments

While we were debating about whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era, Dan Maloney and I stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.

For both of us, the appeal of a store like RadioShack was going through the place and thinking of what you’d do with all of those parts. Looking at the back of the beefiest MOSFET in the joint, you’d think about all the current you could pass with it. Or what you’d do with all of those piezo buzzers. And if you didn’t know yet what electronics project you wanted to make, there were things like the Forrest Mims notebooks to inspire you. There you’d find a way to turn the humble LED into a light sensor, whether you needed to or not. I wonder how many packs of assorted LEDs that book sold?!

Dan got his first hands on with a computer in RadioShack as well, because they let folks try them right there. If you didn’t know what you wanted a computer for, and that was the big question of the early microcomputer era, you could head into the store yourself and find out. Seeing, and playing with, Demon Dancer inspired.

A lot of this role is taken over by hackerspaces these days, and even more is taken by the Internet itself, of course. We have no shortage of inspiration – just read a day’s worth of Hackaday if you don’t believe me. So is there any room left for RadioShack’s inspirational role? Maybe not. But if that’s the cost of living in a world where we have access to more great ideas than we’ll ever have time to execute, then so be it!

Image of the presenter on the podium, in front of the projector screen with graphs shown on it

Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well

September 15, 2023 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!

For a start, there’s the Arduino Serial Plotter that you get for free with your Arduino IDE install, but [Alex] also reminds us of the Mu editor’s serial plotter – about the same in terms of features, but indisputably an upgrade in terms of UX. It’s not the only plotter in town, either – Better Serial Plotter is a wonderful standalone option, with a few features that supercharge it, as [Alex] demonstrates! You don’t have to stop here, however – we can’t always be tethered to our devices’ debugging ports, after all. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well” →

Hackaday Podcast 236: The Car Episode, Building Leonardo’s Water Mill, Reviving Radio Shack

September 15, 2023 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Elliot and Dan got together this time around to recap the week in hacks, and it looks like the Hackaday writing crew very much had cars on their minds. We both took the bait, with tales of privacy-violating cars and taillights that can both cripple a pickup and financially cripple its owner. We went medieval — OK, more like renaissance — on a sawmill, pulled a popular YouTuber out of the toilet, and pondered what an animal-free circus would be like. Is RadioShack coming back? Can an ESP32 board get much smaller than this? And where are all the retro(computer)virus writers? We delve into these questions and more, while still saving a little time to wax on about personal projects.

And although the show is peppered with GSM interference for the first few minutes it’s not actually a clue for the What’s That Sound. (Elliot says sorry! And edited most it out by swapping over to the backup recording for most of the rest of the show.)

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!

Download it yourself if that’s your jam.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 236: The Car Episode, Building Leonardo’s Water Mill, Reviving Radio Shack” →

This Week In Security: Blastpass, MGM Heist, And Killer Themes

September 15, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

There’s yet another 0-day exploit chain discovered as part of NSO Group’s Pegasus malware suite. This one is known as BLASTPASS, and it’s a nasty one. There’s no user interaction required, just receiving an iMessage containing a malicious PassKit attachment.

We have two CVEs issued so far. CVE-2023-41064 is a classic buffer overflow in ImageIO, the Apple framework for universal file format read and write. Then CVE-2023-41061 is a problem in the iOS Wallet implementation. Release 16.6.1 of the mobile OS addresses these issues, and updates have rolled out for macOS 11, 12, and 13.

It’s worth noting that Apple’s Lockdown mode does seem to block this particular exploit chain. Citizen Lab suggests that high-risk users of Apple hardware enable Lockdown Mode for that extra measure of security. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Blastpass, MGM Heist, And Killer Themes” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad

September 14, 2023 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

At “the size of three 60% keyboards (put together)” or approximately one Cannibal Corpse record on vinyl, this beautifully-executed death metal font-inspired macro pad by [zyumbik] may be better off hanging on the wall than hanging out on the desktop.

But let’s say you did have room for the 9-key Deathpad on your desktop. Wouldn’t you just play with the tentacles (?) all the time like I would? Yeah, that’s what I thought. They’re pretty inviting.

So why does this look so fantastic? It’s an SLA print, for one thing. For another, [zyumbik] spent over 1,000 hours designing the thing. Unfortunately it’s not open-source, but you can buy the only other one in existence for a cool $1,000.

Rubik’s Cube Keyboard

Although it doesn’t rotate (yet), creator [_Rudeism] is calling this the Rubik’s Cube Keyboard. Fine with me, though any type of actual rotation would be insanely difficult to pull off. The plan is to do it with RGB LEDs.

The layout is QWERTY-adjacent — the white side is the num pad, yellow has the modifiers, and the other four sides house all the letters. As you might imagine, this uses a custom frame and PCBs. The switches are Glorious Gateron Clears, which definitely supports the blinkenlights planned for V2.

This thing reminds me a bit of of the SafeType™ vertical keyboard, or even [Aaron Rasmussen]’s spherical keyboard. Be sure to check it out in Monkeytype action, where [_Rudeism] manages to pull off about 20WPM. Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad” →