Hackaday Links: April 23, 2023

April 23, 2023 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Mark it on your calendars, folks — this is the week that the term RUD has entered the public lexicon. Sure, most of our community already knows the acronym for “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” and realizes its tongue-in-cheek nature. But given that the term has been used by Elon Musk and others to describe the ignominious end of the recent Starship test flight, it seems like RUD will catch on in the popular press. But while everyone’s attention was focused on the spectacular results of manually activating Starship’s flight termination system to end its by-then uncontrolled flight at a mere 39 km, perhaps the more interesting results of the launch were being seen in and around the launch pad on Boca Chica. That’s where a couple of hundred tons of pulverized reinforced concrete rained down, turned to slag and dust by the 33 Raptor engines on the booster. A hapless Dodge Caravan seemed to catch the worst of the collateral damage, but the real wrath of those engines was focused on the Orbital Launch Mount, which now has a huge crater under it.

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The Freedom To Fail

April 22, 2023 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

When you think of NASA, you think of high-stakes, high-cost, high-pressure engineering, and maybe the accompanying red tape. In comparison, the hobby hacker has a tremendous latitude to mess up, dream big, and generally follow one’s bliss. Hopefully you’ll take some notes. And as always with polar extremes, the really fertile ground lies in the middle.

[Dan Maloney] and I were thinking about this yesterday while discussing the 50th flight of Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter. Ingenuity is a tech demo, carrying nothing mission critical, but just trying to figure out if you could fly around on Mars. It was planned to run for five flights, and now it’s done 50.

The last big tech demo was the Sojourner Rover. It was a small robotic vehicle the size of a microwave oven that they hoped would last seven days. It went for 85, and it gave NASA the first taste of success it needed to follow on with 20 years of Martian rovers.

Both of these projects were cheap, by NASA standards, and because they were technical demonstrators, the development teams were allowed significantly more design freedom, again by NASA standards.

None of this compares to the “heck I’ll just hot-air an op-amp off an old project” of weekend hacking around here, but I absolutely believe that a part of the tremendous success of both Sojourner and Ingenuity were due to the risks that the development teams were allowed to take. Creativity and successful design thrives on the right blend of constraint and freedom.

Will Ingenuity give birth to a long series of flying planetary rovers as Sojourner did for her rocker-bogie based descendants? Too early to tell. But I certainly hope that someone within NASA is noticing the high impact that these technical demonstrator projects have, and also noting why. The addition of a little bit of hacker spirit to match NASA’s professionalism probably goes a long way.

Hackaday Podcast 215: Autonomous Race Car, Espresso Robot, And Vintage Computers

April 21, 2023 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

It’s podcast time again, and this time around Elliot and Dan took a grand tour through the week’s best and brightest hacks. We checked out an old-school analog cell phone that went digital with style, dug into a washing machine’s API, and figured out how to melt metal in the microwave — the right way. Does coffee taste better when it’s made by a robot? Of course it does! Can you get a chatbot to spill its guts? You can, if you know how to sweet talk it. Let’s play Asteroids on an analog oscilloscope, spoof facial recognition with knitting, and feel the need for speed with an AI-controlled model race car. And was VCF East worth the wait? According to Tom Nardi, that’s a resounding “Yes!”

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 your own personal copy!

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This Week In Security: Spandex Tempest, Supply Chain Chain, And NTP

April 21, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 14 Comments

Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence group has announced a new naming scheme for threat actors. It sounds great, naming groups after weather phenomenon, based on the groups motivations or nation of origin. Then each discreet group is given an additional adjective. That’s where things get interesting.

It seems like the adjectives were chosen at random, giving rise for some suitably impressive names, like Ghost Blizzard, Ruby Sleet, or Granite Typhoon. Some of the other names sound like they should be desserts: Caramel Tsunami, Peach Sandstorm, Aqua Blizzard, or Raspberry Typhoon. But then there the really special names, like Wine Tempest and Zigzag Hail. But the absolute winner is Spandex Tempest. No word yet on whether researchers managed to keep a straight face when approving that name.

Chrome 0-day Double

A pair of Chrome browser releases have been minted in the past week, both to address vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited. Up first was CVE-2022-2033, type confusion in the V8 JS engine. That flaw was reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, presumably discovered in the wild, and the fix was pushed as stable on the 14th.

Then, on th 18th, yet another released rolled out to fix CVE-2023-2136, also reported by the TAG, also being exploited in the wild. It seems likely that both of these 0-days were found in the same exploitation campaign. We look forward to hearing the details on this one. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Spandex Tempest, Supply Chain Chain, And NTP” →

Ask Hackaday: Split Rail Op Amp Power Supply

April 20, 2023 by Al Williams 83 Comments

Water cooler talk at the office usually centers around movies, sports, or life events. Not at Hackaday. We have the oddest conversations and, this week, we are asking for your help. It is no secret that we have a special badge each year for Supercon. Have you ever wondered where those badges come from? Sometimes we do too. We can’t tell you what the badge is going to be for Supercon 2023, but here’s a chance for you to contribute to its design.

What I can tell you is that at least part of the badge is analog. Part, too, is digital. So we were discussing a seemingly simple question: How do we best generate a bipolar power source for the op amps on a badge? Like all design requests, this one is unreasonable. We want:

Ideally, we’d like a circuit to give us +/- 9 V to +/- 12 V at moderately low current, say in the tens of milliamps. Actual values TBD.
Low noise: analog circuitry, remember?
Lightweight: it is going on a badge
Battery operated: the badge thing again
Cheap: we only have a couple bucks in the budget for power
Available in quantity: we’ll need ~600 of these

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Last Chance To Re-engineer Education For The 2023 Hackaday Prize

April 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

The first round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize closes next Tuesday, ~~March~~ April 25th. If you’ve got an educational project – whether that’s a robot technique you just need to share, or an instructional radio build – you’ve got this weekend left to get your project into shape, whip up a Hackaday.io page in support, and enter. The top 10 projects get a $500 prize award, and a chance to win the big prizes in the final round. You want to get your project in now.

We’ve already seen some great entries into this first round of the Prize. Ranging from a trainer robot for First Robotics teams, through a complete learn-electronics kit on a PCB, building radios in High Schools, and all the way to an LED-and-lightpipe map to help teachers and students with their geography lessons, we’ve got a broad range of educational projects so far.

ElectroLab

FRC Trainer

The World is Mine!

High Schoolers Build a Radio Receiver

But there is still room for your project! And with the deadline closing in, your best bet at the $500 prize money relies on you burning a bit of the midnight oil this weekend, but Hackaday glory awaits those who do.

Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory

April 18, 2023 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Linux users have a lot of software to be proud of. However, there is the occasional Windows program that does something you’d really like to do and it just won’t run. This is especially true of low-level system programs. If you want to poke around your CPU and memory, for example, there are tons of programs for that under Windows. There are a few for Linux, but they aren’t always as complete or handy. Recently, I had half the memory in my main desktop fail and I wanted to poke around in the system. In particular, I wanted to read the information encoded in the memory chips configuration EEPROM. Should be easy, right? You’d think.

Not Really Easy

One nice tool a lot of Windows users have is CPU-Z. Of course, it doesn’t run on Linux, but there is a really nice imitator called CPU-X. You can probably install it from your repositories. However, the GitHub page is a nice stop if for no other reason than to enjoy the user name [TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]. The program has a gtk or an ncurses interface. You don’t need to run it as root, but if you press the “start daemon” button and authenticate, you can see some extra information, including a tab for memory.

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