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Hackaday Links: May 26, 2024

Another day, another crop of newly minted minimal astronauts, as Blue Origin’s New Shepard made a successful suborbital flight this week. Everything seemed to go according to plan, at least until right at the end, when an “unexpected foliage contingency” made astronaut egress a little more complicated than usual. The New Shepard capsule had the bad taste to touch down with a bit of West Texas shrubbery directly aligned with the hatch, making it difficult to find good footing for the platform used by the astronauts for the obligatory “smile and wave” upon exiting. The Blue Origin ground crew, clad in their stylish black and blue outfits that must be murderously impractical in the West Texas desert, stamped down the brush to place the stairway, but had a lot of trouble getting it to sit straight. Even with the impromptu landscaping, the terrain made it tough to get good footing without adding random bits of stuff to prop up one leg, an important task considering that one of the new astronauts was a 90-year-old man. It seems pretty short-sighted not to have adjustable legs on the stairway, but there it is.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 272: Desktop EDM, Silence Of The Leaves, And The Tyranny Of The Rocket Equation

With Elliot off on vacation, Tom and Dan made a valiant effort to avoid the dreaded “clip show” and provide you with the tastiest hacker treats of the week. Did they succeed? That’s not for us to say, but if you’re interested in things like non-emulated N64 games and unnecessarily cool filament sensors, this just might be one to check out.

We also came across a noise suppressor for a leaf blower, giant antennae dangling from government helicopters, and a desktop-friendly wire EDM setup that just might change the face of machining. We waxed on about the difference between AI-generated code and just pulling routines from StackExchange, came to the conclusion that single-stage-to-orbit is basically just science fiction, and took a look at the latest eclipse from 80,000 feet, albeit a month after the fact.

Worried about attracting the Black Helicopters? Download the DRM-free MP3 and listen offline, just in case.

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This Week In Security: Drama At The C-Level, Escape Injection, And Audits

There was something of a mystery this week, with the c.root-servers.net root DNS server falling out of sync with it’s 12 siblings. That’s odd in itself, as these are the 13 servers that keep DNS working for the whole Internet. And yes, that’s a bit of a simplification, it’s not a single server for any of the 13 entities — the C “server” is actually 12 different machines. The intent is for all those hundreds of servers around the world to serve the same DNS information, but over several days this week, the “C” servers just stopped pulling updates.

The most amusing/worrying part of this story is how long it took for the problem to be discovered and addressed. One researcher cracked a ha-ha-only-serious sort of joke, that he had reported the problem to Cogent, the owners of the “C” servers, but they didn’t “seem to understand that they manage a root server”. The problem first started on Saturday, and wasn’t noticed til Tuesday, when the servers were behind by three days. Updates started trickling late Tuesday or early Wednesday, and by the end of Wednesday, the servers were back in sync.

Cogent gave a statement that an “unrelated routing policy change” both affected the zone updates, and the system that should have alerted them to the problem. It seems there might room for an independent organization, monitoring some of this critical Internet Infrastructure.

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Design Review: USB-C PD Input For Yaesu FRG7700

Today is another board from a friend, [treble], who wants to convert a Yaesu FRG7700 radio to USB-C PD power. It’s yet another review that I’ve done privately, and then realized I’ve made more than enough changes to it, to the point that others could learn from this review quite a bit. With our hacker’s consent, I’m now sharing these things with you all, so that we can improve our boards further and further.

This board’s idea is thought-out and executed well – it replaces a bespoke barrel jack assembly, and is mechanically designed to fit the screw holes and the free space inside the chassis. For USB-PD, it uses a CH32V003 coupled with FUSB302 – I definitely did help pick the latter! For mechanical reasons, this board is split into two parts – one has the USB-C port, whereas the other has the MCU and the PD PHY.

In short, this board is a PD trigger. Unlike the usual PD triggers, however, this one is fully configurable, since it has a 32-bit MCU with good software support, plus, the PD PHY is also well known and easily controllable. So, if you want special behavior like charger-power-dependent profile selection for powering a static resistance load, you can implement it easily – or, say, you can do PPS for variable voltage or even lithium ion battery charging! With a bit of extra code, you could even do EPR (28 V = 140 W power) with this board, instantly making it into a pretty advanced PD trigger, beyond the ones available on the market.

Also, the board has some PCB art, and a very handy filter to get some of the USB-C charger noise out. Let’s take a look at all of these!

Current Flow Improvements

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 784: I’ll Buy You A Poutine

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk with François Proulx about Poutine, the Open Source security scanner for build pipeline vulnerabilities. This class of vulnerability isn’t as well known as it should be, and threatens to steal secrets, or even allow for supply chain attacks in FLOSS software.

Poutine does a scan over an organization or individual repository, looking specifically for pipeline issues. It runs on both GitHub and GitLab, with more to come!

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Supercon 2023: Exploring The Elegance Of The Voja4

When you design an electronic badge, the goal is to make a device that’s interesting and has enough depth to keep your attendees engaged for the duration of the con but not so complicated that they can’t become proficient with it before they have to head home. It’s a difficult balance to nail down, and truth be told, not every Supercon badge has stuck the landing in this regard.

But if you’ve really done things right, you’ll create a piece of hardware that manages to outlive the event it was designed for. A badge that attendees continue to explore for months, and potentially even years, afterward. If the talk “Inside the Voja4” by Nathan Jones is any indication, we think it’s safe to say that goal was achieved with the Supercon 2022 badge.

During this forty-minute presentation, Nathan discusses what makes the 4-bit badge so fascinating from a technical standpoint and how it could theoretically be expanded to accomplish far more complex tasks than one might assume at first glance.

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Hackaday Links: May 19, 2024

If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to the stunning display of aurora borealis — and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:

Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.

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