AMSAT CubeSat Simulator Hack Chat

December 2, 2019 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, December 4th at noon Pacific for the AMSAT CubeSat Simulator Hack Chat with Alan Johnston!

For all the lip service the world’s governments pay to “space belonging to the people”, they did a pretty good job keeping access to it to themselves for the first 50 years of the Space Age. Oh sure, private-sector corporations could spend their investors’ money on lengthy approval processes and pay for a ride into space, but with a few exceptions, if you wanted your own satellite, you needed to have the resources of a nation-state.

All that began to change about 20 years ago when the CubeSat concept was born. Conceived as a way to get engineering students involved in the satellite industry, the 10 cm cube form factor that evolved has become the standard around which students, amateur radio operators, non-governmental organizations, and even private citizens have designed and flown satellites to do everything from relaying ham radio messages to monitoring the status of the environment.

But before any of that can happen, CubeSat builders need to know that their little chunk of hardware is going to do its job. That’s where Alan Johnston, a teaching professor in electrical and computer engineering at Villanova University, comes in. As a member of AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, he has built a CubeSat simulator. Built for about $300 using mostly off-the-shelf and 3D-printed parts, the simulator lets satellite builders work the bugs out of their designs before committing them to the Final Frontier.

Dr. Johnston will stop by the Hack Chat to discuss his CubeSat simulator and all things nanosatellite. Come along to learn what it takes to make sure a satellite is up to snuff, find out his motivations for getting involved in AMSAT and CubeSat testing, and what alternative uses people are finding the platform. Hint: think high-altitude ballooning.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 4 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Supercon: The Things You Brought, And A Few You Forgot

December 2, 2019 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Part of the fun of Supercon is that there is so much available in one place. For the price of admission, you’re surrounded by expertise, power, and soldering irons. Digi-Key brought several large parts bins stuffed full of everything from passives to LEDs to chips for people use in hacking away on their badges. But one thing that makes the whole experience really special is the stuff people bring. We don’t just mean the projects you brought to show off, we mean the stuff you bring to enhance your Supercon experience, whether it be tools, bits and bobs, or other fun stuff to play with.

This year was my first Supercon, and you never forget your first. I had a great time, and was overwhelmed by how much awesomeness was going on in one place. I wish Supercon was a simulation I could run again and again so I could listen to every talk, attend every workshop, and spend time talking to everyone about the things they brought and the cool things they’re doing with their time and badges.

Continue reading “Supercon: The Things You Brought, And A Few You Forgot” →

Hackaday Links: December 1, 2019

December 1, 2019 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

We can recall a book from our youth that cataloged some of the most interesting airplanes in the world. One particularly interesting beast was dubbed “The Super Guppy”, a hilariously distended cargo plane purpose-built for ferrying Saturn rocket sections around the US in the 1960s. We though the Guppies were long gone, victims like so many other fascinating machines of the demise of the Apollo program. It turns out we were only 4/5 right about that, since one of the original five Super Guppies is still in service, and was spotted hauling an Orion capsule from Florida to Ohio for vacuum testing. The almost 60-year-old plane, a highly modified C-97 Stratofreighter, still has a big enough fan-base to attract 1500 people to brave the Ohio cold and watch it land.

The news this week was filled with reports from Texas of a massive chemical plant explosion that forced the evacuation of 50,000 people from their homes the day before Thanksgiving. The explosion and ensuing fire at the TPC Group petrochemical plant were spectacular; thankfully, there were no deaths and only two injuries reported from the incident. The tie-in to the hacker community lies in what this plant made: butadiene, or synthetic rubber. The plant produced about 16% of the North American market’s supply of butadiene, which we know from previous coverage is one of the polymers in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS. It remains to be seen if this will put a crimp in ABS printer filament supplies, or any of the hundreds of products that butadiene is in, including automotive tires and hoses.

Remember when “Cyber Monday” became a thing? We sure do; in the USA, it was supposed to be the first workday back from the Thanksgiving break which would afford those lacking a fast Internet connection at home the opportunity to do online shopping on company time. The idea seems so year 2000 now, but the name stuck, and all kinds of sales and bargains are now competing for your virtual attention and cyber dollars. That includes Tindie, of course, where the Cyber Monday Sale is running through December 6. There’s tons to chose from, including products that got started as Hackaday.io projects and certified open-source hardware products. Be sure to check out the Tindie Twitter feed and blog for extra discount codes, too.

Speaking of gift-giving, we got an interesting tip about a product we never knew we needed. Called “WorkBench”, it’s a modular development system that takes care of an oft-neglected side of prototyping: the physical and mechanical layout. Too often we just start with a breadboard on the bench, and while that’ll do for lots of smaller projects, as the build keeps growing and the breadboards keep coming, things can get out of hand. WorkBench aims to tidy things up by providing a basal platen onto which breadboards, microcontrollers, perfboards, or just about anything else can be snapped. Handles make the whole thing portable, and a clear acrylic cover protects your hard work.

We love to hear stories about citizen science, especially when the amateurs scoop the professionals. Astronomy seems to be a hotbed for this brand of discovery, usually as a lone astronomer peering into the night sky to see a comet or asteroid nobody has seen before. Catching a glitching pulsar in the act is an entirely different level of discovery, though. Back in February, Steve Olney detected a 2.5 parts-per-million increase in the 89-millisecond period of emissions for the Vela pulsar using his RTL-SDR-based observatory. Steve has some fascinating information about pulsars and his observatory on his website. Color us impressed that he was able to pull off this observation without the benefit of millions of dollars in equipment and a giant parabolic dish antenna.

This Week In Security:Malicious Previews, VNC Vulnerabilities, Powerwall, And The 5th Amendment

November 30, 2019 by Jonathan Bennett 29 Comments

Malware embedded in office documents has been a popular attack for years. Many of those attacks have been fixed, and essentially all the current attacks are unworkable when a document is opened in protected view. There are ways around this, like putting a notice at the top of a document, requesting that the user turn off protected view. [Curtis Brazzell] has been researching phishing, and how attacks can work around mitigations like protected view. He noticed that one of his booby-trapped documents phoned home before it was opened. How exactly? The preview pane.

The Windows Explorer interface has a built-in preview pane, and it helpfully supports Microsoft Office formats. The problem is that the preview isn’t generated using protected view, at least when previewing Word documents. Generating the preview is enough to trigger loading of remote content, and could feasibly be used to trigger other vulnerabilities. [Curtis] notified Microsoft about the issue, and the response was slightly disappointing. His discovery is officially considered a bug, but not a vulnerability.

VNC Vulnerabilities

Researchers at Kaspersky took a hard look at several VNC implementations, and uncovered a total of 37 CVEs so far. It seems that several VNC projects share a rather old code-base, and it contains a plethora of potential bugs. VNC should be treated similarly to RDP — don’t expose it to the internet, and don’t connect to unknown servers. The protocol wasn’t written with security in mind, and none of the implementations have been sufficiently security hardened.

Examples of flaws include: Checking that a message doesn’t overflow the buffer after having copied it into said buffer. Another code snippet reads a variable length message into a fixed length buffer without any length checks. That particular function was originally written at AT&T labs back in the late 90s, and has been copied into multiple projects since then.

There is a potential downside to open source that is highlighted here. Open source allows poorly written code to spread. This isn’t a knock against open source, but rather a warning to the reader. Just because code or a project uses an OSS license doesn’t mean it’s secure or high quality code. There are more vulnerabilities still in the process of being fixed, so watch out for the rest of this story. Continue reading “This Week In Security:Malicious Previews, VNC Vulnerabilities, Powerwall, And The 5th Amendment” →

DSP Spreadsheet: Talking To Yourself Using IQ

November 29, 2019 by Al Williams 12 Comments

We’ve done quite a bit with Google Sheets and signal processing: we’ve generated signals, created filters, and computed quadrature signals. We can pull all that together into an educational model for two SDRs talking to each other, but it’s going to require two parts: modulation and demodulation. Guess what? We can do that with a spreadsheet.

The first step is to generate a reference clock for the carrier. You’ll need a cosine wave (I) and sine wave (Q). Of course, you also need the time base. That’s columns A-C in the spreadsheet and works like other signal generation we’ve seen.

Continue reading “DSP Spreadsheet: Talking To Yourself Using IQ” →

Retrotechtacular: The Art Of The Foundry

November 27, 2019 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Mention the term “heavy industry” and the first thing to come to mind might well be the metal foundry. With immense machines and cauldrons of molten metal being shuttled about by crane and rail, the image of the foundry is like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, with fumes filling a vast impersonal factory, and sparks flying through the air. It looks like a dangerous place, as much to the soul as to the body, as workers file in each day to suffer mindlessly at the hearths and ladles, consumed in dirty, exhausting work even as it consumes them.

Things are not always as they appear, of course. While there’s no doubting the risks associated with working in a foundry such as the sprawling Renfrew works of Babcock and Wilcox Ltd. in the middle of the previous century, as the video below shows the work there was anything but mindless, and the products churned out by the millions from this factory and places like it throughout the world were critical to today’s technology.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Art Of The Foundry” →

Fail Of The Week: Z-Tape Is No Substitute For Solder

November 26, 2019 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we see all kinds of mechanical construction methods. Some are impressively solid and permanent, while others are obviously temporary in nature. The latter group is dominated by adhesives – sticky stuff like cyanoacrylate glue, Kapton tape, and the ever-popular hot glue. They’ve all got their uses in assembling enclosures or fixing components together mechanically, but surely they have no place in making solid electrical connections, right?

Maybe, maybe not. As [Tom Verbeure] relates, so-called Z-tape just might be an adhesive that can stand in for solder under certain circumstances. Trouble is, he couldn’t find the right conditions to make the tape work. Z-tape, more properly called “Electrically Conductive Adhesive Transfer Tape 9703”, derives its nickname from the fact that it’s electrically conductive, but only in the Z-axis. [Tom] learned about Z-tape in [Joe FitzPatrick]’s malicious hardware prototyping workshop at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, and decided to put it to the test.

A card from a Cisco router served as a testbed thanks to an unpopulated chip footprint. The 0.5-mm pin spacing on the TSOP-48 chip was within spec for the Z-tape, but the area of each pin was 30 times smaller than the recommended minimum bonding area. While the chip was held down mechanically by the Z-tape, only five of the 48 pins were electrically connected to the pads. Emboldened by the partial success, [Tom] tried a 28-pin SOIC chip next. The larger pins and pads were still six times smaller than the minimum, and while more of the pins ended up connected by the tape, he was unable to make all 28 connections.

Reading the datasheet for the adhesive revealed that constant pressure from a clamp or clip might be necessary for reliable connections, which suggests that gluing down SMD chips is probably not the best application for the stuff. Still, we appreciate the effort, and the fine photomicrographs [Tom] made showing the particles within the Z-tape that make it work – at least in some applications.