Hackaday Columns

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This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.

Friday Hack Chat: Making And Breaking Hardware With Bunnie

February 8, 2017 by 5 Comments

bunnie03-01This Friday, February 10th, at 9am PST, Hackaday.io will be graced with one of the greatest hardware creators in recent memory. [Bunnie Huang] will be talking about making and breaking hardware in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat.

[Bunnie] is a nearly peerless hardware hacker. He literally wrote the book on hacking the XBox, developed the Chumby, and developed the Novena, an open source Laptop. He’s torn down the Form 2 3D printer, explored the iPhone’s hackability with [Edward Snowden], wrote the book you want to have on your carryon when flying into Hong Kong, and recently released The Hardware Hacker, a retelling of his adventures in hardware hacking. He’s now working on the Love to Code platform.

[Bunnie] is a bridge across worlds. There is no one else so deeply embedded in the world of electronics manufacturing that is also willing to tell the world about what he’s found. If you want to learn about electronics, the Bunnie Studios blog is a mandatory read.

For this week’s Hack Chat, [Bunnie] will be taking questions from the Hackaday.io community. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it takes to build a few thousand things, this is the guy to ask.

Having trouble figuring out when 09:00 PST is in your local time zone? Here’s a countdown timer!

Here’s How To Take Part:

Buttons to join the project and enter the Hack Chat
Buttons to join the project and enter the Hack Chat

Our Hack Chats are live community events on Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Upcoming Hack Chats

These Hack Chats are a weekly thing, and we have a few more on the books. Next week, we’ll be covering RF design with [Jenny List], and later going over mechanical manufacturing with Fictiv. You can check out all the upcoming Hack Chats on this project.

Using A Lecher Line To Measure High Frequency

February 7, 2017 by 35 Comments

How do you test the oscillator circuit you just made that runs between 200MHz and 380MHz if all you have is a 100MHz oscilloscope, a few multimeters and a DC power supply? One answer is to put away the oscilloscope and use the rest along with a length of wire instead. Form the wire into a Lecher line.

That’s just what I did when I wanted to test my oscillator circuit based around the Mini-Circuits POS-400+ voltage controlled oscillator chip (PDF). I wasn’t going for precision, just verification that the chip works and that my circuit can adjust the frequency. And as you’ll see below, I got a fairly linear graph relating the control voltages to different frequencies.

What follows is a bit about Lecher lines, how I did it, and the results.

Continue reading “Using A Lecher Line To Measure High Frequency” →

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Hackaday Links: February 5, 2017

February 5, 2017 by 7 Comments

A lot of people around here got their start in electronics with guitar pedals. This means soldering crappy old transistors to crappy old diodes and fawning over your tonez, d00d.  Prototyping guitar pedals isn’t easy, though, and now there’s a CrowdSupply project to make it easier The FX Development Board is just that — a few 1/4″ jacks, knobs, pots, power supply, and a gigantic footswitch to make prototyping guitar pedals and other musical paraphernalia easy. Think of it as a much more feature-packed Beavis Board that’s still significantly cheaper.

How do Communicators in Star Trek work? Nobody knows. Why don’t the crew always have to tap their badge before using it? Nobody knows. How can the com badge hear, ‘Geordi to Worf’, and have Worf instantly respond? Oh, we’ve argued about this on IRC for years now. Over on Hackaday.io, [Joe] is building a Star Trek com badge. The electronics are certainly possible with modern microcontrollers, but for the enclosure, we’ll have to review a few scenes from Time’s Arrow and The Enemy.

[Alois] was working with an Intel Edison on a breadboard. He was generating a signal, and sending it through a little tiny breadboard wire to an oscilloscope. The expected waveform should have been a nice square wave at 440MHz. What he got out of this wire was a mess. You shouldn’t use long wires when probing circuits. That little breadboard wire was a perfect radiator for 440MHz, and the entire setup turned into an antenna.

[Douglas] is running a Kenwood TM-D710A as his amateur radio rig. This radio does APRS stuff, but it requires an external GPS and power source to do it right. GPS receivers are now very small and very cheap, so [Douglas] just stuffed a GPS module inside his radio. The module itself is a GP-20U7, a tiny GPS module the size of a postage stamp, and wired it up to a few pads on the radio PCB.

Here’s an upcoming Kickstarter that’s going straight to the front page of Boing Boing. It’s Pong, in coffee table format which we first saw last Spring. Instead of racing the beam, this version of Pong is mechanical. The ball is a cube, the paddles are slightly longer cubes, and the entire game is a highly refined CNC machine. Here’s something from seven years ago that’s also Pong in coffee table format. Pongmechanik is electromechanical Pong, built entirely out of switches, relays, and a few motors.

Creating A PCB In Everything: Upverter

February 3, 2017 by 48 Comments

For the last five months, I’ve been writing a series of posts describing how to build a PCB in every piece of software out there. Every post in this series takes a reference schematic and board, and recreates all the elements in a completely new PCB tool.

There are three reasons why this sort of review is valuable. First, each post in this series is effectively a review of a particular tool. Already we’ve done Fritzing (thumbs down), KiCad (thumbs up), Eagle (thumbs up), and Protel Autotrax (interesting from a historical perspective). Secondly, each post in this series is a quick getting started guide for each PCB tool. Since the reference schematic and board are sufficiently complex for 90% of common PCB design tasks, each of these posts is a quick how-to guide for a specific tool. Thirdly, this series of posts serves as a basis of comparison between different tools. For example, you can do anything you want in KiCad and most of what you want in Eagle. Fritzing is terrible, and Autotrax is the digital version of the rub-on traces you bought at Radio Shack in 1987.

With that introduction out of the way, let’s get cranking on Upverter.

A little bit about Upverter

Upverter was founded in 2010 as an entirely web-based EDA tool aimed at students, hobbyists, and Open Hardware circuit designers. This was one of the first completely web-based circuit design tools and Upverter’s relative success has been a bellwether for other completely web-based EDA tools such as circuits.io and EasyEDA.

I would like to take a second to mention Upverter is a Y Combinator company (W11), which virtually guarantees this post will make it to the top of Hacker News. Go fight for imaginary Internet points amongst yourselves.

Upverter is a business after all, so how are they making money? Most EDA suites offer a free, limited version for personal, hobbyist, and ‘maker’ projects, and Upverter is no exception. The professional tier offers a few more features including CAM export, 3D preview, an API, simulation (coming soon), BOM management, and unlimited private projects for $125 per seat per month, or $1200 per seat per year.

To give you a basis of comparison for that subscription fee, Eagle CAD’s new license scheme gives you everything – 999 schematic sheets, 16 layers, and unlimited board area – for $65 per month, or $500 per year. Altium’s CircuitStudio comes in at $1000 for a one-year license. There are more expensive EDA suites such as Altium Designer and OrCAD, but you have to call a sales guy just to get a price.

Upverter is positioning itself as a professional tool at a professional price. There are better tools out there, of course, but there are thousands of businesses out there designing products with tools that cost $500 to $1000 per seat per year. In any event, this is all academic; the Hackaday crowd gravitates towards the free end of the market, whether that means beer or speech.

A big draw for Upverter is their Parts Concierge service. You’ll never have to create a part from scratch again, so the sales copy says. Apparently, Upverter is using a combination of very slick scripts to pull part layouts off a datasheet and human intervention / sanity check to create these parts. Does it work? We’re going to find out in the review below.

Continue reading “Creating A PCB In Everything: Upverter” →

Books You Should Read: Making A Transistor Radio

February 3, 2017 by 33 Comments

When a Hackaday article proclaims that its subject is a book you should read, you might imagine that we would be talking of a seminal text known only by its authors’ names. Horowitz and Hill, perhaps, or maybe Kernigan and Ritchie. The kind of book from which you learn your craft, and to which you continuously return to as a work of reference. Those books that you don’t sell on at the end of your university career.

Ladybird books covered a huge range of topics.
Ladybird books covered a huge range of topics.

So you might find it a little unexpected then that our subject here is a children’s book. Making A Transistor Radio, by [George Dobbs, G3RJV] is one of the huge series of books published in the UK under the Ladybird imprint that were a staple of British childhoods for a large part of the twentieth century. These slim volumes in a distinctive 7″ by 4.5″ (180 x 115 mm) hard cover format were published on a huge range of subjects, and contained well written and informative text paired with illustrations that often came from the foremost artists of the day. This one was published at the start of the 1970s when Ladybird books were in their heyday, and has the simple objective of taking the reader through the construction of a simple three transistor radio. It’s a book you must read not because it is a seminal work in the vein of Horrowitz and Hill, but because it is the book that will have provided the first introduction to electronics for many people whose path took them from this humble start into taking the subject up as a career. Including me as it happens, I received my copy in about 1979, and never looked back. Continue reading “Books You Should Read: Making A Transistor Radio” →

Ask Hackaday: Are Unlockable Features Good For The User?

February 2, 2017 by 136 Comments

There are numerous examples of hardware which has latent features waiting to be unlocked by software. Most recently, we saw a Casio calculator which has the same features as its bigger sibling hidden within the firmware, only to be exposed by a buffer overflow bug (or the lead from a pencil if you prefer a hardware hack).

More famously, oscilloscopes have been notorious for having crippled features. The Rigol DS1052E was hugely popular on hacker benches because of it’s very approachable price tag. The model shipped with 50 MHz bandwidth but it was discovered that a simple hack turned it into the DS1102E 100 MHz scope. Tektronix has gotten in on this action as well, shipping modules like I2C, CAN, and LIN analyzation on the scope but requiring a hardware key to unlock (these were discovered to have a horribly insecure unlock method). Similar feature barriers are found on Rigol’s new reigning entry-level scope, the DS1054Z, which ships with protocol analyzation modules (among others) that are enabled only for the first 70 hours of scope operation, requiring an additional payment to unlock them. Most scope manufacturers are in on the game, and of course this is not limited to our tools. WiFi routers are another great example of hardware hosting firmware-unlockable features.

So, the question on my mind which I’d like to ask all of the Hackaday community is this: are unlockable features good for us, the people who use these tools? Let’s take a look at some of the background of these practices and then jump into a discussion in the comments.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Are Unlockable Features Good For The User?” →

Fail Of The Week: GitLab Goes Down

February 2, 2017 by 57 Comments

Has work been a little stressful this week, are things getting you down? Spare a thought for an unnamed sysadmin at the GitHub-alike startup GitLab, who early yesterday performed a deletion task on a PostgreSQL database in response to some problems they were having in the wake of an attack by spammers. Unfortunately due to a command line error he ran the deletion on one of the databases behind the company’s main service, forcing it to be taken down. By the time the deletion was stopped, only 4.5 Gb of the 300 Gb trove of data remained.

Reading their log of the incident the scale of the disaster unfolds, and we can’t help wincing at the phrase “out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place“. In the end they were able to restore most of the data from a staging server, but at the cost of a lost six hours of issues and merge requests. Fortunately for them their git repositories were not affected.

For 707 GitLab users then there has been a small amount of lost data, the entire web service was down for a while, and the incident has gained them more publicity in a day than their marketing department could have achieved in a year. The post-mortem document makes for a fascinating read, and will probably leave more than one reader nervously thinking about the integrity of whichever services they are responsible for. We have to hand it to them for being so open about it all and for admitting a failure of their whole company for its backup failures rather than heaping blame on one employee. In many companies it would all have been swept under the carpet. We suspect that GitLab’s data will be shepherded with much more care henceforth.

We trust an increasing amount of our assets to online providers these days, and this tale highlights some of the hazards inherent in placing absolute trust in them. GitLab had moved from a cloud provider to their own data centre, though whether or not this incident would have been any less harmful wherever it was hosted is up for debate. Perhaps it’s a timely reminder to us all: keep your own backups, and most importantly: test them to ensure they work.

Thanks [Jack Laidlaw] for the tip.

Rack server image: Trique303 [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.