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.

Supercon 2023: Restoring The Apollo Guidance Computer

November 6, 2024 by 17 Comments

Humans first visited the Moon in 1969.  The last time we went was 1972, over 50 years ago. Back then, astronauts in the Apollo program made their journeys in spacecraft that relied on remarkably basic electronics that are totally unsophisticated compared to what you might find in an expensive blender or fridge these days. Core among them was the Apollo Guidance Computer, charged with keeping the craft on target as it travelled to its destination and back again.

Marc Verdiell, also known as CuriousMarc, is a bit of a dab hand at restoring old vintage electronics. Thus, when it came time to restore one of these rare and storied guidance computers, he was ready and willing to take on the task. Even better, he came to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to tell us how it all went down!

Continue reading “Supercon 2023: Restoring The Apollo Guidance Computer” →

Ubiquitous Successful Bus: Hacking USB 2 Hubs

November 5, 2024 by 28 Comments

We’ve been recently looking into USB 2.0 – the ubiquitous point-to-point communications standard. USB 2 is completely different from USB 3, the blue-connector next-generation USB standard. For instance, USB 2 is a full-duplex pseudo-differential bus, and it’s not AC-coupled. This makes USB2 notoriously difficult to galvanically isolate, as opposed to USB 3.  On the other hand, USB 2 is a lot easier to incorporate into your projects. And perhaps the best way to do so is to implement a USB hub.

USB 2 hubs are, by now, omnipresent. it doesn’t cost much to add to your board, and you truly have tons of options. The standard option is 4-port hubs – one uplink port to your host, four downlink ports to your devices. If you only have two or three devices, you might be tempted to look for a hub IC with a lower amount of ports, but it’s not worth bothering – just use a 4-port chip, and stock up on them.

What about 7-port chips? You will see those every now and then – but take a close look at the datasheet. Some of them will be two 4-port chips inside a single package, with four of the ports bottlenecked compared to the three other ports – watch out! Desktop 7-port hubs are basically guaranteed to use two 4-port ICs, too, so, again, watch out for bottlenecks. lsusb -t will help you determine the hub’s structure in case you don’t want to crack its case open, thankfully.

Recommendations? I use SL2.1 chips – they’re available in an SO16 package, very unproblematic, to-the-point pinout and easily hand-solderable. CH334 is a close contender, but watch out because there are different variants of this chip that differ by both package and pinout, so if you’re buying a chip with a certain letter, you will want to stick to it. Not just that, be careful – different variants run out at different rates, so if you lock yourself into a CH334 variant, consider stocking up on it. Continue reading “Ubiquitous Successful Bus: Hacking USB 2 Hubs” →

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Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024

November 3, 2024 by 22 Comments

“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024” →

This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More

November 1, 2024 by 3 Comments

Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as APT31, APT41, and Volt Typhoon.

The story is actually refreshing in its honesty, with Sophos freely admitting that their products, and security products from multiple other vendors have been caught in the crosshairs of these attacks. And indeed, we’ve covered stories about these vulnerabilities over the past weeks and months right here on this column. The sneaky truth is that many of these security products actually have pretty severe security problems.

The issues at Sophos started with an infection of an informational computer at a subsidiary office. They believe this was an information gathering exercise, that was a precursor to the widespread campaign. That campaign used multiple 0-days to crack “tens of thousands of firewalls around the world”. Sophos rolled out fixes for those 0-days, and included just a bit of extra logging as an undocumented feature. That logging paid off, as Sophos’ team of researchers soon identified an early signal among the telemetry. This wasn’t merely the first device to be attacked, but was actually a test device used to develop the attack. The game was on. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More” →

Fail Of The Week: Subscription EV Charger Becomes Standalone, Briefly

November 1, 2024 by 48 Comments

At this point in the tech dystopia cycle, it’s no surprise that the initial purchase price of a piece of technology is likely not the last payment you’ll make. Almost everything these days needs an ongoing subscription to do whatever you paid for it to do in the first place. It’s ridiculous, especially when all you want to do is charge your electric motorcycle with electricity you already pay for; why in the world would you need a subscription for that?

That was [Maarten]’s question when he picked up a used EVBox wall mount charger, which refused to charge his bike without signing up for a subscription. True, the subscription gave access to all kinds of gee-whiz features, none of which were necessary for the job of topping off the bike’s battery. A teardown revealed a well-built device with separate modules for mains supply and battery charging, plus a communications module with a cellular modem, obviously the bit that’s phoning home and keeping the charger from working without the subscription.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Subscription EV Charger Becomes Standalone, Briefly” →

Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad

October 31, 2024 by 12 Comments

Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most other PCB design tools. As a result, the schematics and PCB of the Vectorscope project were not really linked. I decided to try it again this year, but with the added goal of making a complete KiCad project. As usual, [Voja] provided a well drawn schematic diagram in PDF and CorelDRAW formats, and a PCB design using Altium’s Circuit Maker format (CSPcbDoc file). And for reference, this year I’m using KiCad v8 versus v7 last year.

Importing into KiCad

This went smoothly. KiCad imports Altium files, as I discovered last year. Converting the graphic lines to traces was easier than before, since the graphical lines are deleted in the conversion process. There was a file organizational quirk, however. I made a new, empty project and imported the Circuit Maker PCB file. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the importing action didn’t make use the new project I had just made. Instead, it created a completely new project in the directory holding the imported Circuit Maker file. This caused a lot of head scratching when I was editing the symbol and footprint library table files, and couldn’t figure out why my edits weren’t being seen by KiCad.  I’m not sure what the logic of this is, was an easy fix once you know what’s going on. I simply copied everything from the imported project and pasted it in my new, empty project. Continue reading “Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 807: Bitten By The Penguin

October 30, 2024 by No comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch chat with Josh Bressers, VP of Security at Anchore, and host of the Open Source Security and Hacker History podcasts. We talk security, SBOMs, and how Josh almost became a Sun fan instead of a Linux geek.

– https://opensourcesecurity.io
– https://hackerhistory.com
– https://infosec.exchange/@joshbressers
– https://anchore.com

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 807: Bitten By The Penguin” →