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.

Ask Hackaday: What Would You Do With The World’s Smallest Microcontroller?

March 17, 2025 by 94 Comments

It’s generally pretty easy to spot a microcontroller on a PCB. There are clues aplenty: the more-or-less central location, the nearby crystal oscillator, the maze of supporting passives, and perhaps even an obvious flash chip lurking about. The dead giveaway, though, is all those traces leading to the chip, betraying its primacy in the circuit. As all roads lead to Rome, so it often is with microcontrollers.

It looks like that may be about to change, though, based on Texas Instruments’ recent announcement of a line of incredibly small Arm-based microcontrollers. The video below shows off just how small the MSPM0 line can be, ranging from a relatively gigantic TSSOP-20 case down to an eight-pin BGA package that measures only 1.6 mm by 0.86 mm. That’s essentially the size of an 0603 SMD resistor, a tiny footprint for a 24-MHz Cortex M0+ MCU with 16-kB of flash, 1-kB of SRAM, and a 12-bit ADC. The larger packages obviously have more GPIO brought out to pins, but even the eight-pin versions support six IO lines.

Of course, it’s hard not to write about a specific product without sounding like you’re shilling for the company, but being first to market with an MCU in this size range is certainly newsworthy. We’re sure other manufacturers will follow suit soon enough, but for now, we want to know how you would go about using a microcontroller the size of a resistor. The promo video hints at TI’s target market for these or compact wearables by showing them used in earbuds, but we suspect the Hackaday community will come up with all sorts of creative and fun ways to put these to use — shoutout to [mitxela], whose habit of building impossibly small electronic jewelry might be a good use case for something like this.

There may even be some nefarious use cases for a microcontroller this small. We were skeptical of the story about “spy chips” on PC motherboards, but a microcontroller that can pass for an SMD resistor might change that equation a bit. There’s also the concept of “Oreo construction” that these chips might make a lot easier. A board with a microcontroller embedded within it could be a real security risk, but on the other hand, it could make for some very interesting applications.

What’s your take on this? Can you think of applications where something this small is enabling? Or are microcontrollers that are likely to join the dust motes at the back of your bench after a poorly timed sneeze a bridge too far? Sound off in the comments below.

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Hackaday Links: March 16, 2025

March 16, 2025 by 5 Comments

“The brickings will continue until the printer sales improve!” This whole printer-bricking thing seems to be getting out of hand with the news this week that a firmware update caused certain HP printers to go into permanent paper-saver mode. The update was sent to LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models (opens printer menu; checks print queue name; “Phew!) on March 4, and was listed as covering a few “general improvements and bug fixes,” none of which seem very critical. Still, some users reported not being able to print at all after the update, with an error message suggesting printing was being blocked thanks to non-OEM toner. This sounds somewhat similar to the bricked Brother printers we reported on last week (third paragraph).

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 312: Heart Attacks, The Speed Of Light, And Self-balancing

March 14, 2025 by 7 Comments

Elliot does the podcast on the road to Supercon Europe, and Al is in the mood for math and nostalgia this week. Listen in and find out what they were reading on Hackaday this week.

The guys talked about the ESP-32 non-backdoor and battery fires. Then it was on to the hacks.

Self-balancing robots and satellite imaging were the appetizers, but soon they moved on to Kinect cameras in the modern day. Think you can’t travel at the speed of light? Turns out that maybe you already are.

Did you know there was a chatbot in 1957? Well, sort of. For the can’t miss stories: watches monitor your heart and what does the number e really mean?

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 in DRM-free MP3 and stream it on the big speakers.

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This Week In Security: The X DDoS, The ESP32 Basementdoor, And The CamelCase RCE

March 14, 2025 by 9 Comments

We would be remiss if we didn’t address the X Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that’s been happening this week. It seems like everyone is is trying to make political hay out of the DDoS, but we’re going to set that aside as much as possible and talk about the technical details. Elon made an early statement that X was down due to a cyberattack, with the source IPs tracing back to “the Ukraine area”.

The latest reporting seems to conclude that this was indeed a DDoS, and a threat group named “Dark Storm” has taken credit for the attack. Dark Storm does not seem to be of Ukrainian origin or affiliation.

We’re going to try to read the tea leaves just a bit, but remember that about the only thing we know for sure is that X was unreachable for many users several times this week. This is completely consistent with the suspected DDoS attack. The quirk of modern DDoS attacks is that the IP addresses on the packets are never trustworthy.

There are two broad tactics used for large-scale DDoS attacks, sometimes used simultaneously. The first is the simple botnet. Computers, routers, servers, and cameras around the world have been infected with malware, and then remote controlled to create massive botnets. Those botnets usually come equipped with a DDoS function, allowing the botnet runner to task all the bots with sending traffic to the DDoS victim IPs. That traffic may be UDP packets with spoofed or legitimate source IPs, or it may be TCP Synchronization requests, with spoofed source IPs.

The other common approach is the reflection or amplification attack. This is where a public server can be manipulated into sending unsolicited traffic to a victim IP. It’s usually DNS, where a short message request can return a much larger response. And because DNS uses UDP, it’s trivial to convince the DNS server to send that larger response to a victim’s address, amplifying the attack.

Put these two techniques together, and you have a botnet sending spoofed requests to servers, that unintentionally send the DDoS traffic on to the target. And suddenly it’s understandable why it’s so difficult to nail down attribution for this sort of attack. It may very well be that a botnet with a heavy Ukrainian presence was involved in the attack, which at the same time doesn’t preclude Dark Storm as the originator. The tea leaves are still murky on this one.

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Linux Fu: Use The Source (Command), Luke

March 13, 2025 by 12 Comments

You can argue if bash is a good programming language or not, but you can’t argue that it is a programming language. However, there are a few oddities about it that make it different from most other languages you probably know. For one thing, variables are dynamically scoped. Second, you can easily change variables in an upper scope. This leads to a problem when you want to do something like reset your path:

#!/bin/bash
#: This does NOT work
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin

Well, actually, it does work; it just doesn’t work the way you imagine it might. The key is to realize that when you execute our script (say, resetpath), a new copy of bash runs. It inherits all the variables from your shell. Now the script sets PATH for the new copy of bash. Anything else you run in that script will see your change. But when the script exits, the new copy of bash is gone and the old copy sees the same old PATH it always did.

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Hackaday Europe 2025: Speaker Schedule And Official Event Page

March 13, 2025 by No comments

Hackaday Europe 2025 is just days away, and we’ve got the finalized speaker schedule hot off the digital press. We’re also pleased to announce that the event page is now officially live, where you can find all the vital information about the weekend’s festivities in one place.

Whether you’ll be joining the fun in Berlin, or watching the live stream from home, we’ve got a fantastic lineup of speakers this year who are eager to tell us all about the projects that have been keeping them up at night recently:

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