Laser Fault Injection, Now With Optional Decapping

September 20, 2024 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Whether the goal is reverse engineering, black hat exploitation, or just simple curiosity, getting inside the packages that protect integrated circuits has long been the Holy Grail of hacking. It isn’t easy, though; those inscrutable black epoxy blobs don’t give up their secrets easily, with most decapping methods being some combination of toxic and dangerous. Isn’t there something better than acid baths and spinning bits of tungsten carbide?

[Janne] over at Fraktal thinks so, and the answer he came up with is laser decapping. Specifically, this is an extension of the laser fault injection setup we recently covered, which uses a galvanometer-scanned IR laser to induce glitches in decapped microcontrollers to get past whatever security may be baked into the silicon. The current article continues that work and begins with a long and thorough review of various IC packaging technologies, including the important anatomical differences. There’s also a great review of the pros and cons of many decapping methods, covering everything from the chemical decomposition of epoxy resins to thermal methods. That’s followed by specific instructions on using the LFI rig to gradually ablate the epoxy and expose the die, which is then ready to reveal its secrets.

The benefit of leveraging the LFI rig for decapping is obvious — it’s an all-in-one tool for gaining access and executing fault injection. The usual caveats apply, of course, especially concerning safety; you’ll obviously want to avoid breathing the vaporized epoxy and remember that lasers and retinas don’t mix. But with due diligence, having a single low-cost tool to explore the innards of chips seems like a big win to us.

A Guide To Laser Cutting Metal, If You’ve Got The Cash

September 19, 2024 by Al Williams 9 Comments

While many of us now have laser cutters — either a K40-style machine or one of the newer high-output diodes — you probably don’t have one that cuts metal. True, some hobby lasers now offer IR laser heads with modest power to engrave metal. The xTool S1, for example, accepts a 2 W IR laser as an option, but we doubt it would cut through anything thicker than foil. However, there are a growing number of fiber and carbon dioxide lasers that can cut metal at semi-reasonable prices, and [All3DP] has a primer on the technology that is worth a read.

According to the post, CO₂ lasers are less expensive but require gas assist, can’t work with shiny metals well, and are finicky because of the mirrors and glass tube inside. Fiber lasers cost more, but don’t need gas, work on more materials, and have fewer parts that need maintenance or may be prone to damage. There are other kinds of lasers, but the post focuses on these, the most common ones.

Machines that can cut metal aren’t cheap. They start at about $10,000. However, prices are dropping and we remember when $10,000 would buy you what would today be a terrible oscilloscope, so maybe there’s hope for an impulse-buy metal-cutting laser one day.

It isn’t that diode lasers can’t cut metal at all, but the results are not terribly useful. What would you rather have? A metal cutter or a metal 3D printer?

Upgraded Raster Laser Projector Goes RGB

September 18, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

We’ve covered a scanning laser project by Ben Make’s Everything last year, and now he’s back with a significant update. [Ben]’s latest project now offers a higher resolution and RGB lasers. A couple of previous versions of the device used the same concept of a rotating segmented mirror synchronised to a pulsed laser diode to create scanlines. When projected onto a suitable surface, the distorted, pixelated characters looked quite funky, but there was clearly room for improvement.

More scanlines and a faster horizontal pixel rate

The previous device used slightly inclined mirrors to deflect the beam into scanlines, with one mirror per scanline limiting the vertical resolution. To improve resolution, the mirrors were replaced with identically aligned mirrors of the type used in laser printers for horizontal scanning. An off-the-shelf laser galvo was used for vertical scanning, allowing faster scanning due to its small deflection angle. This setup is quicker than then usual vector galvo application, as the smaller movements require less time to complete. Once the resolution improvement was in hand, the controller upgrade to a Teensy 4 gave more processing bandwidth than the previous Arduino and a consequent massive improvement in image clarity.

Finally, monochrome displays don’t look anywhere near as good as an RGB setup. [Ben] utilised a dedicated RGB laser setup since he had trouble sourcing the appropriate dichroic mirrors to match available lasers. This used four lasers (with two red ones) and the correct dichroic mirrors to combine each laser source into a single beam path, which was then sent to the galvo. [Ben] tried to find a DAC solution fast enough to drive the lasers for a proper colour-mixing input but ended up shelving that idea for now and sticking with direct on-off control. This resulted in a palette of just seven colours, but that’s still a lot better than monochrome.

The project’s execution is excellent, and care was taken to make it operate outdoors with a battery. Even with appropriate safety measures, you don’t really want to play with high-intensity lasers around the house!

Here’s the previous version we covered, a neat DIY laser galvo using steppers, and a much older but very cool RGB vector projector.

Continue reading “Upgraded Raster Laser Projector Goes RGB” →

Mowing The Lawn With Lasers, For Science

September 3, 2024 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

Cutting grass with lasers works great in a test setup. (Credit: Allen Pan, YouTube)

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could cut the grass with lasers? Everyone knows that lasers are basically magic, and if you strap a diode laser or two to a lawn mower, it should slice through those pesky blades of grass with zero effort. Cue [Allen Pan]’s video on doing exactly this, demonstrating in the process that we do in fact live in a physics-based universe, and lasers are not magical light sabers that will just slice and dice without effort.

The first attempt to attach two diode lasers in a spinning configuration like the cutting blades on a traditional lawn mower led to the obvious focusing issues (fixed by removing the focusing lenses) and short contact time. Effectively, while these diode lasers can cut blades of grass, you need to give them some time to do the work. Naturally, this meant adding more lasers in a stationary grid, like creating a Resident Evil-style cutting grid, only for grass instead of intruders.

Does this work? Sort of. Especially thick grass has a lot of moisture in it, which the lasers have to boil off before they can do the cutting. As [Allen] and co-conspirator found out, this also risks igniting a lawn fire in especially thick grass. The best attempt to cut the lawn with lasers appears to have been made two years ago by [rctestflight], who used a stationary, 40 watt diode laser sweeping across an area. When placed on a (slowly) moving platform this could cut the lawn in a matter of days, whereas low-tech rapidly spinning blades would need at least a couple of minutes.

Obviously the answer is to toss out those weak diode lasers and get started with kW-level chemical lasers. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing those attempts, and the safety methods required to not turn it into a laser safety PSA.

Continue reading “Mowing The Lawn With Lasers, For Science” →

The Strangest Way To Stick PLA To Glass? With A Laser And A Bit Of Foil

September 2, 2024 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

Ever needed a strong yet adhesive-free way to really stick PLA to glass? Neither have we, but nevertheless there’s a way to use aluminum foil and an IR fiber laser to get a solid bond with a little laser welding between the dissimilar materials.

A piece of sacrificial aluminum foil bonds the PLA to glass with a form of laser welding, with precise control and very little heat to dissipate.

It turns out that aluminum can be joined to glass by using a pulsed laser process, and PLA can be joined to aluminum with a continuous wave laser process. Researchers put them together, and managed to reliably do both at once with a single industrial laser.

By putting a sacrificial sheet of thin aluminum foil between 3D printed PLA and glass, then sending the laser through the glass into the aluminum, researchers were able to bond it all together in an adhesive-free manner with precise control, and very little heat to dissipate. No surface treatment of any kind required. The bond is at least as strong as any adhesive-based solution, so there’s no compromising on strength.

When it comes to fabrication, having to apply and manage adhesives is one of the least-preferable options for sticking two things together, so there’s value in the idea of something like this.

Still, it’s certainly a niche application and we’ll likely stick to good old superglue, but we honestly didn’t know laser welding could bond aluminum to glass or to PLA, let along both at once like this.

Laser Art Inspired By The Ford Motor Company

August 17, 2024 by Al Williams 7 Comments

Have you ever heard of Fordite? It was a man-made agate-like stone that originated from the Ford auto factories in the 1920s. Multiple layers of paint would build up as cars were painted different colors, and when it was thick enough, workers would cut it, polish it, and use it in jewelry. [SheltonMaker] uses a similar technique to create artwork using a laser engraver and shares how it works by showing off a replica of [Van Gogh’s] “Starry Night.”

The technique does have some random variation, so the result isn’t a perfect copy but, hey, it is art, after all. While true Fordite has random color layers, this technique uses specific colors layered from the lightest to the darkest. Each layer of paint is applied to a canvas. Only after all the layers are in place does the canvas go under the laser.

The first few layers of paint are white and serve as a backer. Each subsequent layer is darker until the final black layer. The idea is that the laser will cut at different depths depending on the desired lightness. A program called ImagR prepared the image as a negative image. Adjustments to the brightness, contrast, and gamma will impact the final result.

Of course, getting the exact power settings is tricky. The best result was to start at a relatively low power and then make more passes at an even lower power until things looked right. In between, compressed air cleared the print, although you have to be careful not to move the piece, of course.

There are pictures of each pass, and the final product looks great. If art’s not your thing, you can also do chip logos. While the laser used in this project is a 40-watt unit, we’ve noted before that wattage isn’t everything. You could do this—probably slower—with a lower-powered engraver.

Fordite image By [Rhonda] CC BY-SA 2.0.

Getting A Laser Eye Injury And How To Avoid It

August 2, 2024 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

Most people love lasers, because they can make cats chase, read music from a shiny disc, etch and cut materials, and be very shiny in Hollywood blockbusters, even when their presence makes zero sense. That said, lasers are also extremely dangerous, as their highly focused nature and wide range of power levels can leave a person dazzled, blinded or dead from direct and indirect exposure. A lapse in laser safety was how [Phil Broughton] ended up with part of his retina forever marked, as he describes his adventures with an overly enthusiastic laser company sales person.

Quanta Ray PRO350 with frequency doubling, emitting a 532nm beam – Sales brochure image from Quanta Ray, unknown date — Quanta Ray PRO350 with frequency doubling, emitting a 532 nm beam – Sales brochure image from Quanta Ray, unknown date

It didn’t take much, just this sales person who made a really poor decision while trying to please some customers and nearly ended with multiple adults, a local school, pilots at a nearby airfield getting their retinas blasted out due to an absolutely harebrained idea to use a fairly high-powered Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser on reflective surfaces in the open.

This was in 1999, and fortunately [Phil] only suffered some fairly minor damage to his retina from the laser beam reflection. What happened to the customers (who wore argon laser safety glasses) or the sales critter (who left soon after) is not described, but both may have received some bad news when they had their eyes checked shortly after at the ophthalmologist.

These kind of stories are a stark reminder that laser safety is not optional. Lasers producing a visible (400 – 700 nm) wavelength above Class 2 should only be operated in a fully secured environment, with safety glasses for the appropriate laser wavelength. Class 2 lasers producing a non-visible wavelength can cause permanent damage because the blink reflex of the eye does not offer any protection here.

As even some dodgy laser pointers are being (illegally) sold online are actually Class 2, this should make it clear that laser eye injury can happen to anyone, and it only takes a second to change someone’s life forever.