Just In Time For The Holidays: Give The Gift Of Cray

December 2, 2017 by Al Williams 24 Comments

The name Cray, as in [Seymour Cray] is synonymous with supercomputing. If you hurry, you can bid on a Cray J90/J916 on eBay. You might want to think about where to put it though. It is mounted on a trailer, requires 480V, and the shipping is $3,000!

First introduced in 1994, the J90 was an “entry level” machine. This particular machine supported up to 16 CPUs (each CPU was actually two chips) running at a blazing 100 MHz. The memory system was more impressive, achieving 48 GB/s.

The Cray T90 computer was much faster (and more expensive) but none of these computers had the performance of a typical PC’s graphics card these days. Even your phone may have more raw computing power, depending on how you choose to measure. Don’t fear, though. Cray Research still makes supercomputers that can eat your phone for lunch.

Still, at the time, this was big iron. The I/O system used SPARC processors that would have been entire workstations in that era. The eBay listing says it might need a little work — we weren’t clear if the seller meant in general or just the cooling system, but you can assume this is a fixer-upper. Apparently, the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island restored a similar beast so it can be done.

If your holiday budget doesn’t have room for a real supercomputer, here’s one that is 1/10 the size and much less expensive. Or, you could just pretend.

Next Week’s Bay Area Meetups

November 30, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Next week we’ll be at a few awesome hardware meetups around the Bay Area, and we want you to head out and join us.

The first meetup will be the Silicon Valley Hardware Meetup at the Evil Mad Scientist shop in Sunnyvale. It’s going down Wednesday, December 6th, from 6:30 until 9:30. At least some of the Hackaday/Tindie/Supplyframe crew will be there, and the night will be filled with lightning talks, demos, and the cool hardware people you know and love.

Speakers for this meetup will include [Mitch Altman], hacker extraordinaire and owner of far, far too many TV remotes. He’ll be talking about hardware successes and failures in his own businesses. Also headlining the event will be [Clarissa Redwine] from Kickstarter. She’ll be talking about crowdfunding hardware, and the fact that making a thousand of something is a million times harder than making one of something.

The day after, on December 7th, we’re also going to be opening the doors at the San Francisco Supplyframe office to host the Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic. These Didactics are fun and popular, and you don’t need to go to the South Bay. Food and drink will be served, and there’s a sweet Rick and Morty mural in the alley across the street.

On deck for this month’s Didactic is [Tiffany Tseng], lead UX designer at Autodesk. Her work involves creating and implementing the design decisions that go into Eagle CAD. If you’re wondering why the icons changed a few years ago, she is not the person to talk to; that happened before the Autodesk mothership bought Eagle. If you’re wondering how the awesome push and shove routing actually works, [Tiffany] is the person to talk to.

Also at the Didactic will be [Asaad Kaadan]. He’s a robotics engineer working on cinematic tools for his day job and is currently exploring a very, very cool modular electronics project called Hexabitz. He’ll be talking about Hexabitz and designing for modular electronics.

Introducing The Mobility Unlimited Challenge

November 27, 2017 by Jenny List 10 Comments

If you take a walk across the centre of your city, you will find it to be a straightforward experience with few inconveniences. The occasional hold-up at a pedestrian crossing perhaps, or maybe a crowd of people in a busy shopping area. If however you take the same walk in the company of a wheelchair user you are likely to encounter an entirely different experience. The streets become a nightmare of obstacles to avoid and inaccessible areas requiring a detour, and suddenly what had been a pleasurable experience becomes a significant effort. Despite building and planning code updates to improve the situation, and millions of dollars invested in ramps, lifts, and other improvements, there remain so many problems to be addressed. Meanwhile legislators and the general public imagine that something has been done, the accessibility box has been ticked, and they can move on to the next thing that captures their attention.

The paralympian athlete [Tatyana McFadden] is an ambassador for the Toyota Mobility Foundation’s Mobility Unlimited Challenge, a global competition with the aim of improving mobility for people with disabilities. She’s written a piece introducing the challenge from her informed point of view as a wheelchair user, and makes the point that the basic design of a chair has not significantly changed since the 1930s. Her sentence: “There may be more hype around Bitcoin, but innovators could have far more impact if they turned their attention to how they can make the freedom to move available to all.” is one to make those of us with an interest in technology stop and think. To introduce the challenge they’ve released a glossy video, and we’ve placed it below the break.

As part of this year’s Hackaday Prize, we had an Assistive Technologies section that attracted some fantastic entries. That demonstrates that our community has plenty of people with the required skills, experience, and ideas to make a difference, and we hope that some of them might be among the entries for the Mobility Unlimited competition. If it excites your interest, we’d like to urge you to give it a second look.

A word of warning though – take care to avoid the Engineer Saviour Trap.

Continue reading “Introducing The Mobility Unlimited Challenge” →

Brits: Make A Vote, Put Cash A Hackerspace’s Way

November 18, 2017 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Those of you who have been involved in the running of a hackerspace or makerspace will know the never-ending struggle to maintain financial solvency, and the quest for sources of income to move your organisation forward. It’s certainly a topic upon which Hackaday’s crew have some experience, more than one of us has helped run a space.

A good avenue to explore lies with community grants: money from organisations on a philanthropic basis to invest in community organisations. These can come from charities, governmental organisations, or even from companies as part of their corporate social responsibility. It’s this last source of grant money that claims our attention today, because we are in the final days of voting for the Aviva Community Fund, in which the British financial and insurance company makes grants for worthy causes across the country. The causes compete to gain as much support as they can, and hope to thus win their prize.

Among the many worthy recipients of the cash are a selection of hackerspaces. First up are Hitchin Hackspace, whose Big Hak full-size rendition of a Milton Bradley Big Trak toy was featured in our coverage of EMF Camp 2016. They are building a new space in what we’ll call a redundant community facility because it sounds better than “Former public toilet”, and winning a grant will help them a lot in that aim.

Then we have East London Makerspace. They have secured an unused garage to turn into a makerspace, as the capital’s population of our community swells to support ever more spaces in its different suburbs. Like Hitchin, the money would go to the essential work involved in creating a functioning space where previously there was nothing.

Finally, we have the unexpected, a heating system from Milton Keynes Men In Sheds. If you know about Men In Sheds as a community organisation for older people, you’ll be wondering why this is listed here. What we haven’t told you is that MK Makerspace is a subgroup of the MK Shed that occupies the upstairs portion of their building, and what warms the Shedders also warms the hacker community of one of Britain’s new towns.

These appear to be the only hackerspaces bidding for grant money, but votes can usefully be given to other allied causes. Linlithgow Remakery and Tool Library, for instance could use a boost, as could the other Men In Sheds groups scattered across the competition.

So if you are one of Hackaday’s British readers, please take a minute to stop by the voting pages listed above, and give them a boost. You have a couple of days to get your votes in, so make them count, and make a difference!

Disclosure: [Jenny List] is a member of Milton Keynes Makerspace.

Your Next Wearable May Not Need Electricity

November 17, 2017 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

What if you could unlock a door with your shirtsleeve, or code a secret message into your tie? This could soon be a thing, because researchers at the University of Washington have created a fabric that can store data without any electronics whatsoever. The fabric can be washed, dried, and even ironed without losing data. Oh, and it’s way cheaper than RFID.

By harnessing the ferromagnetic properties of conductive thread, [Justin Chen] and [Shyam Gollakota] have proved the ability to store bit strings and 2D images through magnetization. The team used an embroidery machine to lay down thread in dense strips and patches, and then coded in ones and zeros by rubbing the threads with N and S neodymium magnets.

They didn’t use anything special, either, just this conductive thread, some magnets, and a Nexus 5 to read the data. Any phone with a magnetometer (so, most of them) could decode this type of binary data. The threads stay reliably magnetized for about a week and then begin to weaken. However, their tests proved that the threads can be re-magnetized over and over.

The team also created 2D images with magnets on a 9-patch made of conductive fabric. The images can be decoded piecemeal by a single magnetometer, or all at once by an array of them. Finally, the team made a glove with a magnetized patch of thread on the fingertip. They were able to get the phone to recognize six unique gestures with 90% accuracy, even with the phone tucked away in a pocket. See it in action in their demo video after the break.

Magnetic memory is certainly not a new concept. But for the wearable technology frontier, it’s a novel one.

Continue reading “Your Next Wearable May Not Need Electricity” →

Goodbye, TechShop

November 17, 2017 by DJ Harrigan 112 Comments

The CEO of TechShop, [Dan Woods], has hit the legal E-stop and declared Chapter-7 bankruptcy for the business. All ten US locations were shuttered on Wednesday with absolutely no advance warning. You can read the full statement from [Dan] here.

We are deeply saddened to hear of TechShop’s closing, and while it wasn’t implausible that this might happen someday, the abrupt shuttering must come as a painful shock to many for whom TechShop was an important part of their personal and professional lives. We owe a lot to the work and effort they put forth; they led the way as a pioneering makerspace and for more than ten years, TechShop provided access to tools, taught classes, and created opportunities for the DIY world that are still as important today as they were in the mid-aughts.

Leading the Way

Jim Newton, founder of TechShop, originally wanted a space to tinker with his pet projects. “I’m a frustrated inventor who needs to have access to this kind of stuff. And people always say that the best companies are the ones where the founders are passionate about what they are creating, which is exactly what I am,” Jim said in an interview in 2007, at the beginnings of TechShop.

It turned out that there were a lot of other tinkerers who wanted to work their pet projects too.

TechShop took a risk. All new business ventures are risky and most fail quite quickly, but in 2006, this whole movement, this idea that people could build things and take advantage of new technologies, personal fabrication, ad-hoc manufacturing, and rapid prototyping outside of universities and commercial R&D labs, was just a dream.

Adafruit was incubating in Limor’s dorm room. Arduino was just the name of some pub in Italy. Eben Upton was wiring prototype Raspberry Pi’s by hand. Nathan Seidle was still reflowing Sparkfun’s boards with a toaster oven. Maker Faire, “The World’s Largest Show and Tell,” wouldn’t even launch until the following year.

In the fading light of high school shop classes, people often were shown the ways of woodworking, light metalwork, and maybe how to fix a car or two. Filling a business with a smorgasbord of advanced machinery and teaching people how to use it, was, and still is, a relatively new concept. TechShop had a dream and made it real with the dedication of hardworking support staff and instructors around the country. Continue reading “Goodbye, TechShop” →

Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken Yet?

November 17, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 50 Comments

Our own [Brian Benchoff] asked this same question just six months ago in a similar headline. At that time, the answer was no. Or kind of no. Some exploits existed but with some preconditions that limited the impact of the bugs found in Intel Management Engine (IME). But 2017 is an unforgiving year for the blue teams, as lot of serious bugs have been found throughout the year in virtually every fields of computing. Researchers from Positive Technologies report that they found a flaw that allows them to execute unsigned code on computers running the IME. The cherry on top of the cake is that they are able to do it via a USB port acting as a JTAG port. Does this mean the zombie apocalypse is coming?

Before the Skylake CPU line, released in 2015, the JTAG interface was only accessible by connecting a special device to the ITP-XDP port found on the motherboard, inside a computer’s chassis. Starting with the Skylake CPU, Intel replaced the ITP-XDP interface and allowed developers and engineers to access the debugging utility via common USB 3.0 ports, accessible from the device’s exterior, through a new a new technology called Direct Connect Interface (DCI). Basically the DCI provides access to CPU/PCH JTAG via USB 3.0. So the researchers manage to debug the IME processor itself via USB DCI, which is pretty awesome, but USB DCI is turned off by default, like one of the researchers states, which is pretty good news for the ordinary user. So don’t worry too much just yet.

Continue reading “Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken Yet?” →