Dry Ice Is Nice For Separating Broken Phone Screens

February 11, 2016 by Adam Fabio 29 Comments

Smartphones are the opium of the people. If you need proof, just watch the average person’s reaction when they break “their precious”. Repairing smartphones has become a huge business. The most often broken item on phones is of course the front glass. In most cases, the screen itself doesn’t break. On newer smartphones, even the touchscreen is safe. The front glass is only a protective lens.

The easiest way to repair a broken front glass is to swap the entire LCD assembly. For an iPhone 6 plus, this will run upwards of $120 USD. However, the glass lens alone is just $10. The problem is that the LCD, digitizer and front glass are a laminated package. Removing them without breaking the wafer thin LCD glass requires great care. The hardest part is breaking down the optical glue securing the glass to the LCD. In the past that has been done with heat. More recently, companies from China have been selling liquid-nitrogen-based machines that cool the assembly. Now immersing a phone screen in -196° C liquid nitrogen would probably destroy the LCD. However, these machines use a temperature controller to keep a surface at -140° C. Just enough to cause the glue to become brittle, but not kill the LCD.

[JerryRigEverything] doesn’t have several thousand dollars for a liquid nitrogen machine, but he does have a $5 block of dry ice. Dry ice runs at -78.5°C. Balmy compared to liquid nitrogen, but still plenty cold. After laying the phone screens down on the ice for a few minutes, [Jerry] was able to chip away the glass. It definitely takes more work than the nitrogen method. Still, if you’re not opening your own phone repair shop, we think this is the way to go.

Broken phones are a cheap and easy way to get high-resolution LCD screens for your projects. The problem is driving them. [Twl] has an awesome project on Hackaday.io for driving phone screens using an FPGA. We haven’t seen it done with iPhone 6 yet though. Anyone up for the challenge?

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China’s Fusion Reactor Hits Milestone

February 11, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 105 Comments

An experimental fusion reactor built by the Chinese Academy of Science has hit a major milestone. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) has maintained a plasma pulse for a record 102 seconds at a temperature of 50 million degrees – three times hotter than the core of the sun.

The EAST is a tokamak, or a torus that uses superconducting magnets to compress plasma into a thin ribbon where atoms will fuse and energy will be created. For the last fifty years, most research has been dedicated to the study of tokamaks in producing fusion power, but recently several projects have challenged this idea. The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics recently saw first plasma and if results go as expected, the stellarator will be the design used in fusion power plants. Tokamaks have shortcomings; they can only be ‘pulsed’, not used continuously, and we haven’t been building tokamaks large enough to produce a net gain in power, anyway.

Other tokamaks currently in development include ITER in France. Theoretically, ITER is large enough to attain a net gain in power at 12.4 meters in diameter. EAST is much smaller, with a diameter of just 3.7 meters. It is impossible for EAST to ever produce a net gain in power, but innovations in the design that include superconducting toroidal and poloidal magnets will surely provide insight into unsolved questions in fusion reactor design.

Particle Electron – The Solution To Cellular Things

February 10, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

Just over a year ago, Particle (formerly Spark), makers of the very popular Core and Particle Photon WiFi development kits, released the first juicy tidbits for a very interesting piece of hardware. It was the Electron, a cheap, all-in-one cellular development kit with an even more interesting data plan. Particle would offer their own cellular service, allowing their tiny board to send or receive 1 Megabyte for $3.00 a month, without any contracts.

Thousands of people found this an interesting proposition and the Electron crowdfunding campaign took off like a rocket. Now, after a year of development and manufacturing, these tiny cellular boards are finally shipping out to backers and today the Electron officially launches.

Particle was kind enough to provide Hackaday with an Electron kit for a review. The short version of this review is the Electron is a great development platform, but Particle pulled off a small revolution in cellular communications and the Internet of Things

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FAA Rescinds Drone Ban Around DC

February 10, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

Late last year, the FAA expanded a Special Flight Rule Area (SFRA) that applied to Unmanned Aerial Systems, drones, and RC airplanes around Washington DC. This SFRA was created around the year 2000 – for obvious reasons – and applies to more than just quadcopters and airplanes made out of foam. Last December, the FAA expanded the SFRA from 15 nautical around a point located at Reagan National to 30 nautical miles. No remote-controlled aircraft could fly in this SFRA, effectively banning quadcopters and drones for six million people.

Today, the FAA has rescinded that ban bringing the area covered under the Washington DC SFRA to 15 nautical miles around a point inside Reagan National. This area includes The District of Columbia, Bethesda, College Park, Alexandria, and basically everything inside the beltway, plus a mile or two beyond. Things are now back to the way they were are few weeks ago.

The 30-mile SFRA included a number of model flying clubs that were shuttered because of the ban. DCRC is now back up. The Capital Area Soaring Association worked with the FAA and AMA to allow club members to fly.

Of course, limitations on remote-controlled aircraft still exist. For the most part, these are rather standard restrictions: aircraft must weigh less than 55 pounds, fly below 400 feet line of sight, and must avoid other aircraft.

Replacing The IPhone 6 Button Bricks The Phone

February 5, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 131 Comments

News comes from The Guardian that the iPhone 6 will break because of software updates due to non-authorized hardware replacements. Several thousand iPhone 6 users are claiming their phones have been bricked thanks to software updates if the home button – and the integrated TouchID fingerprint sensor – were replaced by non-Apple technicians.

For the last few iPhone generations, the TouchID fingerprint sensor has been integrated into the home button of every iPhone. This fingerprint sensor provides an additional layer of security for the iPhone, and like everything on smartphones, there is a thriving market of companies who will fix broken phones. If you walk into an Apple store, replacing the TouchID sensor will cost about $300. This part is available on Amazon for about $10, and anyone with a pentalobe screwdriver, spudger, and fine motor control can easily replace it. Doing so, however, will eventually brick the phone, as software updates render the device inoperable if the TouchID sensor is not authorized by Apple.

According to an Apple spokeswoman, the reason for the error 53 is because the fingerprint data is uniquely paired to the touch ID sensor found in the home button. If the TouchID sensor was substituted with a malicious TouchID sensor, complete and total access to the phone would be easy, providing a forehead-slapping security hole. Error 53 is just Apple’s way of detecting devices that were tampered with.

In fairness to Apple, not checking the authenticity of the touch ID would mean a huge security hole; if fingerprint data is the only thing keeping evil balaclava-wearing hackers out of your phone, simply replacing this sensor would grant them access. While this line of reasoning is valid, it’s also incredibly stupid: anyone can get around the TouchID fingerprint sensor with a laser printer and a bit of glue. If you ever get ahold of the German Defense Minister’s iPhone, the fingerprint sensor isn’t going to stop you.

This is a rare case where Apple are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. By not disabling the phone when the TouchID sensor is replaced, all iPhones are open to a gaping security hole that would send the Internet into a tizzy. By bricking each and every iPhone with a replacement TouchID sensor, Apple gets a customer support nightmare. That said, the $300 replacement cost for the TouchID sensor will get you a very nice Android phone that doesn’t have this problem.

Anti-Drone Mania Reaches Panic Levels For Superbowl

February 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 61 Comments

According to this report at FOX News Technology, the FAA may use “deadly force” against your remote-controlled quadcopter, ahem, “drone” if you’re flying within a 36-mile radius of the Super Bowl this weekend. We call shenanigans on using “deadly” for things that aren’t alive to begin with, but we have no doubt that they intend to take your toys away if you break the rules. We are curious to see how they’re going to do it, though.

The actual Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) has the details, and seems pretty comprehensive. You can’t fly your sea plane or go crop dusting either. Model rocketry is off the table within the circle on Sunday afternoon. It tickles our superiority-bone to note that only “drones” made the headlines.

But we also see our loophole! The ban only extends from the ground’s surface up to 18,000 ft (5,500 m) above sea level. (No, we’re not thinking of flying quadcopters in tunnels under the stadium.) They didn’t rule out high-altitude balloon flight over the Super Bowl? Don’t even think about it.

On the other hand, those of you near the game should count your blessings that you don’t live within 30 miles of the US Capitol and spend the day drone racing.

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Super Thin ICs Are Coming

February 2, 2016 by Al Williams 17 Comments

An ordinary integrated circuit is made of layers of material. Typically a layer is made from some material (like silicon dioxide, polysilicon, copper, or aluminum). Sometimes a process will modify parts of a layer (for example, using ion implantation to dope regions of silicon). Other times, some part of the layer will be cut away using a photolithography process.

Researchers at MIT have a new technique that allows super thin layers (1-3 atoms thick) and–even more importantly–enables you to use two materials in the same layer. They report that they have built all the basic components required to create a computer using the technique.

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