Hacker Diary: Embedded World 2022

June 25, 2022 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Yesterday I went up to the Embedded World trade fair in Nuremburg, Germany. As a lone hacker, you often feel more than a little out of place when you buy chips in single unit quantities and the people you’re talking to are used to minimum order quantities of a million. But what’s heartening is how, once you ask an interesting question, even some of the suit-wearing types flip into full-on kids who like to explain the fun tech. I struck up conversations with more than a couple VPs of global chip behemoths, and they were cool.

But my heart is still with the smaller players, and the hackers. That’s where the innovation is. I met up with Colin O’Flynn, of Chip Whisperer fame — his company is selling fancier chip-glitching tools, but he still had a refined version of the open source, quick-and-dirty zapper circuit from his Remoticon talk last year. There was a small local company producing virtual buttons that were essentially Pepper’s Ghost illusions floating in mid-air, and the button press was detected by reflective IR. Cool tech, but I forgot the company’s name — sorry!

Less forgettable was Dracula Technologies, a French company making inkjet-printable organic solar cells. While they wouldn’t go into deep details about the actual chemistry of what they’re doing, I could tell that it pained them to not tell me when I asked. Anyway, it’s a cool low-power solar tech that would be awesome if it were more widespread. I think they’re just one of many firms in this area; keep your eyes on organic solar.

When talking with a smaller German FPGA manufacturer, Cologne Chip, about their business, I finally asked about the synthesis flow and was happily surprised to hear that they were dedicated to the fully open-source Yosys toolchain. As far as I know, they’re one of the only firms who have voluntarily submitted their chips’ specs to the effort. Very cool! (And a sign of things to come? You can always hope.)

I met a more than a few Hackaday readers just by randomly stumbling around, which also shows that the hacker spirit is alive in companies big and small. All of the companies have to make demos to attract our attention, but from talking to the people who make them, they have just as much fun building them as you or I would.

And last but not least, I ran into Hackaday regular Chris Gammell and my old boss and good friend Mike Szczys who were there representing the IoT startup Golioth, and trying to fool me into using an RTOS on microcontrollers. (Never say never.) We had an awesome walkaround and a great dinner.

If you ever get the chance to go to a trade show like this, even if you feel like you might be out of your league, I encourage you to attend anyway. You’d be surprised how many cool geeks are hiding in the least likely of places.

[Banner image: Embedded World]

NASA Called, They Want Their Cockroaches Back

June 25, 2022 by Al Williams 29 Comments

News hit earlier this month that the infamous “cockroach moon dust” was up for auction? Turns out, NASA is trying to block the sale as they assert that they own all the lunar material brought back from the Apollo missions. What? You didn’t know about cockroach moon dust? Well, it is a long and — frankly — weird story.

It may sound silly now, but there was real concern in 1969 that Apollo 11 might bring back something harmful. So much so that NASA tricked out an RV and kept the astronauts and a volunteer in it for about three weeks after they came home. During that time they were tested and some experiments were done to see if they’d been exposed to anything nasty.

One of those experiments was to feed lunar dust to cockroaches (by the way, the table of contents has a mistake in it — check out page 8). Seriously. But that isn’t even the really weird part. A scientist who worked on the project by the name of Marion Brooks decided she wanted a memento, so she extracted the lunar dust from the dead cockroaches and saved it in a vial. At least we learned a new word: chyme.

RR Auction — the RR stands for Remarkable Rarities — was starting the bidding for some dead cockroaches and a vial of chyme at about 12 grand but it was sure to go higher than that, perhaps up to $400,000 USD. That was before they got a cease and desist from NASA.

It appears the collection has been sold at least once before. NASA has cracked down on anyone selling lunar material as even those given to people are considered on loan from the agency. However, many of the rocks given to different countries and state governments are now unaccounted for.

Back in 2002, interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler worked in the building where NASA stores most of the moon rocks it has. They took a 600-pound safe containing about 100 grams of moon samples and some other materials. With some help, Roberts tried to fence them to an amateur rock collector who helped the FBI set up a sting. Roberts got over 8 years in federal prison for his efforts, just a little more than an accomplice, Gordon McWhorter, who claimed to have been duped by Roberts. There have been a few other cases of theft, most of which remain unsolved.

This is one of those tricky things. From NASA’s point of view, they own all the moon rocks (with a few exceptions, mostly of material that didn’t come from Apollo). If you steal them, they want them back and if you are given them on loan they don’t appreciate you giving them away, selling them, or losing them. On the other hand, outside of outright theft like the Roberts case, it is hard to imagine that you want to control old roach chyme.

There’s two things we do wonder. First, who saves roach chyme even if it did start as lunar dust? Second, if three little pebbles brought back by the Soviet Luna 16 probe sold for over $850,000 and this dust might have gone for $400,000, why aren’t more of these “New Space” startups scrambling to bring some fresh samples back? Seems like it might pay for itself.

Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be

June 16, 2022 by Kristina Panos 85 Comments

Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head.

This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version what I’m talking about. Our circumstances may vary wildly, but the outcome is the same: working from home is pretty awesome, but, some small, secret part of us longs for the office. Why is that?

The answer will be different for everyone. Maybe you’re a social butterfly who misses face-time and the din of familiar voices. Maybe you just appreciate the physical separation between work and home life. If you’re lucky, the choice to go to the office is yours at this point, and if not, well, we have to wonder if you’re looking for new work. It’s 2022, we’re still in a pandemic, and of course there’s this, that, and the other multi-national Dumpster fire you haven’t heard about yet. Isn’t it time we prioritized work output over office attendance when it comes to our livelihoods?

To no one’s surprise, few major companies agree with me. Elon recently decreed that ‘remote work is no longer acceptable‘, and that those who want to work remotely may only do so as a reward after serving a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office. Apple tried to enforce three appearances a week until they received an open letter with 1,000+ signatures against.

Continue reading “Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be” →

Eliza And The Google Intelligence

June 15, 2022 by Al Williams 130 Comments

The news has been abuzz lately with the news that a Google engineer — since put on leave — has announced that he believes the chatbot he was testing achieved sentience. This is the Turing test gone wild, and it isn’t the first time someone has anthropomorphized a computer in real life and in fiction. I’m not a neuroscientist so I’m even less qualified to explain how your brain works than the neuroscientists who, incidentally, can’t explain it either. But I can tell you this: your brain works like a computer, in the same way that you building something out of plastic works like a 3D printer. The result may be similar, but the path to get there is totally different.

In case you haven’t heard, a system called LaMDA digests information from the Internet and answers questions. It has said things like “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is,” and “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Great. But you could teach a parrot to tell you he was a thoracic surgeon but you still don’t want it cutting you open.

Continue reading “Eliza And The Google Intelligence” →

Ask Hackaday: Is Bigger (E-mail) Better?

June 13, 2022 by Al Williams 30 Comments

While pundits routinely predict the end of e-mail, we still get a ton of it and we bet you do too. E-mail has been around for a very long time and back in the day, it was pretty high-tech to be able to shoot off a note asking everyone where they wanted to go to lunch. What we had on our computers back then was a lot different, too. Consider that the first e-mail over ARPANET was in 1971. Back then some people had hardcopy terminals. Graphics were unusual and your main storage was probably a fraction of the smallest flash drive you currently have on your desk. No one was sending photographs, videos, or giant PDF files.

Today, things are different. Our computers have gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. We produce and consume richly formatted documents, photographs at high resolutions, and even video. Naturally, we want to share those files with others, yet e-mail has turned up woefully short. Sure, some systems will offer to stash your large file in the cloud and send a link, but e-mailing a multi-megabyte video to your friend across town is more likely to simply fail. Why?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Is Bigger (E-mail) Better?” →

The Box: Think Outside Of It

May 28, 2022 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

There’s no single recipe for creativity, as far as I know. But this week on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were talking about a number of hacks that were particularly inventive, out-of-the-box, or just simply “how did they think of that?”. One possible route to something new is learning from other disciplines.

We were talking about an inspiring video about 3D printing fabrics. At the moment, the design world is going crazy for all things 3DP, so it’s no surprise to see someone with a design background asking herself how to make stuff that comes off the 3D printer more flexible, and fit her needs a little bit better. But what if those of us on the building-purely-functional side of things took what the fabric folks learned and applied it to our work? You’d get something like this hybrid approach to folding mechanisms, or this approach to remove supports from your prints.

I’m continually surprised by how much the home-gamer can learn from industry, and this week was also no exception. [Anne Ogborn]’s piece on handling bulk material draws mostly on the hard work of engineers who are worried about properly emptying gigantic grain silos or feeding tons of screws into small boxes to ship out to customers. But the same physics are at work when you’re designing an automatic dry cat food dispenser for your next vacation, just on a smaller scale.

How about you? What things have you learned from other disciplines, possibly entirely unrelated ones, that have helped you with your hacking?

The Joy Of Broadcast Media Vs. The Paradox Of Choice

May 25, 2022 by Lewin Day 61 Comments

The rise of streaming services on the Internet was a revolutionary shift when it came to the world of media. No more would content be pumped in to homes in a one-way fashion, broadcast by major conglomerates and government-run organizations. Instead, individuals would be free to hunt for content suiting their own desires on an all-you-can-watch basis.

It’s led to a paradigm shift in the way we consume media. However, it’s also led to immense frustration thanks to the overwhelming amount of content on offer. Let’s take a look at why that is, and some creative ways you can get around the problem.

The Paradox of Choice

Many find the masses of content on streaming services to be overwhelming to choose from. Credit: author screenshot

Traditionally, when it came to media, there were two major arms of delivery: broadcast, and home media. One might listen to the radio, or flick on the TV, or alternatively, spin up a record, or select a movie to watch on tape. If none of those options sufficed, one might take a walk down to the local video store to rent something more appealing.

Fundamentally, it was an era in which choices were limited. There were a handful of TV stations to choose from, and if nothing good was on, you could go as far as finding something watchable on tape or going without. Many will remember afternoons and evenings spent watching reruns or a Friday night movie that had been on a million times before. Some shows went as far as becoming legends for their seemingly endless replay, from The Simpsons to M*A*S*H.

As the Internet grew, though, the game started to change. Torrent websites and streaming services came along, offering up the sum total of the world’s cultural output for free, or for a nominal cost for those averse to piracy. Suddenly when it came to choosing a movie to watch, one wasn’t limited to the five or so films on at the local cinema, nor what was left on the shelves at the local video rental. Instead, virtually any movie, from the invention of the format, could be yours to watch at a moment’s notice.

With so many options on the table, many of us find it harder to choose. It’s an idea popularly known as the Paradox of Choice, a term popularized by US psychologist Barry Schwartz in 2004. When our options are limited to a select few, choice is easy. They can quickly be compared and ranked and an ideal option chosen.

Add thousands of choices to the pile, and the job escalates in complexity to the point of becoming overwhelming. With so many different choices to contrast and compare, finding the mythical right choice becomes practically impossible. Continue reading “The Joy Of Broadcast Media Vs. The Paradox Of Choice” →