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Hackaday Links: July 14, 2024

July 14, 2024 by 11 Comments

We’ve been going on at length in this space about the death spiral that AM radio seems to be in, particularly in the automotive setting. Car makers have begun the process of phasing AM out of their infotainment systems, ostensibly due to its essential incompatibility with the electronics in newer vehicles, especially EVs. That argument always seemed a little specious to us, since the US has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to making sure everyone works and plays well with each other on the electromagnetic spectrum. The effort to drop AM resulted in pushback from US lawmakers, who threatened legislation to ensure every vehicle has the ability to receive AM broadcasts, on the grounds of its utility in a crisis and that we’ve spent billions ensuring that 80% of the population is within range of an AM station.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 14, 2024” →

It’s Not Unusual To Love Hacking

July 13, 2024 by 21 Comments

Most of what we do here at Hackaday is look out for cool projects and then write them up so that you all know about them. Nothing is better than being really stoked about a clever hack and then being able to share it with tens of thousands of like-minded folks. Sure, it’s our job, but we really do it because we love to share. And it’s clear that you all do too! After all, we write up the hacks that you document for us.

We recently featured a hack where the guy who did the work in question said that he didn’t think it was “worthy of Hackaday”. (Of course, it was!) And I don’t like that sentiment at all, honestly, because a hack that you enjoyed doing is a hack worth sharing, even if just for sharing the joy of doing it, and that came across fully.

Of course we gladly feature the ultra-bravado hacks where the nearly impossible is made real. But there’s equal value in the simple hacks that inspire others to pursue one odd path or another. Or even pieces where there’s no hack involved, but simply the sharing of something cool.

This week, [Arya Voronova] wrote a piece about her experience using MicroPython on embedded devices, and it apparently resonated with a lot of our readers. It’s not a deep-dive into MicroPython, or a mind-bending abuse of the language. Instead, it’s a simple “this is what I love about doing things this way”, and that’s a great perspective that often gets lost when we get deep in the technical weeds.

I had the same realization a few months back at Hackaday Europe. In the lightning talks, most everyone gave talks about cool projects that they are working on, and they’re absolutely worth watching for that. [Jaap Meijers] gave a wonderful talk about making animated QR codes, but it wasn’t about how he invented animated QR codes, because he was just using someone else’s project. Instead, it was about how neat he thought someone else’s work was, and how he really wanted to share it with us. (And now you know too.)

Epic hacks are fantastic, no question. But the simple expression of the love of hacking, whether in words or in the doing, is equally important. Show us your work, but don’t forget to show us your joy along the way.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Hackaday Podcast Episode 279: Solar Flares, Flash Cells, And Free Airline WiFi

July 12, 2024 by 1 Comment

Get your weekly fix of great hacks with your guides, Elliot Williams and Al Williams. This week, the guys talk about hacking airline WiFi, vanishing cloud services, and hobbies adjacent to hacking, such as general aviation. Things go into the weird and wonderful when the topic turns to cavity filters, driving LEDs with a candle, and thermite.

Quick hacks? Everything from vintage automated telescopes to home fusion reactors and ham radio mobile from a bicycle. Then there’s the can’t miss articles about the Solar Dynamics Observatory and an explainer about flash memory technology.

Check out the links below and leave your favorite hack of the week in the comments below!

As always, this week’s episode is freeze-dried as an MP3 for your convenience.

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This Week In Security: Blast-RADIUS, Gitlab, And Plormbing

July 12, 2024 by 6 Comments

The RADIUS authentication scheme, short for “Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service”, has been widely deployed for user authentication in all sorts of scenarios. It’s a bit odd, in that individual users authenticate to a “RADIUS Client”, sometimes called a Network Access Server (NAS). In response to an authentication request, a NAS packages up the authentication details, and sends it to a central RADIUS server for verification. The server then sends back a judgement on the authentication request, and if successful the user is authenticated to the NAS/client.

The scheme was updated to its current form in 1994, back when MD5 was considered a cryptographically good hash. It’s been demonstrated that MD5 has problems, most notably a chosen-prefix collision attack demonstrated in 2007. The basis of this collision attack is that given two arbitrary messages, it is possible to find a pair of values that, when appended to the end of those messages, result in matching md5 hashes for each combined message. It turns out this is directly applicable to RADIUS.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Blast-RADIUS, Gitlab, And Plormbing” →

Embedded Python: MicroPython Is Amazing

July 11, 2024 by 104 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, about a month ago MicroPython has celebrated its 11th birthday. I was lucky that I was able to start hacking with it soon after pyboards have shipped – the first tech talk I remember giving was about MicroPython, and that talk was how I got into the hackerspace I subsequently spent years in. Since then, MicroPython been a staple in my projects, workshops, and hacking forays.

If you’re friends with Python or you’re willing to learn, you might just enjoy it a lot too. What’s more, MicroPython is an invaluable addition to a hacker’s toolkit, and I’d like to show you why. Continue reading “Embedded Python: MicroPython Is Amazing” →

PCB Design Review: HAB Tracker With ATMega328P

July 10, 2024 by 15 Comments

Welcome to the Design Review Central! [VE3SVF] sends us their board, and it’s a HAB (High Altitude Balloon) tracker board. It’s got the venerable ATMega28P on it, a LoRa modem and a GPS module, and it can be powered from a LiIon battery. Stick this board with its battery onto a high-altitude balloon, have it wake up and transmit your coordinates every once in a while, and eventually you’ll find it in a field – if you’re lucky. Oherwise, it will get stuck hanging on a tree branch, and you will have to use a quadcopter to try and get it down, and then, in all likelihood, a second quadcopter so that you can free the first one. Or go get a long ladder.

The ATMega328P is tried and true, and while it’s been rising in price, it’s still available – with even an updated version that sports a few more peripherals; most importantly, you’re sure to find a 328P in your drawer, if not multiple. Apart from that, the board uses two modules from a Chinese manufacturer, G-Nice, for both GPS and Lora. Both of these modules are cheap, making this tracker all that more accessible; I could easily see this project being sold as a “build your own beacon” kit!

Let’s make it maybe a little nicer, maybe a little cheaper, and maybe decrease the power consumption a tad along the way. We’ll use some of the old tricks, a few new ones, and talk about project-specific aspects that might be easy to miss.

Continue reading “PCB Design Review: HAB Tracker With ATMega328P” →

Solar Dynamics Observatory: Our Solar Early Warning System

July 9, 2024 by 3 Comments

Ever since the beginning of the Space Age, the inner planets and the Earth-Moon system have received the lion’s share of attention. That makes sense; it’s a whole lot easier to get to the Moon, or even to Mars, than it is to get to Saturn or Neptune. And so our probes have mostly plied the relatively cozy confines inside the asteroid belt, visiting every world within them and sometimes landing on the surface and making a few holes or even leaving some footprints.

But there’s still one place within this warm and familiar neighborhood that remains mysterious and relatively unvisited: the Sun. That seems strange, since our star is the source of all energy for our world and the system in general, and its constant emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum and its occasional physical outbursts are literally a matter of life and death for us. When the Sun sneezes, we can get sick, and it has the potential to be far worse than just a cold.

While we’ve had a succession of satellites over the last decades that have specialized in watching the Sun, it’s not the easiest celestial body to observe. Most spacecraft go to great lengths to avoid the Sun’s abuse, and building anything to withstand the lashing our star can dish out is a tough task. But there’s one satellite that takes everything that the Sun dishes out and turns it into a near-constant stream of high-quality data, and it’s been doing it for almost 15 years now. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has also provided stunning images of the Sun, like this CGI-like sequence of a failed solar eruption. Images like that have captured imaginations during this surprisingly active solar cycle, and emphasized the importance of SDO in our solar early warning system.

Continue reading “Solar Dynamics Observatory: Our Solar Early Warning System” →