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Remoticon 2021 // Hash Salehi Outsmarts His Smart Meter

January 13, 2022 by 27 Comments

Smart meters form mesh networks among themselves and transmit your usage data all around. Some of them even allow the power company to turn off your power remotely, through the mesh. You might want to know if any of this information is sensitive, or if the power shutdown system has got glaring security flaws and random people could just turn your house off. Hash Salehi has set out to get inside these meters, and luckily for the rest of us, he was kind enough to share his findings during Remoticon 2021. It’s a journey filled with wonderful tidbits about GNU Radio, embedded devices, and running your own power company inside a Faraday cage.

The smart meter in question is deployed by a power company known as Oncor in the Dallas, Texas, area. These particular meters form an extensive mesh network using a ZigBee module onboard that allows them to to pass messages amongst themselves that eventually make their way to a collector or aggregator to be uploaded to a more central location. Hash obtained his parts via everyone’s favorite online auction house and was surprised to see how many parts were available. Then, with parts in hand, he began all the usual reverse engineering tricks: SDR, Faraday cages, flash chip readers, and recreating the schematic. Continue reading “Remoticon 2021 // Hash Salehi Outsmarts His Smart Meter” →

Four Wheel Steering, Always The Option, Never The Defining Feature

January 13, 2022 by 67 Comments

A couple of weeks ago when it emerged that a new Tesla might have a four-wheel steering capability, our colleague Dan Maloney mused aloud as to how useful a four-wheel steering system might be, and indeed whether or not one might be necessary at all. This is hardly the first time four-wheel steering has appeared as the Next Big Thing on the roads. It’s time to take a look at the subject and ask whether it’s an idea with a future, or set to go the way of runflat tyres as one of those evergreen innovations that never quite catches on.

What’s your dream vehicle? If you’re like me, you have more than one. There in my lottery-winner’s garage, alongside the trail bikes and the mobile hackerspace, the dictator-size Mercedes and the Golf Mk1, will be a vehicle that by coincidence has four-wheel steering. The JCB Fastrac is a tractor that can travel across almost any terrain at full speed, and though I have no practical use for one and will never own one, I have lusted after one of these machines for over three decades. Their four-wheel steering system is definitely unusual, but that makes it the perfect vehicle with which to demonstrate four-wheel steering. Continue reading “Four Wheel Steering, Always The Option, Never The Defining Feature” →

It's a keyboard!

The Charachorder Keyboard Is Too Fast For Competition

January 12, 2022 by 50 Comments

We interrupt the flow of Keebin’ with Kristina to bring you this special bulletin. When three different people alert you to a keyboard within 48 hours or so, it calls for more than just a paragraph in the roundup column. So here are several paragraphs, an animated GIF, and some extended commentary about the Charachorder, a new kind of input that came up through Kickstarter in 2021.

Driving this hype train are some short viral videos that show the founder hitting 500+ WPM on this crazy thing. FYI, that is fast enough to get you banned from typing competitions, including the monkeytype leaderboard. Those apes forbid chorded input altogether, and automatically throw out entries above 300 WPM. It acheives these insane speeds through clever mechanical design and, of course, firmware.

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Regenerative Medicine: The Promise Of Undoing The Ravages Of Time

January 12, 2022 by 15 Comments

In many ways, the human body is like any other machine in that it requires constant refueling and maintenance to keep functioning. Much of this happens without our intervention beyond us selecting what to eat that day. There are however times when due to an accident, physical illness or aging the automatic repair mechanisms of our body become overwhelmed, fail to do their task correctly, or outright fall short in repairing damage.

Most of us know that lizards can regrow tails, some starfish regenerate into as many new starfish as the pieces which they were chopped into, and axolotl can regenerate limbs and even parts of their brain. Yet humans too have an amazing regenerating ability, although for us it is mostly contained within the liver, which can regenerate even when three-quarters are removed.

In the field of regenerative medicine, the goal is to either induce regeneration in damaged tissues, or to replace damaged organs and tissues with externally grown ones, using the patient’s own genetic material. This could offer us a future in which replacement organs are always available at demand, and many types of injuries are no longer permanent, including paralysis. Continue reading “Regenerative Medicine: The Promise Of Undoing The Ravages Of Time” →

Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

3D Printering: Soldering A Heated Bed

January 11, 2022 by 62 Comments

There’s an old saying about something being a “drop in the ocean.” That’s how I felt faced with the prospect of replacing a 12 V heated bed on my printer with a new 24 V one. The old bed had a nice connector assembled from the factory, although I had replaced the cable long ago due to heating issues with that particular printer. The new bed, however, just had bare copper pads.

I’m no soldering novice: I made my first solder joint sometime in the early 1970s. So I felt up to the challenge, but I also knew I wouldn’t be able to use my usual Edsyn iron for a job like this. Since the heated bed is essentially a giant heatsink for these pads, I knew it would require the big guns. I dug out my old — and I mean super old — Weller 140 W soldering gun. Surely, that would do the trick, right?

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Haber-Bosch And The Greening Of Ammonia Production

January 11, 2022 by 47 Comments

We here on Earth live at the bottom of an ocean of nitrogen. Nearly 80% of every breath we take is nitrogen, and the element is a vital component of the building blocks of life. Nitrogen is critical to the backbone of proteins that form the scaffold that life hangs on and that catalyze the myriad reactions in our cells, and the information needed to build these biopolymers is encoded in nucleic acids, themselves nitrogen-rich molecules.

And yet, in its abundant gaseous form, nitrogen remains directly unavailable to higher life forms, unusably inert and unreactive. We must steal our vital supply of nitrogen from the few species that have learned the biochemical trick of turning atmospheric nitrogen into more reactive compounds like ammonia. Or at least until relatively recently, when a couple of particularly clever members of our species found a way to pull nitrogen from the air using a combination of chemistry and engineering now known as the Haber-Bosch process.

Haber-Bosch has been wildly successful, and thanks to the crops fertilized with its nitrogenous output, is directly responsible for growing the population from a billion people in 1900 to almost eight billion people today. Fully 50% of the nitrogen in your body right now probably came from a Haber-Bosch reactor somewhere, so we all quite literally depend on it for our lives. As miraculous as Haber-Bosch is, though, it’s not without its problems, particularly in this age of dwindling supplies of the fossil fuels needed to run it. Here, we’ll take a deep dive into Haber-Bosch, and we’ll also take a look at ways to potentially decarbonize our nitrogen fixation industry in the future.

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Mining And Refining: Copper, The Metal That Built Technology

January 10, 2022 by 16 Comments

It’s hard to reckon exactly when in history humans became a technological species. Part of that is because the definition of technology is somewhat subjective; if you think making a stick pointy enough to grub roots from the dirt or to poke enough holes in an animal to convince it to let you eat it is technology, then our engineered world goes back a long, long way indeed.

But something about pointy sticks just doesn’t seem transformative enough, in the sense of fundamentally changing a naturally occurring material, to really count as a technological line in the sand. To cross that line, it really seems like the use of metals should be part of the package. Even if that’s the case, our technological history still goes pretty far back. And copper ends up being one of the metals that started it all, about 11,000 years ago, when our ancestors discovered natural deposits of the soft, reddish metal and began learning how to fashion it into the tools and implements that lifted us out of the Stone Age.

Our world literally cannot run without copper, forming as it does not only the electric-motor muscles of civilization, but also the wires and cables that form the power and data grids that stitch us together. Ironically, we are just as dependent on copper now as we were when it was the only metal we could make tools from, and perhaps more so. We’ll take a look at what’s involved in extracting and purifying copper, and see how the methods we today use are not entirely different from those developed over seven millennia ago.

Continue reading “Mining And Refining: Copper, The Metal That Built Technology” →