Keith Thorne, Engineer At LIGO, To Deliver Remoticon Keynote

October 11, 2021 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

It is my pleasure to announce that Keith Thorne has graciously agreed to deliver a keynote take at Hackaday Remoticon 2. Get your ticket now!

Keith is an astrophysicist and has worked on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) since 2008, literally looking for ripples in space-time that you know as gravitational waves. The effects of the phenomena are so subtle that detecting an event requires planet-scale sensors in the form of 4 km long interferometers placed in different parts of the United States whose readings can be compared against one another. A laser beam inside these interferometers bounces back and forth 300 times for a total travel distance of 1,200 km in which any interaction with gravitational waves will ever-so-slightly alter how the photons from the beam register.

The challenges of building, operating, and interpreting such a device are manifold. These interferometers are the highest precision devices ever devised, able to detect motion 1/10,000 of the diameter of a proton! To get there, the mirrors need to be cooled to 77 nano-Kelvins. Getting the most out of it is what Keith and the rest of the team specialize in. This has included things like hacking the Linux kernel to achieve a sufficient level of real-time digital control, and using “squeezed light” to improve detection sensitivity in frequencies where quantum mechanics is getting in the way. While the detectors were first run in 2015 & 2016, successfully observing three events, the work to better understand this phenomenon is ongoing and may include a third site in India, and a space-based detector in the future.

In getting to know Keith he mentioned that he is excited to speak to a conference packed with people who want to hear the gory technical details of this fantastic piece of hardware. I’m sure we’re all giddy to learn what he has to say. But if you’re someone who wants to work on a project like this, he tipped us off that there’s an active EE job posting for LIGO right now. Maybe you’ll end up doing the keynote at a future Hackaday conference.

Call for Proposals is Still Open!

We’re still on the hunt for great talks about hardware creation. True creativity is fed by a steady stream of inspiration. Be that inspiration by giving a talk about the kinds of things you’ve been working on!

Things Are Looking Brighter! But Not The Stars

October 11, 2021 by Bob Baddeley 37 Comments

Growing up in Montana I remember looking out at night and seeing the Milky Way, reminding me of my insignificance in the universe. Now that I live in a city, such introspection is no longer easy, and like 1/2 of humanity that also lives in urban areas, I must rely on satellites to provide the imagery. Yet satellites are part of the problem. Light pollution has been getting worse for decades, and with the recent steady stream of satellite launches and billionaire joyrides we have a relatively new addition to the sources of interference. So how bad is it, and how much worse will it get?

Looking up at the night sky, you can usually tell the difference between various man-made objects. Planes go fairly slowly across the sky, and you can sometimes see them blinking green and red. Meteors are fast and difficult to see. Geostationary satellites don’t appear to move at all because they are orbiting at the same rate as earth’s rotation, while other orbit types will zip by.

SpaceX has committed to reducing satellite brightness, and some observations have confirmed that new models are a full magnitude darker, right at the threshold of naked-eye observation. Unfortunately, it’s only a step in the right direction, and not enough to satisfy astronomers, who aren’t looking up at the night sky with their naked eyes, naturally.

The satellites aren’t giving off the light themselves. They are merely reflecting the light from the sun back to the earth, exactly the same way the moon is. Thus something that is directly in the shadow of the Earth will not reflect any light, but near the horizon the reflection from the satellites can be significant. It’s not practical to only focus our observatories in the narrow area that is the Earth’s shadow during the night, so we must look closer to the horizon and capture the reflections of the satellites. Continue reading “Things Are Looking Brighter! But Not The Stars” →

Hackers And China

October 9, 2021 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

The open source world and Chinese manufacturing have a long relationship. Some fifteen years ago, the big topic was how companies could open-source their hardware designs and not get driven bankrupt by competition from overseas. Companies like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Arduino, Maple Labs, Pololu, and many more demonstrated that this wasn’t impossible after all.

Maybe ten years ago, Chinese firms started picking up interesting hacker projects and producing them. This gave us hits like the AVR transistor tester and the NanoVNA. In the last few years, we’ve seen open-source hardware and software projects that have deliberately targeted Chinese manufacturers, and won. We do the design and coding, they do the manufacturing, sales, and distribution.

But this is something else: the Bangle.js watch takes an essentially mediocre Chinese smartwatch and reflashes the firmware, and sells them as open-source smartwatches to the general public. These pre-hacked watches are being sold on Kickstarter, and although the works stands on the shoulders of previous hacker’s reverse engineering work on the non-open watch hardware, it’s being sold by the prime mover behind the Espruino JavaScript-on-embedded language, which it runs on.

We have a cheap commodity smartwatch, being sold with frankly mediocre firmware, taken over by hackers, re-flashed, re-branded, and sold by the hackers on Kickstarter. As a result of it being (forcibly) opened, there’s a decently sized app store of contributed open-source applications that’ll run on the platform, making it significantly more useful and hacker friendly than it was before.

Will this boost sales? Will China notice the hackers’ work? Will this, and similar projects, end up in yet another new hacker/China relationship? We’re watching.

This Week In Security: Apache Nightmare, REvil Arrests? And The Ultimate RickRoll

October 8, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 14 Comments

The Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.49 has a blistering vulnerability, and it’s already being leveraged in attacks. CVE-2021-41773 is a simple path traversal flaw, where the %2e encoding is used to bypass filtering. Thankfully the bug was introduced in 2.4.49, the latest release, and a hotfix has already been released, 2.4.50.

curl --data "echo;id" 'http://127.0.0.1:80/cgi-bin/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/bin/sh'

If that returns anything other than a 403 error, your server may be vulnerable. It’s worth pointing out that Apache is shipped with a configuration block that mitigates this vulnerability.

# Deny access to the entirety of your server's filesystem. You must # explicitly permit access to web content directories in other # blocks below. # <Directory /> AllowOverride none Require all denied </Directory>

The Day The Internet Stood Still

You might have noticed a bit of a kerfluffel on the Internet on Monday. Facebook dropped out for nearly six hours. While the break was nice for some, it was a major problem for others. What exactly happened? The most apparent cause was that the Facebook.com domain was returning nxdomain to DNS lookups. This led to some fun tweets, with screen caps showing Facebook.com for sale.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Apache Nightmare, REvil Arrests? And The Ultimate RickRoll” →

Creating Methane From Captured Carbon Dioxide And The Future Of Carbon Capture

October 7, 2021 by Maya Posch 125 Comments

There’s something intrinsically simple about the concept of carbon (CO₂) capture: you simply have the CO₂ molecules absorbed or adsorbed by something, after which you separate the thus captured CO₂ and put it somewhere safe. Unfortunately, in physics and chemistry what seems easy and straightforward tends to be anything but simple, let alone energy efficient. While methods for carbon capture have been around for decades, making it economically viable has always been a struggle.

This is true both for carbon capture and storage/sequestration (CCS) as well as carbon capture and utilization (CCU). Whereas the former seeks to store and ideally permanently remove (sequester) carbon from the atmosphere, the latter captures carbon dioxide for use in e.g. industrial processes.

Recently, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has announced a breakthrough CCU concept, involving using a new amine-based solvent (2-EEMPA) that is supposed to be not only more efficient than e.g. the previously commonly used MEA, but also compatible with directly creating methane in the same process.

Since methane forms the major component in natural gas, might this be a way for CCU to create a carbon-neutral source of synthetic natural gas (SNG)? Continue reading “Creating Methane From Captured Carbon Dioxide And The Future Of Carbon Capture” →

Decoding SMD Part Markings

October 6, 2021 by Chris Lott 29 Comments

You’ve probably encountered this before — you have a circuit board that is poorly documented, and want to know the part number of a tiny SMD chip. Retro computer enthusiast [JohnK] recently tweeted about one such database that he recently found, entitled The Ultimate SMD Marking Codes Database. This data base is only a couple of years old judging from the Wayback Machine, but seems to be fairly exhaustive and can be found referenced in quite a few electronics forums.

Unlike their larger SMD siblings, these chips in question are so small that there is no room to print the entire part number on the device. Instead, the standard practice is for manufacturers use an abbreviated code of just a few characters. These codes are only unique to each part or package, and aren’t necessarily unique across an entire product line. And just because it is standard practice does not imply the marking codes themselves follow any standard whatsoever. This seemingly hodgepodge system works just fine for the development, procurement and manufacturing phases of a product’s lifecycle. It’s during the repair, refurbishment, or just hacking for fun phases where these codes can leave you scratching your head.

Several sites like the one [JohnK] found have been around for years, and adding yet another database to your toolbox is a good thing. But none of them will ever be exhaustive. There’s a good reason for that — maintaining such a database would be a herculean task. Just finding the part marking information for a known chip can be difficult. Some manufacturers put it clearly in the data sheet, and some refer you to other documentation which may or may not be readily available. And some manufacturers ask you to contact them for this information — presumably because it is dynamic changes from time to time. Continue reading “Decoding SMD Part Markings” →

3D Printering: Corrugated Plastic For Cheaper & Easier Enclosures

October 6, 2021 by Donald Papp 37 Comments

Clear acrylic panels have long been a mainstay of 3D printer enclosure designs, but they can also add significant cost in terms of money, shipping, weight, and hassle. An alternative material worth looking at is corrugated plastic (also known by its trade name coroplast) which is cheap, light, an excellent insulator, and easy to work with. Many enclosure designs can be refitted to use it instead of acrylic, so let’s take a closer look at what it has to offer.

What’s Wrong With Acrylic?

It’s not just the purchase price that makes acrylic a spendy option. Acrylic is fairly heavy, and shipping pieces the size of enclosure panels can be expensive. Also, cutting acrylic without special tools can be a challenge because it cracks easily if mishandled. Acrylic cuts beautifully in a laser cutter, but most laser cutters accessible to a hobbyist are not big enough to make enclosure-sized panels. If you are stuck with needing to cut acrylic by hand, here are some tips on how to get by with the tools you have.

It is best to source acrylic from a local shop that can also cut it to size with the right tools for a reasonable price, but it is still far from being a cheap material. There’s another option: corrugated plastic has quite a few properties that make it worth considering, especially for a hobbyist.

Continue reading “3D Printering: Corrugated Plastic For Cheaper & Easier Enclosures” →