Console Identity In The Age Of PlayStation 5 And Xbox Series

October 26, 2020 by Drew Littrell 22 Comments

Consoles are obsolete the minute they are released. The onward march of silicon innovation ensures that consoles never are able to keep up with the times, but technical superiority rarely results in being remembered. That kind of legacy is defined by the experiences a device provides. A genre defining game, a revolutionary approach to media, or a beloved controller can be enough to sway popular opinion. But really…it all boils down to a box. All the spurious promises of world-class hardware specs, all the overly ambitious software ship dates, and even the questionable fast-food crossover promotions exist in service to the box. The boxes vying for attention in 2020 A.D. are the PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X/S/Seriessss (XSX or whatever the common nomenclature eventually shakes out to be). These boxes likely represent the minimum spec for the next decade in big-budget video games, however, it is the core identity of those consoles that will define the era.

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Get Over Your Fears

October 24, 2020 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

Some projects are just too complex, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet that some things you think are too difficult actually aren’t, and it may be that all you need to get over your personal hurdle is a good demonstration. Here come three cases in point.

I was looking at the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module last weekend. They have a whole bunch of high-speed traces: things like Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and those crazy-fast SDI serial camera interfaces. I have no experience in high-speed design and layout at all, and frankly it gives me the willies. But the Raspberries also shipped me an IO demo board, and concomitant KiCAD design files, with the review board. Looking at it, they were just wires — maybe pairwise length-matched and impedance controlled — but also just wires. Opening up the KiCAD board file and clicking on the traces just like I do with my own designs, I’m a lot less scared. That was a revelation for me.

In a great writeup of his experience building ten different Linux single-board-computers from scratch, Jay Carlson had a similar effect on me. I would never have considered breaking out the hotplate for some CPU-and-DRAM action, and I’ve never had to lay out a PCB with a high density BGA chip before either. I’m not quite into Dunning-Kruger territory yet; I still have a healthy respect for the layout intricacies in fanning out a tight BGA CPU into a DRAM. But Jay’s frank assessments of what is easy and what is hard make it all seem within the realm of the doable.

As Mike and I were talking on the podcast about Jay’s work, Mike came clean about his fear of BGAs. I’ve done enough reflow-plate soldering, with parts that have a lead pitch that’s a factor of two finer than the 0.8 mm pitch BGAs in question, so it doesn’t seem implausible to me. And I’m 100% sure Mike could pull it off too, but he is in need of a BGA guru. Any good hobbyist videos out there?

Being a nerdy type, I’m much more focused on the knowledge and the inspiration, but maybe the courage is equally important — at least I think I undervalue it. I don’t need to lay out HDMI lines, or build a from-scratch Linux box, but I am no longer afraid that I couldn’t, and that’s because I’ve seen detailed examples of fellow hackers who’ve done the same. I might not get it right on the first shot, but I’m not afraid to try, and I wouldn’t have said the same before looking over other folks’ shoulders. Forza e corragio!

Hackaday Podcast 090: DIY Linux SBC, HDMI CEC, Fake Bluepills, And SCARA Arms

October 23, 2020 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chat about our favourite hacks from the past week. We start off with a bit of news of the Bennu asteroid and the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module. We drive ourselves crazy trying to understand how bobbin holders on sewing machines work, all while drooling over the mechanical brilliance of a bobbin-winding build. SCARA is the belt and pulley champion of robot arms and this week’s example cleverly uses redundant bearings for better precision. And we wrap up the show looking in on longform articles about the peppering of microcontrollers found on the Bluepill and wondering what breakthroughs are left to be found for internal combustion.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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This Week In Security: Too Little Too Late, And Other Stories

October 23, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

Microsoft has just announced a way to disable JScript in Internet Explorer. This would have been very useful a few years ago, to proactively prevent problems found in the now-ancient JScript engine, which ran their own slightly different version of standard JavaScript. Even though IE is no longer under active development, it still receives security updates. JScript, on the other hand, is basically done. If you’re one of the 1.06% that still use IE, then go flip the switch to protect yourself from additional JScript vulnerabilities.

Zerologon and Samba?

Samba is an open source re-implemenation of Microsoft’s SMB protocol. There’s a clever term that describes the reality of this situation: “Bug for bug compatibility”. Remember Zerologon, the flaw where a security token’s generation could be manipulated to vastly reduce the key space? Samba follows the specification, and therefore suffers from the same issue, though it seems to be unusual to actually run Samba in a vulnerable configuration.

Other implementations cannot say the same. QNAP in particular has been bitten by Zerologon when configured as a domain controller. What’s not clear is whether QNAP is running Samba on the NAS products, or if this is yet another vulnerable implementation. Either way, go update your devices. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Too Little Too Late, And Other Stories” →

Clacker Hacker: Popping A Cap In A Brother EP43 Thermal Typewriter

October 22, 2020 by Kristina Panos 27 Comments

A few months ago, I fell down the internet rabbit hole known as Ted Munk’s typewriter site. I don’t remember if I just saw this Brother EP43 typewriter for sale and searched for information about them, or went looking for one after reading about them. Either way, the result is the same — I gained a typewriter.

Now I’m not really a typewriter collector or anything, and this is my first word processor typewriter. When it arrived from Goodwill, I anxiously popped four ‘C’ cells in and hoped for the best. It made a print head noise, so that was a good sign. But almost immediately after that, there was a BANG! and then a puff of smoke wafted out from the innards. My tiny typewriter was toast. Continue reading “Clacker Hacker: Popping A Cap In A Brother EP43 Thermal Typewriter” →

STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

October 22, 2020 by Maya Posch 90 Comments

Whenever a product becomes popular, it’s only a matter of time before other companies start feeling the urge to hitch a ride on this popularity. This phenomenon is the primary reason why so many terrible toys and video games have been produced over the years. Yet it also drives the world of electronics. Hence it should come as no surprise that ST’s highly successful ARM-based series of microcontrollers (MCUs) has seen its share of imitations, clones and outright fakes.

The fakes are probably the most problematic, as those chips pretend to be genuine STM32 parts down to the markings on the IC package, while compatibility with the part they are pretending to be can differ wildly. For the imitations and clones that carry their own markings, things are a bit more fuzzy, as one could reasonably pretend that those companies just so happened to have designed MCUs that purely by coincidence happen to be fully pin- and register compatible with those highly popular competing MCU designs. That would be the sincerest form of flattery.

Let’s take a look at which fakes and imitations are around, and what it means if you end up with one. Continue reading “STM32 Clones: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” →

Taking A Crack At The Traveling Salesman Problem

October 21, 2020 by Matthew Carlson 16 Comments

The human mind is a path-planning wizard. Think back to pre-lockdown days when we all ran multiple errands back to back across town. There was always a mental dance in the back of your head to make sense of how you planned the day. It might go something like “first to the bank, then to drop off the dry-cleaning. Since the post office is on the way to the grocery store, I’ll pop by and send that box that’s been sitting in the trunk for a week.”

This sort of mental gymnastics doesn’t come naturally to machines — it’s actually a famous problem in computer science known as the traveling salesman problem. While it is classified in the industry as an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, a more succinct and understandable definition would be: given a list of destinations, what’s the best round-trip route that visits every location?

This summer brought news that the 44-year old record for solving the problem has been broken. Let’s take a look at why this is a hard problem, and how the research team from the University of Washington took a different approach to achieve the speed up.

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