This week Jonathan chats with Jonathan Pallant about embedded Rust! Learn about the growing Rust driver library, the different ways to build a Rust stack on an embedded device, and how the opinionated tooling can make you a better programmer!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 878: A Tool With Opinions”
The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer that was very influential in its time. That’s what inspired [vanheusden] to start working on an emulator for the machine in 2018, which has since been developed to run on a wide variety of platforms.
The emulator, named “Kek,” is quite capable, able to run Unix 5 up to an d including Unix 7 in multi-user mode, along with BSD 2.11 Unix depending on what it’s running on. It also supports classic hardware like RK05, RL02, RP06, and RP07 disks, the KW11-L line time clock, and the DC-11 serial line interface. The emulator can also run on a wide variety of platforms. It’s possible to run it on a standard Linux machine if so desired, or you can run it on BSD, MacOS, or Windows if so desired. Beyond that, you can even get it going on a Teensy 4.1 or an ESP32 if that’s more your jam. Modern microcontrollers are just that powerful that emulating a PDP-11/70 just isn’t a challenge anymore.
We love seeing old machines emulated and brought back to life. It’s funny to see how often it’s done on microcontrollers instead of full-scale PCs these days, too. Video after the break.
This week Jonathan chats with Francois Proulx about SmokedMeat! That’s the third in a trio of Open Source security tools from Boost Security, and this one is the red team tool to demonstrate vulnerabilities. Why are Continuous Integration vulnerabilities such a persistent problem, and what’s on the horizon that may help? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 877: RCE As A Service”
The exciting part of buying a ‘broken, for parts’ off a site like EBay is that you rarely know exactly just how ‘broken’ it truly is. Even if the seller insists that it’s thoroughly buggered, you just might be able to eke out a fix with some out-of-the-box thinking and plucky ingenuity. Such was the case for [Dieter Vansteenwegen] who gambled on a cheap Canon 7D Mark II DSLR body that was sold for a mere €180 on account of said broken condition.
After confirming that the DSLR’s condition was basically as described by the seller, with nothing on the LCD or HDMI output and the auto-focus not working while partially pressing the trigger button, but still taking a picture when fully pressed. Sometimes it would also show a standard maintenance message on the LCD, so clearly it ought to be working. Maybe the camera’s processor was just being chronically unhappy about something, in which case an easy fix might be possible.
As anyone who has ever taken a digital camera apart knows, you do not simply pop them open for a quick look. Somewhere in the nightmarish contraption of flatflex cables, PCBs and endless sub-assemblies there might be a fault, but where to start? Fortunately with some support from the custom Canon firmware community Magic Lantern and the website Photo Parts UA for reference images he was able to start tracing a number of pertinent signals.
With the auto-focus hint as guide, this was traced back to the MPU, which turned out to have a floating signal on the auto-focus pin that got interpreted as ‘active’. Likely the internal pull-up got damaged due to the use of an external trigger module as there’s no real protection on these lines. One bodge wire later to create an external 3.3 V pull-up the DSLR happily sprung back to life.
In terms of parts this definitely was a cheap repair, but it comes with the prerequisite of having the skills and equipment to perform said repair. Still, massive props and congratulations to [Dieter] for saving this DSLR from being merely a device to be picked over for parts.
On this episode, Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss their love of electronic paper, clunky cartridges, and keeping old games alive by any means possible. You’ll also hear about getting the most out of the sensors in our 3D printers, playing with X-rays at home, a ring that runs Java, and a roulette wheel that outgrew its 555 timer. Stick around to the end to learn about a different sort of IRC that’s even more niche than the one you’re probably familiar with, as well as the logistical challenges and potential benefits of catching rockets with a giant net.
Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download in DRM-free MP3.
Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 379: Driving E-ink DIY, NES On ESP, And The Other IRC”
For as long as humans have had writing, there’s been a need to send secret messages. It is easy to think that Enigma machines and their immediate predecessors are old tech, but they are much more recent than ancient systems used by the Greeks and Romans. Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was interested in encryption and is often said to have invented the Jefferson Disk machine for encryption. The truth is, the device is probably older than Jefferson, but he certainly thought about using it for secret communications.
The idea is simple. We make a series of disks. Each disk has a number on it and, around the edge, all the letters of the alphabet. The placement of each wheel with the same number is the same, but, overall, the arrangement is random. That is, all disks marked #5 might start with XCBYG, but all disks marked with #10 could start with FAYQL. You take one set of disks, and I keep the other set.
When we want to send secret messages, we agree to arrange our disks on an axle in the same order. Jefferson used a 36-disk system, so we might agree to go left to right with the odd numbers first and then the even numbers, or any other setup that we could agree on.
Once the wheels are in place, encryption is simple. There’s a bar across the device, and you line up your message using a wheel for each letter: ENEMYCOMESBYSEA, for example. Then you look at any different row, which will now read something crazy like: FSRSSXQCGAEEFOR (plus the random letters on the rest of the disks). That’s the message you send.
This week Jonathan chats with Michael Meeks about Collabora! What’s the origin story in this consulting company, why do they have an outstanding office suite, and where is the world headed to accomplish digital sovereignty? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 876: There Is No Money Fairy”
