Hacker Hotel 2023 Had A Very Cool Badge

March 10, 2023 by Jenny List 8 Comments

One effect of the global pandemic was that there were relatively few events in our sphere for a couple of years. This and that other by-product of COVID-19, the chip shortage, meant that over the past year we’ve been treated to several event badges that should have appeared in 2020 or 2021, but didn’t due to those cancelled events. We were lucky enough to receive probably the last of these delayed badges in mid February, as we made the journey to the central part of the Netherlands to Hacker Hotel 2023.

A Puzzle, A 4-Bit Computer, And An Artwork

The badge takes the form of a rectangular PCB with all parts on the top side. The brains of the operation is an RP2040, and it’s powered by a CR2032 coin cell in a holder. It’s divided into two parts, the top third which carries the circuitry and the lower two thirds of which as a row of buttons and LEDs. It’s pretty obvious from the start that it has data and address lines of a 4-bit computer, and as well as these there is an evident serial port and a USB socket. The artwork comes form the same artist whose work graced both the previous Hacker Hotel badge and the MCH2022 badge, and the rear of the PCB makes full use of all layers to create a mystical puzzle. The sum is to create a puzzle game intended to entertain the visitor, take them round the venue, and find clues to an eventual solution. I love the design both from an artistic and technical viewpoint, but have to admit that the puzzle aspect isn’t really my thing. Thus here we’ll concentrate on the badge hardware and production, and mention the puzzles only in passing. Continue reading “Hacker Hotel 2023 Had A Very Cool Badge” →

Hackaday supercon badge PCB showing illuminated activity lights after being loaded with a punch card

Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card

November 17, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the first since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, was a very similar affair to those of the past. Almost every hardware-orientated hacker event has its own custom electronic badge, and Supercon was no different. This year’s badge is a simulation platform for a hypothetical 4-bit CPU created by our own [Voja Antonic], and presented a real challenge for some of the attendees who had never touched machine code during their formative years. The challenge set was to come up with the most interesting hack for the badge, so collaborators [Ben Hencke] and [Zach Fredin] set about nailing the ‘expandr’ category of the competition with their optical punched card reader bolt-on.

Peripheral connectivity is somewhat limited. The idea was to build a bolt-on board with its own local processing — using a PixelBlaze board [Ben] brought along — to handle all the scanning details. Then, once the program on the card was read, dump the whole thing over to the badge CPU via its serial interface. Without access to their usual facilities back home, [Ben] and [Zach] obviously had to improvise with whatever they had with them, and whatever could be scrounged off other badges or other hardware lying around.

One big issue was that most people don’t usually carry photodiodes with them, but luckily they remembered that an LED can be used as a photodiode when reverse-biased appropriately. Feeding the signal developed over a one Meg resistance, into a transconductance amplifier courtesy of a donated LM358 there was enough variation for the STM32 ADC to reliably detect the difference between unfilled and filled check-boxes on the filled-in program cards.

The CPU required 12-bit opcodes, which obviously implies 12 photodiodes and 12 LEDs to read each word. The PixelBlaze board does not have this many analog inputs. A simple trick was instead of having discrete inputs, all 12 photodiodes were wired in parallel and fed into a single input amplifier. To differentiate the different bits, the illumination LEDs instead were charlieplexed, thus delivering the individual bits as a sequence of values into the ADC, for subsequent de-serialising. The demonstration video shows that it works, with a program loaded from a card and kicked into operation manually. Such fun!

Punch cards usually have a hole through them and can be read mechanically, and are a great way to configure testers like this interesting vacuum valve tester we covered a short while back.

Continue reading “Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card” →

Why Learn Ancient Tech?

October 15, 2022 by Elliot Williams 68 Comments

The inner orbits of the Hackaday solar system have been vibrating with the announcement of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge. The short version of the story is that it’s a “retrocomputer”. But I think that’s somehow selling it short a little bit. The badge really is an introduction to machine language or maybe a programming puzzle, a ton of sweet blinky lights and clicky buttons, and what I think of as a full-stack hacking invitation.

Voja Antonic designed the virtual 4-bit machine that lives inside. What separates this machine from actual old computers is that everything that you might want to learn about its state is broken out to an LED on the front face, from the outputs of the low-level logic elements that compose the ALU to the RAM, to the decoder LEDs that do double-duty as a disassembler. You can see it all, and this makes it an unparalleled learning aid. Or at least it gives you a fighting chance.

So why would you want to learn a made-up machine language from a non-existent CPU? Tom Nardi and I were talking about our experiences on the podcast, and we both agreed that there’s something inexplicably magical about flipping bits, calling the simplest of computer operations into action, and nonetheless making it do your bidding. Or rather, it’s anti-magical, because what’s happening is the stripping away of metaphors and abstractions. Peering not just behind, but right through the curtain. You’re seeing what’s actually happening for once, from the bottom to the top.

As Voja wrote on the silkscreen on the back of the badge itself: “A programmer who has never coded 1s and 0s in machine language is like a child who has never run barefoot on the grass.” It’s not necessary, or maybe even relevant, but learning a complex machine in its entirety is simultaneously grounding and mind-expanding. It is simply an experience that you should have.

Student Competition Badge Bears Custom Silicon

August 9, 2022 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

[Daniel Valuch] shared a fun and record-setting conference badge story (Slovak, translated) with us. He was one of the organizers for the “ZENIT in electronics” event, which is an annual Slovak national competition for students. During the competition, students are assigned a letter+number code for the purpose of result submission anonymity, and organizers are always on the lookout for a fun way to assign these codes – this time, they did it with custom silicon!

It just so happened that [Peter], one of [Daniel]’s colleagues, was at the time working for onsemi who were doing a tapeout and had some free space on their test chips. Of course, they didn’t have to think twice. When it was a student’s turn to draw their identification number, instead of a slip of paper, they received a SOIC-16 package with custom silicon bonded to it. Then, they had to solder it to their competition badge – which was, of course, a PCB. Each chip was individually laser-trimmed to contain the student’s number, and that number could then be decoded using a multimeter – or a reasonably sharp eye.

There’s way more to this competition story than just the badge, but the custom silicon part of it sure caught our eyes. Who knows, maybe next year stars will align again and we’ll see custom silicon on one of the hacker conference badges. After all, things have been advancing rapidly on that front – for instance, since Skywater PDK project’s inception in 2020, there’s been several successful runs already, and if you’d like to learn more, you could check the HackChat we’ve had this year, and this Remoticon 2020 workshop!

Photo of the MCH2022 badge's screen, showing the "Hack me if you can" app's start splashscreen, saying "Service is accessible on IP ADDRESS : 1337"

MCH2022 Badge CTF Solved, With Plenty To Learn From

August 7, 2022 by Arya Voronova 3 Comments

Among all the things you could find at MCH2022, there were a few CTFs (Capture The Flag exercises) – in particular, every badge contained an application that you could try and break into – only two teams have cracked this one! [dojoe] was part of one of them, and he has composed an extensive reverse-engineering story for us – complete with Ghidra disassembly of Xtensa code, remote code execution attempts, ROP gadget creation, and no detail left aside.

There was a catch: badges handed out to the participants didn’t contain the actual flag. You had to develop an exploit using your personal badge that only contained a placeholder flag, then go to the badge tent and apply your exploit over the network to one of the few badges with the real flag on them. The app in question turned out to be an echo server – sending back everything it received; notably, certain messages made it crash. One man’s crashes are another man’s exploit possibilities, and after a few hacking sessions, [dojoe]’s team got their well-deserved place on the scoreboard.

If you always thought that firmware reverse-engineering sounds cool, and you also happen to own a MCH2022 badge, you should try and follow the intricately documented steps of [dojoe]’s writeup. Even for people with little low-level programming experience, repeating this hack is realistic thanks to his extensive explanations, and you will leave with way more reverse-engineering experience than you had before.

The MCH2022 badge is a featureful creation of intricate engineering, with the ESP32 portion only being part of the badge – we’re eager to hear about what you’ve accomplished or are about to accomplish given everything it has to offer!

DOOM Runs On The EMFCamp Tidal Badge

July 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

If it’s got a chip and a screen, someone’s trying to run DOOM on it. The latest entry in this fad is from [Phil Ashby], who figured out how to get the game running on the EMFCamp Tidal Badge as seamlessly as possible.

The badge is based on the ESP32-S3. It’s the latest version of the ESP32, which can run the iconic shooter pretty easily. However, [Phil] set himself a trickier challenge. He wanted to port DOOM to the badge while having it remain compatible with the MicroPython platform already on it. Plus, he wanted to be able to distribute it easily with the TiDAL Hatchery, a platform for sharing apps for the badge.

In the end, it took some deft hacking to make the game run on a microcontroller platform that isn’t really set up for running “applications.” It took some tricks to scale the video output and get the colors right, of course, but it’s there and working.

The state of the art is now so advanced that they managed to port DOOM into DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM. Video after the break.

Continue reading “DOOM Runs On The EMFCamp Tidal Badge” →

Ride DIY Or Die This Badge-Less Suzuki

July 3, 2022 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

A few years ago, [Charles] picked up a sweet Suzuki motorcycle that checked all the boxen: it was in good shape, bore a few useful upgrades and a box of spare parts, plus the price was right. Though he assumed that he had pored over every picture on the classified site before buying, it wasn’t until later that [Charles] realized that something was indeed missing from the bike — a piece of chrome that does little more than to cover the tee in the brake line and bear the Suzuki brand. Once he saw the problem, he couldn’t un-see it, you know? And at that point, he just had to have that little piece, even if he had to make it himself.

That wasn’t the original plan, of course, but bike parts are expensive to begin with and only get worse as size, condition, and rarity increase. [Charles]’ quest to find this piece was halfway successful; he found a reasonable-but-rusty facsimile of the right part, although the emblem portion was long gone. Then he remembered the wife’s vinyl cutter.

Now, let’s stop right there. If you know anything at all about these vinyl cutters, you know that they are basically glorified 2D plotters with a knife attached where a pen would be. Send it any 2D file and you’re good? No, no; of course not. These things are locked down by the manufacturers.

Fortunately, [Charles] found inkscape-silhouette, which makes light work of sending SVGs to the machine. After much back and forth and maybe a bit of coin-flipping, [Charles] settled on the classy, stylized ‘S’ version rather than the full-on Suzuki badge. We think it looks great, and we’ll never tell anyone.

While this isn’t quite the type of badge we’d normally talk about, it’s a great project nonetheless, and it’s always nice to hear about projects that open up otherwise closed-source hardware.