Hacking An NVIDIA CMP 170HX Crypto GPU For EM Sim Work

September 11, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 6 Comments

A few years back NVIDIA created a dedicated cryptocurrency mining GPU, the CMP 170HX. This was a heavily restricted version of its flagship A100 datacenter accelerator, using the same GA100 chip. It was intended for accelerating Ethash, the Etherium proof-of-work algorithm, and nothing else. [niconiconi] bought one to use for accelerating PCB electromagnetic simulations and put a lot of effort into repairing the card, converting it to water-cooling, and figuring out how best to use this nobbled GPU.

Typically, the GA100 silicon sits in the center of the mighty A100 GPU card and would be found in a server rack, cooled by forced air. This was not an option at home, so an off-the-shelf water-cooling block was wedged in. During this process, [niconconi] found that the board wouldn’t power on, so they went on a deep dive into the power supply tree with the help of a leaked A100 schematic. The repair and modifications can be found in the appendix, right down to the end of the article. It is a long read to get there.

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Launching Model Airplanes With A Custom Linear Induction Motor

September 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Launching things with electromagnetism is pretty fun, with linear induction motors being a popular design that finds use from everywhere in hobby designs like [Tom Stanton]’s to the electromagnetic launchers on new US and Chinese aircraft carriers. Although the exact design details differ, they use magnetic attraction and repulsion to create a linear motion on the propulsive element, like the sled in [Tom]’s design. Much like the electromagnetic catapults on a Gerald R. Ford-class carrier, electrical power is applied to rapidly move the sled through the channel, akin to a steam piston with a steam catapult.

Model airplane sparking its way through the launcher’s channel. (Credit: Tom Stanton, YouTube)

For [Tom]’s design, permanent magnets are used along both sides of the channel in an alternating north/south pole fashion, with the sled using a single wound coil that uses brushes to contact metal rails along both sides of the channel. Alternating current is then applied to this system, causing the coil to become an electromagnet and propel itself along the channel.

An important consideration here is the number of turns of wire on the sled’s coil, as this controls the current being passed, which is around 90 A for 100 turns. Even so, the fastest sled design only reached a speed of 44 mph (~71 km/h), which is 4 mph faster than [Tom]’s previous design that used coils alongside the channels and a sled featuring a permanent magnet.

One way to increase the speed is to use more coils on the sled, with a two-coil model launching a light-weight model airplane to 10.2 m/s, which is not only a pretty cool way to launch an airplane, but also gives you a sense of appreciation for the engineering challenges involved in making an electromagnetic catapult system work for life-sized airplanes as they’re yeeted off an aircraft carrier and preferably not straight into the drink.

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Electromagnetic Actuator Mimics Muscle

July 26, 2024 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

Most electromagnetic actuators are rotating motors, or some variation on the theme, like servos. However, it’s possible to do linear actuation with electomagnetics, too. [Adrian Perez] demonstrates this with Linette, his design of a linear actuator that he was inspired to build by the structure of our own muscles.

The design uses a coil of copper wire in a 3D-printed plastic housing, surrounded by a claw full of strong magnets. When the coil is activated, the magnets are pulled towards the coil. When the coil is not energized, the magnets fall away. [Adrian] demonstrates the actuator under the control of an Arduino, which switches power to the coil to move it up and down.

He also notes that the design is similar solenoids and voice coil style actuators, though unlike most his uses discrete magnets rather than a single monolithic magnet. It’s possible to get more capacity out of the Linette design through stacking. You can parallelize the actuators to get more pulling force, with neighboring coils sharing the same magnets. Alternatively, you can stack them in series to get longer stroke lengths.

[Adrian] hasn’t put the design to a practical application yet, but we could see multiple uses for robotics or small machines. We’ve seen some other neat DIY magnetic actuators before, too. Video after the break.

Bass Guitar Gets Shapeshifting Pickups

December 5, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

Electric guitars were the hip new thing back in the mid-century. The electrification of the common and portable guitar opened up a lot of avenues in terms of sound and technique. Specifically, the use of the pickup, an electromagnetic device which converts the vibrations of the guitar strings into electrical signals, increased the number of ways that a musician can alter the guitar’s sound on-the-fly. Some guitars have several rows of pickups which can be used in any number of ways, but this custom guitar has a single pickup which can be moved around the guitar’s body instead.

[Breno] was gifted this Dolphin bass guitar to start learning after years of playing a regular guitar, and while they aren’t known for high-quality instruments this guitar seemed to play and sound well enough to attempt this modification. First, a hole had to be cut all the way through the guitar’s body in order to accommodate the build. The pickup for this guitar is then mounted on two rods which allow it to move in various positions along the strings, and a second set of adjustments can be made to bring the pickups closer or further away from the strings. Some additional custom circuitry was added to control it and also to handle the volume and tone knobs, and while this was being added [Breno] and his friend [Arthur] decided this would be a great time to build some effects into the guitar’s now-custom electronics as well.

While this was largely a project for [Breno] to understand in greater depth the effect of moving the pickups around an electric guitar, the finished product looks ready to play some live shows. The addition of some extras like the effects really adds some punch to this guitar and it looks to be completely original. The nearest thing we could find is this guitar which uses hot-swappable pickups but even those are mounted in fixed locations.

Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat With Samy Kamkar

March 23, 2020 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, March 25 at noon Pacific for the Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat with Samy Kamkar!

In the world of computer security, the good news is that a lot of vendors are finally taking security seriously now, with the result that direct attacks are harder to pull off. The bad news is that in a lot of cases, they’re still leaving the side-door wide open. Side-channel attacks come in all sorts of flavors, but they all have something in common: they leak information about the state of a system through an unexpected vector. From monitoring the sounds that the keyboard makes as you type to watching the minute vibrations of a potato chip bag in response to a nearby conversation, side-channel attacks take advantage of these leaks to exfiltrate information.

Side-channel exploits can be the bread and butter of black hat hackers, but understanding them can be useful to those of us who are more interested in protecting systems, or perhaps to inform our reverse engineering efforts. Samy Kamkar knows quite a bit more than a thing or two about side-channel attacks, so much so that he gave a great talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference on just that topic. He’ll be dropping by the Hack Chat to “extend and enhance” that talk, and to answer your questions about side-channel exploits, and discuss the reverse engineering potential they offer. Join us and learn more about this fascinating world, where the complexity of systems leads to unintended consequences that could come back to bite you, or perhaps even help you.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

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Build Your Own Solenoid Engine

September 25, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

A solenoid engine is a curiosity of the electrical world. By all measures, using electricity to rotate something can be done almost any other way with greater efficiency and less hassle. But there’s just something riveting about watching a solenoid engine work. If you want to build one of your own and see for yourself, [Emiel] aka [The Practical Engineer] has a great how-to.

For this build though he used a few tools that some of us may not have on hand, such as a lathe and a drill press. The lathe was used to make the plastic spool to hold the wire, and also to help wind the wire onto the spool itself rather than doing it by hand. He also milled the wood mounts and metal bearings as well, and the quality of the work really shows through in the final product. The final touch is the transistor which controls power flow to the engine.

If you don’t have all of the machine tools [Emiel] used it’s not impossible to find substitute parts if you want to build your own. It’s an impressive display piece, or possibly even functional if you want your build to have a certain steampunk aesthetic (without the steam). You can even add more pistons to your build if you need extra power.

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Does WiFi Kill Houseplants?

February 28, 2019 by Dan Maloney 72 Comments

Spoiler alert: No.

To come to that conclusion, which runs counter to the combined wisdom of several recent YouTube videos, [Andrew McNeil] ran a pretty neat little experiment. [Andrew] has a not inconsiderable amount of expertise in this area, as an RF engineer and prolific maker of many homebrew WiFi antennas, some of which we’ve featured on these pages before. His experiment centered on cress seeds sprouting in compost. Two identical containers were prepared, with one bathed from above in RF energy from three separate 2.4 GHz transmitters. Each transmitter was coupled to an amplifier and a PCB bi-quad antenna to radiate about 300 mW in slightly different parts of the WiFi spectrum. Both setups were placed in separate rooms in east-facing windows, and each was swapped between rooms every other day, to average out microenvironmental effects.

After only a few days, the cress sprouted in both pots and continued to grow. There was no apparent inhibition of the RF-blasted sprouts – in fact, they appeared a bit lusher than the pristine pot. [Andrew] points out that it’s not real science until it’s quantified, so his next step is to repeat the experiment and take careful biomass measurements. He’s also planning to ramp up the power on the next round as well.

We’d like to think this will put the “WiFi killed my houseplants” nonsense to rest – WiFi can even help keep your plants alive, after all. But somehow we doubt that the debate will die anytime soon.

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