You know the old joke: if it moves when it shouldn’t, fix it with duct tape, and if it doesn’t move but it should, fix it with WD-40. For a lot of us, that’s about as far as our expertise on lubricants — and adhesives — goes. That’s a shame, because with hundreds of years of petrochemical engineering expertise behind us, not to mention millennia more of ad hoc experience with natural substances, just reaching for that trusty blue and yellow can for a spritz is perhaps a wasted opportunity. Sure, it’ll work — maybe — but is it really the right tool for the job?
Modern lubricants are extremely complex and highly engineered materials, often built atom by atom to perform a specific job under specific, often extremely challenging, conditions. Oils and greases are much more than just the slippery stuff that keeps our mechanical systems running, and while you might not need to know all the details of how they’re made to put them to use, a little inside information could go a long way in making sure your mechanism lasts.
We’ve invited Rafe Britton on the Hack Chat to talk about all aspects of lubrication engineering. With degrees in engineering and physics, Rafe runs Lubrication Expert and the Lubrication Explained channel on YouTube to help his clients figure out what they don’t know about lubrication, and how to put that knowledge to use in the real world. Be sure to bring your questions and concerns about lubrication, as well as your lubrication success stories and failures — especially the failures!
Join us on Wednesday, October 12 at noon Pacific for the RF Hacking Hack Chat with Christopher Poore!
On the time scale of technological history, it really wasn’t all that long ago that radio was — well, boring. We’re not talking about the relative entertainment value of the Jack Benny Show or listening to a Brooklyn Dodgers game, but about the fact that for the most part, radio was a one-dimensional medium: what you heard was pretty much all there was to a signal, and radio was rarely used for anything particularly hackable.
Not so today, of course, where anything electronic seems to have at least one radio stuffed into it, and the space around us is filled with a rich soup of fascinating RF signals. For hackers, this is where radio gets interesting — listening in on those signals, exploring their nature, and figuring out how to put them to use are like red meat for most of us.
Hacking and reverse engineering opportunities abound in the RF realm, but can sometimes be a bit difficult. What’s needed is a framework for pulling those signals out of the ether and putting them into some kind of context. Fortunately, there are plenty of tips and tricks in this space; we talked about one of them, FISSURE, not too long ago. The acronym — “Frequency Independent SDR-Based Signal Understand and Reverse Engineering” — about sums up what this framework is all about. But to bring it into further focus, we’re lucky enough to have Chris Poore, a Senior Reverse Engineer at Assured Information Security, drop by the Hack Chat. We’ll talk about RF reverse engineering in general and FISSURE in particular. Be sure to stop by with your RF hacking and reverse engineering questions and war stories!
In a perfect world, all of our electronic devices would come with complete documentation, and there’d be open source libraries available for interfacing them with whatever we wanted. There’d never be arbitrary lockouts preventing us from using a piece of hardware in a way the manufacturer didn’t approve of, and the “cloud” wouldn’t be a black-box server in some data center on the other side of the planet, but a transparent and flexible infrastructure for securely storing and sharing information.
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. What’s worse, rather than moving towards that electronic utopia, the industry appears to be heading in the opposite direction. It seems like every month we hear about another service shutting down and leaving viable hardware to twist in the wind. Just yesterday Google announced they’d be retiring their Stadia game streaming service early next year — leaving users with unique Internet-connected controllers that will no longer have a back-end to communicate with.
Matthew Alt
Luckily for us, there’s folks like Matthew [wrongbaud] Alt out there. This prolific hacker specializes in reverse engineering, and has a knack not just for figuring out how things work, but in communicating those findings with others. His conquests have graced these pages many times, and we were fortunate enough to have him helm the Introduction to Reverse Engineering with Ghidra class for HackadayU back in 2020. This week, he stopped by the Hack Chat to talk about the past, present, and future of reverse engineering.
Matthew got his start in reverse engineering during college, when he was working in a shop that specialized in tuning engine control units (ECUs). He was responsible for figuring out how the ECUs functioned, which ultimately would allow them to be modified to improve engine performance beyond the vehicle’s stock configuration. Sometimes that involved uploading modified calibration data, or disabling functions that were detrimental to engine performance. These software changes could potentially increase engine output by as much as 50 HP, though he says that sometimes the goal was to simply increase throttle response so the vehicle would feel more aggressive on the road.
Moving on to the tools of the trade, Matthew explained why he prefers using Ghidra for embedded targets over classic reverse engineering tools like IDA Pro. As an example he points to a recent project where he used Ghidra’s API and intermediary language PCode to crack passwords in Game Boy Advance games. Though he does mention that IDA still has its place if you’re looking to peek into some Windows C++ software.
Matthew also pointed to new techniques and tools for working with fault injection which have opened up a lot of exciting possibilities over the last few years. In fact, he says tools like ChipWhisperer will become invaluable as newer devices adopt advanced security features. When gadgets are using secure boot and encrypted firmware, gaining access is going to take a bit more than just finding an unleaded serial port on the board. Glitching attacks will become more commonplace, so you might as well get up to speed now.
Colin O’Flynn’s ChipWhisperer makes side-channel power analysis and glitching attacks far more accessible.
We’d like to thank Matthew Alt for not just stopping by the Hack Chat, but for being such a good friend to the Hackaday community. His work has been inspirational for all of us here, and it’s always exciting when he’s penned a new blog post detailing another challenge bested. The next time your favorite MegaCorp releases some anti-consumer gadget, you can take some comfort in knowing he’s still out there bending hardware to his will.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
Our world is full of mysteries, from the nature of time to how exactly magnets work. There are some things that we just have to accept that no matter how hard we look, we’ll never get a complete answer, especially in the natural world. The constructed world is another thing, though. It doesn’t seem fair that only a relatively few people have the inside scoop on the workings of everyday things, like network routers, game consoles, and even the vehicles we drive. Of course, the companies that make these things have a right to profit from their intellectual property, but we as consumers also have a right to be curious about how these things work and to understand what the software running on these devices is doing on our behalf.
Luckily, what can be engineered can be reverse engineered, if you have the right tools and the skills to use them. It can be a challenge, but it’s one Matthew Alt has taken on plenty of times. We’ve seen him deep-dive into JTAG, look at serial wire debugging, and recently even try some glitching attacks. In fact, he even taught a HackadayU course on reverse engineering with Ghidra. And now he’ll drop by the Hack Chat to talk all about reverse engineering. Join us with your questions, your exploits, and your ideas on how to go where no hacker has gone before.
In the electronics world, even for the hobbyists, things have only gotten smaller over the years. We went from through-hole components to surface mount, and now we’re at the point where the experienced DIYers are coming around to the idea of using ball grid array (BGA) components in their designs. We’d wonder what things are going to look like in another couple decades, but frankly, it gives us the heebie-jeebies.
So while we’re pretty well versed these days in the hows and whys of tiny things, we see comparatively little large-scale engineering projects. Which is why we were excited to have Andy Oliver stop by this week for the Heavy Engineering Hack Chat. His day job sees him designing and inspecting the control systems for movable bridges — or what many would colloquially refer to as drawbridges.
Now you might think there’s not a lot of demand for this particular skill set, but we’re willing to bet there’s a lot more of these bridges out there than you realized. Andy kicked things off with the revelation that just between the states of Florida and Louisiana, there are about 200 movable bridges of various sizes. On a larger scale, he points out that BridgeHunter.com lists an incredible 3,166 movable bridges in their database, though admittedly many of those are historical and no longer standing. (There really is a site for everything!)
Andy Oliver
There’s also a huge incentive to keep the existing bridges functioning for as long as possible — building a new one these days could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, repairs and upgrades are the name of the game. Andy says that if it’s properly maintained, you should get about a century out of a good bridge.
It will probably come as little surprise to find that keeping things as simple as possible is key to making sure a movable bridge can withstand the test of time. While we might imagine that all sorts of high-tech automation systems are at work, and they probably would be if any of us were in charge, Andy says that most of the time it’s old school relay logic.
Even controlling the speed of motors is often down to using beefy relays to switch some additional resistance into the circuit. But when reliability and ease of repair are top priorities, who’s to argue against a classic? Andy recalled a time when a government client made it clear that the only tool you should need to maintain a particular bridge’s control system was a hammer.
Of course, when moving around a million pounds of steel, there’s more than just electrical considerations at play. You’ve also got to take into account things like wind forces on the bridge, specifically that your gears and motors can handle the extra load without tearing themselves apart. The bridge also needs an emergency stop system that can arrest movement at a moment’s notice, but not damage anything in the process.
A lot of fascinating details about these motorized behemoths were covered in the Chat, so we’d invite anyone who’s ever watched a bridge slowly reconfigure itself to peruse through the full transcript. Special thanks to Andy Oliver for stopping by and sharing some of the details about his unique career with the community, and remember that if you’ve got your own engineering stories to tell, we’d love to hear them.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
Here at Hackaday, we focus mainly on engineering at the small end of the spectrum. Millimeter waves, nearly microscopic SMD components, nanoscale machines like MEMS accelerometers, and silicon chips with features that measure in the nanometer range. We’ve all become pretty good at wrapping our heads around problems at the wee end of the spectrum.
And while all that tiny stuff is great, there’s a whole, big world out there to explore, with big engineering to solve big problems. Think of things like dam spillways, lift bridges, and canal locks — big stuff that still has to move, and has to do it safely and efficiently. Those are problems that demand an entirely different way of thinking, and skills that not a lot of us have.
Andy Oliver works in the world of big, movable structures, designing control systems for them. He’ll drop by the Hack Chat to discuss the engineering that not only makes these structures work but also keeps them safe and reliable. If you’ve ever wondered how big things work, you won’t want to miss this one.
While the 2020 and 2021 Remoticons were a blast, we all know that virtual events are no substitute for in-person conferences. Which is why we’re so excited to once again invite the Hackaday community to converge on Pasadena in November for a weekend of talks, workshops, and hardware hacking for our sixth Supercon.
To help get the community prepared for the triumphant return of what we very humbly believe to be the greatest hardware hacking conference the world has ever seen, we invited Majenta Strongheart to this week’s Hack Chat to answer the community’s questions about this hotly anticipated event. There’s an incredible number of moving pieces involved in an event like Supercon, and as Head of Design and Partnerships at our parent company SupplyFrame, she’s integral to putting them all together right up until the doors open on November 4th.
The Chat kicked off with a general confirmation that yes, we did receive your talk and/or workshop proposal. It seems several people didn’t receive the intended confirmation message when they sent their information on, but Majenta assured everyone that all of the completed forms were received correctly and are currently under review. If you put in a proposal, you should be notified in the next few weeks about whether or not it was accepted.
With that out of the way, the next big question was the one that so many of you have been wondering: what does the Hackaday Supercon look like in the era of COVID? The truth is, things are still evolving and it’s hard to be sure of anything with two more months to go. But Majenta did confirm that the decision has been made to limit ticket sales compared to previous years so that attendees have a bit more breathing room — literally and figuratively. In addition many of the planned events will be held outdoors, and the talks will be streamed live for anyone who’d rather not sit in the audience.
Majenta also took this opportunity to let everyone know that the volunteer application form for Supercon will be available very soon, and that as usual, those who are willing to help out will get a free ticket in exchange. Speaking of which, if you’d rather pay the gold price, General Admission tickets for the 2022 Supercon are currently on sale.
As you might imagine, Majenta has been exceptionally busy as of late, so we appreciate her taking the time to sit down with us and Chat. If you couldn’t make this live discussion about Supercon, don’t worry. You can send questions, ideas, or comments, to superconference@hackaday.io and we’ll see what we can do.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
We’ve invited Rafe Britton on the Hack Chat to talk about all aspects of lubrication engineering. With degrees in engineering and physics, Rafe runs Lubrication Expert and the Lubrication Explained channel on YouTube to help his clients figure out what they don’t know about lubrication, and how to put that knowledge to use in the real world. Be sure to bring your questions and concerns about lubrication, as well as your lubrication success stories and failures — especially the failures!
