sao

25 Articles

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: August 19, 2018

August 19, 2018 by 20 Comments

If you want to creep everyone out, [Hunter Irving] has your back. He found a weird, creepy knock-off Thomas the Tank Engine toy and mounted a servo to it. This animatronic face is really, really creepy and has the aesthetic of a pastel plastic hell of the forgotten toys destroyed in a day care in 1991. It probably smells like a thrift shop. This rosy-cheeked locomotive shall derail your soul. It sings karaoke.

Like badges? Sure you do. Ph0xx is the badge for the upcoming Fri3d Camp, a family hacker, maker, and DIY camp in Belgium with 600 attendees. The badge features an ESP-32, two 5×7 LED arrays, accelerometer, an 18650 battery with protection and a charger, expansion headers, and this badge is compatible with Lego Technic. Oh yes, they went there.

We’re filing this under ‘but why’. It’s a custom Mercedes-Benz motorcycle, with a sidecar, that looks like an early 80s Benz convertible. [Maarten] stumbled upon a few pics of this, but the google-fu is weak in trying to get some information about this build. Who built it? Why? Does it run?

Here’s something near and dear to my heart: my greatest contribution to humanity so far. The Shitty Add-On spec for this year’s batch of Def Con badges is the reason badges now have their own badges. Now it’s time for a slight upgrade to the standard, and I need your help. The SAO standard 1.1bis will retain the VCC/GND/SDA/SCL layout of the first revision, but to increase mechanical stability and decrease the complexity of populating the headers, we’re adding two pins. Here’s the question: what should these two extra pins do? The current options are adding TX and RX to the standard, or two GPIOs that are undefined, but able to be utilized by each badge team for their own purposes. Those are the two options, but I’m looking for your input in the comments. Hurry up, because we have Superconference badges to build.

You should know the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube. This week he made another step towards the iron age. The basic idea behind this channel is a guy in Australia playing Minecraft in real life, building everything he can, starting with the technology of punching trees. The latest video shows his process for smelting iron. The iron comes from iron-bearing bacterial sludge found in a creek. The geologic disadvantages of northeastern Australia notwithstanding, he’s doing everything else right. He’s making charcoal, and turning that sludge into something that could be a bloom of iron.

This Is The Year Conference Badges Get Their Own Badges

June 21, 2018 by 17 Comments

Over the last few years, the art and artistry of printed circuit boards has moved from business cards to the most desirable of all disposable electronics. I speak, of course, of badgelife. This is the community built on creating and distributing independent electronic conference badges at the various tech and security conferences around the globe.

Until now, badgelife has been a loose confederation of badgemakers and distributors outdoing themselves each year with ever more impressive boards, techniques, and always more blinky bling. The field is advancing so fast there is no comparison to what was being done in years past; where a simple PCB and blinking LED would have sufficed a decade ago, now we have customized microcontrollers direct from the factory, fancy new chips, and the greatest art you’ve ever seen.

Now we have reached a threshold. The badgelife community has gotten so big, the badges are getting their own badges. This is the year of the badge add-on. We’re all building tiny trinkets for our badges, and this time, they’ll all work together. We’re exactly one year away from a sweet Voltron robot made of badges.

Continue reading “This Is The Year Conference Badges Get Their Own Badges” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: April 8, 2018

April 8, 2018 by 7 Comments

SiFive raised $50 Million in funding. SiFive is a semiconductor working on two fronts: they want to democratize silicon prototyping, and they’re the people making the HiFive series of microcontrollers and SoCs. The HiFives are built on the RISC-V instruction set, a Big-O Open instruction set for everything from tiny microcontrollers to server CPUs. With RISC-V, you’re not tied to licensing from ARM or their ilk. Recently SiFive introduced an SoC capable of running Linux, and the HiFive 1 is a very fast, very capable microcontroller that’s making inroads with Nvidia and Western Digital. The new round of funding is great news for anyone who wants Open Source hardware, and the silicon prototyping aspect of it is exceptionally interesting. Great news for SiFive.

Guess what’s in just a few weekends? The Vintage Computer Festival Southeast. The VCFSE is Hotlanta’s own vintage computer festival, with a whole host of speakers, exhibits, and consignment to tickle those vintage dopamine receptors. On deck for the speakers is [Michael Tomczyk], one of the people responsible for the VIC-20, and [Scott Adams], no the other [Scott Adams], creator of adventure-style games for personal computers but not that adventure-style game. The exhibits will include Japanese retro computers, simulating an ENIAC and a mechanical keyboard meetup. If you’re around Georgia, this is an event worth attending.

Conference season is just around the corner, and you know what that means. It’s time to start ramping up for #badgelife. What is badgelife? It’s a hardware demoscene of electronic conference badges. This year, the badgelife scene has stumbled upon something everyone can get in on. Add-ons! They’re electronic hats (or shields, or capes) for all the badges. Physically, it’s a 2×2 pin header. Electronically, it’s power, ground and I2C. Want to prototype your own add-on? Good news, there’s a development board.

The Titius-Bode law states the semi-major axes of planets follow a geometric progression. The (simplified, incorrect) demonstration of this law states Mercury orbits at 0.25 AU, Venus at 0.5 AU, Earth at 1 AU, Mars at 2 AU, and continues to the outer planets. The Titius-Bode law is heavily discredited in the planetary science community, and any paper, talk, or manuscript is rejected by scientific editors out of hand. The Titius-Bode law is the planetary science equivalent of flat Earth conspiracy theories and Nazi moon bases; giving any consideration to the idea confirms you’re a moron. This week, some consulting firm posted something that is the Titius-Bode law on their blog. Why? So it could be submitted to Hacker News for that sweet SEO. This submission was upvoted to the top position, and is a wonderful springboard to argue an interesting point on media literacy. I posit the rise of news aggregators (facebook, twitter, digg, reddit, and HN), is the driving force behind ‘fake news’ as lay people become the gatekeepers. Prove me wrong.

The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed there are cell-site simulators (Stingrays, IMSI-catchers, or otherwise known as your own private cell phone base station) around Washington DC. It’s unknown who is operating these simulators, or even where they are. There are two things to read between the lines with this information: Duh, there are rogue Stingrays in DC. Holy crap duh. I bet there are also some around midtown Manhattan. You can buy the stuff to do this on eBay. Personally, I’ve found half a dozen Stingrays or other rogue cell stations this year (guess where?). Second, why is this a news item now? Is this a signal that the DHS will start clamping down on stuff you can buy on eBay? Hop to it, people; cellular hardware is a great way to make a liquid nitrogen generator.

Hackaday Video: Safe Area Operation For Components (and Helicopters)

March 21, 2014 by 14 Comments

We’re back and this time talking about Safe Operating Area also called Safe Area Operation (SAO) which is short for the combination of things that can conspire to ruin your design. We also talk about helicopters.

Why take all of this time to discuss SAO you might ask, and what is that business about helicopters? Depending on the design there may be quite a bit of tedious math involved and sometimes there is just no avoiding it. Alternatively if you can get a feel for when math is and is not critical (based on design choices), it should be easier to get your next project up and running while still obeying the rules of the road.

Continue reading “Hackaday Video: Safe Area Operation For Components (and Helicopters)” →