Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: engineering – Page 108

Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease — Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, OpenCures; Co-Founder & Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation

Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO, OpenCures (https://opencures.org/), Adjunct Professor, University of Alberta, Co-Founder and Advisor, Oisin Biotechnologies, President, of Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and Co-Founder and Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation.

Kevin is a successful entrepreneur and owner of the largest motorcycle and snowmobile dealership in Canada, Riverside Honda and Skidoo Sales in Edmonton, Alberta. He became a cancer survivor, an experience which clearly highlighted the deficiencies of the current health technology development paradigm where the customer has almost no input in the development of their own health solutions. Armed with the realization that nothing is more valuable than health and the time to enjoy it with those you love, Kevin resolved to put his energies towards addressing these deficiencies.

Continue reading “Dr Kevin Perrott, PhD — Founder & CEO — OpenCures — Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease” | >

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a remote control that allows the user to set not only the color of the LEDs as a whole but also to run simple animations. But these were not your standard WS2812B strips with data lines: all the LEDs were simply connected in parallel with just two wires, so how was this even possible?

[Tim] hooked up his oscilloscope to the LED strings to find out how they worked, detailing the results in a comprehensive blog post. As it turns out, the controller briefly shorts the LED strip’s supply voltage to generate data bits, similar to the way old pulse-dialing phones worked. A tiny chip integrated into each LED picks up these pulses, but retains its internal state thanks to a capacitor that keeps the chip powered when the supply line goes low.

After reverse-engineering the protocol, [Tim] went on to implement a similar design using an ATMega328P as a controller and an ATtiny10 as the LED driver. With just a few lines of code and a 100 nF buffer capacitor across the ATtiny’s power pins, [Tim] was able to turn an LED on and off by sending pulses through the supply lines. Some work still needs to be done to fully implement a protocol as used in the LED strings, but as a proof-of-concept it shows that this kind of power-line communication is possible with standard components.

Read more | >

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing.

A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn’t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where the work pictured comes in. Soldering to the remains of the bond wires has proven to be fruitful, reviving the chip enough to continue investigating, even if, it appears, it was never functional to begin with. The thread continued on with comparing ROMs from a few different chips [TubeTime] had on hand and inferences on what could’ve happened that led to this IC going out in the wild.

Such soldering experiments are always fun to try and pull off! We rarely see soldering on such a small scale, as thankfully, it’s not always needed, but it’s a joy to witness when someone does IC or PCB microsurgery to fix factory defects that render our devices inoperable before they were even shipped. Each time that a fellow hacker dares to grind the IC epoxy layers down and save a game console or an unidentified complex board, the world gets a little brighter. And if you aren’t forced to do it for repair reasons, you can always try it in an attempt to build the smallest NES in existence!

Read more | >

Imagine if we could use strong electromagnetic fields to manipulate the local properties of spacetime—this could have important ramifications in terms of science and engineering.

Electromagnetism has always been a subtle phenomenon. In the 19th century, scholars thought that electromagnetic waves must propagate in some sort of elusive medium, which was called aether. Later, the aether hypothesis was abandoned, and to this day, the classical theory of electromagnetism does not provide us with a clear answer to the question in which medium electric and magnetic fields propagate in vacuum. On the other hand, the theory of gravitation is rather well understood. General relativity explains that energy and mass tell the spacetime how to curve and spacetime tells masses how to move. Many eminent mathematical physicists have tried to understand electromagnetism directly as a consequence of general relativity. The brilliant mathematician Hermann Weyl had especially interesting theories in this regard. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla thought that electromagnetism contains essentially everything in our universe.

Read more | >

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

Read more | >

A team of engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago has built a cost-effective artificial leaf that can capture carbon dioxide at 100 times better than current technologies.

This novel artificial leaf works in the real world, unlike other carbon capture systems that could only work with carbon dioxide from pressurized tanks. It captures carbon dioxide from more dilutes sources, like air and flue gas produced by coal-fired power plants, and releases it for use as fuel and other materials.

“Our artificial leaf system can be deployed outside the lab, where it has the potential to play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere thanks to its high rate of carbon capture, relatively low cost, and moderate energy, even when compared to the best lab-based systems,” said Meenesh Singh, assistant professor of chemical engineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper.

Read more | >

Using less power than a lightbulb. A team of engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has developed a relatively low-cost “artificial leaf” that can capture carbon dioxide at rates 100 times faster than existing systems, bringing us one step closer to the goal of engineering the process of photosynthesis by which plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy.

Nuclear waste can be very harmful to humans and the ecosystem. Watch how it’s handled in our video.

Read more | >

Royal BAM announces ‘world’s first’ fully electric asphalt road paver with dual electric motors and a pair of massive 270 kWh batteries!

Dutch civil engineering company Royal BAM has announced a fully-electric asphalt spreading road paver, which will save more than 93,000 kilograms of CO₂ and 115,000 grams of nitrous oxide emissions compared to its bio-diesel counterparts.

Working together with partners at Wirtgen and New Electric, BAM has replaced the vegetable-oil sourced, bio-diesel powered Volvo Penta Stage V engines with an electric drive, consisting of two “smartly switched electric motors” that pull electrons from a massive 270 kWh battery. For those you keeping score, that’s more than twice as big as the battery used in the 500-mile range Lucid Air electric sedan. (!)

Once the work is done and the road is paved, the Royal BAM machine can power up it’s second 270 kWh battery (!!) and drive itself to the next project, or back to the fleet depot after a long working day.

Continue reading “Royal BAM announces ‘world’s first’ fully electric road paver and massive 270 kWh batteries” | >

A research team led by scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has recently designed a structured thermal armor (STA) that achieves efficient liquid cooling even over 1,000°C, fundamentally solving a 266-year-old challenge presented by the Leidenfrost effect. This breakthrough can be applied in aero and space engines, as well as improve the safety and reliability of next-generation nuclear reactors.

The research has been led by Professor Wang Zuankai from CityU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE), Professor David Quéré from the PSL Research University, France, and Professor Yu Jihong, Director of the International Center of Future Science, Jilin University and Senior Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at CityU.

The findings were published in the latest issue of the highly prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Read more | >

It’s the holy grail of spaceflight, and it could come sooner than many expect.

This month, Washington-based Radian Aerospace announced that it’s building a spaceplane that takes off and lands horizontally. The reveal sparked excitement about what could be considered the holy grail of the decades-old industry.

Christie Maddock, a lecturer in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Strathclyde, says that the “alluring concept” has been around for nearly a century.

Continue reading “Single-stage-to-orbit: How the holy grail of spaceflight could soon become reality” | >