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Category: engineering – Page 139

Factory Defect IC Revived With Sandpaper And Microsoldering

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!

Electromagnetism is a property of spacetime itself, study finds

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.

Blast Chips With This BBQ Lighter Fault Injection Tool

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.

Novel artificial leaf captures 100 times more carbon than other systems

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.

A Novel ‘Artificial Leaf’ Captures 100 Times More Carbon Than Others

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.

Royal BAM announces ‘world’s first’ fully electric road paver and massive 270 kWh batteries

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.

Structured thermal armor achieves liquid cooling above 1,000°C and solves challenge presented by Leidenfrost effect

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.

Single-stage-to-orbit: How the holy grail of spaceflight could soon become reality

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.

“The announcement by Radian Aerospace is exciting, mainly in that it means work in this field, towards this goal, is ongoing,” Maddock tells Inverse. “What exactly that work is, and how successful they may be, is impossible to tell without knowing the technical details.”

First-ever electric bus designed and developed in Africa

Nairobi, Kenya - Opibus has just introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya as well as the first African designed electric bus ever. This is the first major step in the company’s vision to provide a locally designed and developed electric bus that can be mass-produced for the pan-African market, by the end of 2023. This is a step towards realizing Opibus goal of electrifying Africa’s public transport system, deploying products tailored for the local use case. The bus is designed and developed in-house with local engineering talent, while at the same time utilizing local manufacturing partners.

The key to the technology is the Opibus proprietary electric vehicle platform, which is modular and can be the foundation for several types of vehicles. This enables the creation of a bus that is suitable for the African use case, in its reliability, durability and price point. This also means local and global contract manufactures can be used to create a globally competitive product, with a rapid scale-up.

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