This would be a bad time to slip. (Credit: onionboots, YouTube)
In the olden days, an administrator password on a BIOS was a mere annoyance, one quickly remedied by powering off the system and pulling its CMOS battery or moving a jumper around. These days, you’re more likely to find a separate EEPROM on the mainboard that preserves the password. This, too, is mostly just another annoyance, as [onionboots] knew. All it takes is shorting out this EEPROM at the right time to knock it offline, with the ‘right time’ turning out to be rather crucial.

While refurbishing this laptop for a customer, he thought it’d be easy: the guide he found said he just had to disassemble the laptop to gain access to this chip, then short out its reset pin at the right time to make it drop offline and keep it shorted. Important here is that you do not short it when you are still booting the system, or it won’t boot. This makes for some interesting prodding of tiny pins with a metal tool.

What baffled him was that although this method worked, and he could now disable the password, on the next boot, it would be enabled again. As it turns out, to actually save the new supervisor password status to the EEPROM, you should stop shorting its pin, else you cannot write to it. Although the guide said to keep shorting it, this was, in hindsight, a clear case of relying too much on instructions and less on an obvious deduction. Not like any of us are ever guilty of such an embarrassing glitch, natch.

At any rate, it was still infinitely faster than trying to crack such a password with a brute-force method, even if helped by an LLM.

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It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected.
Nope, don’t like that.
One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pups.

The folks at Wyze were quick to capitalize on the misstep, releasing their own parody ad a few days later that showed various three-letter agencies leaving rave reviews for the new feature. By Thursday, Ring announced they would be canceling a planned expansion that would have given the divisive Flock Safety access to their network of cameras. We’re sure it was just a coincidence.

Speaking of three-letter agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced this week that they will no longer incentivize the inclusion of stop-start systems on new automobiles. The feature, which shuts off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop, was never actually required by federal law; rather, the EPA previously awarded credits to automakers that added the feature, which would help them meet overall emission standards. Manufacturers are free to continue offering stop-start systems on their cars if they wish, but without the EPA credits, there’s little benefit in doing so. Especially since, as Car and Driver notes, it seems like most manufacturers are happy to be rid of it. The feature has long been controversial with drivers as well, to the point that we’ve seen DIY methods to shut it off.

An incredible story ran in The Washington Post yesterday (free to read archive) that’s so wild that it’s almost hard to believe. In fact, if it wasn’t from The Washington Post, we’d be sure it was some kind of conspiracy theory fanfic. The short version goes like this: a Norwegian researcher who was so confident the “Havana syndrome” wasn’t the result of a directed energy weapon decided to prove it by not only building some sort of pulsed RF device based on leaked classified documents, but fired the thing at himself as a test. We’re not sure what the Norwegian equivalent to the “Shocked Pikachu Face” meme is, but we’ll give you one guess as to what happened.

If that wasn’t crazy enough, the article goes on to casually mention that the US Department of Homeland Security secretly purchased a similar pulsed-energy weapon for several million dollars on the black market during the Biden administration, and is currently studying it. Despite it apparently containing Russian components, the Feds have yet to determine who actually built the thing. You’ll have a hard time finding a bigger proponent for the free exchange of information than Hackaday, but even we have to admit…maybe there are some things it’s better we don’t know about.
Perfect for Meshtastic
Of course, if you’re looking to really maximize the effects of your black market pulsed-energy weapon, you’ll need to get it up high (maybe, what the hell do we know). Or perhaps you’re just a radio enthusiast. In either event, if you’re within driving distance of Tennessee, you’ll want to keep an eye on this government auction for an 80-foot-tall mobile communications tower. According to the listing posted by the Madisonville Police Department, the towable rig was built in 2016, weighs in at a little over 10,000 pounds, and has been kept in storage. It just needs some air in the tires to get it moving again.

As of this writing, the high bid is just $565, but with 18 days left to go on the auction, we suspect that number will be considerably higher when the gavel drops. We’ll check back next month to see what it sold for, and on the off-chance that any of you actually buy it, please let us know.

If all this talk of mass surveillance and shady government dealings has you down, perhaps a quick game of web-based Descent will lighten the mood. It’s the product of a port to Three.js by [mrdoob], completed with the aid of Claude. We know many of you are critical of AI-produced code, and not without good reason, but the results in this case are pretty slick.

Finally, we’ll go out on a limb and guess that more than a few in the audience are fans of the film Short Circuit, which turns 40 years old this year. In celebration, an event is being planned for June in Astoria, Oregon, where parts of the movie were filmed. As if you needed any other reason to meet Steve Guttenberg, you’ll also get the chance to pose for pictures with Johnny 5 and sit in on Q&A discussions with the cast and crew. There’s even going to be licensed merch for sale, which we can only hope means you’ll be able to buy one of those miniature J5’s from Short Circuit 2. It’s not the sort of event Hackaday generally covers, but we’re certainly tempted.

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See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

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Back in the 1980s, your options for writing your own code and games were rather more limited than today. This also mostly depended on what home computer you could get your hands on, which was a market that — at least in Japan — Nintendo was very happy to slide into with their ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, or ‘Famicom’ for short. With the available peripherals, including a tape deck and keyboard, you could actually create a fairly decent home computer, as demonstrated by [Throaty Mumbo] in a recent video.

After a lengthy unboxing of the new-in-box components, we move on to the highlight of the show, the HVC-007 Family BASIC package, which includes a cartridge and the keyboard. The latter of these connects to the Famicom’s expansion port. Inside the package, you also find a big Family BASIC manual that includes sprites and code to copy. Of course, everything is in Japanese, so [Throaty] had to wrestle his way through the translations.

The cassette tape is used to save applications, with the BASIC package also including a tape with the Sample 3 application, which is used in the video to demonstrate loading software from tape on the Famicom. Although [Throaty] unfortunately didn’t sit down to type over the code for the sample listings in the manual, it does provide an interesting glimpse at the all-Nintendo family computer that the rest of the world never got to enjoy.

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In many places, municipal water from a utility is something that’s often taken for granted. A local government or water utility will employ a water tower or pumping facility to ensure that there’s always water available to every home and business connected to it, all day, every day, and at a relatively constant pressure. This isn’t true the world over, though, and in [Sameer]’s home of Rajasthan he has to deal with a particularly onerous problem with the local water supply. Although he is connected to a utility, there is only water available at certain times of day, and not on a reliable schedule or at a particularly high pressure. This causes all kinds of problems, but he was able to employ an ESP32 to solve some of the headaches.

Most of [Sameer]’s neighbors install small pumps on the water main to pull water into reservoirs when it’s available. This creates two major problems, the first of which is that with all these pumps running, they can sometimes pull a vacuum on the water main, which can draw in contaminants and cause cavitation in the pumps. The second is that, if these pumps are on a timer and run when there’s no water available, they can damage themselves. [Sameer]’s solution pairs a flow sensor with a pump that is controllable via an automation tool like Home Assistant. He also includes a hydraulic analysis of this particular situation, such as placing the sensor on the output side of the pump rather than the inlet, as well as making sure that there is a laminar flow of water in the pipe it is installed on to ensure that it is taking valid measurements.

With everything set up and running, the water pump can automatically detect if there is water available, pump it to the reservoir as long as it lasts, and then automatically turn off the pump to avoid any thermal damage from running dry. [Sameer] even includes a complete Home Assistant setup for those who would like to replicate his work. We also think that this has utility outside of household water supplies as well, perhaps those watering their gardens with stored rainwater or those using other unique, semi-automated water catchment systems.

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It’s no real secret that modern-day cars are basically a collection of computers on wheels, which also means that we get all the joys of debugging complex computer systems and software with cars these days. Rather than a quick poke under the hood to rebuild a carburetor and adjust the engine timing by hand, you’ll be pulling out a scan tool to gain access to the computer and figure out why the darn thing won’t start after someone else used a scan tool on it, as happened to [DiagnoseDan].

The question was whether the third-party scan tool that was used by the owner had done something to the software settings that would prevent the engine of this 2012 Renault Megane RS from starting, such as erasing keys, or if it was something more subtle. With no stored fault codes and the engine having healthy fuel, spark, and cam sensor readings, the conclusion was that the ECU was not doing its fuel injector things for some reason.

Ultimately, the root cause was that the ECU had been modded, with a re-mapping performed in 2020, meaning that the scan tool that [Dan] was using couldn’t properly interact with the ECU. Reflashing the ECU with the original manufacturer’s firmware was thus the next step, which is pretty involved in itself.

Reinstalling the OS on the car proved to be the solution. Likely, the modded firmware had stored some fault codes, as the ECU normally doesn’t start the engine if there are active codes stored. The third-party scan tool was thus likely blameless, but the inability to just clear fault codes was the real issue.

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There are some stories that you can tell a writer has enjoyed composing, and, likely, whoever wrote the piece for Medical Express reporting on new smart underwear to measure human flatulence was in their element. It follows a University of Maryland project to create a clip-on hydrogen sensor that can be attached to a set of underwear to monitor gaseous emissions.

Lest you think that this research has a non-serious tone to it, it seems that gastroenterologists have incomplete data on what constitutes normal activity. The aim of this research is to monitor a large number of people to create a human flatus atlas that will inform researchers for years to come. Better still, they’re recruiting, so if you’re a regular Johnny Fartpants who misspent their youth lighting farts while drunk and would like to atone, get in touch.

We know that gut problems can be no fun at all, so fart jokes aside, if this research makes advancements in their study, it can only be a good thing. Meanwhile, if you are one of those superproducers they mention, perhaps you need to build the FartMaster 3000.

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While modern game consoles are certainly excellent, there is still something magical about the consoles of yore. So why not bring the magical nostalgia of a GameCube controller to the excellent modern Switch series of consoles?

This isn’t [Dorison Hugo’s] first attempt at building a Switch dock, but with seven years of development, there are a lot of updates in the project to unpack. One version allows the user to play on the Switch’s screen instead of on a docked display, and another comes with a mechanical lock to prevent the console from being stolen. But what really caught our eye is the modifications made to the OEM Switch docks.

As it turns out, there is enough space inside a Switch dock to stuff in four GameCube ports. Short of spinning a custom board, the trick was picking the right commercial adapter to start with. The Wii U branded adapter [Dorison] was using wouldn’t fit. However, a rather small third-party adapter from Input Integrity got the job done. Space was still rather tight, and the ports needed to be removed from the board to fit. Some cables with simple connectors on the GameCube connector side make cable management a bit simpler later. Holes have to be very neatly cut into the front of the Switch dock to complete the look, with the mods held in with some superglue, epoxy, and hot glue.

Shortly after the completion of the dock, the Switch 2 was released, so naturally, that dock went through a similar process. While there is more internal space for cable management on this iteration of the console, there is too little space for the ports to fit without modification. Shaving off a few millimeters from the top of the ports allows them to fit inside the case, but makes cutting professional-looking holes in the front panel all the more challenging. Unfortunately, there is no good way to connect the adapter’s USB cable to the dock’s PCB, so an extraUSB cable became necessary.

Regardless of any imperfections, both of [son’s] modified docks look excellent, with near-OEM quality!

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In the realm of first-world problems, your cheap wall clock doesn’t keep time, so you have to keep setting it. The answer? Of course, you connect it to NTP and synchronize the clock with an atomic time source. If you are familiar with how these generic quartz clock movements work, you can probably guess the first step is to gut the movement, leaving only the drive motor.

The motor is somewhat like a stepper motor. The ESP8266 processor can easily control the clock hands by sending pulses to the motor. The rest is simple network access and control. If the network time is ahead, the CPU gooses the clock a little. If it is behind, the CPU stalls the clock until it catches up.

If you’ve ever done a project like this, you know there is one major problem. At some point, the processor needs to know where the hands are now. On initial setup, you can force the issue. However, if the power goes out, it won’t work well. If the power goes out at, say, 8 AM and turns back on at 9 AM, the CPU will be happy to correct the time to agree with the NTP time. The problem is that the processor has no idea that the hands started at 8 AM, so the time will be off.

To combat this problem, the design uses an EERAM chip to store the current time. In the event of a power failure, the CPU knows where its hands are and can adjust accordingly.

While you usually use these movements to keep time, once you can control them, you can do any crazy thing you like. Or, even anything as artistic as you can dream up.

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ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor can also be used to perform a 3D scan of a room. The sensor data can be combined with an IMU to add orientation information to the scan data. These data streams are then combined by an ESP32 MCU that streams the data as JSON to a connected computer.

Of course, that’s just the heavily abbreviated version, with the video covering the many implementation details that crop up when implementing the system, including noise filtering, orientation tracking using the IMU and a variety of plane fitting algorithms to consider.

Note that ST produces a range of these Time-of-Flight sensors that are more basic, such as the VL53VL0X, which is a simple distance meter limited to 2 meters. The VL53L5CX features the multizone array, 4-meter distance range, and 60 Hz sampling speed features that make it significantly more useful for this 3D scanning purpose.

The Python-based viewer that runs on the PC can be found on GitHub, along with the ESP32 firmware.

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One of the joys of browsing secondhand shops is the possibility of finding old, perhaps restorable or hackable, electronics at low prices. Admittedly, they usually seem to be old flat-screen TVs, cheap speakers, and Blu-ray players, but sometimes you find something like the Dash, an educational toy robot. When [Jonathan] came across one of these, he decided to use it as a turtle robot. However, he found the available Python libraries insufficient, and improving on them required some reverse-engineering.

While [Jonathan] was rather impressed with the robot as it was – it had a good set of features, and thought had clearly been put into the design – he wanted a more open way to control it. There was already a quite useful, official Python program to control the robot over a BLE connection, but it only worked with Python 2 on OS X ([Jonathan] theorizes that it might have been written as a development tool, open-sourced, and not diligently supported afterwards). There were also a few third-party libraries ported to Python 3, but they all seemed to be missing some important features.

All the newer libraries were limited because the official library passed commands to an OS X binary, which handled the actual communication, so anyone wanting to do everything in Python would have to reverse-engineer the communications protocol. [Jonathan] therefore used Ghidra to decompile the binary. He first found the JSON structure used for message data, followed by a function that reads command information and sets up packets, and a mapping between Python command names and command IDs. Once he found the section that creates packets from data, he was able to port the program to Python 3. Interestingly, examining the binary revealed some previously unknown commands that appear to be capable of defining autonomous behavior.

We’ve previously seen Ghidra used on devices ranging from a camera to a router; if you’d like to learn more, there’s a HackadayU course on it.

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Are you in the mood for a retrocomputing deep dive into the Scriptovision Super Micro Script? It was a Canadian-made vintage video titler from the 80s, and [Cameron Kaiser] has written up a journey of repair and reverse-engineering for it. But his work is far more than just a refurbish job; [Cameron] transforms the device into something not unlike 8-bit homebrew computers of the era, able to upload and run custom programs with a limited blister keypad for input, and displaying output on a composite video monitor.

Hardware-wise, the Super Micro Script is almost a home computer, so [Cameron] got it accepting and running custom code.A video titler like the Super Micro Script gave people the ability to display bitmapped images (like text or simple graphics) onto a video stream electronically. A standalone device, under the hood, it uses a 6502 as CPU and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip. [Cameron] observes that architecture-wise, it actually had a lot in common with early 8-bit home computers. Sure, it performed only one “job” but that really had more to do with its restrictive firmware than anything else.

[Cameron] obtained a used unit and repaired it, reverse-engineered the scrambled address and data lines (an anti-cloning and anti-tampering measure), and converted it into something for which he could write his own software and run his own programs. As for uploading those programs? A bit-banged serial port on I/O borrowed from the blister keypad, running at a frankly quite respectable 19.2 kbps.

We hope you’re intrigued, because [Cameron] has one more surprise: he created a MAME emulator for the Super Micro Script called SMSBUG. Originally created to make software development easier, its existence also means anyone can join in on the vintage computing fun. The emulator, along with other handy utilities and info, is available on GitHub.

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The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.

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Musician Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are like a Tarot card deck full of whimsical ideas meant to break up a creative-block situation, particularly in the recording studio. They’re loads of fun to pick one at random and actually try to follow the advice, as intended, but some of them are just plain good advice for creatives.

One that keeps haunting me is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”, which basically boils down to taking a “mistake” and seeing where it leads you if you had meant to do it. I was just now putting the finishing touches on this week’s Hackaday Podcast, and noticed that we have been honoring a mistake for the past 350-something shows. Here’s how it happened.

When Mike and I recorded the first-ever podcast, I had no idea how to go about doing it. But I grew up in Nashville, and know my way around the inside of a music studio, and I’ve also got more 1990s-era music equipment than I probably need. So rather than do the reasonable thing, like edit the recording on the computer, we recorded to an archaic Roland VS-880 “Digital Studio” which is basically the glorified descendant of those old four-track cassette Portastudios.

If you edit audio in hardware, you can’t really see what you’re doing – you have to listen to it. And so, when I failed to notice that Mike and I were saying “OK, are you ready?” and “Sure, let’s go!”, it got mixed in with the lead-in music before we started the show off for real. But somehow, we said it exactly in time with the music, and it actually sounded good. So we had a short laugh about it and kept it.

And that’s why, eight years later, we toss random snippets of conversations into the intro music to spice it up. It was a mistake that worked. Had we been editing on the computer, we would have noticed the extra audio and erased it with a swift click of the mouse, but because we had to go back and listen to it, we invented a new tradition. Honor thy error indeed.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

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There are many applications where you have limits on how much you can cram into a particular space. There are also many applications where you need as much battery as you can get. At the intersection of those applications, you may soon be able to 3D print custom batteries to fit into oddly shaped spaces that might otherwise go to waste.

Commercial batteries are typically cylindrical or rectangular. In theory, you could build tooling to make batteries of any size or shape you want, but it’s an expensive process in small quantities. [Lawrence Ulrich] on Spectrum talks about a new process, developed by [Gabe Elias], that can print anodes, cathodes, separators, and casings for custom battery shapes with no costly tooling.

As an example, consider an unmanned aerial vehicle crammed with avionics. You could put off-the-shelf batteries in the wings, but you’ll end up wasting a lot of space. A custom battery could fill the wing’s interior completely. The post also mentions batteries shaped like the earpieces of a pair of smart glasses.

A prototype showed that in the space of 48 cylindrical cells, the new process could deliver a printed battery that uses 35% more of the available volume and a 50% boost in energy density.

Could you do this yourself? Maybe, but it won’t be trivial. The current process requires a liquid electrolyte and the ability to produce thin layers of exotic materials. What oddly-shaped battery would you like to see? Us? We’d like to have a battery for a laptop that was spread uniformly so there wasn’t a heavy side that has the battery.

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Although [Jamie’s Brick Jams] has made many far more complicated motor design in the past, it’s nice to go back to the basics and make a motor that uses as few parts as possible. This particular design starts off with a driver coil and a magnetic rotor that uses two neodymium magnets. By balancing these magnets on both sides of an axis just right it should spin smoothly.
The circuit for the simple motor. (Credit: Jamie’s Brick Jams, YouTube)
First this driver coil is energized with a 9 V battery to confirm that it does in fact spin when briefly applying power, though this means that you need to constantly apply pulses of power to make it keep spinning. To this end a second coil is added, which senses when a magnet passes by.

This sense coil is connected to a small circuit containing a TIP31C NPN power transistor and a LED. While the transistor is probably overkill here, it’ll definitely work. The circuit is shown in the image, with the transistor pins from left to right being Base-Collector-Emitter. This means that the sensor coil being triggered by a passing magnet turns the transistor on for a brief moment, which sends a surge of power through the driver coil, thus pushing the rotor in a typical kicker configuration.

Obviously, the polarity matters here, so switching the leads of one of the coils may be needed if it doesn’t want to spin. The LED is technically optional as well, but it provides an indicator of activity. From this basic design a larger LEGO motor is also built that contains many more magnets in a disc along with two circular coils, but even the first version turns out to be more than powerful enough to drive a little car around.

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