Circuit Break - A MacroFab Podcast

Podcast Notes

• Part B 
  • Weapons of Star Wars (continued) 
    • Light Sabers 
      • Elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Lots of mystical lore surrounding this weapon.
      • Force aligned crystals are necessary for their construction.
      • How would the blade be created? Plasma? Use EM fields to constrain it.
    • Blasters 
      • They are not laser weapons! This is why the projectiles do not travel at the speed of light. 
        • Gas cartridge and a power cell.
        • 400-500 shots per charge.
        • Gas can be mostly anything but typically is Tibanna – a naturally gas found on Bespin home of cloud city. The gas is created by Beldons huge gas filled creatures. Tibanna is also used as hyperdrive coolant.

Podcast Notes

• Part A 
  • Vehicles of Star Wars 
    • Tie Fighters: Twin Ion Engine. This tech exists but its super low power but efficient.
    • Hovercraft and levitation. Land speeders, Pod Racers, Repulsor Lift technology. Magnetic levitation?
    • Power: Fission batteries? A AA battery weighs around 23g. Convert it all to energy e=mc^2 and you get 2 quintillion Joules of power. 2,067,136,911,094,680,572 Joules to be precise.
    • 16 Teslas to levitate a frog. This consumed 4MW of energy according to the paper. A “common frog” weighs 22.7g. Compact car weighs about 1200kg. So that is 211,453 and some change MW or Joules per second. 8.4million Teslas.  This is 211,453,000,000 Watts. A Fission AA battery could power this for 9,775,869seconds or around 113 Days.
  • Weapons of Star Wars 
    • Death Star 
      • Cost of Steel alone would be $852 quadrillion which is 13,000 times the worlds GDP.
      • How much steel  required to make it? It is 160km in diameter and they modeled the Death Star to have a density similar to a modern warship. Which gives us 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. World wide production of steel is 1.3 billion tonnes a year which will take over 800K years to make enough steel.
      • Thats no moon. Speaking of the size. Earths moon is 3,474km. Smallest moon in our solar system is  Methone which orbits Saturn with a diameter of ~3km.
      • How much energy would be  required to blow up a Planet? Earth would require 2.24 × 10^32 Joules to blow apart the gravitational binding energy of the Earth if you consider it a uniform sphere. In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 10^26 Joules. Which means in 589,473 seconds or about 6.8 days worth of energy. Gives a reason behind Star Killer Base.
    • Star Killer Base 
      • Its not as silly as people make it out to be in comparison to a Death Star.
      • Energy gathered from a Sun? How would that work?

First Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special

This is a reupload of Episode 46 into one continuous podcast. Originally it  was broken into 4 parts. 

• Vehicles of Star Wars
  • Tie Fighters
  • Hovercraft and levitation
  • Power: Fission batteries? A AA battery weighs around 23g. Convert it all to energy e=mc^2 and you get 2 quintillion Joules of power. 2,067,136,911,094,680,572 Joules to be precise.
  • 16 Teslas to levitate a frog. This consumed 4MW of energy according to the paper. A “common frog” weighs 22.7g. Compact car weighs about 1200kg. So that is 211,453 and some change MW or Joules per second. 8.4million Teslas. 
• Weapons of Star Wars
  • Death Star
    • Cost of Steel alone would be $852 quadrillion which is 13,000 times the worlds GDP.
    • How much steel required to make it? It is 160km in diameter and they modeled the Death Star to have a density similar to a modern warship. Which gives us 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. World wide production of steel is 1.3 billion tonnes a year which will take over 800K years to make enough steel.
    • Thats no moon. Speaking of the size. Earths moon is 3,474km. Smallest moon in our solar system is Methone which orbits Saturn with a diameter of ~3km.
    • How much energy would be required to blow up a Planet? Earth would require 2.24 × 10^32 Joules to blow apart the gravitational binding energy of the Earth if you consider it a uniform sphere. In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 10^26 Joules. Which means in 589,473 seconds or about 6.8 days worth of energy. Gives a reason behind Star Killer Base.
  • Star Killer Base
    • Its not as silly as people make it out to be in comparison to a Death Star.
    • Energy gathered from a Sun? How would that work?
  • Light Sabers
    • Elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Lots of mystical lore surrounding this weapon.
    • Force aligned crystals are necessary for their construction.
    • How would the blade be created? Plasma?
  • Blasters
    • They are not laser weapons!
    • Gas cartridge and a power cell.
    • Gas can be mostly anything but typically is Tibanna - a naturally gas found on Bespin home of cloud city.
• Light Speed Travel
  • Faster then light travel in Star Wars is accomplished by transporting the vessel to near light speed and then jumping to a "Hyper Space" dimension where faster then light travel is possible.
  • Possible if this "Hyper Space" is worm hole tunneling.
•  Prosthetics
  • Mechanics exist to make them work.
  • General Grievous.
• The "Force"
  • The force is actually the main character of SW. That’s why prequels suck.
  • Fundamental problem with midichlorians.
  • Force as consciousness.
  • Is the "Force" possibility the control over dark matter/energy?
• R.F.O.
  • What is your favorite Star Wars Character?
    • Organic?
    • Robot?
  • Favorite sound effect?
  • The prequels
  • Why do some Jedi disappear after dying and others don’t?
  • What are we excited or concerned about most in the new Rogue One movie?

Podcast Notes

• Parker has a new update to the Jeep Bluetooth Radio Mod. To level shift the Bluetooth audio to what the  TDA7340S expects, Parker is going to build a differential opamp. The Bluetooth audio adapter has a 50mV DC offset and a 1.9V Pk-Pk at max volume where the TDA7429L is expecting a 4.65V DC offset with a 800mV Pk-Pk. See Figure 1.
• Stephen has a crazy idea to make the "ultimate" inexpensive  resistor standard. His plan is to use a big array of resistors that are in parallel/series. He hops that statistically it will swamp out the tolerance. Stephen will use different manufactures to swamp out batch issues. Next week we should have some analysis on this project done.
• Analog-EETimes article: Why the zero-ohm resistor?
• NASA Wants SpacePoop Hackers. Reminds Parker of this Apollo 10 radio transcription. See page 416.
• New Bluetooth 5 spec is  out. Key updates to Bluetooth 5 include longer range, faster speed, and larger broadcast message capacity.
• Samsung exploding battery  update.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• Popping in last weeks audio was probably due to a cheap USB cable. Stephen and Parker recorded last week on a laptop with a USB powered mic preamp that has less then stellar power filtering and performance.
• Stephen is continuing work on his automatic brewing rig. Has a motorized ball valve to control the flow rate for proper mashing and cooling rates.
• Parker found the correct IC that is inside the Jeep radio. Part number TDA7340S. It is a 100% direct match to the pinout of the IC inside the radio. He found it by looking at ST's catalog of Audio and Radio ICs from that time period.
• To switch Audio sources to an external source, Parker is going to hack into the TDA7340's external effects loop. See Figure 1. The signal will probably have a DC offset since the IC is on a single power rail of ~9.4V. DC offset should be around 4.5V. The Bluetooth adapter will need to have a DC offset to match. ICs to switch the audio signals will either be a NJM2520D or a MAX4544CPA+.
• Shout out to Pat Hensley from Tektronix. Came by the shop earlier this week to get a tour of the fab and show off some Tektronix goodies. Got to play with a Tektronix RSA306B USB Spectrum Analyzer. Which was really awesome. Real time over USB. Interface is scriptable with Python. Will be looking at getting one for pre-compliance testing.
•  Attacking air gapped computers using the cooling fans. Basically a piece of malware tweaks the PWM on the fans inside the computer to transmit data audibly.
• Make your own nuclear battery. Using Tritium keychains and some solar cells to produce power. The battery produces 1.6 volts at 800 nano amps or 1.23 microwatts.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• This podcast was recorded at the MacroFab Engineering location. See Figure 1.
• MacroFab had its annual Thanksgiving Potluck today. See Figure 2.
• Parker has been working more on the Jeep Radio. Part numbers for the IC's are the following: 
  • TDA8563 : 2-Channel 40W power amp
  •  TDA7429L : ST manufactured 3 Band Equalizer Audio Processor
  • TEA0675 : Dual Dolby IC
• Stephen brewed another beer with his electronic brewing rig. He has updated it to be safer and less likely to kill him. See Figure 3.
• The FX Dev Board is nearing launch of the crowd funding. Video is almost done.
• The synth Stephen has been working on has the VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator) designed and layed out.
•  Open-V, The First Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller. Students at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia, have been working on an open 32-bit microcontroller based on the RISC-V instruction set. It is being crowd funded on Crowd Supply. $49 USD gets you a first-run mRISC-V in a QFN-32 package and $99 gets you a development board with a SD card slot, USB connector, and voltage regulators. 
  • 160Mhz Clock Speed
  • SPI
  • I2C
  • SDIO
  • JTAG
  • 10 Bit ADC
  • 12 Bit DAC
  • 16 GPIO

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• Justin Knight and Brandon Knight talk a bit about their background and how they got into technology and startups. They have always worked together on projects and at companies. See Figure 1.
• Justin is the Vice President of Operations at MacroFab.
• Brandon is the Director of Customer Success at MacroFab.
• The Houston Maker Faire was a lot of fun for Brandon and Parker. Lots of MacroFab's customers where there showing off their new products. See Figure 2 for a signing fish.
• Another Kind of Cloud:  The Internet of Farts. A geolocating fart tracker with food logs. Brandon thinks it should be able to measure the intensity of the fart as well.
•  Crowd Source your funding. Crowdfunding site Indiegogo has partnered with equity crowdfunding startup Microventures to allow anyone to invest in startups. Parker thinks this is basically allowing people to invest in companies that could not get funding in a traditional way through venture capitalists which will lead to lots of people losing their investments. Venture capitalism into companies is one of the hardest investments to make a profit from where only a few groups actually outperform traditional investments.  
• Macs Don’t have  replaceable harddrives now. What happens when the computer dies and you need to pull off data?

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• MacroFab will be at the Houston Maker Faire this weekend. Stop by and meet us!
• The FX Dev board's crowd funding campaign is almost ready to launch. The video for it is in post production now. It is awesome and Stephen can't wait to upload it.
• The fixture Parker designed for the selective solder is working. Allows 16"x16" panels on the machine while supporting the middle with a magnet. Stephen has been adjusting the machine to make it fit. See Figure 1.
• Parker's LED clock idea will need some slight revising after he did a bit of napkin math and realized his clock will take almost 3kW of power to light up all the segments.
• The MacroDuino Light Tower will be at Maker Faire. It is using a TGS2602 to measure VOC levels in the air.
• Stephen needs to repair his Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Gun. Unfortunately Hakko does not sell the part he needs. 
•  Visual Guide to the Best Hacker T-Shirts. The MacroFab shirt is missing from this collection. We must fix that! See Figure 2.
• Samsung can’t catch a break.  Top loading washing machines exploding. The washing machine top can unexpectedly detach from the washing machine chassis during use, posing a risk of injury from impact.
• SciShow Space. This is the channel Stephen mentioned. Video about the Pioneer probes being off course.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• Stephen has been working hard on getting the crowd funding setup for the FX DEV Board. Video is being recorded now. Should have something to show next week about the video.
• Parker's bluetooth radio hack for his Jeep is going well. Tested the module and it works. A spare radio to hack on arrived so Parker can get to work.
• The  MacroDuino Rev 2 is working! To make the ATmega328PB work with the Arduino IDE, Parker used the Watterott's ATmega328PB-Testing repo. See Figure 1 of it controlling a light tower.
• Wall Clock idea is in progress now. Parker will be ordering boards for it soon. Stay tuned for this one.
•  Upgraded USB killer V2.5 U disk killer miniature high voltage pulse generator. Parker and Stephen talked about this on a previous podcast but this is a newer version. The description is full of broken English.
  • High voltage, power must be off after standing for 2 minutes, until the release of more than electricity, and then carefully openings on the motherboard!
  • Solve the USB killer V2.0 problem of unstable extension cable, By the test, extension line 5 meters long, killer can still release pulse. Nothing can stop it from releasing high voltage pulses.
•  What’s New, ESP-32? Testing the Arduino Library. The new ESP-32 now has core support for GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, and WiFi for the Arduino IDE. The code is on Espressif's github who are the designers of the chip. Interesting that the designers of the chip are pushing the Arduino platform for their hardware.
• Space Echo progress. Three quarters done. Should have it back together next podcast.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

Podcast Notes

• As mentioned in last weeks episode, MacroFab is moving to a new location currently. See Figure 1.
• Parker is going to hack his Jeep's radio this weekend with a Bluetooth Audio board. Parker is using this board found on Amazon. See Figure 2.
• Parker goofed on making the podcast notes and had that NXP was buying out Qualcomm. It is actually the other way  around. Set for a $39 billion buy out.
• Botnet Recall of Things. This is a continuation of the IoT DDOS attacks that have been happening this past couple weeks. Commentator "anszom" in the Hack A Day comment thread had a really good idea. 
  • 1. Write a bot attacking the vulnerable devices. It doesn’t seem very difficult
     2. Our new bot either simply bricks the device or changes the default password to a random one
     3. Problem “solved’ :)
• Stephen and Parker think they need to make designers and programmers of IoT devices accountable for security. Maybe implement a CE/FCC emissions and ESD testing for hardware. Can a security test be standardized across multiple platforms?

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!