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Neat. I’ve been watching a lot of Nvidia board level repair videos; the technician would occasionally probe the SPI signal lines to the flash chip containing “VBIOS” code to see if the GPU shows signs of life. Given no external microcontrollers on the board, I’ve always wondered what is the type of core that runs mundane tasks like executing the boot ROM, controlling PWM output for the fans, setting RGB LED colors etc. My guess was on Cortex-M, but I guess I might be wrong.

I think Nvidia made a good choice to concentrate logic into the main die, despite a CPU usually having a separate EC (Embedded Controller) or Super IO chip to deal with bootstrapping and fluff. It likely helped board vendors avoid having to go through 50 STM32 copycat product lines during COVID, even though this means the GPU die’s signals are somewhat exposed in practice and “power users” keep blowing up their cards when trying to do a cooling mod.

I remember reading an analysis on one of those projectors; the author found a residential proxy running on their device. I would recommend keeping these things off the internet.

Root persistence is more for encouraging you to report all bugs you’ve found instead of holding on to them in fear that the vendor will patch them and make further research difficult. See Apple’s security research device program.

Notably this bill covers Class 2 and 3 ebikes, not Class 1. The key distinction here is Class 2/3 features a throttle that lets you accelerate without having to pedal.

IMO Class 2/3 bikes are more of a bike/moped hybrid than just bikes.

If you analyze binary files often, I highly recommend binvis - http://binvis.io/. It creates a colored minimap for files it loads and has two available arrangements. Pixel color is based on range of bytes, eg ASCII/null bytes/FF bytes. Besides, it’s a pretty basic hex viewer that runs in your browser. The minimap is extremely powerful for identifying interesting areas and patterns in unknown data.

You seemed to have made an account just for this reply. Care to explain the cynicism? I’m out of the loop with the toxicity.

Here’s a tangent discussion from a while ago that I enjoyed, on bootstrapping PoE (Power over Ethernet) from UEFI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111609

Looking back, funnily the top comment drew a parallel to negotiating USB-PD in u-boot, aka the bootloader. I suppose this wouldn’t have worked for your case though, since your device couldn’t boot at all on 5V.

Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/

That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.

Is it necessary to prevent the water from freezing? If the chamber and water within are subzero while the SoC produces sufficient heat, the ice would simply melt.

* Edit: the article mentioned freezing could crack the seal. Freezing would be a bigger issue than I had thought, then.

I applaud his efforts to document this what must’ve been a nightmare of a case for him. But it felt like a lot of the wording is speculative or hyperbolic in nature and aggressively tries to paint Volvo in a bad light. For example:

“Analysis of Volvo's Final Response: This response … confirms Volvo's complete abandonment of customer responsibility…This is Volvo's definition of ‘customer care’ in 2025.”

“Center Display Failure - Critical Interface Blackout: Main Controls Inaccessible”

“Climate Control Malfunction - Climate System Override: Controls Unresponsive Despite Interface Status”

“Complete Center Screen Malfunction - Total System Breakdown: Hard Reset Failed to Restore Screen”

I know little about Volvo or this case; I’m choosing to offer them some benefits of doubt. Comms and decision making are prone to break down on the corporate ladder. Volvo had no doubt fumbled his case badly but I’m not convinced it is indicative of the company’s overall customer support policy. Sure, the main touchscreen had failed. But how is this an “override” of HVAC or a “total system breakdown”? And what’s the “system” anyways? On top of all that, these subtitle summaries smell like AI.

I don’t deny that Volvo has a lot to answer for. Though the choice of these instigating descriptions might not be the best one giving the author is actively pursuing litigation.

Before I came across this tool, one use case I’d conceived for a tool like this is to help in debugging and reverse engineering. One could hook this up to a microcontroller under test/analysis and essentially monitor its “disk I/O” or supply it with arbitrary data.

Files looks great but it has performance issues and occasional crashes when I tried it out a few months ago. When going into subfolders, there is a very noticeable subsecond lag which I don’t get from native Explorer. For all complaints of lack of features that Windows File Explorer gets, it’s still a very respectable native GUI app for being Windows’ most used program!

> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience

For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.

I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.” In college, you have a bunch of freshly educated, similarly minded people in one place with a whole bunch of free time to put towards one project, highly motivated because it’s both an extracurricular escape and a career prep achievement. And these teams are often financially supported by their school departments or fundraisers. If you fail, there are little if any consequences on your life. All these motivators improve the likelihood of making something truly impressive.

Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.

Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.

Thank you for Outline, I used to self-host it for a team and it was a breeze compared to Google Docs or confluence.

Does it support the use case of publishing the wiki as a public documentation site, while allowing authenticated users to edit?

With an ESP32 or comparable (RPi Pico W, for example) you get MicroPython or CircuitPython support! That means a Python interpreter, drivers for popular peripherals and usually a network stack. Performance doesn’t beat a native SDK but Python is Python.

The Voyagers’ protocol use no encryption and the specification appears to be public. I’ve linked a PDF of what appears to contain the protocol description below. So anyone with a *large enough* antenna can talk to it. It just happens to be that the “anyone” on earth really is just NASA and its Deep Space Network.

https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...

It’s a bit of a pain to set up and self host the container stack but Outline has been great for me. Does anyone have experience with using Outline as a public facing docs/blog site?

My job involves 60% writing software and 40% testing with hardware. I work about 5% of my days from home, when I’m sick or have other obligations.

I don’t have the space, time or incentive to set up a home office in the place I live. This unfortunately means all the stuff around me become distractions. I find it harder to sustain long work sessions at home.

I miss having quick chats with coworkers by their desk. Sometimes I hit an issue and all I need is a 30-second talk with the dev 2 aisles over. And it’s mutual: I find these quick chats great for helping folks out and keeping myself in the loop. Instant messaging is not an adequate substitute.

And lastly this is tied to my work and company policies but usually I can only access test hardware at the office, due to logistics or confidentiality.

If anyone is interested in a game themed shipbreaking/dismantling things, check out Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Instead of oceanic ships one gets to take apart spaceships and sort the salvages like garbage-recycle-compost.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1161580/Hardspace_Shipbre...

Not my idea but here’s an interesting opportunity to iterate on nonetheless.

“event[0]” is a singleplayer sci-fi RPG where you communicate with an AI on a stranded spaceship, essentially a chatbot, to progress the game and learn its story. Your goal is to convince the AI to let you go home. The chatbot detects semantic tags, intents and sentiments from your input, then procedurally generate output in the form of text and game mechanics depending on your request, the context (what part of the game you’re at), and short- or long-term memory.

LLMs weren’t as big of a thing back in 2016 so this game used a rule-based conversation system. Even then, many people praised the AI for how natural and relevant its output felt. There was even an unintentional, secret ending in game due to a bug in how the AI is programmed. I think making a game like this but plug the chat interface into a LLM would create chance for more emergent gameplay and help the game feel more real.

Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/470260/Event0/

Developer interview: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/q-a-ocelot-society-on-b...

> … anyone using other than embedded iOS/Android work. I’m talking businesses with 8 or 9 digit revenue…

The use case and revenue doesn’t have to be contradictory, I guess? What do you mean by “serious work”? iOS and macOS and their bundled apps use SQLite in a lot of places and Apple generated, idk, at least 9 digits in revenue last year. It sounds like you expect SQLite to excel in all use cases including high concurrency/resiliency web services where traditional heavyweight DBMSes like MySQL and PostgreSQL typically stand out, but that’s far from the truth. The authors of SQLite clearly carve out when you should use it (https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html) and it’s clearly succeeding in what it’s good at.

With that said, lots of big firms successfully use SQLite in desktop and web offerings as well: https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

Third party GPU repair is a big business and many GPU schematics and boardviews somehow find their ways from corporate SVN servers to paid forums and google drive links. They would provide enough information, like net names, to identify the straps.

If design files from a particular company is not available, one can usually reference other schematics using the same GPU chip as their board designs are usually similar.

I’d be curious to see the actual design. How much existing aluminum are they replacing with wood? Assuming the wood is purely structural, doesn’t that leave solar panels and internal propulsion/electronics as is which happen to make up the most of a satellite’s volume?

> This exercise has reinforced my prejudice that IoT devices are horribly insecure.

Generally I agree with this assessment for home IoT devices, but I’m curious does this hold true for industrial or transportation? Can someone point me to blogs or studies on Chinese EV security?

I know some MediaTek WLAN chips come with MIPS cores clocked at more or less 1 Ghz, like the MT7621. TLS should be trivial; I believe the thing that matters is how much time/money/design the company is willing to spend on security.

The choice of microcontroller matters. Functional safety qualified MCUs might have the same CPU core but is built in a way that minimizes interference or common cause of failures between peripherals. The software needs to be written closely following the safety manual of such a MCU to make maximum use of those safety guarantees.

Can you provide sources on this? I’ve never heard of their AI chip.

Raspberry Pi’s original SoC is designed by Broadcom for the set-top box market. Subsequent SoCs up until Pi 4 are of the same architecture design but with the Arm cores swapped out and upgraded.

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/563

I’m not sure Ryzen Embedded is the answer to every SBC use case. Even the budget V3000 line comes with 2x 10 GbE, 20 lanes of PCIe and 8 cores. Does an elevator controller [0], e-scooter [1] or a kiosk need that much power? Doubtful. There is plenty of room for low power Arm SOCs.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37016842

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37016842