Collaborate Disseminate
Join us on Wednesday, March 10 at noon Pacific for the Decapping Components Hack Chat with John McMaster!
We treat them like black boxes, which they oftentimes are, but what lies beneath the inscrutable packages of electronic components is another …read more
Continue reading Decapping Components Hack Chat with John McMaster
At least by today’s standards, some of the early chips were really, really big. They may have been revolutionary and they certainly did shrink the size of electronic devices, but integrating a 40-pin DIP into a modern design can be …read more
Continue reading Open-DIP Surgery Cuts Retro Chips Down to Size
FPGAs are somewhat the IPv6 of integrated circuits — they’ve been around longer than you might think, they let you do awesome things that people are intrigued by initially, but they’ve never really broke out of their niches until rather recently. There’s still a bit of a myth and mystery …read more
Continue reading What’s Inside An FPGA? Ken Shirriff Has (Again) The Answer
Roll your negotiation skill, because this d20 is a hefty one. The Tweet is also below. We are charmed by [Greg Davill]’s twenty-sided LED contraption, but what do we call it? Is it a device? A sculpture? A die? Even though “d20” is right on his custom controller PCB, we …read more
When you buy a chip, how can you be sure you’re getting what you paid for? After all, it’s just a black fleck of plastic with some leads sticking out of it, and a few laser-etched markings on it that attest to what lies within. All of that’s straightforward to …read more
Continue reading Deep-Sleep Problems Lead to Forensic Investigation of Troublesome Chip
Like pretty much every other big conference, the Chaos Communication Conference is going virtual this year. What was supposed to be 37C3 has been rebranded as rC3, the remote Chaos Experience. It’s understandable, as a 17,000 person live event would have not only been illegal but a bit irresponsible in …read more
At any given time I’m likely to have multiple projects in-flight, by which of course I mean in various stages of neglect. My current big project is one where I finally feel like I have a chance to use some materials with real hacker street cred, like T-slot extruded aluminum …read more
Continue reading Under Pressure: How Aluminum Extrusions Are Made
You’d think that the 8086 microprocessor, a 40-year-old chip with a mere 29,000 transistors on board that kicked off the 16-bit PC revolution, would have no more tales left to tell. But as [Ken Shirriff] discovered, reverse engineering the chip from die photos reveals some hidden depths.
The focus of …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Charge Pump of an 8086 Microprocessor
Chip decapping videos are a staple of the hacking world, and few things compare to the beauty of a silicon die stripped of its protective epoxy and photographed through a good microscope. But the process of actually opening that black resin treasure chest seems elusive, requiring as it does a …read more
Using 3D printed forms to bend sheet metal isn’t exactly new. We’ve seen several people create custom dies for their brakes, and the results have shown the concept has merit for small-scale production. But that’s usually where the process ends. A bend here or there is one thing, but the …read more
Continue reading Forming Sheet Metal Parts with 3D Printed Dies