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When you think of an old radio it’s possible you imagine a wooden-cased tube radio receiver as clustered around by a 1940s family anxious for news from the front, or maybe even a hefty 19-inch rack casing for a “boat anchor” ham radio transmitter. But neither of those are really old radios, for that we must go back another few decades to the first radios. Radio as demonstrated by Giulielmo Marconi didn’t use tubes and it certainly didn’t use transistors, instead it used an induction coil and a spark gap. It’s a subject examined in depth by [The Plasma Channel] and [Blueprint], as they come together to build and test a pair of spark gap transmitters . This is a collaboration between two YouTube channels, so we’ve put videos from both below the break.They both build simple spark gap transmitters and explain the history behind them, as well as running some tests in RF-shielded locations. The transmitters are fairly crude affairs in that while they both use electronic drives for their in

Even though machine learning AKA ‘deep learning’ / ‘artificial intelligence’ has been around for several decades now, it’s only recently that computing power has become fast enough to do anything useful with the science. However, to fully understand how a neural network (NN) works, [Dimitris Tassopoulos] has stripped the concept down to pretty much the simplest example possible – a 3 input, 1 output network – and run inference on a number of MCUs, including the humble Arduino Uno. Miraculously, the Uno processed the network in an impressively fast prediction time of 114.4 μsec! Whilst we did not test the code on an MCU, we just happened to have Jupyter Notebook installed so ran the same code on a Raspberry Pi directly from [Dimitris’s] bitbucket repo. He explains in the project pages that now that the hype about AI has died down a bit that it’s the right time for engineers to get into the nitty-gritty of the theory and start using some of the ‘tools’ such as Keras, which have now

In our continuing series of, ‘point and laugh at this guy’, I present a Kickstarter for the, “World’s First Patented Unhackable Computer Ever”.   It’s also a real web site and there’s even a patent (US 10,061,923, not showing up on Google Patents for some reason), and a real product: you can get an unhackable laptop, and you can get it in either space gray or gold finish. This gets fun when you actually dig into the patent; it appears this guy invented protected memory, with one section of memory dedicated to the OS, and another dedicated to the browser. This is a valid, live patent, by the way. The 2019 New York Maker Faire is off . Yeah, it says it’s still going to happen on the website, but trust me, it’s off, and you can call the New York Hall of Science to confirm that for yourself. Maker Media died recently , and there will be no more ‘Flagship’ Maker Faires. That doesn’t mean the ‘mini’ and ‘featured’ Maker Faires are dead, though: the ‘Maker Faire’ trademark is simply license

For the last decade or so, we’ve been powering and charging our portable devices with USB. It’s a system that works; you charge batteries with DC, and you don’t want to have a wall wart for every device, so just grab a USB hub and charge your phone and you headphones or what have you. Now, though, we have USB Type C, with Power Delivery. Theoretically, we can pull a hundred Watts over a USB cable. What if we could tap into that with screw terminals? That’s the idea behind [Jakob]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize . It’s a USB 3.1 Type C to Type A adapter, but it also has the neat little bonus of adding screw terminals. Think of it as jumper cables for your laptop or phone, but don’t actually  do  that. [Jakob]’s board consists of a USB Type C receptacle on one end, and a Type A plug on the other, while in between those two sockets is an STM32G0 microcontroller that handles the power negotiation and PD protocol. This gives the USB Type C port dual role port (DRP) capability, so the power

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We’ve all had that moment of seeing a product that’s an object of desire, only to realize that it’s a little beyond our means. Many of us in this community resolve to build our own, indeed these pages are full of projects that began in this way. But few of us have the audacity of [vcch], who was so taken with the QLockTwo expensive designer word clock that they built their own using the facsimile of its face on the front of QLock’s own catalogue . The claim is that this isn’t an unauthorized copy as such because no clock has been copied — as far as we’re aware there’s nothing against taking the scissors to a piece of promotional literature, and it certainly differs from the usual word clocks we’ve seen. So how has this masterpiece of knock-off engineering been performed? The catalog cover has a high-quality cut-out rendition of the clock face, and the pages behind are thick enough to conceal an addressable LED. By cutting slots through the pages enough space is created for strips of L

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Carola Rackete, captain of the migrant rescue ship Sea-Watch 3, has been arrested for docking in Italy with 40 rescued Libyans on board. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2NmY2fe via IFTTT

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In late 2013 and early 2014, in the heady days of the drone revolution, there was one killer app — the selfie drone. Selfie sticks themselves had already become a joke, but a selfie drone injected a breath of fresh air into the world of tech. Fidget spinners had yet to be invented, so this is really all we had. It wasn’t quite time for the age of the selfie drone, though, and the Lily camera drone — in spite of $40 Million in preorders — became the subject of lawsuits, and not fines from the FAA. Technology marches ever forward, and now you can build your own selfie drone. That’s exactly what [geaxgx] did , although this build uses a an off-the-shelf drone with custom software instead of building everything from scratch. For hardware, this is a Ryze Tello , a small, $100 quadcopter with a front-facing camera. With the right libraries, you can stream images to a computer and send flight commands back to the drone. Yes, all the processing for the selfie drone happens on a non-flying co

It’s not uncommon to drive around the neighborhood on trash day and see one or two ceiling fans haphazardly strewn onto a pile of garbage bags, ready to be carted off to the town dump. It’s a shame to see something like this go to waste, and [Giesbert Nijhuis] decided he would see what he could do with one. After some painstaking work, he was able to turn a ceiling fan into a wind turbine (of sorts) . While it’s true that some generators and motors can be used interchangeably by reversing the flow of electricity (motors can be used as generators and vice-versa) this isn’t true of ceiling fans. These motors are a type called induction motors which, as a cost saving measure, have no permanent magnets and therefore can’t simply be used as a generator. If you make some modifications to them, though, like rewiring some of the windings and adding permanent magnets around them, you can get around this downside of induction motors. [Giesbert] does note that this project isn’t a great way to

Access to fast and affordable internet is a big issue in the USA, even in a major metropolis such as New York City. Amidst a cartel of ISPs who simply will not deliver, a group of NYC inhabitants first took it upon themselves to ease this situation by setting up their own mesh-based internet connections way back in 2013. Now they will be installing a new Supernode to take the installation base far beyond the current 300 buildings serviced. As a community project, NYC Mesh is run as a non-profit organization , with its community members supporting the effort through donations, along with partnerships with businesses. Its router hardware consists out of off-the-shelf equipment (with a focus on the Ubiquiti NanoStation NSM5) that get flashed with custom firmware containing the mesh routing functionality. As this article by Vice mentions, NYC Mesh is one of 750 community-led broadband projects in the US. Many of those use more traditional fixed wiring with distribution lines, but NYC

On Santorini, an old cave complex on the edge of island’s western spine translates into covetable – and, these days, eye-wateringly expensive – real estate. Not that this has stopped local hoteliers from scrambling for their cheque books whenever one comes on the market. Even if the space is only large enough to accommodate three rooms. For the newly opened White Ark, this translates into an exclusive and intimate bolt-hole. Turning its back, literally, to Thira town, the hotel opens out onto jaw-dropping views of that spectacular caldera. Local architects Alexandros and Marianna Kapsimalis have wisely stayed close to the Santorini playbook – which is to say, vast expanses of white surfaces, minimalist wire chairs to decrease visual bulk, light grey linen and accents of marble and steel. The hotel’s relatively bijou size means facilities are limited. There is no restaurant or spa, though there is a tie up with the Andronis Concept Hotel over in Imerovigli. That said, the hotel and t

The MoMA Young Architects Program commission ‘Hórama Rama’ by Pedro & Juana has opened today. The immersive ‘junglescape’ within a 40ft high cyclorama structure will be the site of Moma’s Summer Music series, at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. Mexico City-based architects Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mecky Reuss, founders of Pedro & Juana, designed the installation to transport visitors to a wild place. The hovering scaffold structure covered in wooden bristles features a panoramic image of the jungle inside, while hammocks crafted in the south of Mexico and a flowing waterfall both further add to the immersive experience. The brief for the project was to create an environmentally sustainable outdoor installation for the MoMA PS1 courtyard that provides shade, seating and water. Sean Anderson, associate curator, MoMA Department of architecture and design, was looking for attention to surface, movement and narrative in the winning entry: ‘Pedro & Juana’s world-within-a-world,

Hot on the tail of its inaugural opening in San Francisco last year, Proper Hotels and Residences has launched its sophomore property, this time in Santa Monica, on the city’s sun-soaked Wilshire Boulevard, just a stone’s throw from the beach. The group has once again reenlisted So-Cal interiors queen, Kelly Wearstler, who imparted her characteristic blend of casual luxury and soulful design to the 271 guestrooms and public spaces- a project made all the more compelling thanks to the hotel’s Spanish Colonial Revival frame by architect Arthur E. Harvey. And so, Wearstler’s trademark fusion of earthy materials - such as wood, stone, and marble - organic textiles , and local art, comes together for a fully sensory experience and a refreshingly localised aesthetic. The atmosphere up on the sixth-floor rooftop deck and pool shifts gears for an electric mood spurred by Calabra, a restaurant and bar, while on the ground floor Onda, an exclusive collaboration between chefs Jessica Koslow and

Full-sized arcade cabinets are undeniably cool, but take up a lot of space and can be somewhat of a handful. [PleaseNoFisticuffs] desired something a little more fun-sized, and so built a desktop arcade machine that has some serious style. It’s a build that’s remarkably accessible for even the inexperienced builder. Paper templates are used to cut out the plywood parts for the cabinet, and the electronic components are all off-the-shelf items. Assembly is readily achievable with high-school level woodworking and soldering skills. Like most similar builds, it relies on the Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, meaning you’ll never run out of games to play. Where this project really shines, however, is the graphics. Cribbed from Mortal Kombat II and looking resplendent in purple, they’re key to making this cabinet a truly stunning piece. The attention to detail is excellent, too, with the marquee and screen getting acrylic overlays for that classic shine, as well as proper T-moulding being us

Software-defined radios or SDRs have provided a step-change in the way we use radio. From your FM broadcast receiver which very likely now has single-application SDR technology embedded in a chip through to the all-singing-all-dancing general purpose SDR you’d find on an experimenter’s bench, control over signal processing has moved from the analogue domain into the digital. The possibilities are limitless, and some of the old ways of building a radio now seem antiquated. [Pete Juliano N6QW] is an expert radio home-brewer of very long standing, and he’s proved there’s plenty of scope for old-fashioned radio homebrewing in an SDR with his RADIG project .  It’s an SDR transceiver for HF which does all the work of quadrature splitting and mixing with homebrewed modules rather than the more usual technique of hiding it in an SDR chip. It’s a very long read in a diary format from the bottom up, and what’s remarkable is that he’s gone from idea to working SDR over the space of about three w

For [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], the question was simple: Do I spend 20 minutes slaving away in front of a bandsaw to cut a bunch of short brass rods into even shorter pieces of brass rod? Or do I spend days designing and building an automatic cutoff saw to do the same job? The answer is obvious. It’s only at the end of the video below that [TCME] reveals the need for these brass bits: they’re for riveting together the handles of knives he makes and sells. That makes the effort that went into his “Auto Mega Cut-O-Matic” a little easier to swallow, although we still think he ran afoul of this relevant XKCD . The saw is built out of scraps and odd bits using angle iron as a base and an electric die grinder to spin a cut-off wheel. A small gear motor feeds the brass rod down a guide tube until it hits a microswitch stop, which starts the cut cycle. Another motor swivels the saw to make the cut then moves it out of the way so the stock can advance. The impressive thing is that the only

For a hundred years or thereabouts, if you made something out of plastic, you used a mold. Your part would come out of the mold with sprues and flash that had to be removed. Somewhere along the way, someone realized you could use these sprues to hold parts in a frame, and a while later the plastic model was invented. Brilliant. Fast forward a few decades and you have 3D printing. There’s still plastic waste in 3D printing, but it’s in the form of wasteful supports. What if someone designed a 3D printable object like a flat-pack plastic model? That’s what you get when you make a Fully 3D-printable wind up car, just as [Brian Brocken] did . It’s his entry for the Hackaday Prize this year, and it prints out as completely flat parts that snap together into a 3D model. This 3D model is a fairly standard wind-up car with a plastic spring, escapement, and gear train to drive the rear wheels. Mechanically, there’s nothing too interesting here apart from some nice gears and wheels designed in

There’s something magical about a laser light show. Watching that intense beam of light flit back and forth to make shapes and patterns, some of them even animated, is pretty neat. It leaves those of us with a technical bent wondering just exactly how the beam is manipulated that fast. Wonder no more as [Zenodilodon], a working concert laser tech with a deep junk bin, dives into the innards of closed-loop galvanometers , which lie at the heart of laser light shows. Galvos are closely related to moving-coil analog meters, which use the magnetic field of a coil to deflect a needle against spring force to measure current. Laser galvos, on the other hand, are optimized to move a lightweight mirror back and forth, by tiny amounts but very rapidly, to achieve the deflection needed to trace out shapes. As [Zeno] explains in his teardown of some galvos that have seen better days, this means using a very low-mass permanent magnet armature surrounded by coils. The armature is connected to the

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We’ll all be familiar with Tic-Tac-Toe, or Noughts and Crosses, a childhood pencil-and-paper diversion which has formed the basis of many a coding exercise. It’s an easy enough task to implement in software, but how many of us have seen it done in hardware alone? That’s just what [Warren Toomey] has done using TTL chips , and his method makes for a surprisingly simple circuit. At its heart is an 8 kB ROM that contains precomputed move sequences that are selected via an address composed of the game states for both player and machine. A series of flip-flops control and buttons to make the board, and a 555 provides a clock. The technique of using a ROM to replace complex logic is a very powerful one that is facilitated by the low price of relatively large devices that would once have been unaffordable. We’ve seen the technique used elsewhere, including as an ALU in a TTL CPU , and even for an entire CPU in its own right . You can see the result in operation in the video below the break

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The Marvel villains given to us by the MCU are sometimes botched, but they usually nail the great ones. Here's a ranking. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2ZUJwfR via IFTTT

Doom holds a special place as one of the biggest games of the 1990s, as well as being one of the foundational blocks of the FPS genre. Long before 3D accelerators hit the market, iD Software’s hit was being played on computers worldwide, and later spread to all manner of other platforms. [David Ruiz] decided to build a cutdown version for everyone’s favourite, the ATmega328 . Due to the limited resources available, it’s not a direct port of Doom.  [David] instead took some sprites and map data from the original game, and built a raycasting engine similar to that of  Wolfenstein 3D.  Despite the limited memory and CPU cycles, the basic game can run at between 8-11 FPS. There are fancy dithering tricks to help improve the sense of depth, a simplified enemy AI, and even a custom text library for generating the UI. It’s a great example of what can be done with a seemingly underpowered part. We’ve seen similar work before, with Star Fox replicated on the Arduboy . A hacker’s ingenuity t

Situated in a quiet residential area in the city of Nishinomiya, Hyogo prefecture, a supreme natural setting that is proudly counted among Japan’s top one hundred sites for viewing cherry blossoms, F Residence is the work of local practice Gosize. This project in fact, bears a special significance to the firm, being the home and office of the studio’s owner Go Fujita, who founded Gosize in 1999. A complex brief that combines live and work areas did not deter Fujita from employing his signature approach to architecture; the studio excels in creating contemporary interiors that draw on the country’s traditions. ‘Seeking to reflect a distinctive Japanese aesthetic that favours natural materials and finds beauty in simplicity, the design emphasizes plainness and blank spaces in the interior,’ explain the architects.  Photography: Nacasa & Partners The largely concrete structure has a neat orthogonal footprint that stretches out to a slightly more jagged shape towards the back.

Parallel processing is an idea that will be familiar to most readers. Few of you will not be reading this on a device with only one processor core, and quite a few of you will have experimented with clusters of Raspberry Pi or similar SBCs. Instead of one processor doing tasks sequentially, the idea goes, take a bunch of processors and hand out the tasks to be done simultaneously. It’s a fair bet though that few of you will have designed and constructed your own parallel processing architecture. [BB] sends us a link which though it’s an old one is interesting enough to bring you today: [Michael] created a massively parallel array of Parallax Propeller microcontrollers back in 2008, and he did so on a breadboard. The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core RISC microcontroller from the company that had found success in the 1990s with the BASIC Stamp , the PIC-based board that was all the rage before Arduino came into the world. In the last decade it was seen as an extremely exciting prospect

Humans like things that look like other things. A great example are faux LED tea light candles, with a plastic “flame” and flickering orange LED to recreate the effect of their waxy brethren. [gzumwalt] wanted to take the concept a little further, however, and got down to work . The design harvests the orange LED and flame lens from an existing LED candle, but the rest is all original. [gzumwalt] printed a full-size candle, and fitted it with inductive charging hardware and a lithium-polymer battery. A corresponding charging base is used to supply power to the candle when it’s not in use. This is all handled automatically, with neodymium magnets used to activate reed switches to turn the charger on and the LED off. It’s a tidy build that can be easily replicated with a 3D printer and some off-the-shelf parts. It’s also less wasteful than using disposable batteries, and safer than using real candles – so if you find yourself routinely shooting candle scenes in your budget film studio,

Many of us have seen an old bus for sale for a tantalizingly low price, and begun thinking about the possibilities. [EpiclyEpicEthan1] is someone who took the next step, bought the bus, and got to work converting it to an RV, with impressive results . The bus in question is a 2002 International RE3000, which in its former life had helped move school children and barrels of pool chemicals to and fro. The project began, as many do, with a full teardown of the interior. With this done, the floor was treated to remove rust and repainted. Insulation and new plywood boards were then installed, and the fit-out began. The amount of work involved in the build is immense. There’s a master bedroom, auxiliary bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen area. It’s a fully featured RV in every sense of the word, and yes, there is hot water. There was also significant work done to improve the driving experience, with switches relocated, lights added, and a reversing camera installed for easier parking. Overall

Jony Ive has been leaving Apple Inc. for years. When it was finally made official on Thursday, there was nevertheless hand-wringing about the company’s future. Ive led a stable, close-knit team of designers who created the slick look and feel of Apple’s hardware and software for more than two decades. At least six members of the group have left in the past three years. The departures herald a new era. The days when Apple could reliably deliver a whole new category of device—a spare music player, a sleek tablet, an elegant smartphone—every few years have waned. More recently, the company has focused on iterations of its existing lineup. Now, the company needs another hit, but this one will require fundamental technological innovation, not just the design genius of Ive and his team. One person close to Apple captured the anxiety of the moment: “People who have been there forever don’t want to keep doing incremental updates to current products.” Apple shares slipped less than 1 percen

Thursday night’s bruising Democratic primary debate set ratings record for the party, as NBC News’ presentation of the two-hour event averaged 18.1 million viewers. That beat the previous high of 15.8 million viewers set by CNN in October 2015, when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders first sparred in front of a live TV audience. The week’s second 10-candidate showdown now stands as the 23rd most-watched broadcast of 2019, nestling between Game 5 of the NBA Finals on ABC (18.2 million) and the 105th Rose Bowl on ESPN (16.8 million).  Of the millions of political junkies and rubberneckers who watched the second Demo debate across NBC, MSNBC and the Spanish-language network Telemundo, 29 percent (5.3 million) were members of the adults 25-54 news demo. That edged CNN’s previous record of 5 million adults 25-54. The NBC broadcast network accounted for the lion’s share of impressions, averaging 10.6 million viewers from 9 to 11 p.m. EDT. Per Nielsen, 3.28 million of those viewers were in

Facebook says it has fixed a problem with its new premium video ad offering that caused some initial advertisers to fall short of their campaign targets.  Showcase, which went live in February, offers brands access to a pool of highly curated shows on Facebook's Watch video portal. But two ad execs say the network's new offering was unable to meet the number of views they ordered on behalf of clients. Facebook confirmed that there were a few instances where campaigns missed their targets, blaming it on a teething issue when the program was first getting off the ground, but says the problem has since been rectified. “We’re meeting advertiser-impression goals and helping them reach the younger audiences they want,” says Erik Geisler, head of North America agency sales at Facebook. “A few early campaigns had a bug that resulted in very small delivery variance. That is now fixed.” Showcase is meant to offer brands the same predictability as advertising on TV, with guaranteed au

“Amazing how with only the power of 3D-printing, two different computers, hundreds of dollars in CNC machinery, a lathe, and modern microcontroller magic, I can almost decorate a cupcake as well as a hyperactive ten-year-old.”  We can think of no better way to sum up [Justin]’s experiment in CNC frosting application , which turns out to only be a gateway to more interesting use cases down the road. Granted, it didn’t have to be this hard. [Justin] freely admits that he took the hard road and made parts where off-the-shelf components would have been fine. The design for the syringe pump was downloaded from Thingiverse and does just about what you’d expect – it uses a stepper motor to press down on the plunger of a 20-ml syringe full of frosting. Temporarily attached in place of the spindle on a CNC router, the pump dispenses onto the baked goods of your choice, although with an irregular surface like a muffin top the results are a bit rough. The extruded frosting tends to tear off and

Take a dozen or so fish hooks, progressively embed them in plastic with a 3D printer and attach them to the feet of your hexapod and you’ve got a giant cockroach! A team of researchers at Carnagie Mellon University came up with this ingenious hack which can easily be copied by anybody with a hexpod and a 3D printer. Here you can see the hooks embedded into the ends of a leg. This ‘Microspine technology’ enables their T-RHex robot to climb up walls at a slightly under-whelming 55 degrees, but also grants the ability to cling on severe overhangs. Our interpretation of these results is that the robot needs to release and place each foot in a much more controlled manner to stop it from falling backwards. But researchers do have plans to help improve on that behavior in the near future. Sensing and Closed Loop Control: As of now, T-RHex moves with an entirely open-loop, scripted gait. We believe that performance can be improved by adding torque sensing to the leg and tail actuators,

Imagine a tub overflowing with bubble bath, except it’s a club dancefloor and music is pumping all night. This is what is known as a “foam party” — a wild and exciting concept that nonetheless many are yet to experience. The concept exploded in popularity in Ibiza in the 1990s, and foam parties are regularly held at nightclubs and festivals the world over. Foam is generated with the obviously-named foam machine, and these can be readily purchased or hired for anyone wishing to host such an event. However, that’s not the hacker way. If you’re a little ingenious and take heed of the safety precautions, here’s how you can do it yourself. How Do Foam Machines Work? This is a foam party. Yes, you should definitely have one. If you’ve ever blown bubbles, you’ll be familiar with the basic theory. Create a soap film across an opening, and then blow air through, and it’s possible to form a bubble. Foam is created the same way — it’s just millions and billions of tiny bubbles all stacked tog

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish their favorite hacks from the past week. Seems like everyone is trying to mill their own Mac Pro grille and we love seeing how they go about it. Elliot is gaga over a quintet of power latching circuits, Mike goes crazy for a dough sheeter project, and we dig through the news behind methane on Mars, the Raspberry Pi 4 release, and spoofing Presidential text alerts with SDR. If you like mini-keyboards you need to see the Fauxberry, Artificial Intelligence became an art critic this week, and poorly-lit rooms have been solved with a massive mirror system. Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! And note: next week we’re taking a break to go outside and shoot off some 4th of July fireworks, so there will be no podcast and you’ve got some time to listen through our 24 previous episodes for anything you’ve missed.  You’ll hear from us again the w

Social media can connect us to a vibrant worldwide community, but it is also a huge time sink as it preys on both our need for attention and our insatiable curiosity. Kept on a leash by those constant notification sounds, we can easily look up from our phones to find half a day has gone and we’re behind with our work. [Laura Lytle] has a plan to tackle this problem, her OutBox project involves a single button press machine that posts a picture to Twitter of whatever is put in it. It’s not just another gateway to social media addiction though, she tells us it follows Design For Disuse principles in which it must be powered up and adjusted for each picture, and that it provides no feedback to satisfy the social media craving. Under the hood of the laser-cut housing reminiscent of an older hobby 3D printer is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ and a webcam, with a ring of LEDs for illumination. On top is the only interface, a small “arm” button to set things up and a big red arcade button to do

AMD Epyc processors support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), a technique that prevents even a hypervisor reading memory belonging to a virtual machine. To pull this off, the encryption and decryption is handled on the fly by the Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is an ARM core that handles processor start-up and many security features of modern AMD processors. The vulnerability announced this week is related to the encryption scheme used. The full vulnerability is math heavy, and really grokking it requires a deeper understanding of elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) than your humble author currently possesses. During the process of starting a virtual machine, the VM process goes through a key-sharing process with the PSP, using an ECC Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Rather than raising prime numbers to prime exponents, an ECC-DH process bounces around inside an elliptical curve in order to find a shared secret. One of the harder problems to solve when designing an ECC ba