crikeyconIt's nearly that time, and the Sleuth are running around with final steps. It takes a lot of people to get a con going. Droppy wanted to say "Sleuth, we love you, thank you so much". We make this happen through many volunteers that give up their personal time, and we can't do it without them. 🥰 👏 🙌
Gordon Draper
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Security Engineer, Security Consultant, Entrepreneur | Conference Presentations at Defcon, SecTalks, AISA, BSides Sydney
Wow!
We’re over 2/3 of the way through the tickets now, we’ll keep on selling til capacity or the day before, but merchandise pre-sales will end on Sunday as we have to finalise the order!
There will be some for sale on the day too but no guarantees on sizes....
Head to www.crikeycon.com or https://events.humanitix.com/crikeycon-11
See you there :D
We’re over 2/3 of the way through the tickets now, we’ll keep on selling til capacity or the day before, but merchandise pre-sales will end on Sunday as we have to finalise the order!
There will be some for sale on the day too but no guarantees on sizes....
Head to www.crikeycon.com or https://events.humanitix.com/crikeycon-11
See you there :D
AndyAny high power electrical engineers here who could give me a hint how to not kill myself and/or my gear?
It's about this thing here: https://dm-elektrotechnik.at/notstromladegeraet-epc-2165-2/
It's a three phase generator modified by a company in Austria to emulate a PV string. You are supposed to plug directly into the MPPT of a hybrid inverter to charge your batteries during blackout. This has the advantage that you don't need to worry about unequal loading of the three phases which these cheap 1K€ generators are prone of.
I think this is the original generator they retrofit with their DC generation: https://www.championpowerequipment.de/ITC-POWER-Diesel-Stromaggregat-Full-Power-8-KVA-DG7800SE-T-230V-400V
5K is a pretty steep price in my opinion, especially if I'm somewhat of an electrical engineer myself (it's my passion).
My current theory of operation of this thing is as follows: Rectifying and buffering the 3 phase 400V AC gives you 400V * sqrt(2) ~= 565V.
That was the easy part. And I think they do this because they still have a three phase AC breaker on the panel and a generator naturally gives you AC, what else?
Now for the part I don't know exactly how they do it yet: You need to fake a PV string with its characteristic IV curve to prevent the MPPT from going crazy. This essentially boils down to a current limited power supply, right? There is this 0% to 100% control knob that seems to be able to move the set-point of the current limiting after which the voltage is supposed to drop.
How are they doing this? The simplest approach would be a Mosfet (or at these powers of 5kW an IGBT) and just build a buck or buck/boost converter that is controlled by a feedback of both voltage and current so that you can implement whatever IV curve you'd like. However, we are talking about 5kW here. If something goes wrong we are not only releasing magic smoke but sputtering whole metal surfaces with electronic bits.
A bit of research showed that you can order that generator with an optional Modbus interface for just 1K€ extra (lol). They apparently implement this by using a small PLC according to a document I saw (https://www.loxforum.com/filedata/fetch?id=356007) documenting the coil and register addresses which shows the model number of this thing: https://barth-elektronik.com/media/5b/de/c5/1723458515/9021-0015-A.pdf
I wonder if they just generally use the thing in all their generators no matter if you buy the modbus addon or not and use it to control the power supply after the rectification as well. It has a high power PWM output to potentially drive a switching element for the power supply. There has to be something "intelligent" here that controls the IV curve, or they implemented that entirely discretely, who knows? Maybe they really just use this as a fancy Modbus gateway, I have no idea.
Does anybody of you know of an existing solution that implements something like this? Does my reasoning make sense? Especially the DC part. Can't be that hard to build this at a small scale with a single string 600W inverter first and then scale up, right? :D
I think I need a 3 phase PSU and/or isolation transformer...
They claim to have a (pending?) patent of this thing, however I cannot find it anywhere.
The team at @division5io have been long time sponsors, and so we're super grateful to have them back again as Silver sponsors in 2026! Check them out here or online at: https://division5.io/
Thank you so much! See you in March!
Adrian SanabriaP.S.
found a batch of Camerica NES carts on eBay, clearly showing off their ability to "zap" your NES console into compliance.
Love the label:
"Position B. Only use this position if the game does not work with position A"
The reason for this is that later NES consoles didn't have the lockout chip, so defaulting to position A wouldn't zap the console for no reason.
BOOM.
Just a big fat lie, and Atari didn't have to follow Nintendo's rules anymore.
Of course, if you know anything about Nintendo, what happened next was obvious.
Tengen and Nintendo spent the next 6 years in court over this.
Tengen lost and lost another suit over their version of Tetris (which was competing with Nintendo's own version).
Atari would go on to release the portable Lynx game console and the Jaguar home console. Both were flops and after releasing a some more games for other 90's consoles, they disappeared into Time Warner Interactive.
Overall, they released 3 licensed NES games, and 17 unlicensed games.
I don't know if it's coincidence, but this is the only Tengen NES title in my collection and it's the only one I can't get working.
Also, if you're ever in Knoxville, I set up vintage video games at both Crafty Bastard brewery locations once a month (announced on their Instagram account) - come say hi!
Clearly Tengen found a way around this lock-out chip, and it's a wild story.
Initially, Tengen agreed to Nintendo's licensing terms and produced a few games, letting Nintendo produce the cartridges, like all other 3rd party publishers.
However, they were secretly working on figuring out how to publish their own NES games without Nintendo's permission.
Apparently, some folks had managed to override the lockout with a voltage spike, but that could damage the console.
If you want to see what a game cart designed to send a voltage spike to the lock-out chip on the NES console looks like, check out this post, they have a photo: https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html
Instead, Tengen attempted to reverse engineer the chip. For whatever reason, they failed to do so.
In desperation, Tengen had the cajones to request a copy of the lock-out program from the United States Copyright Office, lying and saying they needed it for a forthcoming lawsuit against Nintendo.
The copyright office GAVE IT TO THEM, and they quickly designed their own chips to emulate Nintendo's lock-out chip.
They called it the 'rabbit', and I believe it's the small chip in the upper-right hand corner of this Gauntlet cartridge.
Nindendo's rules for licensees at the time:
- restricted third parties to releasing only 5 games a year (one of the things that arguably led to the crash was bad quality games from certain publishers)
- required games to be NES exclusives for the first 2 years (no simultaneous releases of movie tie-in games on multiple consoles!)
- and that Nintendo handle ALL cartridge manufacturing
It was this last rule that led to all NES cartridges looking the same, with Tengen's cartridges looking wildly different (very much on purpose).
How did they enforce this though? Spoiler: a 'lock-out chip' on every NES game ensured that the console would only play games manufactured by Nintendo.
(I've never dug into how it works, would be cool if someone can dive into that)
