Hacker News: Ductapemaster

New comment by Ductapemaster in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:35:26 +0000

Water is being used to get heat from one place to another. The idea is being able to separate the heat generation and the heat extraction

New comment by Ductapemaster in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:46:55 +0000

If you were to remove the heat at a sufficient rate by, say, turning the lid into a heat exchanger, you would have a stable system.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:13:10 +0000

Nope, it doesn't have to be open loop!

Example of such a system being used specifically for datacenters: https://blog.vantage-dc.com/2026/04/22/cooling-without-the-d...

Evaporated water is condensed, and in the process transfers its heat into another place that removes it. Another simple example is a pot of boiling water with a lid on it.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:09:51 +0000

Evaporative cooling does not necessitate an open loop system

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Tracking Costco Gas Prices During a Global Fuel Crisis"

Ductapemaster — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:16:51 +0000

https://archive.ph/qX4vF

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:23:57 +0000

I usually smell it too. I've noticed its when they switch from the air handler provided by the jetway (big yellow hose) to the plane's onboard system. Perhaps there's some sequencing procedure that the staff is moving through too quickly trying to get the plane out on time, or it's just an acceptable amount of cross-contamination.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:14:23 +0000

You're right, I was representing a best-case scenario with an intention to be inspiring.

And yes, the Android approach works too and I have done exactly that with Claude previously. The BLE dongle is however a platform-independent approach.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:30:25 +0000

Quite possible transport is encrypted, but that can likely be overcome with some RE on the Android app. Given the price of this piece of hardware, it's likely recoverable with moderate effort. At least worth a try.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:21:10 +0000

From my experience Fable will reject this request - its pretty trigger-happy with it's safety detector for reverse engineering, even if you push it on right-to-repair. However Opus 4.8 is more than capable of doing it, with a bit of guidance.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:39:01 +0000

While I empathize with your feelings about lock-in, I encourage you to see that we live in an amazingly empowering era. I would wager that with $20 in credits for the LLM flavor of the week and and an equally expensive BLE-to-USB dongle (try the nRF52840 dongle), you will have the protocol reverse-engineered overnight. BLE protocols are often very low-hanging fruit for this type of effort.

Yes, it's annoying this stuff isn't open source from the get-go, but it has never been easier to open hardware up for yourself and others.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Decrypting my Flume water monitor's MQTT traffic with a passive relay"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:48:04 +0000

Nice work! Through efforts with Claude in the last few weeks, I have a working model of the actual wireless protocol between sensor and bridge, and have built a passive listener device to snoop on local traffic. I'm in the process of creating documentation for the protocol and would be happy to share what I've learned.

Shoot me an email at my username-at-gmail if you want to chat.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Flume Water Monitor 915 MHz Security Is Pretty Good"

Ductapemaster — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:41:28 +0000

The 8266 has no flash readout protection, and the UART is exposed on a programming header. It was very easy to dump the firmware.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Reverse Engineering Apple Wallet"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:51:20 +0000

I looked into it and the channel sounding approach isn't yet ready. Will need the new iOS as well as some firmware work from Nordic's side.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Flume Water Monitor 915 MHz Security Is Pretty Good"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:50:20 +0000

No need — I simply plugged into the exposed programming header on the gateway.

The sensor has an Atmel SAMD part which I assume has the security bit set. I didn't need to dump that firmware directly as it exists within the gateway flash.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Flume Water Monitor 915 MHz Security Is Pretty Good"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:48:05 +0000

I am planning a write up once I get it working. I'd be happy to share.

My setup is a logic analyzer tap on the SPI bus between 8266 and the RFM69 on the bridge device to log raw traffic, and my secondary RX (ESP32 + RFM69) for over-the-air traffic.

Also, I have a gas meter sensor based on your work half-built on my workbench. I plan to set that up once I finish my Flume distraction. Great work, thank you!

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Flume Water Monitor 915 MHz Security Is Pretty Good"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 02:12:52 +0000

Interesting timing, I have spent the last week with Claude reverse engineering the on-air protocol and I'm getting pretty close to building a secondary "listener" receiver that will collect measurements from my bridge + sensor pair locally.

To Flume's credit, it required me to dump the firmware from the bridge device's ESP8266 in order to extract my key. I didn't consider an approach like this article took, given I have direct access to the HW and there's no flash protection on the 8266.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Reverse Engineering Apple Wallet"

Ductapemaster — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:24:21 +0000

Nordic has newly-released silicon that supports Aliro using Channel Sounding, meaning a UWB chipset becomes optional. Also, NFC is supported directly.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Technologies/Aliro/Produ...

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

Ductapemaster — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:37:35 +0000

This is cool! I have recently been building a "life admin" system that is focused around keeping track of bills and insurance reimbursements, and I am currently extending it to support a recipe database. My data model is markdown + CSV, but it has reached a point where a real database would be helpful. I'll check this out as it may be a good migration. Thanks for sharing.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "Artemis II fault tolerance"

Ductapemaster — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:55:16 +0000

In simple terms, this works by doing an XOR on the outputs and if they disagree, performing a fault recovery.

There's also space systems that use 3 processors and a majority vote for the correct output, but that's different.

New comment by Ductapemaster in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

Ductapemaster — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:49:43 +0000

It's not about the whole microcontroller having less than 64kB of memory - it's that each WASM module has a minimum memory size of 64kB, regardless of how much it actually requires. Also, if you need 65kB of memory, you now have to reserve 2 pages, meaning your app now needs 128kB of memory!

We're working on WASM for embedded over at atym.io if you're interested.