The Playa Crawler: A Kinetic Walking Chair for Burning Man
In 2017, engineer Mark Ellis designed an innovative kinetic chair called The Playa Crawler to navigate the vast expanse of Burning Man. Inspired by the Strandbeest sculptures of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, this unique chair is specifically crafted to withstand the alkaline terrain of the Black Rock Desert.
Mark Ellis wanted a personal vehicle that was both functional and original for getting around Burning Man. This led him to create a chair that walks using a system of articulated legs. This mechanism, invented by Theo Jansen, allows the chair to move similarly to Jansen's giant sculptures, which are propelled by the wind along the beaches.
Built from laser-cut aluminum and steel, The Playa Crawler is equipped with two electric wheelchair motors, batteries, and is controlled via a wheelchair joystick.
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The @rise-fashion-zine is out, which means that I can finally post my article! I was inspired to do something in the vein of Mad Max with a Krangified version of Burning Man. (What's Burning Man? If you have to ask, then don't worry about it and please don't look it up. I will not be held responsible). Have an extra concept sketch for funsies.
Also big BIG shout out to the whole crew and all the amazing artists who took part in this fantastic zine! I helped with the art of a few other articles which I might share later, but this double page spread is all mine!
If you would like to see the rest the Rise Fashion Zine, you can check out the free digital PDF HERE! I hope you enjoy!
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
If Andrew "bunnie" Huang didn't actually exist, I'd swear he was a character out of a(n extraordinarily technologically well-informed) cyberpunk novel. Every time I interact with this legendary hardware hacker, he blows my mind with some incredible project or insight that permanently alters how I think about technology.
I first met bunnie when he came to EFF for help with the threats he'd received from Microsoft. At the time, bunnie was an electrical engineering grad student at MIT, and he'd taken the bootloader locks on the new Xbox platform as a personal affront and challenge. He applied his prodigious skill and talent to these digital handcuffs, and in short order, he had broken the Xbox and installed Linux on it. MIT's general counsel immediately washed its hands of any responsibility to defend this young grad student from bullying by a corporate monopolist, hanging him out to dry. So he turned to us – and we got his back. You can read all about it in Hacking the Xbox, his canonical work about hardware hacking and technological freedom (it's free!):
In the many years since, I've been lucky enough to count bunnie as a friend, colleague and comrade, albeit one I only physically run into every year or so, usually at some tech event or on the playa at Burning Man, where he still camps with the MIT crew at The Institute.
I just got to see bunnie in person again, over Christmas week at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. He gave a late-night presentation with his collaborator Sean "xobs" Cross, entitled "Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbWWGkyIBGM
Don't let the technical-sounding title intimidate you! This was a banger of a talk, and as with every bunnie Huang production, it left a pleasant and persistent aftertaste.
The background for this talk is bunnie's obsession with building a trustworthy computer. For decades, bunnie has been chasing the dream of a computer whose every component – operating system, drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – are open to inspection. Bunnie's reasoning here is that anything that can't be inspected (and, by extension, modified) by its users is a spot where bad guys can hide bad stuff, and where lurking bugs can fester until they are exploited by bad guys. Remember the spectacular (and still mysterious) claims that Apple's servers had all been compromised with minuscule hardware bugs? The single best explanation of that you will find comes from bunnie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As
Bunnie was doing all this before there was an "open source hardware" movement, and he remains at its vanguard. His "Precursor" project is a reference hardware platform where every component is open to inspection and modification, from the chassis to the random number generator:
One area of especial concern and interest for bunnie is the promise and peril of the "system-on-a-chip" (SoC). This is exactly what it sounds like: a cheap chip that incorporates everything you need to do full-fledged computing, including interfaces and drivers for networks, screens, peripherals, etc. SoCs are ubiquitous. You find them in things like individual car engine components and inkjet printer cartridges, and each one is a whole-ass computer, capable of running some really ugly malware.
As bunnie explained back in 2020, there are two problems with SoCs: first, they are packaged such that the silicon traces inside of them can't be readily inspected, and second, they are so expensive to fabricate that someone like bunnie can't possibly come up with the millions needed to make an open, trustworthy, inspectable alternative:
That's where bunnie's CCC talk comes in. The chips that SoCs are etched upon have lots of space (relatively speaking – we're talking about nanometer-scale circuits, after all). Even after an SoC designer packs in a ton of extra traces to handle oddball applications, the chip is still mostly "dark matter" – blank silicon.
The first half of bunnie and xobs's talk concerns itself with "Xous," a secure operating system for an SoC, written in Rust. But the second half of the talk tackles the problem of procuring an SoC that you can trust to run Xous on. That's where this dark matter comes in.
Bunnie's day-job is consulting on extremely gnarly, high-stakes, high-value hardware design and manufacturing, so naturally, he's got lots of clients and contacts in the SoC manufacturing world. He approached one of these companies with a proposal: let me tape out a whole separate chip that fits in the dark matter for one of your upcoming chips. Adding these traces adds virtually no cost to the production, and adding bunnie's chips to the production run actually saves the manufacturer money, because the prices drop when the quantities increase.
The idea is to put two chips on the chip, and badge most of them with the OEM's branding, while a small rump of the chips will have bunnie's branding (he calls it the Baochip). On bunnie's chips, the traces to the OEM chip will be physically cut, meaning that the Baochips will just be Baochips – the original chip will be inaccessible and unusable.
What's more, bunnie didn't just fit one chip into the OEM's "dark matter" – he fit five separate, specialized SoCs into the unused space. Remember, the beauty of SoCs is that once they're taped out and sent to production, the cost of an actual chip is peanuts, meaning that these Baochips are cheap as hell.
Even better: the traces on these chips are scaled to be readily inspected using relatively low-cost equipment, meaning that many parties around the world can grab one of these chips, stick it in a machine, and compare the traces on the chip to the free, open sourcefile that was used to produce it, confirming that there are no nasty surprises lurking inside.
This was such an exciting talk, and as I sat through it, I had this nagging feeling that it reminded me of something else I'd learned about years before, though I couldn't quite place it. Finally, as bunnie and xobs were stepping off the stage, I had it – it reminded me of another bunnie talk I'd seen – this one at The Institute, the MIT Burning Man camp, more than a decade prior.
Back in 2015, bunnie designed and built a set of really cool, wearable radio-linked badges for his campmates, which would help them locate one another on the playa at night. These badges were really cool – they used a genetic algorithm to "have sex" with one another and mutate their color patterns. Bunnie even worked in a "consent" mechanism!
But the really cool part that stuck with me was the manufacturing story. Bunnie wanted to fabricate custom injection-molded plastic enclosures for these pendants, but injection molding – like chip design – is a mass production phenomenon, with sky-high setup costs and incredibly cheap per-unit costs thereafter.
So (and this might sound familiar) bunnie reached out to a die-maker that he worked with in China and said, "Hey, the next time you're contracted to mill out a die for a client, let me know if there's any extra space on the face of the die, and I'll provide you with a shapefile you can carve out of this 'dark matter.'" This doesn't add any cost to the die setup, and it means that bunnie can run just a couple dozen injection-molded, custom cases at a cost of pennies per unit.
I grabbed bunnie later that night and mentioned this old Burning Man project to him and he said, "You know, I haven't ever thought of it, but you're right, there's definitely a throughline between the two projects."
I asked him what he called this technique and he shrugged and said he didn't really have a name for it, but he thought of it as "piggybacking," which seems like a good name to me.
It seems to me that these two kinds of manufacturing can't be the only ones that can be "piggybacked" onto. That's what motivated me to write this post – to get people thinking about these high-setup/low-unit cost production types that might be piggybacked for small batch, delightful projects like bunnie's.
Well, that, and just to do one of my periodic bunnie Huang appreciation posts. If there's one person that I'd recommend people pay more attention to, it's him. He's also a terrific communicator, and an indecently great writer. My readers might be familiar with him thanks to the afterword he contributed to Little Brother:
https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
More recently, he wrote a fantastic intro for last year's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Computers Work, a brilliant middle-grades graphic novel that uses steampunk dinosaurs to explain digital logic and the building blocks of computation:
He also co-authored a fascinating research paper with Edward Snowden, after the two of them collaborated on a daughter-board that spots otherwise untraceable malware:
That's not bunnie's only sweet hardware hack, of course. Check out the insanely clever design for a contact-tracing dongle he prototyped for the EU in 2020:
But really, you owe it to yourself to read bunnie at book length, and his best book is 2016's The Hardware Hacker, a tour-de-force, lay-friendly exegesis on the theory and practice of hardware hacking:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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The burning man debacle is rly captivating to me in the ‘convention dumpster fire poetic irony’ sense. Like ur telling me these silicon valley crystal guys are stuck in a flooding lake bed after calling the cops on climate change protestors holding up traffic into the festival? By telling the cops these unarmed protestors had a gun? Fantastic. And they’re dying from exposure- oh they’re scaring the shit out of each other with a fake ebola scare??? Of course. I’m sure they’re handling that normally. Just saw a video from a guy at the festival saying folks need to stop being ‘negative’ about the people who didn’t survive the night. And they can’t leave the flooding lake bed because nobody can move their cars- It appears Chris Rock and Diplo have escaped the lake bed by walking out, as it was only a few miles until they hit regular traffic. We do not know the state of the burning man sex plane, the plane at burning man you book to have sex in, which exists. Never before seen cataclysmic impact to the ‘white women with $5k veneers and box braids’ community.
