Author Archives: the machinegeek

Video: Breaking SCADA communications

In this presentation from the InfoSec 2013 conference held October 3, 2013 in Louisville, Kentucky, Mehdi Sabraoui discusses the relative insecurity of SCADA network protocols. He covers the Sixnet Tools, taking advantage of a proprietary communication protocol supported by nearly all of Sixnet’s SCADA devices to compromise these devices across a network. Mehdi is a […]

Cypress PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit Smarter Life Challenge

Cypress Semiconductor and element14 are sponsoring the PSoC 4 Smarter Life Design Challenge. The contest will seek applicants to be one of ten RoadTest challenge competitors who will build “Smarter Life” projects to enhance their home, office and / or car using the PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit. Each competitor will also receive $500 budget to […]

Detecting the Perseids meteor shower using RTL-SDR

Amateur radio operation EB3FRN demonstrates how he used an RTL-SDR dongle tuned to a distant VHF transmitter as a passive radar receiver to view the echoes produced by the meteor’s ionization. The signal he received was from the Graves radar system on 143.050 MHz, using a VHF ground plane connected to the dongle. He displayed […]

GNU Radio LiveDVD

A new release of the GNU Radio LiveDVD has been announced. Release 2013-0926 is based on the Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS 64-bit operating system and is a bootable SDR environment suitable for demonstration and experimentation, contained on a read-only medium. This release now includes GNU Radio 3.7.2, gqrx v2.2.0-25, gr-air-modes, gr-iqbal, gr-osmosdr v0.1.0-11, hackrf v2013.07.1-16, osmo-sdr […]

DEFCON video: Live Free or RFID Hard

In this talk from the 2013 DEFCON conference, Francis Brown and Bishop Fox provide practical insight into how RFID proximity badge systems work. They highlight the real world difficulties encountered in reading RFID prox cards with conventional readers, and what you’ll need to build out your own RFID physical penetration toolkit. They use an Arduino […]

Arduino teams with Intel to produce Galileo

Massimo Banzi has announced the latest release in the Arduino line: the Galileo. Galileo is a microcontroller board based on the Intel Quark SoC X1000 Application Processor, a 32-bit Intel Pentium-class system on a chip (datasheet — 920 page PDF.) It’s the first board based on Intel® architecture designed to be hardware and software pin-compatible […]

Open source Halloween LED projects

Eric Thompson of Lowvoltagelabs. sends in these two Open Source Hardware projects for Halloween: I thought October might be a good time to share a couple Halloween related circuit boards that I have designed. Both of them were designed using KiCAD and I have released them as open source hardware so people can make their […]

Amateur radio TV beacon inside CCTV case

András Veres-Szentkirályi write about an interesting project The Budapest hackerspace (hsbp.org) did some joint work with a local ham radio club and created an SSTV beacon housed inside a CCTV case that takes an image of its environment and transmits it using slow-scan television over ham bands. There’s currently one experimental device installed, and since […]

iSEC Open Security video: Hacking the Wireless World

In this presentation from the iSEC Open Security Forum, September 12, 2013 in Palo Alto, CA, Balint Seeber, Applications Engineer and SDR Evangelist / Ettus Research, provides an introduction on how to analyze and hack RF communications systems using open source software and cheap radio hardware. He describes, “The focus will be on how to […]

Video: R-Pi, media centers and AppleTV

In this presentation from the September 29, 2013 session of the Derbycon conference in Louisville, KY, David Schuetz, Senior Consultant with Intrepidus Group, demonstrates the use of the R-Pi as a media center and content server. He devised the project as a way to entertain his children on car trips, now that they’ve graduated from […]

Video – JTAGulator: Assisted discovery of on-chip debug interfaces

Joe Grand presented on the JTAGulator at this weekend’s Derbycon conference in Louisville, KY. We previously posted about Joe’s JTAGulator, which is an open source tool which assists in identifying on-chip debugging (OCD) and/or programming connections from test points, vias, or component pads on a target piece of hardware. The JTAGulator is available from Parallax […]

Mobile phone/Arduino Bluetooth interface

Kerimil has created another app for interfacing mobile phones and microcontrollers through Bluetooth. This time it’s a simple phone controlled RGB LED. The Arduino sketch/code can be found in his Arduino Forum post. The Android .apk file can be downloaded from Google docs, as well as a zip file containing the Android source. Via the […]

OpenXC automotive API for Android

“OpenXC is an API to your car – by installing a small hardware module to read and translate metrics from a car’s internal network, the data becomes accessible from most Android applications using the OpenXC library. You can start making vehicle-aware applications that have better interfaces based on context, can minimize distraction while driving, are […]

Decoding D-STAR headers with the RTL-SDR

D-STAR or Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio is a digital voice and data protocol used in amateur radio. Here’s a link which shows how the RTL-SDR can decode D-STAR text messages and headers (link is in Italian but Google translate can help, and the pictures show more than enough information). By using SDRSharp and […]

ProfTweak app tweaks Makerware settings

Rich Olson of Nothing Labs writes: I’m a Makerbot Replicator 2 user – and I generally like MakerWare – but it pains me that they don’t expose about 95% of the slicer settings in the GUI. To get good results with filaments besides PLA – I often need to do things not in MakerWare’s interface […]

Rant: ham radio and hacking

Bill Meara just did a great guest post at Hackday on why today’s electronics hackers should give ham radio some serious consideration. With the removal of the Morse code requirement from all licensing exams, and the use of multiple choice testing (with the questions/answers available online) there’s no excuse not to consider pursuing your Amateur […]

GNURadio based scanner for SmartNet II digital radio systems

Luke Berndt posted on the HackRF-dev forum: “I built a Scanner app so I could use my HackRF to listen to my local fire department. It should work for any Moto SmartNet trunking systems that uses P25 CAI for the voice channels. It is based off the gr-smartnet code and uses DSD to decode the […]

New Energia version available

The Energia team announces the availability of version 0101E0010. Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform started by Robert Wessels in January of 2012 with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad. Energia uses the mspgcc compiler by Peter Bigot and is based on the Wiring […]