Bertho was inspired by a recent forum discussion about driving SPI signals over long cables, so he headed to the workshop and did some test. His epic analysis of transmission lines shows real life example of how signals degrade in … Read more
We go through a lot of prototypes, and many are not perfect the first time around. Here is a pic of one of our prototypes that had 2 pins cross-connected. The simplest solution was to cut the offending traces and … Read more
Lloyd Atkinson writes: I was recently researching the possibility of running OpenWRT on one of my Netgear Wireless access points. I came across a Netgear page that has available TAR files of source code for hundreds of their devices! So … Read more
Bruno hacked his Bus Pirate to be a ZigBee sniffer. He built a small protoboard adapter that connects the Microchip MRF24J40 module to the Bus Pirate IO header. He also wrote custom firmware that captures IEEE 802.15.4 traffic, and passes … Read more
Squok writes referring us to several documents he’s found regarding hacking the bitstream in secure FPGAs: In order to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud, e.g., by cloning an FPGA or manipulating its content, many current FPGAs employ … Read more
JJShortcut took one of the webkey USB devices his school was discarding and decided to reverse engineer it. The device plugs into the USB port on a PC and when its on-board button is pushed it opens the computer’s web … Read more
Travis Goodspeed has assembled this wardriving project covering the ZigBee wireless protocol. It is designed around the radio module from the TelosB, which is used to sniff for nearby ZigBee/802.15.4 transmissions. This module is connected via serial to a Roving … Read more
James decided to reverse engineer car ultrasonic parking sensors. These sensors have integrated electronics that handle all the measurements. They are connected to the car’s internal computer via a low-speed single wire CAN network. James provides pinouts, protocol interface, and … Read more
Kenneth tapping a pager’s output to sniff pager traffic. He bought an old pager and was happily surprised that he could easily tap into the demodulated digital signal. A little poking around between the circuit boards and Google and I … Read more
Darco is evaluating home automation systems for his new house. Devices will be controlled over a power line signaling protocol like X10 or UPB power-line signaling. He seems set to use the more advanced, well documented, and more expensive UPB … Read more
SadE is exploring the possibility of building a reflow oven from an IR cooker. He was able to implement a simple switching temperature control and get some initial temperature response results. A graph of his first run is below. I … Read more
Here is a hack to extract, and use the LCD from a cheap picture-frame key chain. The project involved desoldering the LCD from its mainboard and building a breakout for it. With the help of a DSO it was possible … Read more
Victor converted an SMD IC into a through hole device using perfboard, wire, and lots of hot glue. Wire from each lead is soldered to pinheader mounted through a perfboard, and everything is held in place with a giant squeeze … Read more
Nerdindustries is a small innovations lab from Hamburg, Germany. They were looking for a novel way for members of their inner circle to be able to call them literally at the touch of a button. Their effort led them to … Read more
Philip Peter has made a somewhat unconventional use of the Open Bench Logic Sniffer. Recently we suspected that one motor of our hexacopter had been damaged in a crash. Since removing the motor requires almost the complete disassembly of the … Read more
Gleb Polyakov and Igor Zamlinsky of Atlanta, GA have designed this proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controlled espresso machine. Based upon their observations after reverse engineering a number of espresso units, the pair worked on developing a machine which would be reasonably priced, … Read more
The Nook Tablet hardware protection was hacked with some help from the Bus Pirate. The Bus Pirate was used as a simple USB to UART bridge so nook hackers can talk directly to onboard ICs and bypass the standard bootloader. … Read more
Here is a simple programmable load. It’s basically a constant current sink that is controlled through a pot. The current is sunk through a high power FET which needs to be cooled to function properly. Here’s a link to a … Read more
Ok, so you burned all the memory chips you had around, and now a nice 7-digit display is standing on your desktop just taking up space. This hack turns your unused Flash Destroyer into a clock using a real time … Read more
Kartik soldered the first prototype of his PSoC3 development board. He used a no-solder soldering technique to solder the SSOP IC. He had great success with this technique, after destroying a few PCBs with his old method. Things didnt go … Read more
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