Comments on: “Clicker” hacking

By: Fartman

Fartman — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:08:24 +0000

Hah, first thing I thought when being forced to buy an I>Clicker was how can I flood with votes.

By: wafflematt

wafflematt — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:32:32 +0000

The i>clicker uses an AVR micro controller that you can easily reflash with your own firmware. I haven’t investigated the possibilities of listening to other clickers yet. The communication chip is a standard one, though.

Way old post, but I ran across it when I was looking at what other people have done with the iclicker.

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:25:13 +0000

The RF proto for the Qwizdom RF clickers is known as ZigBee, IEEE 802.15.4.

By: XLQR9

XLQR9 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:41:48 +0000

How to Hack a Smar card/ SIM Card

By: fade

fade — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:08:01 +0000

The RF iClickers operate at 915Mhz. Any know if’s possible to get a standard 802.11g adapter to pick up the signal? That seems like it would be the only hard part… once you can pick up data it’s just a matter of packet sniffing.

By: ClickerHacker

ClickerHacker — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:02:36 +0000

Has anyone hacked the i>clicker yet? It seems that they’ve all converted to wireless now, so infrared is a thing of the past. We just need to know what frequency and we need to know how to register the votes A-E. If somebody makes this, I know there will be hundreds who will want to buy it.

By: A Nonny mouse

A Nonny mouse — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:04:39 +0000

For the WRT54G to pick up a non-802.11b/g signal, you’d have to do some deep driver modification, at the very least. The Broadcom driver is not open-source, and the hardware is not publicly documented, so it would not be an easy task. To the best of my knowledge, no-one has yet produced an open-source driver for the Broadcom radio hardware on the WRT54G.

Depending on the extent to which the radio is software-defined, you might have also have to do hardware modification. For non-2.4GHz signals, you would certainly have to modify the hardware.

(My completely uneducated guess is that it’s a 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz device.)

You’d probably be better off looking in to GNU Radio. Or, if you already have a receiver lying around, you could put an appropriate transverter in front of it and plug the AF output into your laptop’s microphone jack.

By: Billytheimpaler

Billytheimpaler — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 05:37:20 +0000

nullset, i understand what you’re saying, but in order for a wrt54g to *pick up* the signal it wouldn’t have to be on the 802.11 system. it doesn’t have to be 2.4ghz to listen does it. i guess i should talk to some firmware hacking folks because i really don’t know. it’s just an interesting idea.

By: furtim

furtim — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 23:07:55 +0000

nullset, I figured on reflections, but most living rooms I’ve encountered are painted white, so the reflectivity is pretty good. Classrooms aren’t always, plus there will be more obstructions in the form of people’s heads and whatnot.

I’d really like to see a real-world(ish) test to examine the reliability rather than just a simple undocumented “lab”-environment test results that they showed on the website. For that matter, they only showed their program’s output, not the input from the clickers. For all we know, the program could have been giving wrong results.

There have been plenty of hacks in the past on this site with good testing documentation, so it’s not asking so much really.

By: mirthlesssmile

mirthlesssmile — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:45:37 +0000

Yeah I bought a PRS freshman year for my astro 100 class in Hasbrouck and tha’s the only class I ever needed it for…$30 down the drain!

By: Jfalk

Jfalk — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:29:36 +0000

Yes, we use the PRS ones at my school (umass amherst) and I would personally love one that could spam back registered id’s w/ answers, because attendence is taken in many classes by this method. That alone is worth breaking out the soldering iron.

By: nullset

nullset — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 22:22:25 +0000

umm…I doubt the RF modules use 802.11…. That would be ungodly expensive.

–buddy

By: billytheimpaler

billytheimpaler — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 21:03:00 +0000

Damn! My school just switched from these IR models to the newer (more expensive) RF versions. they really are better from a non-hacking standpoint, in that in classes over 50 the recievers don’t bog down. perhaps some WRt54g action could harness the power of the rf editions. I envision having the router in my backpack with ethernet running to my laptop, showing a live graph of votes as they are placed. wicked, hehe.

By: sbulof

sbulof — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:48:44 +0000

Ya my campus uses these also, but they’ve moved over to the rf ones. that way they removed the need for the ir ones to be pointed directly to the sensors

By: nullset

nullset — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:29:44 +0000

furtim,

While it’s true that IR is directional, it’s not very directional at all. It’s more like a speaker than a laser. The other problem with IR is that it bounces ALOT. Ever pointed your TV remote in different directions to see how many different ways you can point the remote and still have it work? Same idea….

The output of any light source for the most part is a cone. The further away you are, the larger the cone is. If these things transmitted a spot, you’d have to be really good at aiming for it to work :)

–buddy