Fresh hacks every day
Half the fun of buying toys for your kids is getting your hands on them when they no longer play with them. [Kerry Wong] seems to be in this boat. He bought a Syma S107G helicopter for his son. The flying toy is IR controlled and he reverse engineered the protocol it uses. This isn't the first time we've seen this type of thing with the toy. In fact, we already know the protocol has been sniffed … [Read more...]
Back when broadcast television was first switching over from analog to digital most people needed to get a converter box to watch DTV broadcasts. Remember that abomination that was "HD-Ready"? Those TVs could display an HD signal, but didn't actually have a digital tuner in them. Nowadays all TVs come with one, so [Craig] found his old converter box was just gathering dust. So he cracked it open … [Read more...]
The Stylophone - a musical toy from the 60s - is a surprisingly simple piece of engineering. With a simple metallic keyboard played with a stylus and just a handful of transistors, the Stylophone was able to produce a few marvelous for their time sounds, and is the equivalent of a pre-[Stradivarius] violin for the electronic music scene. [Simon] tore apart an original Stylophone, and did a … [Read more...]
[Furrteck] had a little adventure with this FM transmitter he picked up on eBay. It worked alright, but he wanted to be able to scan through the frequencies, and to have the device return to the same settings after power cycling. He cracked it open and got to work to achieve all of his goals. The device is driven by an ATmega48, and there's a 6-pin ISP header on the board. An initial read of … [Read more...]
[John McMaster] is doing some pretty amazing work with figuring out how the circuitry in an integrated circuit works. Right now he's reverse engineering a serial EEPROM chip one section at a time. This is a 24c02 made by ST, and he chose this particular portion of the die to examine because it looked like there were some analog components involved. He removed the top metal using hydrofluoric … [Read more...]
You can find all kinds of LCD screens in broken electronics. But it's often a chore to figure out how they are controlled if you don't have a working device that can be used to sniff the communications protocol. [Justin] grabbed this character LCD screen from an old Brother printer and decided to see if he could reuse it in his own projects. Luckily the driver card still worked so he patched into … [Read more...]
The crew over at the Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (H.A.C.K.) say they aren’t the most well-funded organization out there, so they were stoked when they found they could afford to bring a slightly used UNI-T UT2025B digital oscilloscope into the shop. As they started to tinker with it, the scope revealed one major shortcoming - screenshots were only accessible via a USB connection to … [Read more...]
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