Month: June 2008

DNS Spoofing With Ettercap

June 7, 2008 by 12 Comments


[IronGeek] has published his latest video how-to: DNS Spoofing with Ettercap. Ettercap is designed specifically to perform man in the middle attacks on your local network. It can do ARP poisoning, collect passwords, fingerprint OSes, and content filtering. For DNS spoofing, you just need to edit a config file that defines which domains resolve to which IP addresses. You can use wildcards for the domains. In the video, he uses Linux because the network interfaces are easier to remember. Once you’re done playing with DNS spoofing, remember to flush your local cache otherwise your browser will continue to go to the wrong IP.

[photo: mattdork]

IR Controlled Relays

June 7, 2008 by 3 Comments


If you’re thinking of building some DIY home automation, this looks like an interesting idea. At the heart is a PIC16F84 that decodes IR signals and controls six outputs – in this case, relays to activate various appliances. The PIC is dirt cheap – if you get a deal on some relays you should be able to build a small local IR HA system for $30… This might be just the thing for my office. It’s cheap enough that it probably wouldn’t walk off.

Tips On Picking The Right Case

June 6, 2008 by 12 Comments


Finding the right enclosure to house your latest project can be tricky, so Sparkfun wrote up some handy tips on the how to pick the right one.

The most important tip is to have your components measured before acquiring a case; even being a few milimeters too small can put you back at square one. To do this right, it’s useful to look at the dimensional drawings of prospective cases to get a sense for the size. These typically include recommended shapes for PCBs too.

You may find a case that meets your dimensional needs but doesn’t have the appropriate mounting bosses. To get the placement right, screw some plastic standoffs to the PCB, then use super glue to attach them firmly to the case.

Tips on button choices, hole drilling, and other typical issues with case modification can also be found in this guide. If this is something that’s been stumping you, give it a look.

How-To: Binary Clock Using A Freeduino SB 2.1

June 6, 2008 by 10 Comments


Solarbotics recently released its own version of the Arduino microcontroller development board. They based their board on the Freeduino design. We thought this would be a good opportunity to review the new board as well as present a How-To about building a simple binary clock. Along the way we’ll cover some basics on attaching LEDs and switches to a microcontroller.

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Wheels And Weed Whackers

June 6, 2008 by 21 Comments


Perhaps you’ve seen this image before: a young kid tooling around on a pair of inline skates, pushed forward by a weed whacker cycle. While the instructions for this device would seem fairly obvious (attach wheel to weed whacker) the writeup appears to be nonexistent. If you have any information, do let us know, but in the meantime, enjoy these other weed whacker powered projects.

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Flipstart HSDPA Mod

June 6, 2008 by 3 Comments


Our friend [tnkgrl] has successfully added HSDPA to a Vulcan Flipstart. The Flipstart is a palmtop Windows machine with 1.1GHz Pentium M, 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and an EVDO option. Before starting, you need to come up with a mini-PCI Express HSDPA card. Instead of trying for a random bare mini-PCIe card on eBay, she purchased an unlocked AT&T Sierra Wireless Aircard 875U USB dongle. Inside of the dongle is a battery, SIM slot, and a mini-PCI Express card. The Flipstart lid comes off with just a few screws and the card drops into place. Even though the antenna isn’t tuned for all the possible bands you should still get good signal most of the time. The best part of this mod is that it doesn’t require any obvious modification, so your warranty will be intact… as far as anyone can tell. Embedded below is the video of the easy swap. In the past, she added HSDPA to the OQO 02, which definitely takes a lot more work.

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