Hackaday Links: January 5, 2014

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While we can’t condone the actual use of this device, [Husam]’s portable WiFi jammer is actually pretty cool. It uses a Raspberry Pi and an Aircrack-ng compatible dongle to spam the airwaves with deauth packets. The entire device is packaged in a neat box with an Arduino-controlled LCD and RGB LEDs. Check out an imgur gallery here.

You can pick up a wireless phone charger real cheap from any of the usual internet outlets, but try finding one that’s also a phone stand. [Malcolm] created his own. He used a Qi charger from DealExtreme and attached it to a 3D printed phone stand.

A while back, [John] noticed an old tube radio in an antique store. No, he didn’t replace the guts with a Raspberry Pi and an SD card full of MP3s. He just brought it back to working condition. After fixing the wiring (no ground cord on these old things), repairing the speaker cone, putting some new twine on the tuner and replacing the caps, [John] has himself a new old radio. Here’s a video of the complete refurbishment.

Here’s a Sega Master System (pretty much a Game Gear) running on an STM32 dev board. Also included are some ROMs for some classic games – Sonic the Hedgehog, Castle of Illusion, and The Lion King. If you have this STM Discovery board you can grab the emulator right here.

[Spencer] wanted a longer battery life in his iPhone, so he did what any engineering student would do: he put another battery in parallel.

Breadboarding something with an AVR or MAX232? Print out some of these stickers and make sure you get the pinouts right. Thanks, [Marius].

26 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: January 5, 2014

  1. Oh god, that codeforge.com site hosting the SMS emulator source is awful. Requires a login, then requires you to either pay or ‘upload your own code’ to get enough points to download anything. “Free Open Source Codes Forge and Sharing” my arse, this is an outright scam.

    1. Dunno, presumably the OS controls the radio chip. Maybe if you redid the OS but even then I dunno, depends on the drivers, which you wouldn’t have the source to. What’s the state of Android? Are there manuf-specific drivers for some bits of hardware? I think that’s allowed even under the GPL for the Linux parts.

      Be unlikely to do it from an app, anyway. Maybe hardware with a 2.4GHz oscillator that’s noisy, or feed some noise into a crystal oscillator.

    2. Probably, if you can get the card in monitor mode. If you have a rooted android phone and a chipset that supports it you can just start aircrack. Don’t do it doh, it’s lame and illegal.

  2. A Raspberry Pi with a 700MHz ARM CPU and GPIOs… that includes an Arduino to drive a character LCD? There’s easily enough GPIOs and CPU power overhead to bitbang 4-bit HD44780 commands…

    1. Funny specs on the quality charger

      >Input votlage: USB 5V / 2000mA; Output voltage: 5V, 1000mA; Power: 5W; Transfer range: 5mm; Charging effeicent: >/= 70%

      Turn 2000mA into 1000mA with 50% efficiency perhaps?

      1. You seem to be assuming that there’s always 10W going in and 5W coming out — that that’s the only data point. They’re more like the “maximums” for the input and output stages, respectively. Over a range of fairly typical values the claim is that the average efficiency is 70%. Not necessarily precluded just by those specs.

        Just don’t forget it’s DX though…

        1. DX’s product descriptions are even more unreliable than HaD article summaries (never mind the speeling & gramar misteaks HaD editors think is normal).

          To add to the fun DX suppliers change the specs whenever they feel like it as well, usually after lunch. You’ll get something vaguely like the last one your ordered (it may well be better!).

          1. From what I’ve seen, DX has been pretty good on sending the right stuff out. Few years ago it was true that it was a mystery what you would actually get, but now that I order something from DX, it’s what I ordered.
            Remeber the delivery times though everyone! If you don’t go for the expensive EMS option, you’ll be waiting several weeks for your order to arrive! Fastest I’ve gotten stuff delivered to Finland has been three weeks, and now that Chinese new year is coming up, don’t even think about getting it under two months :D

          2. They are getting better, but that doesn’t mean much. Their descriptions are still rubbish (the comments help if someone volunteers to be a Guinea pig) and ‘In Stock’ means nothing.

            Still, they do ship faster than what they did, promptly refund you when you complain “It’s been 6 months!!!!” and I’ve always found them good at fixing shipping errors, although that hasn’t happened of late.

            Yes, after all these years I still order from them.

  3. Isn’t that how phone blockers work? sending out “no network” signals on all the available bands?

    Someone should totally make a GPS, phone and wifi blocker detector to see why their device(s) aren’t connecting properly.
    would be a handy device and also allow undetected wifi networks from say machines with wifi left on search mode to be located.
    Seems that many machines now support 5.2Ghz which is a security risk due to buggy card firmware and this can be very dangerous ie. to medical databases on standalone machines etc.

  4. People: aircrack-ng is not a jammer. Sending de-authenticate floods across the channels is a simple Denial-of-Service attack and not strictly illegal (though I’m sure the U.S. or EU governments would intervene if used against them). Jamming implies transmitting noise across a broad spectrum of frequencies, effectively “jamming” the use of any device utilizing those frequency ranges. This is a completely different concept from simple DoS. WiFi DoS is not against FCC or EC regulations. RF Jamming is. De-authenticate/De-associate floods are easy to protect against. RF Jamming is not.

    Please use proper nomenclature because this is misleading to uneducated people.

    Feel free to ping one of the best WiFi hackers in the world – Josh Wright (http://www.willhackforsushi.com) if you’re still confused.

    Also – be sure to change your MAC address before doing this unless you like to be sloppy.

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