Cheap WiFi Outlets Reflashed; Found To Use ESP8266

February 6, 2016 by Dan Maloney 52 Comments

There’s a bunch of simple WiFi-enabled outlets on the market today, and all of these blister-pack goodies seem to have something in common – crappy software. At least from the hacker’s point of view; there always seems to be something that you want to do that the app just doesn’t support. Stuck in this position, [scootermcgoober] did the smart thing and reflashed his cheap IoT outlets.

Although [scooter]’s video is very recent, and he says he got his plugs at Home Depot, we were unable to find them listed for sale at any store near us. Walmart lists the same device for a paltry $15, though, so the price is right for repeating his experiment. The video after the break shows his teardown, which locates all the major components, including a mystery module that was revealed to be an ESP8266 upon decapping. Pins were traced, leads were tacked to his serial-to-USB adapter, and soon new firmware was flashing. [scooter]’s new app is simple, but there’s plenty of room for improvement once you’ve got the keys. All the code is up on GitHub.

WiFi outlets like this and the WeMo have proved to be fertile ground for hacking. Of course, if you’re not into the whole blister-pack thing, you could always roll your own WiFi outlet.

Continue reading “Cheap WiFi Outlets Reflashed; Found To Use ESP8266” →

Balancing D-Pad Gets You In The Game

February 6, 2016 by James Hobson 14 Comments

Inspired by TRON, [lasttraveler] decided to try his hand at building a Balance Board — basically a giant joystick pad you can stand on to control.

Constructed of solid wood, the switches are actually very simple — he’s just using tin foil to make the contacts. By opening up the sacrificial keyboard, he’s taken the up/down/left/right keys and wired the contacts directly to the four tin foil pads. A recess in the bottom of the board allows the rest of the keyboard to remain intact — in case he ever wants to take it apart again. Or add new buttons!

Wooden crossbeams in the shape of an X allow the board to balance in the middle without touching any of the contacts — but as soon as you lean the connections are made and you’re off to the races!

Now strap on a VR headset and play some TRON! Though if you want even more accurate control you might want to pick up a cheap Wii balance board instead.

[via r/DIY]

Ancient Fonts Are Fontastic!

February 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

Doing some 8-bit ASCII art, but can’t remember where you left your copy of MicroKnight for the Amiga? Or maybe you just need some low-res-but-high-style bitmap fonts to go with your LED pixel array. No fear! Maze.io is cataloguing old text-mode fonts for you.

Textmode.es has a slew of new and old text art from both the Amiga and PC scenes. Rendering some of these correctly really relies on having the right font, so the parser piece reads many different art file formats and renders them with the requested fonts. There’s ASCII, sure, but also ICE Draw, PCBoard, Artworx, and many more. But piece needs the right fonts to do its work, which brings us back to Maze.io.

So whether you’re interested in new or old text-mode art, or just in need of some pixels to push around, have a look at Maze.io. And if you see any ROMs out there with interesting fonts, let them know.

Title image credit trueschool.se

Reverse Engineering A WiFi Security Camera

February 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The Internet of Things is slowly turning into the world’s largest crappy robot, with devices seemingly designed to be insecure, all waiting to be rooted and exploited by anyone with the right know-how. The latest Internet-enabled device to fall is a Motorola Focus 73 outdoor security camera. It’s quite a good camera, save for the software. [Alex Farrant] and [Neil Biggs] found the software was exceptionally terrible and would allow anyone to take control of this camera and install new firmware.

The camera in question is the Motorola Focus 73 outdoor security camera. This camera connects to WiFi, features full pan, tilt, zoom controls, and feeds a live image and movement alerts to a server. Basically, it’s everything you need in a WiFi security camera. Setting up this camera is simple – just press the ‘pair’ button and the camera switches to host mode and sets up an open wireless network. The accompanying Hubble mobile app scans the network for the camera and prompts the user to connect to it. Once the app connects to the camera, the user is asked to select a WiFi connection to the Internet from a list. The app then sends the security key over the open network unencrypted. By this point, just about anyone can see the potential for an exploit here, and since this camera is usually installed outdoors – where anyone can reach it – evidence of idiocy abounds.

Once the camera is on the network, there are a few provisions for firmware upgrades. Usually, firmware upgrades are available by downloading from ‘private’ URLs and sent to the camera with a simple script that passes a URL directly into the shell as root. A few facepalms later, and [Alex] and [Neil] had root access to the camera. The root password was ‘123456’.

While there’s the beginnings of a good Internet of Camera in this product, the design choices for the software are downright stupid. In any event, if you’re looking for a network camera that you own – not a company with a few servers and a custom smartphone app – this would be near the top of the list. It’s a great beginning for some open source camera firmware.

Thanks [Mathieu] for the tip.

Build Yourself An Awesome Modular Power Supply

February 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 34 Comments

You may think you’ve built a power supply for your bench. Heck, we all do. But until you check out [Denis]’s bench power supply build, you may not even know what you’re missing.

[Denis]’s design is nearly entirely modular and targeted to the intermediate builder. It’s built on easily available parts and through-hole components. It’s got an Arduino running as the brains, so you’re going to be able to hack on the code when you feel like tweaking it. But easy doesn’t mean light on features. Let’s walk through the build together.

It starts off with a pre-regulator: a switching MOSFET that gets the voltage down to just a couple volts above the target value. Then it’s off to the post-regulator that includes all of the fine adjustments, the DAC and ADC interfacing to the microcontroller, and some fancy features like a “down-programmer” that turns the output off extra quickly.

On the user end of things, [Denis] made a very sleek board that incorporates a TFT touchscreen for the controls, Arduino connections, and the obligatory banana plug outputs. There’s opto-isolation on the SPI bus, a real-time clock, and a bunch more goodies on board. He’s in his third revision of this module, and that level of refinement shows. It’s even SCPI compliant, meaning you can control remotely using an industry-standard protocol.

So what would you do with a ridiculously fancy power supply under microcontroller control? Test out battery charging algorithms? Program test routines to see how your devices will work as their batteries drain out? We have no idea, but we know we want one!

Hacklet 94 – Pi Zero Contest Entries

February 6, 2016 by Adam Fabio 16 Comments

Hackaday and Adafruit have joined forces to present the Raspberry Pi Zero Contest. A great contest is nothing without entries though. This is where the Hackaday.io community is proving once again that they’re the best in the world. The contest is less than a week old, yet as of this Thursday evening, we’re already up to 33 entrants! You should submit your own project ideas now for a chance at one of the many prizes. This week on The Hacklet, we’re going to take a look at a few of these early entrants!

We start with [usedbytes] and Zero Entertainment System [usedbytes] has crammed an entire emulator into a classic Nintendo Entertainment System control pad thanks to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Zero Entertainment System also has something the original NES couldn’t dream of having: An HDMI output. The emulator uses the popular RetroPie front end. We’re happy to say that [usedbytes] knew that hacking up a real Nintendo controller would be sacrilegious, so they grabbed a low-cost USB clone from the far East. A bit of creative parts-stuffing and point-to-point wiring later, ZES was ready to meet the world!

Next up is [Jenny List] with The Australia Project. [Jenny] is a hacker from Europe. She’s hoping to use a Pi Zero to talk to Australia. “Talk” may be pushing it a bit though. The Australia Project will use the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) network to transmit RF straight out of the Pi’s GPIO ports. All that is required is a good filter, an antenna, and a balun. The filter in this case is a 7-pole Chebyshev low-pass filter. The filter keeps the Pi’s harmonic filled square waves from messing up every band from DC to light. [Jenny] normally sells these filters as a kit, but she’s made a special version specifically for the Pi Zero.

[Radomir Dopieralski] has brought his signature walking robots to the Pi Zero world with Tote Zero. Tote Zero is a quadruped walking robot built mainly from 9 gram servos. [Radomir’s] custom tote board interfaces the servos to the Pi Zero itself. The Pi Zero opens all sorts of doors for sensors, vision, and advanced processing. The Arduino board on the original Tote would have been hard pressed to pull that off. Tote is programmed in Python, which will make the code quick and easy to develop. Tote Zero just took its first steps a few days ago, so follow along as a new robot is born!

Finally we have [julien] with PoEPi: Pi Zero Power over Ethernet with PHY. The Raspberry Pi Zero is so tiny, that it’s easy to forget it needs a fair amount of power to run. [Julien] is giving us a way to connect our Pi to a network while ditching the USB power supply using Power Over Ethernet (PoE). PoE has been powering devices like IP cameras for years now. It’s become a standard way of transmitting power and data. For the Ethernet physical interface, [Julien] is using Microchip’s ENC28J60, which has a handy SPI interface. Linux already has drivers in place for the device, so it’s a slam dunk. The “power” part of this system comes with the help of an LTC4267 PoE interface chip, which has a built-in switching regulator.

If you want to see more entrants to Hackaday and Adafruit’s Pi Zero contest, check out the submissions list! If you don’t see your project on that list, you don’t even have to contact me, just submit it to the Pi Zero Contest! That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Learn Bluetooth Or Die Tryin

February 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Implementing a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device from scratch can be a daunting task. If you’re looking for an incredibly detailed walkthrough of developing a BLE project from essentially the ground up, you’ve now got a lot of reading to do: [Jocelyn Masserot] takes you through all the steps using the ARM-Cortex-M0-plus-BLE nRF51822 chip.

The blog does what blogs do: stacks up in reverse-chronological order. So it’s best that you roll on down to the first post at the bottom and start there. [Jocelyn] walks you through everything from setting up the ARM compiler toolchain through building up a linker script, blinking an LED, flashing the chip, and finally to advertising your device to your cell phone. It’s a lot of detail, but if you’re doing something like this yourself, you’re sure to appreciate it.

Of course, all the code is available for you to ~~crib~~ peruse on [Jocelyn]’s GitHub. And for yet more background reading on BLE, check out the Hackaday Dictionary.