Author: Arya Voronova

498 Articles

Showing the modchip installed into a powered up Xbox, most of the board space taken up by a small Pi Pico board. A wire taps into the motherboard, and a blue LED on the modchip is lit up.

An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene

June 30, 2024 by 45 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a modchip that adds features to your game console, you might have noticed sanded-off IC markings, epoxy blobs, or just obscure chips with unknown source code. It’s ironic – these modchips are a shining example of hacking, and yet they don’t represent hacking culture one bit. Usually, they are more of a black box than the console they’re tapping into. This problem has plagued the original XBOX hacking community, having them rely on inconsistent suppliers of obscure boards that would regularly fall off the radar as each crucial part went to end of life. Now, a group of hackers have come up with a solution, and [Macho Nacho Productions] on YouTube tells us its story – it’s an open-source modchip with an open firmware, ModXO.

Like many modern modchips and adapters, ModXO is based on an RP2040, and it’s got a lot of potential – it already works for feeding a BIOS to your console, it’s quite easy to install, and it’s only going to get better. [Macho Nacho Productions] shows us the modchip install process in the video, tells us about the hackers involved, and gives us a sneak peek at the upcoming features, including, possibly, support for the Prometheos project that equips your Xbox with an entire service menu. Plus, with open-source firmware and hardware, you can add tons more flashy and useful stuff, like small LCD/OLED screens for status display and LED strips of all sorts!

If you’re looking to add a modchip to your OG XBOX, it looks like the proprietary options aren’t much worth considering anymore. XBOX hacking has a strong community behind it for historical reasons and has spawned entire projects like XBMC that outgrew the community. There’s even an amazing book about how its security got hacked. If you would like to read it, it’s free and worth your time. As for open-source modchips, they rule, and it’s not the first one we see [Macho Nacho Productions] tell us about – here’s an open GameCube modchip that shook the scene, also with a RP2040!

Continue reading “An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene” →

A graphic representing the features of a Sleep Number smart bed, showing individually controlled heated zones

Root Your Sleep Number Smart Bed, Discover It Phoning Home

June 30, 2024 by 64 Comments

Did you know you can get a “smart bed” that tracks your sleep, breathing, heart rate, and even regulates the temperature of the mattress? No? Well, you can get root access to one, too, as [Dillan] shows, and if you’re lucky, find a phone-home backdoor-like connection. The backstory to this hack is pretty interesting, too!

You see, a Sleep Number bed requires a network connection for its smart features, with no local option offered. Not to worry — [Dillan] wrote a Homebridge plugin that’d talk the cloud API, so you could at least meaningfully work with the bed data. However, the plugin got popular, Sleep Number didn’t expect the API to be that popular. When they discovered the plugin, they asked that it be shut down. Tech-inclined customers are not to be discouraged, of course.

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Two of these boards next to each other, one showing the front, assembled, side with the MCU and supporting components soldered on, and the other showing the back, patch panel, side, with wires connecting the MCU pads to testpoints leading to the supporting components

Try Out MCUs With This Jumperable TSSOP20 Adapter

June 29, 2024 by 7 Comments

There are so many new cool MCUs coming out, and you want to play with all of them, but, initially, they tend to be accessible as bare chips. Devboards might be hard to get, not expose everything, or carry a premium price. [Willmore] has faced this problem with an assortment of new WCH-made MCUs, and brings us all a solution – a universal board for TSSOP20-packaged MCUs, breadboard-friendly and adaptable to any pinout with only a few jumpers on the underside.

The board brings you everything you might want from a typical MCU breakout – an onboard 3.3V regulator, USB series resistors, a 1.5K pullup, decoupling capacitors, and a USB-C port. All GPIOs are broken out, and there’s a separate header you can wire up for all your SWD/UART/USB/whatever needs – just use the “patch panel” on the bottom of the board and pick the test points you want to join. [Willmore] has used these boards for the CH32Vxxx family, and they could, no doubt, be used for more – solder your MCU on, go through the pin table in the datasheet, do a little point-to-point wiring, and you get a pretty functional development board.

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Screenshot of the blog post, showing how you can optimize your battery level measurement resistor dividers, among many other things

Making Your Wireless Keyboard Truly Low-Power

June 26, 2024 by 46 Comments

The basics of keyboard design are tried and true at this point, but there are still a few aspects yet unconquered. One of them is making your keyboards wireless. You might think it’s easy, but if you just slap a wireless-enabled microcontroller onto your board, you’ll soon be left with a dead battery. Rejoice – [Pete Johanson], creator of ZMK, tells all that you want to know about making your keyboard low-power.

In a lengthy blog post, he goes through everything that a typical keyboard consists of, and points out factor after factor that you never knew could cause a spike in power consumption. Are you using muxes or config options that will force your MCU to always stay alert? Is your voltage regulator’s quiescent current low enough, and can the same be said about other parts you’re using? Does your MCU have to work extra hard transmitting bytes because you’ve put a copper fill under its antenna? Most importantly, is the firmware you’re using designed to optimize power consumption at its core?

If you’ve ever thought about designing low-power keyboards, hell, any low-power device, you seriously should read this post – it will set you at ease by giving you a checklist of things to do, and it also links to quite a few other useful resources, like the ZMK power profiler. Perhaps, if you’re building a wireless keyboard or just creating battery-powered device, you should consider ZMK, as it sure seems to be written with energy efficiency in mind.

Want to learn more about what it takes to build a low-power device? Our 2023 Low-Power Contest attracted a wide range of entrants, and they’ve shared a flurry of methods and tricks you can use to build any sort of battery-juice-sipping gadget.

screenshot of the code defining a hid descriptor by using essentially macros for common descriptor types

Coupling STM32 And Linux? Consider HID Over I2C

June 26, 2024 by 25 Comments

If you’re pairing a tiny Linux computer to a few peripherals — perhaps you’re building a reasonably custom Pi-powered device — it’s rightfully tempting to use something like an STM32 for all your low-level tasks, from power management to reading keyboard events.

Now, in case you were wondering how to tie the two together, consider HID over I2C, it’s a standardized protocol with wide software and peripheral support, easily implementable and low-power. What’s more, [benedekkupper] gives you an example STM32 project with a detailed explanation on how you too can benefit from the protocol.

There are several cool things about this project. For a start, its code is generic enough that it will port across the entire STM32 lineup nicely. Just change the pin definitions as needed, compile it, flash it onto your devboard and experiment away. Need to change the descriptors? The hid-rdf library used lets you define a custom descriptor super easily, none of that building a descriptor from scratch stuff, and it even does compile-time verification of the descriptor!

The project has been tested with a Raspberry Pi 400, and [benedekkupper] links a tutorial on quickly adding your I2C-HID device on an Linux platform; all you need is DeviceTree support. Wondering what’s possible with HID? We’ve seen hackers play with HID aplenty here, and hacking on the HID standard isn’t just for building keyboards. It can let you automate your smartphone, reuse a laptop touchpad or even a sizeable Wacom input surface, liberate extra buttons on gamepads, or build your own touchscreen display.

Showing a Raspberry Pi 4 board connected to an ESP32 devboard using jumper wires for the purposes of this project

ESP-Hosted Turns ESP32 Into Linux WiFi/BT Adapter

June 25, 2024 by 25 Comments

While we are used to USB WiFi adapters, embedded devices typically use SDIO WiFi cards, and for good reasons – they’re way more low-power, don’t take up a USB port, don’t require a power-sipping USB hub, and the SDIO interface is widely available. However, SDIO cards and modules tend to be obscure and proprietary beyond reason. Enter ESP-Hosted – Espressif’s firmware and driver combination for ESP32 (press release)(GitHub), making your ESP32 into a WiFi module for either your Linux computer (ESP-Hosted-NG) or MCU (ESP-Hosted-FG). In particular, ESP-Hosted-NG his turns your SPI- or SDIO-connected ESP32 (including -S2/S3/C2/C3/C6 into a WiFi card, quite speedy and natively supported by the Linux network stack, as opposed to something like an AT command mode.

We’ve seen this done with ESP8266 before – repurposing an ESP8089 driver from sources found online, making an ESP8266 into a $2 WiFi adapter for something like a Pi. The ESP-Hosted project is Espressif-supported, and it works on the entire ESP32 lineup, through an SDIO or even SPI interface! It supports 802.11b/g/n and even Bluetooth, up to BLE5, either over an extra UART channel or the same SDIO/SPI channel; you can even get BT audio over I2S. If you have an SPI/SDIO port free and an ESP32 module handy, this might just be the perfect WiFi card for your Linux project!

There are some limitations – for instance, you can’t do AP mode in the NG (Linux-compatible) version. Also, part of the firmware has blobs in it, but a lot of the firmware and all of the driver are modifiable in case you need your ESP32 to do even more than Espressif has coded in – this is not fully open-source firmware, but it’s definitely way more than the Broadcom’s proprietary onboard Raspberry Pi WiFi chip. There’s plenty of documentation, and even some fun features like raw transport layer access. Also, of note is that this project supports ESP32-C6, which means you can equip your project with a RISC-V-based WiFi adapter.

Title image from [zhichunlee].

PCB Design Review: Switching Regulator Edition

June 18, 2024 by 18 Comments

This article was prompted by a friend of mine asking for help on a board with an ESP32 heart. The board outputs 2.1 V instead of 3.3 V, and it doesn’t seem like incorrectly calculated feedback resistors are to blame – let’s take a look at the layout. Then, let’s also take a look at a recently sent in design review entry, based on an IC that looks perfect for all your portable Raspberry Pi needs!

What Could Have Gone Wrong?

Here’s the board in all its two-layer glory. This is the kind of board you can use to drive 5 V or 12 V Neopixel strips with a firmware like WLED – exactly the kind of gadget you’ll want to use for LED strip experiments! 3.3 V power is provided by a Texas Instruments TPS54308 IC, and it’s the one misfiring, so let’s take a look.

Continue reading “PCB Design Review: Switching Regulator Edition” →