Forget Flipper, How About Capybara?

October 20, 2024 by Jenny List 25 Comments

One of the hacker toys to own over the last year has been the Flipper Zero, a universal wireless hacking tool which even caused a misplaced moral panic about car theft in Canada. A Flipper is cool as heck of course but not the cheapest of devices. Fortunately there’s now an alternative in the form of the CapibaraZero. It’s a poor-hacker’s Flipper Zero which you can assemble yourself from a heap of inexpensive modules.

At the center is an ESP32-S3 board, which brings with it that chip’s wireless and Bluetooth capabilities. To that is added an ST7789 TFT display, a PN532 NFC reader, an SX1276 LoRa and multi-mode RF module, and an IR module. The firmware can be found through GitHub. Since the repo is nearly two years old and still in active development, we’re hopeful CapibaraZero will gain features and stability.

If you’re interested in our coverage of the Canadian Flipper panic you can read it here, and meanwhile if you’re using one of those NFC modules, consider tuning it.

A Hacker’s Travel Guide To Europe

October 18, 2024 by Jenny List 55 Comments

This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such a rare occurrence, and since Hackaday is an American organisation and I am in a sense writing from its European outpost, I should do what I can to encourage my other friends from the USA and other parts of the world to visit. So here I’m trying to write a hacker’s guide to visiting Europe, in the hope that I’ll see more of you at future camps and other events.

It’s Intimidating. But Don’t Worry.

Danish road sign: "Se efter tog", or according to Google Translate: "Look for trains". — Yes. We’d find this intimidating, too. Bewitchedroutine, Public domain.

First of all, I know that it’s intimidating to travel to an unfamiliar place where the language and customs may be different. I’m from England, which sits on a small island in the North Atlantic, and believe it or not it’s intimidating for us to start traveling too. It involves leaving the safety of home and crossing the sea whether by flight, ferry, or tunnel, and that lies outside one’s regular comfort zone.

Americans live in a country that’s almost a continent in its own right, so you can satisfy your travel lust without leaving home. Thus of course the idea of landing in Germany or the Netherlands is intimidating. But transatlantic flights are surprisingly cheap in the scheme of international travel because of intense competition, so I’m here to reassure you that you can travel my continent ‘s hacker community without either feeling out of your depth, or breaking the bank.

Continue reading “A Hacker’s Travel Guide To Europe” →

Winamp Taken Down: Too Good For This Open Source World

October 16, 2024 by Jenny List 58 Comments

If you picked today in your hackerspace’s sweepstake on when Winamp would pull their code repository, congratulations! You’re a winner! The source for the Windows version of the venerable music player was released on GitHub three weeks ago, and after some derision over its licence terms, a bunch of possible open source violations, and the inadvertent release of some proprietary third-party code, it’s been taken down. We’re sure that if you still have a burning desire to look at it then it won’t be too difficult to find a copy through your favorite search engine, leaving the question of what really just happened.

It’s fairly obvious that the owners of the code lacked some level of understanding of just what open source really is, based on their not-really-open licence and all those code leaks. They did back down on not allowing people to create forks, but it’s evident that they didn’t anticipate the reaction they got. So were they merely a bit clueless, or was it all just a publicity stunt involving a piece of software that’s now of more historical than practical interest? It’s possible we’ll never know, but the story has provided those of us sitting on the fence eating popcorn with some entertainment.

An Arduino Triggers A Flash With Sound

October 15, 2024 by Jenny List 37 Comments

To capture an instant on film or sensor with a camera, you usually need a fast shutter. But alternately a flash can be triggered with the scene in the dark and the shutter wide open. It’s this latter technique which PetaPixel are looking at courtesy of the high-speed class at Rochester Institute of Technology. They’re using a cheap sound sensor module and an Arduino to catch instantaneous photographs, with students caught in the act of popping balloons.

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Portable Pi Palmtop Provides Plenty

October 13, 2024 by Jenny List 11 Comments

We’ve seen many portable laptops using the Raspberry Pi series of boards in the decade-plus since its launch. The appeal of a cheap board that can run a desktop Linux distro without requiring too much battery is hard not to fall for. Over the years, the bar has been raised from a Pi stuck to the back of one of those Motorola netbook accessories, through chunky laptops, to some very svelte and professional-looking machines. A recent example comes from [Michael Mayer], whose Portable Pi 80 is a palmtop design that we’d be happy to take on the road ourselves.

At its heart is a Pi Zero 2, combining as it does a tiny form factor with the useful power of its Pi 3-derived processor. This is mated to a Waveshare 7-inch display, and in the bottom half of the machine sits a 40% mechanical keyboard. Alongside this are a pair of 18650 cells and their associated power modules. The little Arduino, which normally handles the keyboard, has been relocated due to space constraints, which brings us to the case. A project like this one is, in many ways, a task of assembling a set of modules, and it’s in the case that the work here really shines. It’s a 3D-printable case that you can download from Printables, and it’s very nice indeed. As we said, we’d be happy to use one of these.

Portable computing has come a very long way. Often the keyboard can make it or break it.

Have You Heard Of The Liquid Powder Display?

October 12, 2024 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Over the decades the technology behind flat panel displays has continuously evolved, and we’ve seen many of them come and go. Among the popular ones there are a few that never quite made the big time, usually because a contemporary competitor took their market. An example is in a recent [Wenting Zhang] video, a mystery liquid powder display. We’d never heard of it, so we were intrigued.

The first segment of the video is an examination of the device, and a comparison with similar-looking ones such as a conventional LCD, or a Sharp Memory LCD. It’s clearly neither of those, and the answer finally came after a lot of research. A paper described a “Quick response liquid powder” as a mechanism for a novel display, and thus it was identified. It works by moving black and white electrically charged powder to flip a pixel from black to white, and its operation is not dissimilar to the liquid-based e-ink displays which evidently won that particular commercial battle.

The process of identifying the driver chip and pinout should be an essential watch for anyone with an interest in display reverse engineering. After a lot of adjusting timing and threshold voltages the dead pixels and weird effects fall away, and then it’s possible to display a not-too-high-quality image on this unusual display, through a custom PCB with an RP2040. Take a look at the video below the break.

We’ve seen [Wenting Zhang]’s work here a few times before, most recently in a very impressive mirror-less camera project.

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PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Corporation Prolok

October 11, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

In the 2020s we’re used to software being readily accessible, and often free, whether as-in-beer or as-in-speech. This situation is a surprisingly new one, and in an earlier era of consumer software it was most often an expensive purchase. An anti-piracy industry sprang up as manufacturers tried to protect their products, and it’s one of those companies that [GloriousCow] examines in detail, following their trajectory from an initial success through to an ignominious failure driven by an anti-piracy tech too extreme even for the software industry.

Vault Corporation made a splash in the marketplace with Prolok, a copy protection system for floppies that worked by creating a physically damaged area of the disc which wouldn’t be present on a regular floppy. The write-up goes into detail about the workings of the system, including how to circumvent a Prolok protected title if you find one. This last procedure resulted in a lawsuit between Prolok and Quaid Software, one of the developers of circumvention tools, which established the right of Americans to make backup copies of their owned software.

The downfall of Vault Corporation came with their disastrously misjudged Prolok Plus product, which promised to implant a worm on the hard disks of pirates and delete all their files in an act of punishment. Sensing the huge reputational damage of being tied to such a product the customers stayed away, and the company drifted into obscurity.

For those interested further in the world of copy protection from this era, we’ve previously covered the similar deep dives that [GloriousCow] has done on Softguard’s Superlok as well as the Interlock system from Electronic Arts.