Author: Jenny List

3368 Articles

An RF Remote Is No Match For A Logic Analyser!

September 16, 2021 by 7 Comments

The Neewer NL660-2.4 Video Keylight has a handy remote control, which for [Tom Clement] has a major flaw in that it can’t restore the light to the state it had during its last power-on. He’s thus taken the trouble to reverse engineer it and create his own remote using a suitably-equipped Arduino clone.

The write-up is a step through primer for the would-be RF remote hacker, identifying the brains as an STM8 and the radio as an NRF24 clone before attempting to dump the firmware of the STM8. As might be expected the STM is protected, which only leaves the option of sniffing the connection between the two chips. The SPI pins are duly probed with a logic analyser, and the codes used by Neweer are extracted. As luck would have it there is a handy board called the RF Nano which is an Arduino Nano and an NRF24 in an Arduino Nano form factor, so a proof of concept remote could be written on an all-in-one module. You can find the result as a GitHub Gist, should you be curious.

We’ve seen Tom a few times before, particularly in his European BadgeLife work, as part of which he’s put a lot of effort into bringing browser-based WebUSB and WebSerial development to his work.

Overengineering A Smart Doorbell

September 12, 2021 by 19 Comments

Fresh from the mediaeval splendour of the Belgian city of Gent, we bring you more from the Newline hacker conference organised by Hackerspace Gent. [Victor Sonck] works at the top of his house, and thus needed a doorbell notifier. His solution was unexpected, and as he admits over engineered, using machine learning on an audio stream from a microphone to detect the doorbell’s sound.

Having established that selling his soul to Amazon with a Ring doorbell wasn’t an appropriate solution, he next looked at his existing doorbell. Some of us might connect directly to its power to sense when the button was pressed, but we’re kinda glad he went for the overengineered route because it means we are treated to a run-down how machine learning works and how it can be applied to audio. The end result can sometimes be triggered by a spoon hitting a cereal plate, but since he was able to demonstrate it working we think it can be called a success. Should you wish to dive in further you can find more in his GitHub repository.

How would you overengineer a doorbell? Use GNU radio and filters? Or maybe a Rube Goldberg machine involving string and pulleys? As always, the comments are open.

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Hey, MiSTer Emulator, Gimme Almost Any Classic Platform!

September 12, 2021 by 20 Comments

I’m back with another of the talks from Hackerspace Gent’s NewLine conference, fresh from my weekend of indulgence quaffing fine Belgian food and beers while mixing with that country’s hacker community. This time it’s an overview from [Michael Smith] of the MiSTer project, a multi-emulator using an FPGA to swap out implementations of everything from an early PDP minicomputer to an 80486SX PC.

At its heart is a dev board containing an Intel Cyclone SoC/FPGA, to which a USB hub must be added, and then a memory upgrade to run all but the simplest of cores. Once the hardware has been taken care of it almost seems as though there are no classic platforms for which there isn’t a core, as a quick browse of the MiSTer forum attests. We are treated to seamless switching between SNES and NED platforms, and even switching different SID chip versions during a running Commodore 64 demo.

There are many different routes to a decent emulator set-up be they using hardware, software, or a combination of both. It’s unlikely that there are any as versatile as this one though, and we’re guessing that as it further evolves it will become a fixture below the monitor or TV of any gamer.  It’s a step up from single-platform FPGA emulators, that’s for certain!

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EM-Glitching For Nintendo DSi Boot ROMs

September 11, 2021 by 2 Comments

Some hacker events are muddy and dusty affairs in distant fields, others take place in darkened halls, but I went to one that can be experienced as a luxury break in a European city steeped in culture and history. Newline takes place at Hackerspace Gent, in the Belgian city of that name, and I was there last weekend to catch the atmosphere as well as the programme of talks and workshops. And of those a good start was made by [PoroCYon], whose fascinating introduction to the glitching techniques involved in recovering the boot ROMs from a Nintendo DSi taught us plenty of things we hadn’t seen before.

The talk which you’ll find below the break starts by describing the process of glitching — using power supply interference to interrupt the operation of a microprocessor and avoid certain instructions — to bypass security code. It then moves on to some of the protection mechanisms used in the various generations of Nintendo consoles and handhelds, before moving on to the work on the DSi at which point the talk moved onto a field which may be old hat in glitching circles but was new to me; that of EM glitching.

EM glitching involves using a small coil to generate precisely timed electromagnetic pulses which induce the glitch voltages in the chip. The fascinating part is that the EM probe can be made small enough to target individual areas of the chip, so using it involves a brute-force technique trying all combinations of timing and position with the probe held in a computer-controlled X-Y mount.

The DSi has two processors on board, this achieves success with the ARM7 but leaves its companion ARM9 as yet untapped. There are a promising set of attack vectors left to try, of which the ARM7 placing the ARM9 into a state from which it can be glitched seems to be the most promising. It’s fairly obvious that there’s plenty more to come from this quarter.

More details of the talk can be found in this repository, and for those interested in EM glitching you can find out more in this video and in this project using it to attack a Gecko microcontroller.

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Save That Old VGA Monitor From The Trash

September 11, 2021 by 64 Comments

It’s quite a while since any of us unpacked a brand new VGA monitor, but since so many machines still have the ability to drive them even through an inexpensive adaptor they’re still something that finds a use. With so many old VGA flat panel monitors being tossed away they even come at the low low price of free, which can’t be argued with. CNXSoft’s [Jean-Luc Aufranc] was tasked with fixing a dead one, and wrote an account of his progress.

Seasoned readers will no doubt be guessing where this story will lead, as when he cracked it open and exposed the PSU board there was the tell-tale puffiness of a failed electrolytic capacitor. For relative pennies a replacement was secured, and the monitor was fixed. As repair hacks go it’s a straightforward one, but still worth remarking because a free monitor is a free monitor.

We called the demise of VGA back in 2016, and have seen no reason to go back on that. But for those of us left with a few legacy monitors it’s worth remembering that DVI and thus the DVI compatibility mode of HDMI is little more than a digitised version of the R, G, and B channels you’d find on that trusty blue connector. Maybe that little dongle doesn’t make such a bad purchase, and of course you can also use it as an SDR if you want.

Creating Video From A ROM

September 10, 2021 by 14 Comments

We’re used to computers with display screens, yet how many of us have created the circuitry to drive one directly? Sure, we’ve coded up an SPI display driver on a microcontroller, but create the hardware to generate a usable video signal? That’s a little more difficult. [Jdh] has given it a go though, with a TTL video card.

In this case it’s not a card so much as a collection of breadboards, but all the logic is there to generate the complex array of video timings necessary for synchronisation, and to output the bits sequentially at the right voltage levels for the analogue monitor. It’s worth pointing out though that it’s not a composite video signal that’s being created sinceit’s monochrome only with no subcarrier.

In the end he encounters the problem that his ROM isn’t fast enough for the pixel rate and thus the image has artefacts, but it does at least produce a recognisable and readable something on the screen. Old hands in the video business might point out that analogue TVs were a bit forgiving when it came to exact timings and line counts so the circuit could quite possibly be simplified, and also that trading away some of the resolution might fix the ROM speed issue. But it’s an impressive piece of work, and should be of particular interest for anyone interested in how video works.

Fans of video cards on breadboards should also check out [Ben Eater’s] 7400-series video card.

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Books You Should Read: Bil Herd’s Back Into The Storm

September 8, 2021 by 27 Comments

It’s a morning ritual that we guess most of you share with us; before whatever work a new day will bring to sit down with a coffee and catch up with the tech news of the moment on Hackaday and other sites. Most of us don’t do many exciting things in our everyday lives, so reading about the coolest projects and the most fascinating new developments provides us with interest and motivation. Imagine just for a moment then that by a twist of fate you found yourself taking a job at the epicentre of the tech that is changing the world,  producing the objects of desire and pushing the boundaries, the place you’d give anything to work at.

This is the premise behind our Hackaday colleague Bil Herd’s autobiographical chronicle of time in the mid 1980s during which he worked at Commodore, maker of some of the most iconic home computers of the day. We follow him through the three years from 1983 to 1986 as hardware lead on the “TED” series of computers including the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, and then the Commodore 128, a dual-processor powerhouse which was arguably the last of the big-selling 8-bit home computers.

It’s an intertwined set of narratives peppered with personal anecdotes; of the slightly crazy high-pressure world of consumer videogames and computing, the fine details of designing a range of 8-bit machines, and a fascinating insight into how the culture at Commodore changed in the period following the departure of its founder Jack Tramiel.

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