the Logitech receiver in question next to the mouse it's paired to

Uncovering Secrets Of Logitech M185’s Dongle

June 15, 2024 by Arya Voronova 14 Comments

[endes0] has been hacking with USB HID recently, and a Logitech M185 mouse’s USB receiver has fallen into their hands. Unlike many Logitech mice, this one doesn’t include a Unifying receiver, though it’s capable of pairing to one. Instead, it comes with a pre-paired CU0019 receiver that, it turns out, is based on a fairly obscure TC32 chipset by Telink, the kind we’ve seen in cheap smart wristbands. If you’re dealing with a similarly obscure MCU, how do you even proceed?

In this case, GitHub had a good few tools developed by other hackers earlier — a Ghidra integration, and a tool for working with the MCU using a USB-UART and a single resistor. Unfortunately, dumping memory through the MCU’s interface was unreliable and frustrating. So it was time to celebrate when fuzzing the HID endpoints uncovered a memory dump exploit, with the memory dumper code helpfully shared in the blog post.

From a memory dump, the exploration truly began — [endes0] uncovers a fair bit of dongle’s inner workings, including a guess on which project it was based on, and even a command putting the dongle into a debug mode where a TC32-compatible debugger puts this dongle fully under your control.

Yet another hands-on course on Ghidra, and a wonderful primer on mouse dongle hacking – after all, if you treat your mouse’s dongle as a development platform, you can easily do things like controlling a small quadcopter, or pair the dongle with a SNES gamepad, or build a nifty wearable.

We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us!

The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp

June 8, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 23 Comments

Many people have been attracted to the low price and big dreams of the CNC3018 desktop CNC router. If you’re quick, you can pick one up on the usual second-hand sales sites with little wear and tear for a steal. They’re not perfect machines by any stretch of the imagination, but they can be improved upon, and undoubtedly useful so long as you keep your expectations realistic.

[ForOurGood] has set about such an improvement process and documented their journey in a whopping eight-part (so far!) video series. The video linked below is the most recent in the series and is dedicated to creating a brushless spindle motor on a budget.

As you would expect from such a machine, you get exactly what you pay for. The low cost translates to thinner than ideal metal plates, aluminium where steel would be better, lower-duty linear rails, and wimpy lead screws. The spindle also suffers from cost-cutting, as does the size of the stepper motors. But for the price, all is forgiven. The fact that they can even turn a profit on these machines shows the manufacturing prowess of the Chinese factories.

We covered the CNC 3018 a while back, and the comments of that post are a true gold mine for those wanting to try desktop CNC. Warning, though: It’s a fair bit harder to master than 3D printing!

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An image of a grey plastic carrying case, approximately the size of an A5 notebook. Inside are darker grey felt lined cubbies with a mirror, piece of glass, a viewfinder, and various small printed parts to assemble a camera lucida.

Camera Lucida – Drawing Better Like It’s 1807

May 23, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 14 Comments

As the debate rages on about the value of AI-generated art, [Chris Borge] printed his own version of another technology that’s been the subject of debate about what constitutes real art. Meet the camera lucida.

Developed in the early part of the nineteenth century by [William Hyde Wollaston], the camera lucida is a seemingly simple device. Using a prism or a mirror and piece of glass, it allows a person to see the world overlaid onto their drawing surface. This moves details like proportions and shading directly to the paper instead of requiring an intermediary step in the artist’s memory. Of course, nothing is a substitute for practice and skill. [Professor Pablo Garcia] relates a story in the video about how [Henry Fox Talbot] was unsatisfied with his drawings made using the device, and how this experience was instrumental in his later photographic experiments.

[Borge]’s own contribution to the camera lucida is a portable version that you can print yourself and assemble for about $20. Featuring a snazzy case that holds all the components nice and snug on laser cut felt, he wanted a version that could go in the field and not require a table. The case also acts as a stand for the camera to sit at an appropriate height so he can sketch landscapes in his lap while out and about.

Interested in more drawing-related hacks? How about this sand drawing bot or some Truly Terrible Dimensioned Drawings?

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Hackaday Links: February 18, 2024

February 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

So it turns out that walking around with $4,000 worth of hardware on your head isn’t quite the peak technology experience that some people thought it would be. We’re talking about the recently released Apple Vision Pro headset, which early adopters are lining up in droves to return. Complaints run the gamut from totally foreseeable episodes of motion sickness to neck pain from supporting the heavy headset. Any eyeglass wearer can certainly attest to even lightweight frames and lenses becoming a burden by the end of the day. We can’t imagine what it would be like to wear a headset like that all day. Ergonomic woes aside, some people are feeling buyer’s remorse thanks to a lack of apps that do anything to justify the hefty price tag. The evidence for a wave of returns is mostly gleaned from social media posts, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. We wouldn’t expect Apple to be too forthcoming with official return figures, though, so the ultimate proof of uptake will probably be how often you spot one in the wild. Apart from a few cities and only for the next few weeks, we suspect sightings will be few and far between.

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Designing A Macintosh-to-VGA Adapter With An LM1881

October 7, 2023 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

Old-school Macintosh-to-VGA adapter. Just solve for X, set the right DIP switches and you’re golden.

If you’re the happy owner of a vintage Apple system like a 1989 Macintosh IIci you may know the pain of keeping working monitors around. Unless it’s a genuine Apple-approved CRT with the proprietary DA-15-based video connector, you are going to need at least an adapter studded with DIP switches to connect it to other monitors. Yet as [Steve] recently found out, the Macintosh’s rather selective use of video synchronization signals causes quite a headache when you try to hook up a range of VGA-equipped LCD monitors. A possible solution? Extracting the sync signal using a Texas Instruments LM1881 video sync separator chip.

Much of this trouble comes from the way that these old Apple systems output the analog video signal, which goes far beyond the physical differences of the DA-15 versus the standard DE-15 D-subminiature connectors. Whereas the VGA standard defines the RGB signals along with a VSYNC and HSYNC signal, the Apple version can generate HSYNC, VSYC, but also CSYNC (composite sync). Which sync signal is generated depends on what value the system reads on the three sense pins on the DA-15 connector, as a kind of crude monitor ID.

Theoretically this should be easy to adapt to, you might think, but the curveball Apple throws here is that for the monitor ID that outputs both VSYNC and HSYNC you are limited to a fixed resolution of 640 x 870, which is not the desired 640 x 480. The obvious solution is then to target the one monitor configuration with this output resolution, and extract the CSYNC (and sync-on-green) signal which it outputs, so that it can be fudged into a more VGA-like sync signal. Incidentally, it seems that [Steve]’s older Dell 2001FP LCD monitor does support sync-on-green and CSYNC, whereas newer LCD monitors no longer list this as a feature, which is why now more than a passive adapter is needed.

Although still a work-in-progress, so far [Steve] has managed to get an image on a number of these newer LCDs by using the LM1881 to extract CSYNC and obtain a VSYNC signal this way, while using the CSYNC as a sloppy HSYNC alternative. Other ICs also can generate an HSYNC signal from CSYNC, but those cost a bit more than the ~USD$3 LM1881.

$13 Scope And Logic Analyzer Hits 18 Msps

September 26, 2023 by Al Williams 31 Comments

We aren’t sure what’s coolest about [Richard Testardi’s] Flea-Scope. It costs about $13 plus the cost of making the PCB. It operates at 18 million samples per second. It also doesn’t need any software — you connect to it with your browser! It works as an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, and a waveform generator. Not bad. The board is basically a little life support around a PIC32MK and the software required to run it.

Of course, for $13, you need to temper your expectations. One analog input reads from -6 to 6V (hint: use a 10X probe). The goal was for the instrument to be accurate within 2%. There are also nine digital inputs sampled simultaneously with the analog sampling. The signal generator portion can output a 4 MHz square wave or a 40 kHz arbitrary waveform.

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Reverse-engineering The Milwaukee M18 Redlink Protocol

September 15, 2023 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

In an ideal world, every single battery pack for power tools would use the same physical interface and speak a clearly documented protocol with chargers. Since we live in a decidedly less-than-ideal world, we get to enjoy the fun pastime of reverse-engineering the interfaces and protocols of said battery packs.

A recent video from the [Tool Scientist] goes over what is already known about the Milwaukee M18 Redlink protocol, used with the manufacturer’s M18-series of batteries, before diving into some prodding and poking of these packs’ sensitive parts to see what comes out of their interface.

Previously, [Buy It Fix It] shared their findings on Reddit, covering the basic protocol, including the checksum method, but without an in-depth analysis of the entire charging protocol. Meanwhile [Quagmire Repair] performed an in-depth teardown and reverse-engineering of the M18 hardware, including the circuitry of the BMS.

Putting these two things together, [Tool Scientist] was able to quickly get some of his M18 packs strapped down into the analysis chair for both passive analysis, as well as the effect of overvoltage, undervoltage, overheating and freezing the battery pack on the output reported by the battery’s BMS.

One of the lists of commands and response messages obtained by [Tool Scientist] on YouTube.

The result is a rather comprehensive list of instructions obtained under these various conditions, including a fault condition (05) returned by the BMS of one pack indicating its likely demise. Overall, it does not appear to be a particularly special (or well-designed) protocol, but it does make for a good reverse-engineering target, while adding to the body of collective knowledge on these widely available battery packs.

Hopefully the same inertia that prevents people from moving outside the designated power tool ecosystem due to the incompatible battery packs will also ensure that this level of knowledge will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, especially since the manufacturers of knock-off battery packs seem rather unwilling to share the results of their own reverse-engineering efforts.

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