A T-mobile Sidekick 3 phone. It has an LCD screen that swings up above a backlit QWERTY keyboard sitting between a joystick and illuminated call start and end buttons on the right and a directional pad on the left. The screen shows the selected application, a visual novel called "Class of 09."

Hacking The Sidekick In 2026

November 10, 2026 by No comments

The early 2000s saw a Cambrian Explosion of form factors for mobile devices, and one of the most feature-rich phones of the time was the Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick. [ashe] wanted to get the phone going again, which took some sleuthing.

While not advertised as such at the time, the Hiptop was primarily a client for web apps from the Danger servers. So, when Danger was shuttered, so were most of the phone’s features. [ashe] was able to track down the SDK for the device’s Java-based OS, but to get any programs running on an actual device, they needed a developer key. After finding a few more clues, they were able to use CADO-NFS, a general number sieve, to crack the 512-bit encryption scheme for the system’s developer key and generate a new one for their device.

[ashe] ported a visual novel to their Sidekick 3 with their new key, saying “Endings arrive as real Sidekick text notifications, using an emulated modem.” Work continues on the Re:Danger server to bring other functionality back, including plans to spin up a GSM network to connect an actual Sidekick. The server replication only works with an emulated Sidekick so far. They did include a Sidekick emulator on their site if you’d like to try it yourself.

If you’re a fan of the form factor but would like something with a bit more power, we’ve seen a UMPC inspired by the Hiptop/Sidekick a few years back.

Robotic Car Charger Locks On With Suction

November 9, 2026 by No comments

Not only does [Mew463]’s robotic car charger take care of plugging in his vehicle for him, it has some really clever features that are great to see in action.

We’ve seen a rover-platform-based robotic car charger before, but what’s different here is that [Mew463]’s robot isn’t particularly husky. It’s designed to be low-profile, snug right up against the vehicle during use, and park itself against the wall when not.

As an added touch, one doesn’t even have to manually open the car’s charge port door. The robot uses API calls that — once it confirms the vehicle is parked and not in use — unlocks and opens the charge port remotely. People used to be able to pop the charge port with a plain old wireless replay attack, but an API is the better way to go about it.

Four Mecanum wheel and LiDAR get the robot into more or less the right position, then fine-tuning happens with the help of an onboard camera and a ChARuco board pattern on the car just under the charging port.

Once things are lined up just right, the charger moves forward to plug into the car. Here’s where [Mew463] had to get clever, because plugging in a car charger actually takes a decent amount of force, and the robot is not particularly heavy. The solution is two suction cups that anchor the robot to the car as a gear assembly pushes the charger home. We really like how the robot snugs right up, so while the car is charging there isn’t a big thing in the way.

Disconnecting is the reverse of the process, and for the robot to park itself again it simply swivels the camera backward so it can see the marker on the wall without the whole robot having to turn around. It’s all very slick, and you can watch it in action in the video embedded below.

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You Wouldn’t Download A Car…

November 9, 2026 by 8 Comments

For as long as there have been sports cars, there have been blokes in tin sheds making their own sports cars. It’s a pursuit that has birthed famous marques and more than one motor racing series. Over the years these home made autos have been variously made of steel, aluminium, and fibreglass, and now thanks to [Kevin Kuehn] they can also be 3D printed.

His car little open top number with a body 3D printed ion PETG, and finished with a layer of carbon fibre. The styling is very organic, but maybe that windscreen needs a little work.  Under the hood are the mechanicals from a Nissan Leaf. It’s fully driveable, and road legal in California.

Perhaps the most unexpected part is that the PETG part was 3D printed in 600 small parts and heat-stapled together. He’s even created the software to do this, which could be useful in other large projects.

Having been involved in a few builds, we can see that this is a fascinating project that we hope will be the first of many. If the next generation of self-built cars are 3D printed, that can’t be a bad thing. Perhaps the worthy successor to the most hackable car will be 3D printed.

Free Your Harley From The Dealer

November 9, 2026 by 4 Comments

Vehicles have come with diagnostic ports for many years now, and there are a host of easily available tools to interrogate them. Despite that, there are still proprietary aspects that remain out of reach. For one of them there may be a way to know more though, as [Daniel Henzulea] has made what he describes to us as a dealer-grade diagonostic tool for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. These machines don’t come with the familiar OBD-II port.

The Harley diagnostic port is a custom six-pin socket that carries a CAN bus. Into this is plugged a CAN transceiver, and to that is connected one of the Xtensa-based ESP32s. The magic then is in the software, which exposes and makes accessible every function. What used to be closed source and prohibitively expensive, is now open to all.

You might not be surprised to read that this isn’t the first time we’ve featured a project diving into a Harley-Davidson’s data bus.

Header: Reinhold Möller, CC BY-SA 4.0.

From Phone, To SDR, No Extra Hardware

November 9, 2026 by 12 Comments

One of the more exciting recent developments has been the discovery that many radio chips used in common and cheap wireless network interfaces, microcontrollers, LoRa interfaces and others can be persuaded to give access to their baseband data streams This gives them full SDR functionality, which on cheap devices is hugely interesting. Continuing that trend and taking it to a new height is [Logan Zarov], who’s converted an LG D325 Android phone into a wideband receiver with very minor modification indeed.

The phone is rooted and runs LineageOS as you might expect, and there’s a modem firmware update to supply the SDR baseband magic. There’s also a mod for an antenna wire. Where this becomes especially interesting is in its receive frequency range. The modem talks in the GHz, but this radio receives in the MHz, it can pick up shortwave. This is achieved by using the Bluetooth radio as a local oscillator, oddly in a similar manner to that we suggested a few weeks ago.

This is hackery at its most epic, we love it, and look forward to the similar hacks which will certainly follow. There’s a video below the break, and you can see it doing its thing.

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UDP Broadcasting Meets The More Focused Multicasting

November 9, 2026 by 1 Comment

After previously exploring the basics of UDP broadcasting, why IPv4 subnets are an exciting feature that you really want to dive into, as well as the contentious topic of IPv6, there are still plenty of elephants to admire and cans of sardines to crack open. One of them being the topic of broadcasting versus multicasting, which at first glance sounds rather similar and may even have some wondering why you’d even bother with multicasting if you can just send-and-forget with IPv4 broadcast address.

Of course, we already found out that IPv4 broadcast addresses come in a few flavors, and that’s before you start even considering the implications of subnets and routing limits. When we then consider that in IPv6 broadcast addresses were dropped completely in favor of link-local multicast addresses, and that IPv4 also supports multicast, then this raises the question whether using IPv4 multicast’s own take on ‘link-local’ doesn’t make more sense.

Or perhaps more succinctly put, is IPv4’s take on link-local broadcasting as straightforward as IPv6’s?

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Reverse Engineering A 1960s Diode-Transistor Logic IC

November 9, 2026 by 4 Comments

Before transistor-transistor logic (TTL) took over, diode-transistor logic (DTL) was a common sight especially in pre-IC circuits where it was a major improvement over resistor-transistor logic (RTL). That said, it’s rare to see DTL used in ICs considering how e.g. TI’s 5400 and 7400 series set the trend in the 1960s. This makes the Signetics ST680a quad-NAND gate DTL DIP IC that [Ken Shirriff] ogled recently a bit of a treat.

This was also one of the earliest ICs to use the then brand new plastic dual in-line package (PDIP) for modular convenience, even if [Ken] was none too happy about as unlike ceramic DIP, PDIP requires more extreme methods to decap to access the die for reverse-engineering.

Overall, TTL is faster and less power-hungry than DTL, but it took a while to work out its issues, including noise immunity and fan-in/out issues. Until then alternatives like DTL still made sense as a well-understood and mature technology. In the article an example is provided of how a DTL NAND gate as used in this IC works, which is really quite simple in how it uses multiple diodes to sum the inputs, which subsequently drives the transistors.

We’d like to thank [CuriousMarc] for finding this IC in his strategic reserve of unknown ICs and for doing the initial decapping using hot air, as well as [Ken] for doing the analysis and documenting of this fascinating glimpse into early semiconductor logic history.