Introducing FISSURE: A Toolbox For The RF Hacker

August 27, 2022 by 4 Comments

No matter what the job at hand is, if you’re going to tackle it, you’re going to need the right kit of tools. And if your job includes making sense out of any of the signals in the virtual soup of RF energy we all live in, then you’re going to need something like the FISSURE RF framework.

Exactly what FISSURE is is pretty clear from its acronym, which stands for Frequency Independent SDR-Based Signal Understanding and Reverse Engineering. This is all pretty new — it looks like [Chris Poore] presented a talk at DEFCON a few weeks back about using FISSURE to analyze powerline communications between semi-trucks and their trailers, and they’ve got a talk scheduled for next month’s GNU Radio Conference as well. We’ve been looking through all the material we can find on FISSURE, and it appears to be an RF hacker’s dream come true. They’ve got a few examples on Twitter, like brute-forcing an old garage door opener with a security code set by a ten-position DIP switch, and sending tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) signals to a car. They also mention some of the framework’s capabilities on the GitHub README; we’re especially interested in packet crafting for various protocols. The video below has some more examples of what FISSURE can do.

It looks like FISSURE could be a lot of fun, and very handy for your RF analysis and reverse engineering work. If you’ve been using Universal Radio Hacker like we have, this looks similar, only more so. We’ll be downloading it soon and giving it a try, so be on the lookout for a hands-on report.

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The Quiet Before The Storm?

August 27, 2022 by 82 Comments

My wife and I are reading a book about physics in the early 1900s. It’s half history of science and half biography of some of the most famous physicists, and it’s good fun. But it got me thinking about the state of physics 120 years ago.

What we’d now call classical mechanics was fully settled for quite a while, and even the mysterious electricity and magnetism had been recently put to rest by Maxwell and Heaviside. It seemed like there was nothing left to explain for a while. And then all the doors broke wide open.

As much as I personally like Einstein’s relativity work, I’d say the most revolutionary change in perspective, and driver of the most research in the intervening century, was quantum mechanics. And how did it all start? In the strangest of ways – with Niels Bohr worrying about why hydrogen and helium gasses gave off particular colors when ionized, which lead to his model of the atom and the idea of energy in quantum packets. Or maybe it was De Broglie’s idea that electrons could behave like waves or magnets, from slit and cathode-ray experiments respectively, that lead to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Either way, the birth of the strangest and most profound physics revolution – quantum mechanics – came from answering some ridiculously simple and straightforward questions. Why does helium emit pink, and how do TVs work? (I know, they didn’t have TVs yet…) Nobody looking at these phenomena, apart or together, could have thought that answering them would have required a complete re-thinking of how we think about reality. And yet it did.

I can’t help but wonder if there are, in addition to the multi-bazillion dollar projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, some simpler phenomena out there that we should be asking “why?” about. Are we in a similar quiet before the storm? Or is it really true that the way to keep pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance is through these mega-projects?

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The Pi Pico board on top of a white box with an Ethernet jack, with a sensor module plugged onto the Pico's pin headers. A black MicroUSB and a green Ethernet cable are connected to this device.

An Elegant Ethernet Library For Your Next RP2040 Project

August 27, 2022 by 17 Comments

A few days ago we covered a project that brought Ethernet connectivity to the Raspberry Pi Pico using little more than some twisted pair and a RJ-45 connector. It was a neat trick, but not exactly ready for widespread adoption. Looking to improve on things a bit, [tvlad1234] has taken that project’s code and rewritten it into a friendly library you can use with any RP2040 board.

In case you missed it, the initial demo did 10BASE-T transmission by bit-banging with the PIO, and was able to send UDP messages to devices on the wired LAN. It was an impressive accomplishment, but its code didn’t make it easy to build your project around it. This new library makes UDP messaging as easy as a printf, offloading all non-PIO-managed Ethernet signal work onto the RP2040’s second CPU core. The library even generates a random MAC address out of your flash chip’s serial number!

As a demonstration of the new library, [tvlad1234] has put together a simple Ethernet-connected temperature monitor using the BMP085 or BMP180 sensor connect over I2C. If you feel like you could use an Ethernet transmit-only sensor in your life, browsing the source code would be a great start.

DIY Video Transmitter Turned WiFi Jammer

August 27, 2022 by 31 Comments

The proliferation of FPV drones has brought a flood of cheap wireless video tech. After flying and crashing a cheap FPV drone for a bit, [GreatScott] decided to try his hand at building his own video transmitter, which turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

While digital technology has caught up to the FPV world, a lot of systems still use analog video, especially for drone racing. The video quality isn’t great, but it has the advantage of very low latency. The technology is very similar to the old analog TV broadcasts, but mainly uses the 5.8 GHz license-free bands. It is essentially analog video signal, frequency modulated onto a 5.8 GHz carrier signal transmitted through an appropriately sized antenna.

After a brief failed experiment with a simple circuit built from discrete components, [GreatScott] turned his attention to voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO). He bought a couple of 5.8 GHz VCOs from Aliexpress, and created and used a simple opamp circuit to boost the FPV camera video signal to the required input level for the VCO. This failed to produce any identifiable image on his video receiver goggles. In an attempt to confirm that the VCOs produced the desired frequency, he ordered a similar 2.4 GHz VCOs and built a short range (20 cm) WiFi jammer. With a signal generator to create a simple input signal, and confirmed that it interfered with his laptop’s WiFi connection.

After more experimentation with other VCOs, the closest [GreatScott] came to success was a barely identifiable image transmitted using a Maxim 2.4 GHz VCO. If you have any ideas on what is missing in the VTX circuit, drop them in the comments below.

Building RF circuits that interfere with the legitimate signal around you, or broadcasting out of band, is generally not a great idea, and could earn you an unpleasant visit from the authorities. If you want to build your own digital video transmission, take a look at the Wifibroadcast project.

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A multimeter connected to the EEPROM chip with crocodile clips, showing that there's a 0.652V diode drop between GND and one of the IO pins

Dead EPROM Dumped With Help Of Body Diodes

August 26, 2022 by 9 Comments

[Jason P], evidently an enjoyer of old reliable laser printing tech, spilled a drink (nitter) onto his Panasonic KX-P5400 SideWriter. After cleanup, everything worked fine — except that the PSU’s 5 V became 6.5 V during the accident, and the EPROM with LocalTalk interface firmware died, connection between VCC and GND seemingly interrupted inside the chip. Understandably, [Jason] went on Twitter, admitted the error of his ways, and sheepishly asked around for EPROM dumps.

Instead, [Manawyrm] wondered — would the chip have anti-ESD body diodes from GND to IO pins, by any chance? A diode mode multimeter check confirmed, yes! It was time for an outlandish attempt to recover the firmware. [Manawyrm] proposed that [Jason] connect all output pins but one to 5 V, powering the EPROM through the internal VCC-connected body diodes – reading the contents one bit at a time and then, combining eight dumps into a single image.

After preparing a TL866 setup, one hour of work and some PHP scripting later, the operation was a success. Apparently, in certain kinds of cases, dead ROM chips might still tell their tales! It’s not quite clear what happened here. The bond wires looked fine, so who knows where the connection got interrupted – but we can’t deny the success of the recovery operation! Need a primer on dumping EPROMs that are not dead? Here you go.

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Make Your Own Vinegar

August 26, 2022 by 32 Comments

Making fermentation work for us is one of the original hacks that allowed humans to make food last longer, and festivities more interesting. [Mike G] has been experimenting with making his own vinegar, and found the end product to be a delicious addition to his cooking.

The first step is similar to making alcoholic beverages. Take something that contains sugar, like fruit, mix it with water and let stand. Wild yeast will feed on the sugar and create alcohol. Once the alcohol content reaches the 6-12% range, the resulting liquid can be separated from the solids and left exposed to the air. This allows Acetobacter bacteria to convert the alcohol into acetic acid, producing vinegar. The entire process takes around 30 days.

[Mike]’s first round of experiments was mainly with fresh fruit, with the addition of raisins. To prevent white mold from forming the mixtures should be stirred daily, but life got in the way and mold got out of control on all the fruits, except for the raisins. This gave [Mike] the to try another round with dried fruit, which was significantly less prone to mold, and produced deliciously flavored vinegar. [Mike] also demonstrated their use in a couple of mouth-watering dishes.

The DIY vinegar production process is just begging for some fermentation monitoring and automation tech. We’ve seen plenty of sourdough and beer production projects, which we suspect could also be applied to vinegar production with some minor changes.

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Water Monitor Measures The Cost Of Your Shower Thinking Time

August 26, 2022 by 18 Comments

The shower is one of the top thinking places for many of us, but can get a bit out of hand with water wastage and utility bills if you go down a deep rabbit hole. To be more mindful of his water usage in the shower, [GreatScott!] created a power sipping water monitor that lives there.

The device is built around a cheap 1/2″ brass water flow rate sensor connected to his shower hose, which outputs pulses as a small wheel passes an internal hall effect sensor. The datasheet didn’t contain any spec for pulses/volume, so [GreatScott!] had to experimentally determine this by filling a one-liter container with water and counting the pulses. He found that the pulse count per liter was dependent on the flow rate, so he narrowed down the variables and just determined the average count at his shower’s pressure and flow rate.

The sensor is connected to a battery-powered ESP8266 housed inside a sealed 3D-printed enclosure in the shower. To reduce power usage to a minimum, a flow switch was added in series with the flow meter, which only switches on the ESP8266 when water starts flowing. A latching circuit keeps the ESP powered after the water stops, giving it enough time to transmit the data before shutting down. This type of circuit is very handy for any battery-powered project connected to an external switch or sensor.

It is programmed with ESPHome and outputs the data to a local Home Assistant server, so no data is saved on someone else’s server.

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