Toy Train Joins The Internet Of Things

September 30, 2025 by 1 Comment

[Zoltan] was developing a workshop on Matter for DEF CON, and wanted to whip up a fun IoT project to go with it. His idea was simple—take a simple toy train, and put it on the Internet of Things.

Speed and low cost were the goals here, with a budget of around $40 and a timeline of one week. The train set sourced for the build was a 43 piece set with a locomotive, one carriage, and a simple oval track, retailing for $25. The toy train got a new brain in the form of an ESP32-C3 DevKitM-1, with the goal of commanding the device over Wi-Fi for ease of use. The microcontroller was set up to control the train’s brushed DC motor with an IRL540 MOSFET. A USB battery bank was initially employed to power the rig, which sat neatly on the train’s solitary carriage. This was later swapped out for a CR123A battery, which did the job for the train’s short duration in service.

Code for the project was simple enough. The ESP32 simply listens for commands via Matter protocol, and turns the train on and off as instructed. [Zoltan] demos the simple interoperability of the Matter protocol by switching the train on and off with Google Home voice commands, and it works perfectly well.

Toy trains aren’t something we typically see included in smart homes, but maybe they should be. If you’re cooking up your own oddball IoT hacks, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!

2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers

September 30, 2025 by 4 Comments

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! Just check out this roster of talks that will be going down. We’ve got something for everyone out there in the Hackday universe, from poking at pins, to making things beautiful, to robots, radios, and FPGAs. And this isn’t even half of the list yet.

We’ve got a great mix of old favorites and new faces this year, and as good as they are, honestly the talks are only half of the fun. The badge hacking, the food, the brainstorming, and just the socializing with the geekiest of the geeky, make it an event you won’t want to miss. If you don’t have tickets yet, you can still get them here.

Plus, this year, because Friday night is Halloween, we’ll be hosting a Sci-Fi-themed costume party for those who want to show off their best props or most elaborate spacesuits. And if that is the sort of thing that you’re into, you will absolutely want to stay tuned to our Keynote Speaker(s) announcement in a little while. (Spoiler number one.) Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers” →

YouTube… Over Dial Up

September 29, 2025 by 25 Comments

In the days of yore, computers would scream strange sounds as they spoke with each other over phone lines. Of course, this is dial up, the predecessor to modern internet technology, offering laughable speeds compared to modern connections. But what if dial up had more to offer? Perhaps it could even stream a YouTube video. That’s what the folks over at The Serial Port set out to find out.

The key to YouTube over dial up is a little known part of the protocol added right around the time broadband was taking off called multilink PPP. This protocol allows for multiple modems connected to a PC in parallel for faster connections. With no theoretical limit in sight, and YouTube’s lowest quality requiring a mere 175 Kbps, the goal was clear: find if there is a limit to multilink PPP and watch YouTube over dialup in the process.

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This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery

September 26, 2025 by 3 Comments

Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is actually important to keep in mind when writing software. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most rnd implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a seed value, and turns it into a seemingly random value, and also produces a new seed for the next time a random value is needed. This could be as simple as a SHA256 sum, where the hash output is split to become the next seed and the random value.

The PRNG approach does still have a challenge. Where does the initial seed come from? There are a few common, if flawed, approaches, and one of the most common is to use the system clock. It’s not a bulletproof solution, but using the microsecond counter since the last system boot is often good enough, because there are a lot of them to choose from — the entropy is high. With that brief background in mind, let’s talk about what happens in VBScript. The Randomize call is used to seed that initial value, but Randomize has some quirks.

The first is a great feature: calling Randomize a second time with the same seed doesn’t reset the PRNG engine back to the same initial state. And second, when called without a value, Randomize uses the number of system ticks since midnight as the PRNG seed. There are 64 ticks per second, giving five-and-a-half million possible seeds, or 22 bits of entropy. This isn’t great on its own, but Randomize internally typecasts that number of ticks into a narrower value, with a maximum possible of time-based seeds set at 65,536, which is a lot easier to brute-force.

We don’t know the exact application where the researchers at Doyensec found VBScript generating secure tokens, but in their Proof of Concept (PoC) test run, the generated token could be found in four guesses. It’s a terrible security fail for basically any use, and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.

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Spy Tech: The NRO And Apollo 11

September 25, 2025 by 13 Comments

When you think of “secret” agencies, you probably think of the CIA, the NSA, the KGB, or MI-5. But the real secret agencies are the ones you hardly ever hear of. One of those is the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Formed in 1960, the agency was totally secret until the early 1970s.

If you have heard of the NRO, you probably know they manage spy satellites and other resources that get shared among intelligence agencies. But did you know they played a major, but secret, part in the Apollo 11 recovery? Don’t forget, it was 1969, and the general public didn’t know anything about the shadowy agency.

Secret Hawaii

Captain Hank Brandli was an Air Force meteorologist assigned to the NRO in Hawaii. His job was to support the Air Force’s “Star Catchers.” That was the Air Force group tasked with catching film buckets dropped from the super-secret Corona spy satellites. The satellites had to drop film only when there was good weather.

Spoiler alert: They made it back fine.

In the 1960s, civilian weather forecasting was not as good as it is now. But Brandli had access to data from the NRO’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), then known simply as “417”. The high-tech data let him estimate the weather accurately over the drop zones for five days, much better than any contemporary civilian meteorologist could do.

When Apollo 11 headed home, Captain Brandli ran the numbers and found there would be a major tropical storm over the drop zone, located at 10.6° north by 172.5° west, about halfway between Howland Island and Johnston Atoll, on July 24th. The storm was likely to be a “screaming eagle” storm rising to 50,000 feet over the ocean.

In the movies, of course, spaceships are tough and can land in bad weather. In real life, the high winds could rip the parachutes from the capsule, and the impact would probably have killed the crew.

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Franke A600 coffee machine with PicoVoice

Coffee By Command: The Speech2Touch Voice Hack

September 24, 2025 by 1 Comment

If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’. Now [edholmes2232] made it actually come true. With Speech2Touch, he grafts voice control onto a Franke A600 coffee machine using an STM32WB55 USB dongle and some clever firmware hacking.

The office coffee machine has been a suspect for hacking for years and years. Nearly 35 years ago, at Cambridge University, a webcam served a live view of the office coffee pot. It made sure nobody made the trip to the coffee pot for nothing. The funny, but in fact useless HTTP status 418 was brought to life to state that the addressed server using the protocol was in fact a teapot, in answer to its refusal to brew coffee. Enter this hack – that could help you to coffee by shouting from your desk – if only your arms were long enough to hold your coffee cup in place.

Back to the details. The machine itself doesn’t support USB keyboards, but does accept a USB mouse, most likely as a last resort in case the touchscreen becomes irresponsive. That loophole is enough: by emulating touchscreen HID packets instead of mouse movement, the hack avoids clunky cursors and delivers a slick ‘sci-fi’ experience. The STM32 listens through an INMP441 MEMS mic, hands speech recognition to Picovoice, and then translates voice commands straight into touch inputs. Next, simply speaking to it taps the buttons for you.

It’s a neat example of sidestepping SDK lock-in. No reverse-engineering of the machine’s firmware, no shady soldering inside. Instead, it’s USB-level mischief, modular enough that the same trick could power voice control on other touchscreen-only appliances.

A Serial Mouse For A Homebrew 8-bit Computer

September 21, 2025 by 2 Comments

[Too Many Wires] has a custom computer he’s building. He wanted a mouse, but USB is a bit of a stretch for the fledgling computer. We might have opted for PS/2, but he went for something even older: a serial mouse connected with a DE-9 (colloquially, a DB-9). Check it out in his recent video update on the project below.

Don’t remember serial mice? They were very common many years ago, and apparently, you can still buy new ones, which makes you wonder what people are doing with them. If you are an old hand at serial, you’ll immediately know why he couldn’t get it to work at first. If you haven’t worked with RS-232 gear before, you’ll learn a lot.

The protocol is simple enough, and you can read the code or find plenty of old documents. He’s using a UART chip, which offloads the CPU. However, the PS/2 mice are very easy to work with directly, and you could skip the +/- 12V RS-232 and other issues.

Either way, however, using an RS-232 or PS/2 mouse in a project is relatively straightforward. You might not think you need a mouse, but don’t forget, they are really accurate two-axis sensors. An optical mouse on a motion table, for example, could be worth something.

The computer is based on [Ben Eater]’s design, if you want more details on that. Can’t decide between RS-232 and PS/2? You don’t have to.

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