[Sprite_TM] OHM2013 Talk: Hacking Hard Drive Controller Chips

August 2, 2013 by 16 Comments

Even if he hadn’t done any firmware hacking on this hard drive [Sprite_TM’s] digital exploration of the controller is fascinating. He gave a talk at this year’s Observe, Hack, Make (OHM2013) — a non-commercial community run event in the Netherlands and we can’t wait for the video. But all the information on how he hacked into the three-core controller chip is included in his write up.

[Sprite_TM] mentions that you’re not going to find datasheets for the controllers on these drives. He got his foot in the door after finding a JTAG pinout mentioned on a forum post. The image above shows his JTAG hardware which he’s controlling with OpenOCD. This led him to discover that there are three cores inside the controller, each used for a different purpose. The difference between [Sprite_TM’s] work and that of mere mortals is that he has a knack for drawing surprisingly accurate conclusions from meager clues. To see what we mean check out the memory map for the second core which he posted on page 3 of his article.

Using JTAG he was able to inject a jump into the code (along with a filler word to keep the checksum valid) and run his own code. To begin the firmware hacking portion of the project he pulled the flash ROM off of the board and installed it on that little board sticking out on the left. This made it easy for him to backup and reflash the chip. Eventually this let him pull off the same proof of concept as a firmware-only hack (no JTAG necessary). He goes onto detail how an attacker who has root access could flash hacked firmware which compromises data without any indication to they system admin or user. But we also like his suggestion that you should try this out on your broken hard drives to see if you can reuse the controllers for embedded projects. That idea is a ton a fun!

When we were poking around the OHM2013 website (linked above) we noticed that the tickets are sold out; good for them! But if you were still able to buy them they take Bitcoin as one payment option. Are there any other conferences that allow Bitcoin for registration?

[Sprite_tm] Connects An LCD To A Tiny Linux Board

June 25, 2012 by 11 Comments

One of [Sprite_tm]’s colleagues recently challenged him to connect a small LCD touch screen to a Raspberry Pi. Sadly, [Sprite_tm] has yet to take delivery of a Raspberry Pi, but he did manage to connect an LCD to a Linux board without video capabilities.

Because [Sprite_tm]’s display has a 16-bit parallel interface, and 16 GPIO pins are hard to come by on the Carambola Linux board, a few shift registers had to be brought into the build to make the LCD work. These shift registers are connected to the Carambola board via an SPI interface; a very simple way to connect all the LCD pins to the Linux board.

Of course, there’s no way for Linux to speak to the LCD without a kernel driver; [Sprite_tm] wrote a framebuffer driver so the LCD can be used as a console, an X session, or used by any other program that can write to a framebuffer device.

Like all good driver authors, [Sprite_tm] is giving away the patch to enable SPI-ified LCD panels on the Carambola along with the shift register schematic. With any luck we’ll also see the Raspi drivers when [Sprite_tm] takes delivery of his Raspberry Pi.

[Sprite_tm]’s Three-component FM Transmitter

January 26, 2012 by 54 Comments

When the Regency TR-1 transistor radio came out onto the market in the 1950s, it was hailed as a modern marvel of microelectronics. With only four transistors and a handful of other components, the TR-1 was a wonder of modern engineering. [Sprite_tm] may have those old-timers beat, though. He built an FM transmitter with the lowest parts count of any transmitter ever.

Like most of [Sprite_tm]’s builds, it’s an unimaginably clever piece of work. [Sprite] overclocked the internal RC oscillator of an ATtiny45 to 24 MHz. After realizing the PLL running at four times the frequency of the oscillator was right in the middle of the FM band, he set about designing a tiny FM transmitter.

[Sprite_tm] remembered his work on MONOTONE and made a short song for hit ATtiny. The firmware for the build takes the notes from his song and varies the 96 MHz PLL frequency a tiny bit, thereby serving as a tiny FM transmitter.

Does it work? Well, if you want to compare it to a Mister Microphone, the range is incredibly limited. That being said it works. It’s an FM transmitter built out of a microcontroller and a battery, and that’s very impressive. Check out [Sprite_tm]’s demo after the break.

Continue reading “[Sprite_tm]’s Three-component FM Transmitter” →

Behind The Scenes Of The 2019 Superconference Badge

November 16, 2019 by 4 Comments

If you count yourself among the several hundred of our closest friends that have joined us at Supplyframe HQ for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, then by now you’ll have your hands on one of this year’s incredible FPGA badges. It should come as no surprise that an incredible amount of time and effort went into developing and manufacturing this exceptionally unique piece of hardware; the slick gadget in your hands today took nearly an entire year to develop, and work continued on it until very literally the last possible moment.

Badge designer Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM), Hackaday staff, and a team of dedicated volunteers were still putting the final touches on these ambitious devices less than 24 hours before they were distributed to the first wave of Superconference attendees. Naturally, that’s not exactly how things were supposed to go. But when you’ve got a group of people that want to push the envelope and build something truly incredible, convincing them to actually stop working can be a challenge in itself.

In fact, development of the badge is still ongoing. Fixes and improvements are being made to the software even as you read this, and if you haven’t already, you should upgrade your badge to make sure you’ve got the latest and greatest from our international team of wizards. We all know that conference badges have an unfortunate habit of languishing on the shelf and collecting dust, but the 2019 Superconference badge was built to challenge you for longer than just one weekend. Consider yourself warned: for every Supercon badge that gets tossed in a drawer come Monday, Sprite_TM will shed a single tear.

After the break, come along as we turn back the clock and take a look at the last minute dash to get 500+ badges programmed and ready to go before the doors opened for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference.

Continue reading “Behind The Scenes Of The 2019 Superconference Badge” →

Gigantic FPGA In A Game Boy Form Factor, 2019 Supercon Badge Is A Hardware Siren Song

November 4, 2019 by 53 Comments

Look upon this conference badge and kiss your free time goodbye. The 2019 Hackaday Superconference badge is an ECP5 FPGA running a RISC-V core in a Game Boy form factor complete with cartridge slot that is more open than anything we’ve ever seen before: multiple open-source CPU designs were embedded in an open system, developed using the cutting-edge in open-source FPGA tools, and running (naturally) open-source software on top. It’s a 3,000-in-one activity kit for hardware people, software people, and everyone in between.

The brainchild of Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM), this design has been in the works since the beginning of this year. For more than 500 people headed to Supercon next week, this is a source of both geeky entertainment and learning for three action-packed days and well beyond. Let’s take a look at what’s on the badge, what you need to know to hack it, and how the design serves as a powerful development tool long after the badge hacking ceremonies have wrapped up.

Continue reading “Gigantic FPGA In A Game Boy Form Factor, 2019 Supercon Badge Is A Hardware Siren Song” →

Speakers Taking The Stage At Supercon Plus A Hint Of The Hacking To Come

October 18, 2019 by 3 Comments

Four weeks from today the Hackaday Superconference comes alive for the fifth year. From engineering in challenging environments to elevating the art form of electronics, here are nine more talks that will make this a year to remember.

In addition to the slate of speakers below there are three other announcements, plus workshops. Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM) is designing this year’s badge based around a beefy FPGA running a RISC-V core and using open source synthesis tools. We’ll have more on that soon, but if you just can’t wait, check out the expansion board spec he just published, and join the conference chat room for the inside track. Badge hacking is sure to be the liveliest we’ve ever seen.

Tickets are sold out but you can still get on the waiting list and hope that one becomes available. If you are holding onto one of these hot commodities but are unable to use it, please return your ticket so that we can get it to someone waiting with their fingers crossed.

The Talks (Part Four of Many)


  • Laurel Cummings

    When it Rains, It Pours

    Over the last two years my work has been beyond ordinary, building and prototyping in strange locations like being stranded on a sailboat in the Atlantic Ocean, teaching US Marines in Kuwait, and building fuel gauge sensors for generators for vital systems in North Carolina post hurricane Florence. Some of the big lessons I’ve learned are about how to source materials and supplies in weird places, like finding potentiometers in the backwoods of North Carolina when Amazon cannot physically deliver across flooded highways, how to find welding gas in Kuwait City (and how a local chef could possibly be your best bet), or how far you can get with an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store near the city docks. These situations help you really see the “engineer creep” that can happen to a project. I’ve learned that when you’re in high-risk situations, you really should stop caring about whether the edges of your 3D print are chamfered. In fact, version 1 of the hurricane fuel gauge sensor was demonstrated while being housed inside an elegant, tasteful sandwich baggie.


  • Angela Sheehan

    Building Whimsical Wearables: Leveling Up Through Playful Prototyping

    Whether it’s for a theme party, Halloween, cosplay, or That Thing in The Desert, designing wearables for whimsical self expression presents a great opportunity to challenge yourself as a maker, wearer, and collaborator. As an artist and designer who crash landed into a career in tech, I’ve found that imposter syndrome can often place limits on what feels personally achievable from an electronics and programming standpoint. Recontextualizing a project to shift the focus from ‘wearable tech hardware endeavor’ to ‘quirky mixed media experiment in personal styling’, I’ve created a safe space to play and try new things just outside my skill set and produced some of my most technically complex and polished personal work. Take a journey with me through the process of conceptualizing and building my Color Stealing Fairy project, an exercise in iterative design and upgrading an interactive wearable project over the course of two years and counting.


  • Michael Ossmann and Kate Temkin

    Software-Defined Everything

    The popularity of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has led to the emergence of powerful open source software tools such as GNU Radio that enable rapid development of real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques. We’ve used these tools for both radio and non-radio applications such as audio and infrared, and now we are finding them tremendously useful for diverse sensors and actuators that can benefit from DSP. In this talk we’ll show how we use the open source GreatFET platform to rapidly develop an SDR-like approach to just about anything.


  • Kelly Heaton

    “Hacking Nature’s Musicians” (or, “The Art of Electronic Naturalism”)

    The general lack of acceptance of electronic art results from a scarcity of critics, curators, collectors, and grantors who understand electronic media, compounded by a cultural gap between the artistic and engineering communities. In order to solve this problem, we must stretch our comfort zone and vocabularies to have a respectful, enlightening conversation with people with different educational backgrounds. In this talk I’ll discuss my wonderment at the simple, analog circuit designs that mimic life-like behavior such as chirping crickets and singing birds. This will include discussion of various schematics and demonstrations of a small. along with an abbreviated survey of my work to-date.


  • Jasmine Brackett

    Setting your Electronics Free

    In this panel we’ll discuss the key ways to get your projects from your workshop into the hands of the first few users, and what you can do to scale up from there. We’ll talk about common pitfalls, and also what are the best resources to draw upon.


  • David Williams

    MicroFPGA – The Coming Revolution in Small Electronics

    Big FPGA’s are awesome. They’re doing what they’ve always done, enabling AI, signal processing, military applications etc. However, there is a new possibility emerging – FPGA’s for small applications – which is quite possibly even more significant. Using open source tools, cheap flexible development boards, and new libraries, designers have a whole new set of options, creating incredibly high performance, flexible, low power projects and products.


  • Nick Poole

    Boggling the Boardhouse: Designing 3D Structures, Circuits, and Sensors from PCBs

    The presentation will be a series of design features or techniques with a few minutes of exploration into the ‘gotchas’ of each, as well as example layouts in EAGLE and physical examples. I’d like to cover as many different techniques as I can cram into 30 minutes, including bringing weird shapes into EDA, the inside corner problem caused by tab and slot, fillet soldering, stacking boards, imitating model sprues with mouse bites, manipulating the mask layer for custom displays, bendy tab buttons, working rotary encoder, and ergonomic design for handheld PCBs.


  • Ted Yapo

    Towards an Open-Source Multi-GHz Sampling Oscilloscope

    Tektronix designed a 14.5 GHz sampling oscilloscope in 1968. With the easy multi-layer PCB designs, tiny surface-mount parts, blazingly fast semiconductors, and computer horsepower available to the individual designer today, can a similar sampling head be re-created inexpensively with common, off-the-shelf components? Should be easy, right? It’s not. In this talk, I’ll discuss progress towards an open-source GHz+ sampling oscilloscope, including a lot of dead ends, plus some very promising leads.


  • Jeroen Domburg

    Building the Hackaday Superconference Badge

    The tradition of the Hackaday Supercon badge is to build something unlike any Supercon badge that came before. This year’s badge has an FPGA as its central component, and this comes with some extra challenges: the FPGA only comes in a BGA package with a whopping 381 pads to solder, and instead of just referring to the datasheet of the SoC to write the badge software, the SoC itself had to be written first.  I will discuss the development process of the badge, as well as the many challenges encountered along the way.

 

Keep Your Eye on Hackaday for the Livestream

The speakers you’ll see at Supercon have an amazing wealth of experience and we can’t wait to see their talks. But even if you couldn’t get a ticket, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. Keep your eye on Hackaday for a link to the livestream which will begin on Saturday, November 16th.

A Wedding Gift Fit For A Hardware Hacker

July 13, 2019 by 5 Comments

If you read Hackaday on a regular basis, there are some names you will have seen more than once. People who continually produce fascinating and inventive projects that amaze and delight us, and who always keep us coming back for more. One such hacker is [Jeroen Domburg], perhaps better known in these pages by the handle [Sprite_TM], who has never failed to delight us in this respect.

Today is a special day for [Jeroen] for it is his wedding day, and his friend [Maarten Tromp] has decided to surprise him and his wife [Mingming] with a special gift. At first sight it is simply a pair of blinky badges in the shape of a bride and groom, but closer examination reveals much more. The PCBs are studded with WS2812 addressable LEDs controlled by an ESP32 module and powered by a small LiPo battery, and the clever part lies in the software. The two badges communicate via Bluetooth, allowing them to both synchronise their flashing and flash ever faster as the couple come closer to each other.

The write-up is an interesting tale of the tribulations of designing a badge, from which we take away that buying cheap LEDs may be a false economy. A surprise was that the black-cased and white-cased versions of the LEDs had different timings, and they proved prone to failure.

We wish the happy couple all the best, thank [Sprite_TM] for all he has given us over the years, and look forward to seeing his future projects.