Ripping Up A Rothult

May 5, 2019 by 28 Comments

NFC locks are reaching a tipping point where the technology is so inexpensive that it makes sense to use it in projects where it would have been impractical months ago. Not that practicality has any place among these pages. IKEA carries a cabinet lock for $20USD and does not need any programming but who has a jewelry box or desk drawer that could not benefit from a little extra security? Only a bit though, we’re not talking about a deadbolt here as this teardown shows.

Rothult has all the stuff you would expect to find in an NFC scanner with a moving part. We find a microcontroller, RFID decoder, supporting passives, metal shaft, and a geartrain. The most exciting part is the controller which is an STM32L051K8 processor by STMicroelectronics and second to that is the AS3911 RFID reader from AMS. Datasheets for both have links in the teardown. Riping up a Rothult in the lab, we find an 25R3911B running the RFID, and we have a link to that PDF datasheet. Both controllers speak SPI.

There are a couple of things to notice about this lock. The antenna is a flat PCB-mounted with standard header pins, so there is nothing stopping us from connecting coax and making a remote antenna. The limit switches are distinct so a few dabs of solder could turn this into an NFC controlled motor driver. Some of us will rest easy when our coworkers stop kidnapping our nice pens.

Rothult first came to our attention in a Hackaday Links where a commenter was kind enough to tip us off to this teardown. Thanks, Pio! If this whets your appetite for NFC, we have more in store.

3D Printed Weather Station Gets A Wireless Upgrade

May 5, 2019 by 15 Comments

A weather station can be anything from a fun home science exercise, all the way up to a useful tool for planning and weather prediction. [Rob Ward] is one such person who has developed their own weather station, and it recently got a wireless upgrade.

We first featured [Rob]’s work back in 2018, noting that a largely 3D-printed weather station was a particularly useful tool for the home experimenter. The utility of this is now improved, with the addition of a 433 MHz wireless link from the weather sensors back to the base station. Over on Github, [Rob] does a great job of explaining the basics of the Manchester encoding scheme used, and has developed a system that can decode signals from Oregon Scientific weather stations, too.

[Rob] uses the weather station to report weather conditions at Lake Tyers Beach, providing useful information for anyone in the area who might be considering a visit to the coast. It’s not quite as fun as asking whoever’s around on the CB road channel, but it’s a darn sight more accurate for your trouble. Video after the break.

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Toolpath Painting Brings Out That First Layer Sparkle

May 5, 2019 by 7 Comments

In the 3D-printing community, [Mark Peeters] may be known-and-loved for his drooloop printing, but that’s not enough to stop him from pushing the spectrum of printing tricks even further. Dubbed Toolpath Painting, [Mark] is taking that glorious sheen from the bottom layer of a 3D print and putting it to work to make eye-catching deliberate visual displays.

[Mark’s] work comes in two flavors. The first capitalizes on a fairly wide 2mm nozzle and translucent filaments to create vibrant sun catchers. The second relies on the reflective patterns of an opaque filament where the angle of the extrusion lines determine the type of sheen. [Mark’s] progress is beautifully captured on his twitter feed where he rolls out variations of this style.

Photographs simply don’t do justice to this technique, but you need not be left unsatisfied. Mark has left us with a thorough introduction to creating these patterns on your own printer in the video after the break.

Eager to put that printer to work on other avant-garde styles? Have a look at some other inspirational techniques from a prior MRRF, or have a go at texturing your prints with some velocity painting.

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Clock Radio Receives Upgrade

May 5, 2019 by 8 Comments

Before everyone had a cell phone alarm to wake them up in the mornings, most of us used clock radios that would faithfully sit by our beds for years. You could have either a blaring alarm to wake you up, or be gently roused from slumber by one of your local radio stations. These devices aren’t as commonly used anymore, so if you have one sitting in your parts drawer you can make some small changes and use it to receive radio stations from a little further away than you’d expect.

This Panasonic clock radio from [Ryan Flowers] has several upgrades compared to the old clock radio hardware. For one, it now can receive signals on the 7 and 14 MHz bands (40 and 20 meters). It does this by using separate bandpass filters for each frequency range, controlled by a QRP Labs VFO kit which can switch between the two filters automatically once programmed. The whole thing is powered by 8 AA batteries, true to form with a clock radio from the ’90s.

[Ryan] notes that his first iteration was a little quiet but he’s now able to receive radio stations from as far away from Japan with this receiver. Even without a license, you can make these changes and listen in to stations from all around the world, as long as you don’t start transmitting. If you want to make a small upgrade from this clock radio though, it’s not that hard to get into.

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3D Printed Parts Let You Hold Work The Way You Want

May 5, 2019 by 6 Comments

Fixturing and work holding can be huge problems for hackers. Let’s face it – that $5, alligator clip-festooned “Helping Hand” is good for only the smallest of workpieces, and the problem only gets worse as the size scales up. One can jury rig fixtures for things like microscopes and lights, but a systematic approach like this 3D-Printed work fixturing Erector Set really appeals to our need for organization.

As [Tinkers Projects] explains it, the genesis of this project came from a need to mount a microscope firmly over a PCB. Rather than build a one-off fixture, the idea of a complete system of clamps and connectors seemed to make more sense. Based on 10-mm aluminum rods and a bewildering number of 3D-printed pieces, the set has just about everything needed to fixture pretty much anything. There’s a vertical element that acts as the central support, connectors for putting another rod perpendicular to that, plus neat attachments like a three-fingered clamp for small cylindrical objects and a couple of blocks that act like a stick-vise for PCBs and similar workpieces. And yes, there’s even a fixture with alligator clips. The whole thing seems very well thought out and has a little mad scientist vibe to it, but while some fixtures look as if they came right from the chemistry lab, we’d be cautious about chemical compatibility and use near heat sources.

[Elliot Williams] did a rundown of what people are using for helping hands a couple of years ago which made us covet articulating dial indicator arms for our bench. Still, [Tinkers Projects]’ approach has a lot of appeal and is probably cheaper and more versatile to boot.

Finally, A TV For Portrait Videos

May 4, 2019 by 54 Comments

Vertical video is bad, or so we’re told, and you shouldn’t shoot a video with your phone in a vertical position. Why? Because all monitors are wider than they are tall. This conventional wisdom is being challenged by none other than Samsung. There is now a vertical TV (Korean, Google Translate link) , engineered specifically videos shot on mobile phones.

“Samsung Electronics analyzed the characteristics of the Millennial generation, which is familiar with mobile content, and presented a new concept TV ‘The Sero’ (loosely translated as ‘The Vertical’), which is based on the vertical screen, unlike the conventional TV,” so goes the press release.

Features of The Sero TV include synchronization between the screen and a mobile device, and mirroring functions based on NFC. This display is no slouch in the audio department, either: it features a 4.1 channel, 60-watt high-end speaker. A built-in microphone and support for Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant means artificial intelligence can easily control various functions of the display.

The Sero will be released in Korea at the end of May, with a reported price tag of 18,900,000 South Korean Won. A quick Google search tells us that converts to an implausible-sounding $16,295 USD, but it’s not as if you were going to buy one anyway.

Nevertheless, there actually is a market for ‘vertical’ or portrait displays; thanks to the ever-widening of aspect ratios by LCD manufacturers, it makes sense to edit documents with a vertically-oriented monitor. You can fit more code on the screen if you just rotate your monitor. Apple was one of the first companies to realize this with the release of the Macintosh Portrait Display in 1989, providing a wondrous 640×870 grayscale resolution display for desktop publishing. Of course, the Radius full page display was released a few years earlier and the Xerox Alto had a vertically oriented screen. But wait a minute, can’t you just rotate your monitor and save $16k?

Faxsploit – Exploiting A Fax With A Picture

May 4, 2019 by 26 Comments

Security researchers have found a way to remotely execute code on a fax machine by sending a specially crafted document to it. So… who cares about fax? Well apparently a lot of persons are still using it in many institutions, governments and industries, including the healthcare industry, legal, banking and commercial. Bureaucracy and old procedures tend to die hard.

This is one of those exploits that deserve proper attention, for many reasons. It is well documented and is a great piece of proper old school hacking and reverse engineering. [Eyal Itkin], [Yannay Livneh] and [Yaniv Balmas] show us their process in a nicely done article that you can read here. If you are into security hacks, it’s really worth reading and also worth watching the DEFCON video. They focused their attention in a all-in-one printer/scanner/fax and the results were as good as it gets.

Our research set out to ask what would happen if an attacker, with merely a phone line at his disposal and equipped with nothing more than his target`s fax number, was able to attack an all-in-one printer by sending a malicious fax to it.

In fact, we found several critical vulnerabilities in all-in-one printers which allowed us to ‘faxploit’ the all-in-one printer and take complete control over it by sending a maliciously crafted fax.

As the researchers note, once an all-in-one printer has been compromised, it could be used to a wide array of malicious activity, from infiltrating the internal network, to stealing printed documents even to mining Bitcoin. In theory they could even produce a fax worm, replicating via the phone line.

The attack summary video is bellow, demonstrating an exploit that allows an attacker to pivot into an internal network and taking over a Windows machine using Eternal Blue NSA exploit.

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