Flipper Zero Hacker Tool Gets UI Editor For Custom Apps

December 10, 2022 by 12 Comments

[Mikhail] released a handy GUI editor/generator tool for the Flipper Zero multipurpose hacker tool, making layouts and UI elements much easier and more intuitive to craft up.

Those who decide to delve into rolling their own applications or add-ons will find this a handy resource, especially as it generates the necessary code for the visual elements. It’s not limited to placing icons, either. Boxes, lines, dots, text, and more can be freely laid out to get things looking just right.

To use it, simply drag and drop icons of various sizes into the screen area. Non-icon UI elements like frames, lines, text, and others can be placed with a click using the buttons. To move elements around, click the SELECT button first, then drag things as needed. To fine-tune positioning (or change the text of a string) a selected element’s properties can be accessed and modified to the right of the simulated screen. When things look good, switch to the CODE tab and copy away to use it in your Flipper application.

Unfamiliar with the Flipper Zero? It’s a kind of wireless multitool; a deeply interesting device intended to make wireless exploration and experimentation as accessible as its dolphin mascot is adorable.

Using GitHub Actions To Brew Coffee

December 10, 2022 by 27 Comments

It’s getting harder and harder to think of a modern premium-level appliance that doesn’t come with some level of Internet connectivity. These days it seems all but the cheapest refrigerators, air purifiers, and microwaves include wireless capabilities — unfortunately they’re often poorly implemented or behind a proprietary system. [Matt] recently purchased a high-end coffee maker with Bluetooth functionality which turned out to be nearly useless, and set to work reverse-engineering his coffee maker and adapting it to work by sending commands from GitHub.

Since the wireless connectivity and app for this coffee maker was so buggy and unreliable, [Matt] first needed to get deep into the weeds on Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE). After sniffing traffic and identifying the coffee maker, he set about building an interface for it in Rust. Once he is able to send commands to it, the next step was to integrate it with GitHub, so that filing issues on the GitHub interface sends the commands from a nearby computer over Bluetooth to the coffee maker, with much more reliability than the coffee maker came with originally.

Using [Matt]’s methods, anyone stuck with one of these coffee makers, a Delonghi Dinamica Plus, should be able to reactivate the use of its wireless functionality. While we’d hope that anyone selling a premium product like this would take a tiny amount of time and make sure that the extra features actually work, this low bar seems to be oddly common for companies to surmount. But it’s not required to pick up an expensive machine like this just to remotely brew a cup of coffee. You can do that pretty easily with a non-luxury coffee maker and some basic wireless hardware.

An Open Source PowerPC Notebook Edges Closer

December 9, 2022 by 21 Comments

Back in 2020, we reported on the effort to create a brand new open-source laptop platform using the PowerPC architecture. At the time they had big plans and a PCB design, and we’re very pleased to report that in the intervening two years they’ve progressed to the point of now having some real prototypes ready for testing.

Some might question why this should be necessary, after all there are plenty of laptops and more than one commonly available processor platform. But that’s to miss the point of open source hardware, that it’s as much about plurality as functionality. But if you’ve only encountered the PowerPC architecture in slightly older Macs and some game consoles, what’s the chip powering this device? The answer is, not one of those venerable chips, but the NXP T2080, a 1.8 GHz quad-core device that boasts a respectable power for a laptop.

There is of course many a hurdle still to be crossed between prototype and final device, but given the challenge of a functioning laptop it’s impressive for them to have reached this milestone at all. We look forward to seeing further iterations, and maybe, just maybe, a finished device one day. Our original coverage is here.

Ask Hackaday: Will Your 2030 Car Have AM Radio?

December 9, 2022 by 170 Comments

Car makers have been phasing out AM radios in their cars for quite some time. Let’s face it, there isn’t much on AM these days, and electric vehicles have been known to cause interference with AM radios. So why have them? For that matter, many aftermarket head units now don’t even have radios at all. They play digital media or stream Bluetooth from your phone. However, a U.S. Senator, Edward J. Markey, has started a letter-writing campaign to the major car makers urging them to retain the AM radio in their future vehicles.

So does that mean AM lives? Or will the car makers kill it off? The letter requests that the companies answer several questions, including if they plan to discontinue AM or FM radios in the near future and if they support digital broadcast radio.

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Hackaday Podcast 196: Flexing Hard PCBs, Dangers Of White Filament, And The Jetsons’ Kitchen Computer

December 9, 2022 by 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start the Hackaday Podcast by talking about another podcast that’s talking about…Hackaday. Or more accurately, the recent Hackaday Supercon. After confirming the public’s adoration, conversation moves on to designing flexible PCBs with code, adding a rotary dial to your mechanical keyboard, and a simulator that lets you visualize an extinction-level event. We’ll wrap things up by playing the world’s smallest violin for mildly inconvenienced closed source software developers, and wonder how the world might have been different if the lady of the house had learned to read binary back in 1969.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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This Week In Security: Rackspace Falls Over, Poison Ping, And The WordPress Race

December 9, 2022 by 17 Comments

In what’s being described as a Humpty-Dumpty incident, Rackspace customers have lost access to their hosted Exchange service, and by extension, lots of archived emails. The first official word of trouble came on December 2nd, and it quickly became clear that this was more than the typical intern-tripped-over-the-cable incident. Nearly a week later, Rackspace confirmed what observers were beginning to suspect, it was a ransomware attack. There’s not a lot of other answers yet, and the incident FAQ answers are all variations on a theme.

Our investigation into the incident is ongoing and will take time to complete. To ensure the integrity of the ongoing investigation, we do not have additional details to share at this time.

Knowing the security issues that have plagued Microsoft Exchange over the last couple of months, one has to wonder if Rackspace was breached as a result of the PowerShell problems. What’s staggering is that a week after the incident, Rackspace still has no timeline for service restoration.

Rackspace isn’t the only major ransomware attack this week, as a hospital in Versailles has partially shut down due to another ransomware attack. Operations were canceled, and work has to be done the old fashioned way, without the network to support.

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An Affordable And Programmable PLC

December 8, 2022 by 74 Comments

We’re all used to general purpose microcontroller boards such as the Arduino or its many imitators, but perhaps we don’t see as much of their industrial cousins. A programmable logic controller (PLC) is a computer designed to automate industrial machinery, and comes with protected interfaces and usually a specific PLC programming environment. Thus [Galopago]’s work with an inexpensive Chinese PLC clone is especially interesting, providing a route forward to using it within the Arduino IDE ecosystem.

Opening it up, the processor is identified as an STM32F103, and the connection needed to place it in bootloader mode is identified. Then it can be programmed from the Arduino IDE, even though its bootloader can’t be changed. Then to complete the process it’s necessary to identify the various different inputs and outputs by old-fashioned hardware reverse engineering.

This PLC may not be quite as robust as some products costing much more money, but it still represents a cost-effective way to access a microcontroller board with much of the interface circuitry already installed that would normally be required for controlling machinery. We expect that we’ll be seeing it appear on these pages over the coming months, and perhaps there might even be another comparison in the air.