33C3: Chris Gerlinsky Cracks Pay TV

December 27, 2016 by 40 Comments

People who have incredible competence in a wide range of fields are rare, and it can appear deceptively simple when they present their work. [Chris Gerlinksy]’s talk on breaking the encryption used on satellite and cable pay TV set-top boxes was like that. (Download the slides, as PDF.) The end result of his work is that he gets to watch anything on pay TV, but getting to watch free wrestling matches is hardly the point of an epic hack like this.

The talk spans hardware reverse engineering of the set-top box itself, chip decapping, visual ROM recovery, software reverse analysis, chip glitching, creation of custom glitching hardware, several levels of crypto, and a lot of very educated guessing. Along the way, you’ll learn everything there is to know about how broadcast streams are encrypted and delivered. Watch this talk now.

Some of the coolest bits:

  • Reading out the masked ROM from looking at it with a microscope never fails to amaze us.
  • A custom chip-glitcher rig was built, and is shown in a few iterations, finally ending up in a “fancy” project box. But it’s the kind of thing you could build at home: a microcontroller controlling a switch on a breadboard.
  • The encoder chip stores its memory in RAM: [Chris] uses a beautiful home-brew method of desoldering the power pins, connecting them up to a battery, and desoldering the chip from the board for further analysis.
  • The chip runs entirely in RAM, forcing [Chris] to re-glitch the chip and insert his payload code every time it resets. And it resets a lot, because the designers added reset vectors between the bytes of the desired keys. Very sneaky.
  • All of this was done by sacrificing only one truckload of set-top boxes.

Our jaw dropped repeatedly during this presentation. Go watch it now.

200 Years Of The Stirling Engine

December 27, 2016 by 56 Comments

In the early years of the nineteenth century, steam engines were at work in a variety of practical uses. However, they were still imperfect in many ways. One particular problem were the boilers, that had a tendency to explode, causing injuries and fatalities. Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling, a Scottish clergyman, was concerned about the death toll from exploding boilers. Based on previous work by George Cayley (known for his pioneering work on aeronautics), Stirling filed his patent for a safer engine in 1816. That makes this year the bicentenary of this engine. The Stirling engine has the highest theoretical efficiency of any thermal engine. It is also a relatively simple machine. Unlike other types of engines, there are no valves, and that makes the mechanical design much simpler.

Continue reading “200 Years Of The Stirling Engine” →

Long-range Electric Longboard Outlasts Rider

December 27, 2016 by 24 Comments

What could be better than a holiday ride past the palm trees and blue waters of a Mediterranean resort town? Perhaps making that ride on a long-range electric longboard of your own design will ice that particular cake.

And when we say long range, we mean it – an estimated 25 miles. The only reason [overclocker_kris] couldn’t come up with an exact number in the test drive seen below is that he got too tired to continue after mile 20. With a bit of juice left in the 64-cell battery pack, built from 18650s harvested from old laptops, the board was sure to have another five miles in it. A custom molded underslung carbon fiber enclosure houses the battery pack and electronics, including the receiver for the handheld remote control and the ESCs for the two motors. Motor mounts were fabbed from aluminum and welded to the trucks, with power transmission through timing belts to 3D-printed pulleys. It’s a good-looking build, and topping out at 22 MPH isn’t too shabby either.

We’ve covered fleets of electric longboards before, from those with entirely 3D-printed decks to one with a flexible battery pack. But we doubt any have the endurance and performance of this board.

Continue reading “Long-range Electric Longboard Outlasts Rider” →

Hacking Together A Temperature Sensor For Boiling Milk

December 27, 2016 by 13 Comments

Ever have trouble justifying your hacking to anyone from another generation? [Domen] presented his mother with a custom-made device that monitors the milk temperature as it boils on the stove, preventing boil-over. And he made the device robust, simple to use, and foolproof. To his mom, it must look like he’s a wizard — able to conjure up home electronics out of solder smoke and some plywood.

Of course, we know better. Inside his gadget is a simple temperature sensor, an ATtiny841, a very nice home-made PCB, a buzzer, an LCD, and some pushbuttons. [Domen] rubbed together a few pre-existing libraries, and had a working prototype inside a nice wooden box on the quick. It’s a simple hack, but imagine how this must look to a muggle. For the detailed incantations, check out [Domen]’s GitHub for the project.

Continue reading “Hacking Together A Temperature Sensor For Boiling Milk” →

OpenAg Is A Personal Food Computer

December 26, 2016 by 20 Comments

When a device that calls itself a personal food computer lands in your timeline, what image springs to mind? A cloud-connected diet aid perhaps, advertised on TV infomercials by improbably fit-looking Californian ladies crediting all their health to a palm-sized unit that can be yours for only 199 dollars. Fortunately that proved not to be the case, and on further reading our timeline story was revealed to be about a computerized farming device.

The OpenAg Food Computer from the MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative bills itself as:

“a controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber”

It takes the form of a tabletop enclosure in which so-called climate recipes to replicate different conditions for plant growth can be tested. It’s probably fair to say that in this most basic form it is more of an educational device than one for full-scale food production, though they are applying the same technologies at a much greater scale. Their so-called “Food servers” are banks of OpenAg environments in freight containers, which definitely could be used to provide viable quantities of produce.

The good news is that the project is open source, and their latest story is that they have released version 2.0(alpha) of the device. If you are interested, you can read the documentation, and find all the resources you need to build one on their GitHub repository. They page linked above has a video that’s very much of the slick PR variety rather than the nuts-and-bolts, so we’ve sought out their build video for you below the break instead. Continue reading “OpenAg Is A Personal Food Computer” →

Colorful, Touch-Sensitive Light Table Is Ready For Gaming

December 26, 2016 by 1 Comment

It’s an ambitious build for sure — you don’t start with $500 worth of wood if you don’t intend for the finished product to dazzle. And this 240-pixel touch-sensitive light box coffee table does indeed dazzle.

Sometimes when we see such builds as these, fit and finish take a back seat to function. [dasdingo89] bucks that trend with a nicely detailed build, starting with the choice of zebrawood for the table frame. The bold grain and the frosted glass top make for a handsome table, but what lurks beneath the glass is pretty special too. The 240 WS2812 modules live on custom PCBs, each thoughtfully provided with connectors for easy service. There’s also an IR transmitter-receiver pair on each board to detect when something is placed over the pixel. The pixel boards are connected to custom-built shift register boards for the touch sensors, and an Arduino with Bluetooth runs the whole thing. Right now the table just flashes and responds to hand gestures, but you can easily see this forming the basis of a beautiful Tetris or Pong table.

This build reminds us a little of this pressure-sensitive light floor we featured recently, which also has some gaming possibilities. Maybe [dasdingo89] and  [creed_bratton_] should compare notes and see who can come up with the best games for their platform.

[via r/DIY and a tip from emptycanister]

Getting IEC Standards For Free

December 26, 2016 by 28 Comments

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is an international body that issues standards on a wide range of electronics-related topics. How wide? Their mandate seems to span rules for household product safety to the specification of safety logic assemblies in nuclear power plants. Want to know how to electrically measure sound loudness? Test methods for digital door lock systems? Or maybe you’re interested in safety interlock systems for laser processing machines. There’s an IEC standard for that too.

Unfortunately, this information is kept behind a paywall. OK, it’s a lot more like a pay fortress. They really, really don’t want you accessing their documents without first coughing up. This is a shame.

The IEC doesn’t just make the standards in a vacuum, however. Before the scribes touch their chisels to the stone tablets, there are draft versions of the standards that are open for public comment by those knowledgeable in the field. And by “those knowledgeable”, we mean you, dear hacker. Head on over to the public commenting page, sign up, and you’ve got free access to every document that’s currently up for discussion.

Now, it does look like the IEC doesn’t want you sharing these PDFs around — they watermark them with your username and threaten all sorts of things if you use them for anything other than commenting purposes — so don’t go abusing the system. But on the other hand, if you are a private individual who knows a thing or two about a thing or two, we think you’re entirely right to look over their shoulders. Let us know in the comments if you find any gems.

They’ve even got a weekly update feature (in the registration pages) that’ll keep you up to date. And who knows, maybe your two cents, submitted to your country’s chapter of the IEC, will influence future international standards.

Thanks to [Johann] for the great tip!