Looking Inside The KR580VM80A Soviet I8080 Clone

March 7, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 16 Comments

The folks at Zeptobars are on a roll, sometimes looking deep inside historic chips and at others exposing fake devices for our benefit. Behind all of those amazing die shots are hundreds of hours of hard work. [Mikhail] from Zeptobars recently tipped us off on the phenomenal work done by engineer [Vslav] who spent over 1000 hours reverse engineering the Soviet KR580VM80A – one of the most popular micro-controllers of the era and a direct clone of the i8080.

But before [Vslav] could get down to creating the schematic and Verilog model, the chip needed to be de-capped and etched. As they etched down, they created a series of high resolution images of the die. At the end of that process, they were able to determine that the chip had exactly 4758 transistors (contrary to rumors of 6000 or 4500). With the images done, they were able to annotate the various parts of the die, create a Verilog model and the schematic. A tough compatibility test confirmed the veracity of their Verilog model. All of the source data is available via a (CC-BY-3.0) license from their website. If this looks interesting, do check out some of their work that we have featured earlier like comparing real and fake Nordic dies and amazing descriptions of how they figure out the workings of these decapped chips. If this is too deep for you check out the slightly simpler but equally awesome process of delayering PCBs.

A Secret Door To The Mines Of Moria

March 7, 2015 by James Hobson 9 Comments

What home movie theater is complete without a secret entrance? [Eclipse_007] had the brilliant idea to make this Lord of The Rings themed hidden door, akin to the entrance way to the Mines of Moria.

It’s a custom door panel filled to the brim with LED lights on the underside. The front panel is a large piece of plexi-glass with a vinyl coating on one side. [Eclipse_007] painstakingly cut the design out of the vinyl coating, all by hand. Once installed the door just looks like another part of the wall. But when touched, the door lights up and then swings open, revealing the movie theater. Plans are already in the works to make it voice controlled to open when the password is spoken.

As one reddit user puts it:

That is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I’m trying to imagine an estate agent introducing your house… two bathrooms, double glazing, five bedrooms, the Westgate of Moria which opens into a basement movie theater when you say Mellon, and a stylish modern kitchen…

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Animated ASCII Fluid Dynamics Simulator Is Retro Cool

March 7, 2015 by George Graves 18 Comments

ASCII art holds a place near and dear to our hearts. If you were fortunate enough to get started in computers before there was such a thing as a graphical user interface (GUI) then you remember tolling for hours to make clever use of the ASCII characters to make on screen graphics appear as realistic as possible.

Although this animated ASCII fluid dynamics simulator dates back to 2012, it’s just too cool not to share. It’s the product of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC). A contest held each year where the goal is to write the most confusing C code that you can – making use of loopholes and ambiguity in the C programming language to obfuscate(hide) the purpose of the program. Basically, doing everything you’re taught not to do in school. You can take a look at the source code here.

We’re sure the programmer [Yusuke Endoh] would be the first to admit, that there is no practical use for such a low resolution simulator, but we give it an A+ in the retro cool department anyways. (Not to mention, the source code is way too confusing to even comment on) Take a look at the animated ASCII graphics in the video after the break.

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DIY Reverse Trike Bike Has Sick IFS

March 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 23 Comments

There is certainly no shortage of bicycle builds out there on the ‘net. We’re not talking custom race bikes or anything here, we mean cool odd-ball bikes built just because. We’ve seen trike conversions before, both with single wheels in the front and in the back, but today we stumbled across something we haven’t seen before.

[Kong79] has built a reverse trike, with 2 wheels in the front. That by itself is nothing new but this trike has an independent front suspension, meaning each wheel can move up and down independently from the other. This particular build uses a double A-arm setup that keeps the axle of the wheel near parallel with the ground throughout its range of travel.

The trike started off as a standard mountain bike. The front fork was removed to make way for the new front suspension. There is a new box frame that was welded up and positioned directly below the head tube. This frame will support all 4 A-arms. Speaking of the A-arms, they certainly aren’t off the shelf units. Take a look, the uppers are bike forks and the lowers were welded together from bike frame tubes.

The spindles are where it gets a little tricky but [Kong79] made it happen with his resourcefulness. Bike head tubes, head bearings and standard stems make up the spindle components and are responsible for allowing each front wheel to steer. Each spindle is connected to the steering column by a tie rod scrounged from an ATV. The shocks were found at a motorcycle scrap yard.

This is a pretty unique build and it’s sure great to see people doing stuff like this. For more trick trikes, check out this wooden one or this no-weld-required recumbent.

An Arduino Device That Monitors Your External IP Address

March 6, 2015 by Rick Osgood 43 Comments

[Bayres’] dad setup a webcam as a surveillance camera for a remote property. The only problem was that the only stable Internet connection they could get at this property was DSL. This meant that the external IP address of the webcam would change somewhat often; the needed a way to keep track of the external IP address whenever it changed. That’s when [Bayres] built a solution using Arduino and an Ethernet shield.

The main function of this device is to monitor the public IP address and report any changes. This is accomplished by first making a request to checkip.dyndns.org. This website simply reports your current public IP address. [Bayres] uses an Arduino library called Textfinder in order to search through the returned string and identify the IP address.

From there, the program compares this current value to the previous one. If there is any change, the program uses the Sendmail() function to reach out to an SMTP server and send an e-mail alert to [Beyres’] dad. The system also includes a small LCD. The Arduino outputs the current IP address to this display, making it easy to check up on the connection. The LCD is driven by 74HC595 shift register in order to conserve pins on the Arduino.

The system is also designed with a pretty slick setup interface. When it is booted, the user can enter a configuration menu via a Serial terminal. This setup menu allows the user to configure options such as SMTP server, email address, etc. These variables are then edited and can be committed to EEPROM as a more permanent storage solution. Whenever the system is booted, these values are read back out of the EEPROM and returned to their appropriate variables. This means you can reconfigure the device on the fly without having to edit the source code and re-upload.

Decoding ZeuS Malware Disguised As A .DOC

March 6, 2015 by Rick Osgood 30 Comments

[Ronnie] recently posted about his adventures in decoding malware. One of his users reported a phishy email, which did indeed turn out to contain a nasty attachment. The process that [Ronnie] followed in order to figure out what this malware was trying to do is quite fascinating and worth the full read.

[Ronnie] started out by downloading the .doc attachment in a virtual machine. This would isolate any potential damage to a junk system that could be restored easily. When he tried to open the .doc file, he was presented with an error stating that he did not have either enough memory or disk space to proceed. With 45GB of free space and 2GB of RAM, this should not have been an issue. Something was definitely wrong.

The next step was to open the .doc file in Notepad++ for analysis. [Ronnie] quickly noticed that the file was actually a .rtf disguised as a .doc. [Ronnie] scanned through large chunks of data in an attempt to guess what the malware was trying to do. He noticed that one data chunk ended with the bytes “FF” and D9″, which are also found as the ending two bytes of .gif files.

[Ronnie] copied this data into a new document and removed all new line and return characters. He then converted the hex to ASCII, revealing some more signs that this was actually image data. He saved this file as a .gif and opened it up for viewing. It was a 79KB image of a 3D rendered house. He also found another chunk of data that was the same picture, but 3MB in size. Strange to say the least.

After finding a few other weird bits of data, [Ronnie] finally started to see more interesting sections. First he noticed some strings with mixed up capital and lowercase letters, a tactic sometimes used to avoid antivirus signatures. A bit lower he found a section of data that was about the size of typical shellcode. He decoded this data and found what he was looking for. The shellcode contained a readable URL. The URL pointed to a malicious .exe file that happened to still be available online.

Of course [Ronnie] downloaded the .exe and monitored it to see how it acted. He found that it set a run key in the registry to ensure that it would persist later on. The malware installed itself to the user’s appdata folder and also reached out repeatedly to an IP address known to be affiliated with ZeuS malware. It was a lot of obfuscation, but it was still no match for an experienced malware detective.

ROBOCHOP! It Slices, Dices, But Wait! There’s More…

March 6, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 17 Comments

You’re gunna love my cuts.

KUKA robots are cool. They’re both elegant and terrifying to watch in action as they move unyieldingly to preform tasks. Not many of us get to use industrial tools like this because they aren’t exactly trivial to wield (or cheap!). Artists [Clemens Weisshaar] and [Reed Kram] however created an installation that allows anyone to potentially control one of these orange beauties to do their bidding… all from the safety and comfort of a computer chair.

For their piece, “ROBOCHOP”, the artists developed a web app that allows you to easily manipulate the surface of a virtual cube. You can rotate for positioning and then use a straight or curved line tool to draw vectors through its surface and subtract material. Once you’re finished sculpting your desired masterpiece, one of the four KUKA robots in the installation will retrieve a 40 x 40 x 40 cm block of foam and shape it into a real-life version of whatever you created in the app.

Starting today you can visit the project’s website and upload your own mutilated cube designs. If your design is selected by the artists, it will be among the 2000 pieces carved by the robots throughout their installation during CeBit in Hanover. After the show, your cube spawn will then be mailed to you free of charge! The only way I could see this being cooler, is if they filmed the process so you could watch your shape being born.