Cellphone Hacks

526 Articles

Automatic Turntable Makes Photogrammetry A Cinch

April 28, 2022 by 9 Comments

Photogrammetry is a great way to produce accurate 3D models of real objects. A turntable is often a common tool used in this work as it helps image an object from all angles. [Peter Lin] wanted a way to run the photogrammetry process with minimal human intervention, and set about building an automated turntable setup.

The build relies on a smartphone to take images of the physical object. The phone is triggered to take photos by an ESP8266, which fires the shutter via the phone’s audio socket. The microcontroller then turns the turntable on for a short period of time after each shot, rotating it by a set angle.

The build still requires objects to be repositioned in various orientations on the turntable now and then, in order to capture the top and bottom areas that would otherwise be obscured. However, the grunt work of taking the photos and rotating the objects is now entirely automated.

It’s a useful build for anyone that finds themselves regularly imaging objects to create 3D models. The results of [Peter]’s rig look great, and as a bonus come with life-like textures ready to go. We’ve seen some other great photogrammetry builds before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Automatic Turntable Makes Photogrammetry A Cinch” →

Monitor Space Weather And The Atmosphere With Your Cellphone!

April 4, 2022 by 9 Comments

Above our heads, the atmosphere is a complex and unpredictable soup of gasses and charged particles subject to the influence of whatever the Sun throws at it. Attempting to understand it is not for the faint-hearted, so it has for centuries been the object of considerable research. A new project from the European Space Agency and ETH Zurich gives the general public the chance to participate in that research in a small way, by crowdsourcing atmospheric data gathering to a mobile phone app. How might a mobile phone observe the atmosphere? The answer lies in their global positioning receivers, which can track minute differences in the received signals caused by atmospheric conditions. By gathering as much of this data as possible, the ESA scientists will gain valuable insights into atmospheric conditions as they change across the globe.

The app requires an Android phone equipped with a dual frequency satnav receiver, and having been duly installed on the trusty Hackaday Motorola it in turn started picking up all the different constellations of satellites. The instructions are to leave it somewhere such as a windowsill with an unobstructed view of the sky and move it as little as possible, to which we’d add clicking the “Log in background” button and connectign a charger. There’s a promise that uploaders can win prizes, so aside from contributing to scientific discovery there might be an unexpected benefit. More details on the app can be found here, meanwhile many readers will know that this isn’t the only crowdsourced atmospheric data gathering effort.

Galaxy Users Accuse Samsung Of Throttling Performance And Benchmark Rigging

March 10, 2022 by 24 Comments

A lot of Samsung Galaxy users think that Samsung has been throttling smartphone performance, so much so that they don’t live up to their published specifications. At issue is the game optimizing service (GOS) which is intended to throttle the CPU while playing games to prevent overheating. S22 owners have recently discovered that it’s not only games that are throttled, but there’s a list of over 10,000 apps which are subject to GOS control, and there is no way to disable it.

What they’re really upset over is the fact that popular benchmarking apps are not subject to GOS throttling — something that’s hard to see as anything but a blatant attempt to game the system. In fact, this past weekend the folks at Geekbench banned four generations of Samsung Galaxy phones (S10, S20, S21, S22) for benchmark manipulation.

Admittedly, thermal management is critical on today’s incredibly powerful handheld devices, and the concept of throttling is an accepted solution in the industry. But people are upset at the opaqueness and lack of control of GOS, not to mention cherry picking apps in order to excel at benchmarks. Furthermore Samsung has removed their vapor chamber cooling system from recent models. This makes GOS even more important and looks like a cost-savings measure that may have backfired. Currently there’s a petition with the government claiming false advertising, and users are actively pursuing a lawsuit against Samsung.

First Hacks: The Brand New Nokia 5G Gateway Router

December 27, 2021 by 28 Comments

Aside from being the focus of a series of bizarre conspiracy theories, 5G cellular networks offer the promise of ultra-fast Internet access anywhere within their range. To that end there are a new breed of devices designed to provide home broadband using 5G as a backhaul. It’s one of these, a Nokia Fastmile, that [Eddie Zhang] received, and he’s found it to be an interesting teardown and investigation. Spoiler: it runs Android and has exploitable bugs.

A privilege escalation bug in the web administration tool led to gaining the ability to export and modify configuration files, but sadly though a telnet prompt can be opened it’s not much use without the password. Uncovering some blocked-off ports on the base of the unit revealed a USB-C port, which was found to connect to an Android device. Via ADB a shell could be opened on Android, but on further  investigation it was found that the Fastmile is not a single device but two separate ones. Inside is a PCB with an Android 5G phone to handle the connection, and another with a completely separate home router.

With access to the Android side and a login prompt on the router side that was as far as he was prepared to go without risking bricking his Fastmile. It only remained to do a teardown, which reveals the separate PCBs with their own heatsinks, and an impressive antenna array. Perhaps these devices will in time become as ubiquitous as old routers, and we’ll see them fully laid bare.

It’s a shame that we’ve had to write more about the conspiracy theories surrounding 5G than real 5G devices, but maybe we’ll see more teardowns like this one to make up for it.

Inspecting a SIM card via MTM

Diving The Depths Of Ma Bell

December 27, 2021 by 13 Comments

The modern smartphone is a marvel of sensors, radios, inputs, outputs, and processing power. In particular, some of those radios, such as WiFi and cellular, have grown fiendishly complex over the years. Even when that complexity is compressed down for the user into the one-dimensional space of the signal strength bars at the top of your phone. So when [David Burgess] was asked to look at some cellphone records of text messages and figure out where some of the more mysterious messages were coming from, it led him down a rabbit hole into the dark arts behind the glowing phone screen.

The number in question was 1111340002, sent by a phone connected to AT&T at the time, and was crucial for a legal case around distracted driving. [David’s] tools in his investigation were YateBTS (a cellular network simulator), SimTrace2 (pictured above), and old reliable Wireshark. Since the number isn’t a specific phone number and is not reachable from the public phone network, it must be a unique number inside AT&T processed by one particular AT&T SMSC (Short Message service center). The SMSC in question is in Atlanta and isn’t a typical texting center, so it must have some particular purpose. The message’s payload is raw binary rather than text, and [David] has done a pretty good job of decoding the majority of the format.

The most exciting revelation in this journey is that the phone (in the traditional sense) does not send this message. The processor on the phone does not know this message and executes no code to send it. Instead, the SIM card itself sends it. The SIM card is connected directly to the baseband processor on the phone, and the baseband polls the sim every so often, asking for any commands. One of those commands is an SMS (though many other commands have worrying consequences).

The SMS that [David] was chasing is triggered whenever a SIM detects a new IMEI, and the message lets the network know what about the previous and current IMEI. However, in the case of this message, it was unlikely that the SIM changed phones, so what happened? After some additional lab work and the deposition of an AT&T employee, [David] showed that a baseband firmware update would also trigger this SMS.

It’s a fascinating journey into the fragmented world of a smartphone’s minds and [David] does a fantastic job on the writeup. If you’re interested in sniffing wireless accessories, you will enjoy this soundbar’s wireless protocol laid bare.

Finally, A Use For Old Cellphones

December 4, 2021 by 50 Comments

In what is now a three-year long search, I’ve finally found the perfect use for an old cellphone. And with it, the answer to a burning question: Why aren’t we hacking cellphones?

First, the application. The Octo4a project lets you use an old Android phone as a 3D printer server, web interface, and even time-lapse camera to make those nice movies where the print seems to grow up out of nothing before your eyes. It’s the perfect application for an old phone, making use of the memory, WiFi, graphics capabilities, and even the touch-screen if you want local control of your prints.

Connecting to the phone was the main hurdle that I’ve always seen in developing for cellphone projects, because I have robotics applications in mind. But Octo4a gets around this with low or no effort. Most 3D printers are designed to run on USB anyway, so connecting it to the phone is as simple as buying a USB OTG cable. With the USB port taken over, powering the phone long-run becomes a tiny problem, which can be solved with a Y-cable or a little solder. Keep the OS from going to sleep, somehow, and it’s problem solved!

But here’s why this isn’t a solution, and it points out the deeper problem with cellphone hacking that many pointed out in the comments three years ago. Octoprint is written in Python, and because of this is very easy to write extensions for and to hack on, if that’s your thing. When I first saw Octo4a, I thought “oh great, a working Android Python port”. Then I went to dig into the code.

Octo4a is written in Kotlin and uses the Gradle framework. It’s a complete port of Octoprint, not just to a different platform, but to a different programming language and to an almost entirely different programming paradigm. My hat is off to [feelfreelinux] for doing it, but my guess is that the community of other people fluent enough in Kotlin and Python to help port across upstream changes in Octoprint is a lot smaller than the community of Python programmers would have been. Octo4a is a great project, but it’s not a walk in the park to develop on it.

So all of you who wrote in the comments to my previous piece that it’s the Android software ecosystem that’s preventing phone reuse, well here’s the exception that proves your rule! A dedicated and talented, multi-lingual developer community could pull it off, but the hurdle is so high that few will rise to it.

Anyway, thanks [Feelfree Filip] for your great work! I’ll be putting this on my old S4.

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The PinePhone Pro Is Here. But It’s Still Probably Not The Year Of Open-Source Linux On The Smartphone

October 19, 2021 by 82 Comments

A trope in open source commentary over the last decades has been the phrase “Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?”, as though the open source OS will finally break through and challenge Windows. In fact the process has been one of stealth rather than explosive growth, as the likes of ChromeOS with its Linux underpinnings become the go-to choice for an inexpensive consumer laptop. In the phone arena the same has happened with Android, as most users have no idea that a Linux foundation lies beneath their Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel.

Fully open-source via Android on the phone has been very slow to arrive, but could that be changed by the arrival of Pine64’s PinePhone Pro? The new device will be available alongside their existing PinePhone, and will continue the dream of a fully open-source mobile phone with its increased-specification hardware.

As much as the specs of one black slab versus another matter, at its heart is a 1.5 GHz Rockchip RK3399S hexa-core SoC alongside 4 GB of dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM. This compares well to the original PinePhone’s quad-Core Allwinner A64 at 1.152 GHz and 3 GB LPDDR3 RAM, so it’s clear that there is plenty of capability in this phone.

Any phone whether open-source or not will however live or die on the quality of its software and support, so for this model to be a real success outside the realm of extreme open-source devotees we think that Pine64 will need to be prepared to up their game when it comes to what happens after hardware delivery. It’s fair to say that some of their previous products have been a little lacklustre in this department, with hardware bugs remaining unfixed. Their approach of relying on the community of users to deliver software support has not so far returned a stable experience for users of the original PinePhone. We understand that their intention is to provide a developer’s phone, but developers need to place phonecalls and take pictures too.

We’ve seen some PinePhone owners commenting to this effect, and though we’re fans of Pine64 and like what they are trying to do, we have to admit that those users have a point. If they were prepared to put some effort into software development to the extent of providing an official OS image with let’s say Plasma Mobile, a working phone app, a working web browser, and responsive phone features such as instant on and off, even at the expense of charging more for the phone itself, we think that they’ll be on to a winner. Otherwise they’ll remain as the really cool open-source phone that only your kernel-wizard friends own, and even then they use a Google Pixel as their everyday phone. Please Pine64, prove us wrong!

Last month our colleague Brian Cockfield took us on a tour of his PinePhone.