Apparently the iPhone jack isn’t quite standard – it’s a bit recessed to the point that third parties are offering adapters for it. [John] offers this simple method for modding Etymotic’s fine ER6i headphones. (If only I could find mine. I haven’t seen them for 8 months.) I suggest using a utility knife over a pocket knife. It’s simple, easy, and will probably work on most headphones.
Cellphone Hacks541 Articles
GSM Alarm
Fresh from the tips line, [Pedro] sent in his GSM alarm. He combined a GSM phone, a motion sensor and BasicX24 controller board. If the detector trips during a set time period, the alarm sends SMS messages to the terminator, er whoever you want. He was kind enough to release the code, but I’d like to see this with a smaller micro-controller board to keep the cost/size down.
CCCamp 2007: GSM A5 Cracking
Steve Schear and David Hulton gave a presentation on A5 cracking. A5 is the encryption employed on GSM cellphone networks between the handset and the tower (nowhere else in the network). To sniff the GSM band, they use the GNU radio USRP. GNU radio is a software defined radio project, which given some effort you should be able to both receive and transmit in any RF band. You could use it to broadcast digital television, track radio tags, or even mess with garage door openers. For their initial investigation they used a Nokia 3310 in trace mode to dump the initial frames. Using a box with at least 27 FPGA’s they plan on constructing a 6+ terabyte rainbow table (it’ll take a couple months). Once complete, any GSM conversation can be cracked in less than 5 minutes using a single FPGA. The Hackers Choice has more info on the USRP based GSM analyzer and what they did to crack A5.
Cell Phone Controlled Door Lock
Inspired by the knock to open hack, [ashish] put together a fairly simple DTMF decoder to control solenoid door unlocker and connected it to a Nokia 1100 cell phone. Call the phone, input the magic code, and the door unlocks.
SMS Tracking With A GPS GSM Enabled AVR
[Alex] sent in some of his latest work. He interfaced some not so cheap components to give an AVR GPS and GSM I/O. For now it can read the GPS position and send text messages. Thanks to the GPS/GSM module, the schematic is pretty simple – anyone with basic soldering skills and a desire to put a dent in their credit card can probably build this. (Programming the AVR is probably the most difficult task)
IPhone Eve’ Extra
The guys at I-hacked put up a how-to on giving your windows mobile phone some iPhone skinned powers, but later in the day they decided to make it login required. Thanks to [Katrina] for the tip. (requiring logins for contributed content just doesn’t sit well with me.)
[chris] sent in his own round up of his personal projects.
[Chris Coleman] let me know about hacktherazr. They’ve got some decent guides on customizing just about everything on the things.
[Ben Heck] got sick of emails, so he’s offering to build one more xbox 360 laptop, if you give him a pile of money.
Staring sunday, I’ll be ripping the hell out of my new house (and re-doing most of the upstairs). Do me a favor and keep the tips line brimming over.
[David] has some interesting ideas involving wireless AP antennas and wireless keyboards. How about a cantenna…
Nokia LCD In A Laptop
I was poking around and ran across this interesting mod in progress. It’s mostly a study in customizing an old laptop, but embedding a Nokia LCD in the palm rest is an interesting little hack. The LCD was taken from a Nokia 3310 and modded to connect to the parallel port. (Probably with a circuit like this one)
