Recently people have been adapting Bluetooth headsets for use in other devices: the NES controller headset and the classic brick phone. [matt billings] put together a guide to tearing down a Motorola HS820 Bluetooth headset to show how easy this is. He picked the HS820 because it is apparently only $30 at Radio Shack and Amazon. Sounds like a good enough candidate to me.
[th0mas] has put together a concise how-to on forwarding Atom or RSS to you cellphone. In his example he grabs an Atom feed from his Gmail account then parses it to find the new messages. The new message list is compared to a file so that duplicate messages aren’t sent. All new messages are then sent to the phone’s email address. th0mas has provided enough information so that this script could be easily expanded. It looks like a decent introduction to PERL as well, so even if you aren’t looking to send stuff to your cellphone it might still be worth a look.
[moddy] sent in a couple of his projects that would probably be entertaining on a Sunday afternoon. The first one is how to reverse the rotation of a battery powered travel clock. It’s just a simple modification of the plate the coil is wrapped around. The second is adding 9V battery terminals to a cell phone. Neither project is practical, but they’re still fun.
Looking for a way to demonstrate his AutoIt script that allows Windows control using a cellphone, zerocool60544 put together this automatic door opener/closer. It uses two water bottles as counterweights and two LEGO motors to drive the door. The motor control is a parallel port connected relay board. It’s a pretty simple demo, but I’ll definitely be looking into AutoIt in the future.
[thanks emdy]
Now that the CCC is over, we finally dug ourselves out of a ginormous pile of cables (Kabelsalat ist gesund!) to bring you this round up post about the best stuff from the last two days of the con.
First up on day 10 was I See Airplanes!, Eric Blossom’s excellent speech on creating hardware for making homebrew radars and software using the GnuRadio project. He uses bistatic passive receivers in the 100 MHz range doing object detection using other peoples’ transmitters. The project has a lot yet to accomplish including the use of helical filters (if there are any antenna freaks reading this, contact Eric, he’s looking for a bit of help).
Next on the third day we attended Ilja van Sprundel‘s huge fuzzing extravaganza. Fuzzers generate bad data that is designed to look like good data and will hopefully break something in an interesting way. Our fav part? When the list of irc clients broken by his ircfuzz tool was so long he had to use 10pt font to get it all on one slide (see slide 53)! His paper can be found here and the slides here.
We then wandered to Harald Welte‘s talk on hacking the Motorola EZX series phones (which we’ve reported on here before). In case you forgot, the EZX series has a linux kernel. Incidentally the phone runs lots of stuff it really doesn’t need (like glibc, 6 threads for just sound processes, and even inetd). He presented the project for the first time in an official context since we saw him at 0Sec in October. Apparently lots of kinks have been worked out and there’s an official code source tree here.
The clincher for day 11 was FX and FtR of Phenoelit‘s semi-controversial talk on Blackberry security (covering both handheld devices and server based RIM products). This talk was a bit of a wake up call for RIM and thus the slides are still not available online so keep a sharp eye out for the video when it’s released by the CCC.
Also available from the CCC are the full proceedings in a downloadable pdf (also available in paper format for you physical-space-doodle-in-the-margin freaks).
The march of reader hacks continues and I couldn’t be happier. [Timo] has been experimenting with a prototype Nokia 3220 Near Field Communication phone. The phone features an RFID reader/writer (and an odd logo that seems to combine a Dreamcast with RSS). The phone’s Service Discovery application reads RFID tags that it encounters. The read data can trigger a variety of actions: dial a number, send a pre-defined SMS, or load a URL. Timo placed an array of RFID tags under the surface of his desk. He then recorded different actions to each tag and placed a corresponding Post-It note liable on the desk surface above each tag. So, by resting the phone on “call Jack” the phone would load the number. When he walks into the office he can set the phone down on “I’m in the office” and a text message will be sent. He’s got some interesting thoughts on this system. It made him very aware of where he had to set the phone when he didn’t want it to do anything. Timo also wonders how your acquaintances would feel if they found themselves ranked across your desktop.
We’ve posted Part Two of the Magic Phone How-To over at Engadget. In this Installment, we show you the process behind creating the custom circuit that will live inside the rotary phone. This circuit is as small as possible by making it two-sided and by using surface mount components. Part One of the How-To covered number pad matrix decoding on just about any phone or number pad.
