classic hacks

2667 Articles

Car Alarm Hacks 3 Million Vehicles

March 8, 2019 by 30 Comments

Pen testing isn’t about evaluating inks. It is short for penetration testing — someone ensuring a system’s security by trying to break in or otherwise attack it. A company called Pen Test Partners made the news last week by announcing that high-end car alarm systems made by several vendors have a critical security flaw that could make the vehicles less secure. They claim about three million vehicles are affected.

The video below shows how alarms from Viper/Clifford and Pandora have a simple way to hijack the application. Once they have access, they can find the car in real time, control the door locks, and start or stop the car engine. They speculate a hacker could set off the alarm from a nearby chase car. You’d probably pull over if your alarm started going off. They can then lock you in your car, approach, and then force you out of the car.

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A Garbage Bag Skirt Is Fit For A Hovercraft

March 7, 2019 by 12 Comments

The hovercraft is an entertaining but much maligned form of transport. While they have military applications and at times have even run as ferries across the English Channel, fundamental issues with steering and braking have prevented us all driving them to work on a regular basis. They do make great toys however, and [HowToMechatronics] has built an excellent example.

The build is primarily a 3D printed affair, with the hull, ducting, and even the propellers being made in this way. The craft is sized to be readily printable on a 30cm square build platform, making it accessible to most printer owners. Drive is via brushless motors, and control is achieved using their previously-featured self-built NRF24L01 radio control transmitter.

What stands out among most other hovercraft builds we see here is the functioning skirt. It’s constructed from a garbage bag, and held on to the hull with a 3D printed clamping ring. Most quick builds omit a skirt and make up for it with light weight and high power, so its nice to see one implemented here. We’d love to see how well the craft works on the water, though it holds up well on the concrete.

Finished in a camouflage paint scheme, the craft looks the part, and handles well too. We’d consider a small correction to the center of gravity, but it’s nothing a little ballast wouldn’t fix. Video after the break. Continue reading “A Garbage Bag Skirt Is Fit For A Hovercraft” →

RemoteDebug For ESP Platforms

March 7, 2019 by 10 Comments

Debugging tools are critical to quick and effective development. Without being able to peek under the hood at what’s really going on, it can be difficult to understand and solve problems. Those who live on the Arduino platform are probably well acquainted with using the serial port to debug, but it’s far from the only way. [JoaoLopesF] has coded the RemoteDebug tool for ESP platforms, and the results are impressive.

RemoteDebug does away with the serial interface entirely, instead using the ESP’s native wireless interface to send debug data over TCP/IP. It’s all handled over telnet, making it completely platform agnostic. By handling things over the WiFi connection, it negates issues with physical access, as well as hassles with cables and limited serial ports. It’s also of benefit to robotics projects, which no longer need a tether when debugging.

It comes with a similar set of features to [JoaoLopesF]’s earlier work, SerialDebug. Things like verbosity and timestamps are all built in, making it easy to get high-quality debug data without having to reinvent the wheel yourself. Video after the break.

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ESP32 Drives Controllerless Display Using I2S Hack

March 7, 2019 by 14 Comments

It’s possible to find surplus LCDs in all kinds of old hardware. Photocopiers, printers – you name it, there’s old junk out there with displays going to waste. Unfortunately, unlike the displays on sale at your favourite maker website, these often lack a controller and can be quite difficult to drive. [pataga] took on the challenge to drive a LCD of unknown provenance, using the power of the ESP32.

The LCD in question is a 240×160 monochrome device, that was initially being driven successfully with a Microchip PIC24 with a dedicated LCD driver peripheral. This allowed [pataga] to study the display interface under working conditions with the help of an oscilloscope. Inspiration was then taken from a project by [Sprite_tm], which used the I2S peripheral to drive a small LED display without placing load on the CPU.

Using the ESP32’s I2S peripheral in parallel mode makes it possible to shift data out in the correct format to drive the LCD without bit-banging IO pins and using up precious CPU time. This leaves processor cycles free to do interesting things, like generating 3D images using [cnlohr]’s routines from the Channel 3 project. There’s a little extra work to be done, with the frame signal being generated by an external flip flop and some fudging with the arrangement of various registers, but it’s a remarkably tidy repurposing of the I2S hardware, which seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. (Here it is spitting out VGA video through a resistor DAC.)

Code is available on Github for those looking to get at the nuts and bolts of the hack. It’s another build that goes to show, it’s not the parts in your junk box that count, but how you use them.

Fun With A Hydrogen Thyratron

March 6, 2019 by 20 Comments

There’s something oddly menacing about some vacuum tubes. The glass, the glowing filaments, the strange metal grids and wires suspended within – all those lead to a mysterious sci-fi look and the feeling that strange things are happening in there.

Add in a little high voltage and a tube that makes its own hydrogen, and you’ve got something extra scary. This hydrogen thyratron ended up being just the thing for [Kerry Wong]’s high-voltage, high-current experiments. One would normally turn to the solid-state version of the thyratron, the silicon controlled rectifier (SCR), to switch such voltages. But the devices needed to handle the 30 amps [Kerry] had in mind were exorbitant, and when the IGBTs he used as a substitute proved a little too fragile he turned to the Russian surplus market for help. There he found a TGI1-50/5 hydrogen thyratron, a tube that has a small hydrogen gas generator inside – thyratrons are actually gas-filled rather than vacuum tubes and switch heavy currents through plasma conduction. [Kerry] set up a demo circuit with a small RC network to provide the fast switching pulse preferred by the thyratron, and proceeded to run 3500 volts through a couple of 1/4-W resistors with predictable results. The video below shows the fireworks.

Can’t get enough of the thyratron’s lovely purple glow? We’ve seen it before on this beautiful old switch-mode power supply. The versatile tubes also helped rebuild the first vocal encryption system.

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Hacking The IPod Nano Display: Beautiful!

March 6, 2019 by 14 Comments

The 6th Generation iPod Nano was something of a revelation on launch. Packing a color screen, audio hardware, and a rechargable battery into a package no bigger than a large postage stamp remains impressive to this day. They’re now being used in various maker projects for their displays, but if you’re doing so, you might want to think about how you’re going to build a graphical interface. Not to worry – just grab an ESP32 and the right GUI library, and you’re on your way.

The Nano screen uses a MIPI DSI interface, which isn’t the easiest thing to use directly with the ESP32. Instead, a SSD2805 interface chip converts parallel input data to MIPI DSI signals to drive the display. Driving the display is only part of the game, however – you need something to display on it. Combining the LittlevGL GUI library with the screen’s touchpad makes creating a full graphical interface easy.

Hacked screens are something we don’t see as much these days, with the proliferation of display products aimed directly at the maker market. However, it’s always awesome to see a successful hack pulled off well. We’ve seen the display reverse engineered, too – and it certainly wasn’t easy.

 

Designing Custom LCDs To Repair Retrocomputers

March 3, 2019 by 26 Comments

China, we’re told, can make anything. If you need some PCBs in a few weeks, there are a few factories in China that will do it. If you need a nuclear reactor, yep, there’s probably a factory in China that’ll do it because nuclear reactors are listed as one of the items facing new tariffs when imported into the United States. No, I am not kidding. What about LCDs? What about old-school character LCDs? Is it possible to find a factory in China that will make you the LCD you want? That’s what [Robert Baruch] will find out, because he’s repairing an old computer with new parts.

The object of this repair and restomod is a TRS-80 Pocket Computer (PC-1), otherwise known as the Sharp PC-1211. It looks like a calculator, but no, it’s a legitimate computer you can program in BASIC. [Robert] bought this computer for a bit more than $5 on eBay ‘for repair’, which means the zinc-air battery was dead, and unfortunately, the LCD was shot. The LCD technically works, but it just doesn’t look good. Sometime in the last thirty years, moisture got in between the layers of glass, polarizing film, and liquid crystal. This is not unique to [Robert]’s unit — a lot of these PC-1s have the same problem, many of these broken seals rendering the computers themselves useless.

This is an ancient computer, and replacements for this LCD are impossible to find, but because the Sharp PC-1211 is well documented, it is possible to find the datasheet for the original display. With that, it’s just a question of finding an LCD manufacturer that will do it. So far, the costs look good — $800 USD ($300 for tooling and 10 samples, $500 for another 200 LCDs) is what it’ll take to get a few units. [Robert] already has a few people interested in repairing their own Pocket Computers. You can follow the eevblog thread here, or check out the video below.

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