FPGA’s have become especially useful to the hacker community of late. Once upon a time, these lovely pieces of dedicated hardware were fabled to only be within reach of deep pocketed graphics card producers working to up their shader and vertex counts. Today they’re often found in the bowels of high end network gear. As reprogrammable arrays of logic gates, FPGAs represent a happy middle ground between general purpose CPUs and dedicated silicon. After the break, we’ll recount some of the more interesting FPGA projects we’ve seen, like the open source graphics card we featured yesterday.
Misc Hacks4117 Articles
Bump Key Experiments
[Barry] took one of his blog readers comments to heart and started wondering just what happens when you bump a lock. As suggested, he made a cut away lock core and started experimenting. [Barry] doesn’t have a high speed camera, so he tried some alternatives like filling the chambers with grease to indicate pin movement. Master Lock put together a nice video demo of lock bumping (in order to sell their new bump stop gear).
USB Microcontroller Dev/emulation Sticks
[nazerine] sent in [Emanuele]’s list of interesting USB micro-controller development tools. Some of them are surprisingly cheap for what you get. The wireless dev/emulator stick looks extra interesting for developing remote projects. (The purchase links are through the manufacturer – at first I thought he might be selling the things)
DIY Rebreather Scrubber Refill
Most people fear refilling their own ink cartridges. [Skipbreather] made his own CO2 scrubber refill for his rebreather. (Modern rebreathers are damn impressive.) The build is fairly straight forward, but requires some machining. I had to laugh when I found out that part of his build involved toilet seat hold down bolts.
Syringe Logic Probe
[Travis] sent in his oh so simple(why didn’t I think of that) syringe logic probe. that he put together for his version of the sump logic analyzer. Real probes tend to be pretty expensive. With some effort, you can probably fit an led/diode/resistor in there and make a simple 5v logic probe. If you’d like a nice logic analyzer, Spartan-3 board that it’s based on is only $99.
Interfacing Your Laptops Onboard I2c
[ladyada] ran across this excellent hack by [phillip]. Apparently there’s a clock, data, 5v and ground connection available in most modern video connections. (He even notes HDMI cable pins) He wrote some drivers and can now control i2c hardware directly from the PC Mac. [Ladyada] notes that most laptops use an i2c bus for extra sensors as well. For now, the code only works on Mac OS X.
Cold Boot Encryption Attack Video
We haven’t made a regular habit of watching BoingBoing TV, but lately they’ve been covering topics we’ve been interested in… not the dolphin pr0n. In yesterday’s episode they talked to Jacob Appelbaum and members of the EFF about the cold boot encryption attack. The attack involves dumping the contents of memory to a storage device by power cycling the system. Cooling the memory chip with compressed air helps preserve the integrity of the data. The attacker can then search the data to find encryption keys protecting the contents of the hard drive. A fool proof solution to mitigate this attack hasn’t been developed yet. You can read more about cold boot attacks at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The BoingBoing TV episode, bizarre editing and all, can be downloaded directly here.
