Network Hacks

249 Articles

Hackaday Explains: Li-Fi & Visible Light Communications

December 11, 2015 by 62 Comments

A new way to transmit data is coming that could radically change the way that devices talk to each other: LiFi. Short for Light Fidelity, LiFi uses visible light to send data, creating the link between router and device with invisible pulses of light. This type of Visible Light Communication (VLC) uses something that is present in pretty much every room: an LED lightbulb.

What is LiFi?

Li-Fi sounds like the an engineer’s fevered dream: it is fast, cheap, secure and simple to implement. Speeds of up to 10Gbps have been demonstrated in the lab, and products are now available that offer 10Mbps speed. It is cheap because it can use a modified LED lightbulb. It is secure because it only works where the light is visible: step out of the room and the signal is lost. It is simple to implement because it uses an existing technology: LEDs.

The basis of the technology is in turning the LED light on and off very fast. By switching an LED on and off millions of times a second, you can create a data signal that can be detected by a sensor, but which is invisible to the human eye. At the other end, another LED detects these pulses, and can send light pulses back in response, creating a bi-directional link. If you combine this with wired Ethernet or a WiFi network, you have an awesome combination: an Internet connection that uses visible light for the last link.

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Pi Zero Ethernet The Hard Way

December 6, 2015 by 22 Comments

[Alex@Raspi.tv] had the misfortune of blowing the USB hub and Ethernet port on a Raspberry Pi B+. He thought about using a cheap SPI to Ethernet board to rescue it, and while he bought the board, he never got around to interfacing it to the broken Pi. However, when he saw the Raspberry Pi Zero arrive and noticed that everyone wanted to connect it to the network, he remembered the SPI board, rescued it from his junk box, and a few hours later had Ethernet via Raspberry Pi GPIO working.

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Hacking Old Ethernet Gear

December 6, 2015 by 22 Comments

Have you ever wanted a pocket-sized device that could tell you if a network jack was live or not? [TanzerGuy] did and he hacked a piece of old networking gear to do the job.

Today when you think of Ethernet, you probably think of CAT-5 cable or something similar. But it hasn’t always been like that. In the early days of Ethernet networking, an Ethernet cable was a big piece of coax. A media attachment unit (MAU) clamped to the cable and then connected to an attachment unit interface (AUI) that resided in the actual network card. Later standards used thinner coax that attached to the card using a Tee connector, but even these are rare today.

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Pip Boys As A Service

November 24, 2015 by 24 Comments

A few weeks ago Fallout 4 was released, and like all future games of the year, productivity has fallen through the floor, cosplayers are busy crafting outfits, and modders are busy tearing the game to pieces. As with all big game releases, Fallout 4 has a super-deluxe, ultra-collectible edition, and this version comes with its own Pip Boy, the in-game wrist-mounted user interface that manages stats, inventory, and quests.

This Pip Boy is actually functional, relying on a smartphone to mirror the display in-game Pip Boy. This, of course, means there must be some sort of communication between the game and a phone. [Kyle] found this somewhat interesting and decided to dig into these communications to see what else could be done with the real life mirror of the in-game Pip Boy

With a simple swipe of nmap, [Kyle] discovered two ports open on his PS4. By creating a relay to listen in on whatever is passing through these ports, [Kyle] built a tool that allows anyone to dump data from the in-game Pip Boy to any other service.

The library and command line tool work with PS4 and PC and are able to dump stats and data from the in-game Pip Boy to the outside world. It will be interesting to see what kind of mashups could be created with this; especially interesting would be a leaderboard for an entire office of vault dwellers, but a TV-sized Pip Boy would also suffice.

Yes, that is a challenge.

Serial Data From The Web To An Arduino

October 10, 2015 by 8 Comments

In the old days, a serial port often connected to an acoustic coupler that gripped a phone handset and allowed a remote connection to a far away serial port (via another phone and acoustic coupler) at a blistering 300 baud or less. The acoustic coupler would do the job of converting serial data to audio and reconstituting it after its trip through the phone lines. Modems advanced, but have mostly given way to DSL, Cable, Fiber, and other high speed networking options.

In a decidedly retro move, [James Halliday] and [jerky] put a modern spin on that old idea. They used the webaudio API to send serial data to a remote Arduino. The hack uses a FET, a capacitor, and a few resistors. They didn’t quite build a real modem with the audio. Instead, they basically spoof the audio port into sending serial data and recover it with the external circuitry. They also only implement serial sending (so the Arduino receives) so far, although they mention the next step would be to build the other side of the connection.

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Managing An Unmanaged Switch

September 7, 2015 by 13 Comments

Network switches come in two different flavors: managed, where you have some interface to configure and monitor the equipment, and unmanaged where the device just does what it is supposed to do and you can’t really control it. [Tiziano Bacocco] wanted to manage his cheap unmanaged switch, so he did what any good hacker would do: he opened it up.

Inside the Digicom 10/100 switch he found an IP178CH controller IC and a quick search turned up a data sheet. [Tiziano] noticed there were three ways to configure the switch: Some hardware pins could control very basic functions; an EEPROM (absent on the PCB) could configure the device; or the chip would accept commands via a synchronous serial port.

Since the datasheet covered the protocol required, [Tiziano] commandeered an Arduino Pro Mini and used it to send commands to configure the switch. A few resistors and some quick code allowed him to control VLAN and other functions on the switch via the USB port. Of course, he mentioned you could use a Raspberry Pi if you wanted a network interface–or maybe that’s a good excuse to use one of those Ethernet shields you got on clearance at Radio Shack.

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Better TV Via Hacking

September 4, 2015 by 19 Comments

Smart TVs are just dumb TVs with a computer and a network connection, right? In a variation of rule 34, if it has a computer in it, someone will hack it. When [smarttvhacker] bought a Sony 48 inch smart TV, he noticed all the software licenses listed in the manual and realized that was a big leg up into hacking the TV.

We don’t have a comparable Sony model, but [smarttvhacker’s] post is a veritable travel log of his journey from TV viewer to TV ruler. By analyzing everything from network port scans to a dump of a firmware upgrade, he wound up being able to install a telnet server.

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