Peripherals Hacks

1536 Articles

DIY KVM Switch Lets You Use One Keyboard And Mouse With Multiple Computers

November 12, 2016 by 36 Comments

Here’s a quick DIY hack if you happen to have multiple computers at home or at the office and are tired of juggling mice and keyboards. [Kedar Nimbalkar] — striving for a solution — put together a keyboard, video and mouse switcher that allows one set to control two computers.

A DPDT switch is connected to a female USB port, and two male USB cables — with the ground and 5V wires twisted together and connected to the switch — each running to a PC. [Nimbalkar] suggests ensuring that the data lines are correctly wired, and testing that the 5V and ground are connected properly. He then covered the connections with some hot glue to make it a little more robust since it’s about to see a lot of use.

Now all that’s needed is a quick press of the button to change which PC you are working on, streamlining what can be a tedious changeover — especially useful if you have a custom keyboard you want to use all the time.

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Custom Gaming Keypad Developed With PSoC And Fusion 360

September 15, 2016 by 8 Comments

There was a time when building something yourself probably meant it didn’t look very much like a commercial product. That’s not always a bad thing. We’ve seen many custom builds that are nearly works of art. We’ve also seen plenty of builds that are–ahem–let’s say were “hacker chic”.

[AlexanderBrevig] decided to take on a project using a PSoC development board he picked up. In particular, he wanted to build a custom game keypad. He prototyped a number of switches with the board and got the firmware working so that the device looks like a USB HID keyboard.

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Bluetooth HID Gamepad And HC-05 Serial Hack

August 10, 2016 by 20 Comments

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Don’t bother us with stupid questions, they both co-evolved into the forms that we now serve up in tasty sandwiches or omelets, respectively. “Which came first, the HC-05 serial-flash-hack, or the wireless Bluetooth Gamepad?” Our guess is that [mitxela] wanted to play around with the dirt-cheap Bluetooth modules, and that building the wireless controller was an afterthought. But for that, it’s a well-done afterthought! (Video below the break.)

It all starts with the HC-05 Bluetooth module, which is meant to transfer serial data, but which can be converted into a general-purpose device costing ten times as much with a simple Flash ROM replacement. The usual way around this requires bit-banging over a parallel port, but hackers have worked out a way to do the same thing in bit-bang mode using a normal USB/Serial adapter. The first part of [mitxela]’s post describes this odyssey.

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Unexpected Betrayal From Your Right Hand Mouse

August 9, 2016 by 40 Comments

Some people really enjoy the kind of computer mouse that would not be entirely out of place in a F-16 cockpit. The kind of mouse that can launch a browser with the gentle shifting of one of its thirty-eight buttons ever so slightly to the left and open their garage door with a shifting to the right of that same button. However, can this power be used for evil, and not just frustrating guest users of their computer?

We’ve heard of the trusted peripheral being repurposed for nefarious uses before. Sometimes they’ve even been modified for more benign purposes. All of these have a common trend. The mouse itself must be physically modified to add the vulnerability or feature. However, the advanced mice with macro support can be used as is for a vulnerability.

The example in this case is a Logitech G-series gaming mouse. The mouse has the ability to store multiple personal settings in its memory. That way someone could take the mouse to multiple computers and still have all their settings available. [Stefan Keisse] discovered that the 100 command limit on the macros for each button are more than enough to get a full reverse shell on the target computer.

Considering how frustratingly easy it can be to accidentally press an auxiliary button on these mice, all an attacker would need to do is wait after delivering the sabotaged mouse. Video of the exploit after the break.

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DIY Command Station For Kerbal Space Program Is Overkill

July 25, 2016 by 16 Comments

We’ve seen custom controller mods for Kerbal Space Program before, but a group calling themselves the Makerforce went a step further with their design and build of the KSP “Overkill” Command Station, which has much more in common with a fancy standup arcade unit than a custom controller. Kerbal Space Program is a hit indie game that, among other things, simulates the challenges of spaceflight. Like most games, you use the mouse and keyboard for control but many fans find this too limiting. With the help of a software mod that exposes control and status information over hardware serial communications, the door to full telemetry and remote control was opened to just about anyone to craft their own custom hardware such as flight sticks and status displays. Not content with the idea of having just a joystick and a few buttons critical for the flight process, this project took a different approach.

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Binary Keyboard Is The Purest Form Of Input Device

July 20, 2016 by 55 Comments

You may be a hardcore keyboard aficionado whose buckled-spring switches will be pried from your cold dead hands, but there is a new model on the street that relegates your blank-key Das Keyboard or your trusty IBM Model M to the toy chest.

The new challenger comes from Reddit user [duckythescientist], who has created a minimalist three-key binary keyboard. It features a 0 key, a 1 key, a return key, and nothing else. Characters are entered as ASCII or Unicode, and the device emulates either a QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard layout to the host computer’s USB interface. It couldn’t be a simpler layout to learn, though we’d concede that not everyone has the entire binary Unicode table memorised.

The keys are mounted in a custom 3D printed case, and the electronics come from the creator’s own “tinydev” board based on an ATtiny85. All the code is available in a GitHub repository, and there is a very short video of its Unicode ability below the break.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Better Way Of Cheating

July 17, 2016 by 26 Comments

Believe it or not, some video games are still developed for the PC. With video games come cheat codes, and when they’re on the PC, that means using a keyboard. You can easily program any microcontroller to send a string of characters over a USB port with the touch of a button. Believe it or not, a lot of people haven’t put these two facts together. [danjovic] has, leading him to build a simple and cheap USB keystroke generator for quickly typing in cheat codes.

[danjovic] is basing his build around a Digispark, a cheap, USB-enabled ATtiny85 dev board. This, of course, means there’s not a lot of pins to play with – there are only four I/O pins, and one of them is connected to ground by a LED. That leaves only three I/O pins, but [danjovic] managed to put seven different cheats in his project using diodes and something that is almost charlieplexing.

If you’re wondering, this is a very inexpensive project. [danjovic] is using a Chinese digispark clone, a handful of 1N4148 diodes, and a few tact switches. Anyone with a well-stocked part drawer or a tenner on eBay could build this. If you want the proof of work for this project, you can check out the demo video below.

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