Phone Hacks

186 Articles

Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android

June 18, 2024 by 16 Comments

Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar. A new player, Lindroid, claims to provide real Linux distributions with hardware-accelerated Wayland on phones. How capable is it? The suggested window manager is KDE’s KWIN. That software is fairly difficult to run on anything but a full-blown system with dbus, hardware accelerations, and similar features.

There are, however, a few problems. First, you need a rooted phone, which isn’t totally surprising. Second, there are no clear instructions yet about how to install the software. The bulk of the information available is on an X thread. You can go about 4 hours into the very long video below to see a slide presentation about Lindroid.

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Screenshot of Microsoft Flight Simulator with the Dune expansion, and in the top right corner, the mod's author is shown using their phone with an attached gamepad for controlling a Dune ornithopter.

Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone

June 1, 2024 by 3 Comments

Anyone with more than a passing interest in flight simulators will eventually want to upgrade their experience with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) setup that has buttons and switches for controlling your virtual aircraft’s assorted systems, which are well supported by games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). But a traditional HOTAS system can be a bit of an investment, so you might want to thank [Vaibhav Sharma] for the virtualHOTAS project that brings a configurable HOTAS interface to your phone — just in time to try out that Dune expansion for MSFS.

The phone’s orientation sensors are used as a joystick, and on the screen, there’s both sliders and buttons you can use as in-game controls. On the back-end there’s a Python program on the computer which exposes a webserver that the phone connects to, translating sensor and press data without the need for an app. This works wonderfully in MSFS, as [Vaibhav] shows us in the video below. What’s more, if you get tired of the touchscreen-and-accelerometer controls, you can even connect a generic smartphone-designed game controller platform, to have its commands and movements be translated to your PC too!

All the code is open source, and with the way this project operates, it will likely work as a general-purpose interface for other projects of yours. Whether you might want to build an accessibility controller from its codebase, use it for your robot platform, maybe simply repurpose this project for any other game, [Vaibhav]’s creation is yet another reminder that we’re carrying a sensor-packed platform, and it might just help you build a peripheral you didn’t know you needed.

Don’t have a phone handy? Perhaps an Xbox controller could work with just a few 3D printed upgrades, or you could stock up on buttons and build your own joystick from scratch. Oh, and keeping HOTAS principles in mind can be pretty helpful — you might get to redesign the venerable computer mouse, for instance!

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Screenshot of the YouTube channel videos list, showing a number of videos like the ones described in this article.

[DiyOtaku] Gives Old Devices A New Life

May 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

Sometimes we get sent a tip that isn’t just a single article or video, but an entire blog or YouTube channel. Today’s channel, [Diy Otaku], is absolutely worth a watch if you want someone see giving a second life to legendary handheld devices, and our creator has been going at it for a while. A common theme in most of the videos so far – taking an old phone or a weathered gaming console, and improving upon them in a meaningful way, whether it’s lovingly restoring them, turning them into a gaming console for your off days, upgrading the battery, or repairing a common fault.

The hacks here are as detailed as they are respectful to the technology they work on. The recent video about putting a laptop touchpad into a game controller, for instance, has the creator caringly replace the controller’s epoxy blob heart with a Pro Micro while preserving the original board for all its graphite-covered pads. The touchpad is the same used in an earlier video to restore a GPD Micro PC with a broken touchpad, a device that you can see our hacker use in a later video running FreeCAD, helping them design a 18650 battery shell for a PSP about to receive a 6000 mAh battery upgrade.

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Wireshark screenshot with QCSuper-produced packets streaming into it; QCSuper script running in an adjacent terminal

Turn Your Qualcomm Phone Or Modem Into Cellular Sniffer

April 30, 2024 by 16 Comments

If your thought repurposing DVB-T dongles for generic software defined radio (SDR) use was cool, wait until you see QCSuper, a project that re-purposes phones and modems to capture raw 2G/3G/4G/5G. You have to have a Qualcomm-based device, it has to either run rooted Android or be a USB modem, but once you find one in your drawers, you can get a steady stream of packets straight into your Wireshark window. No more expensive SDR requirement for getting into cellular sniffing – at least, not unless you are debugging some seriously low-level issues.

It appears there’s a Qualcomm specific diagnostic port you can access over USB, that this software can make use of. The 5G capture support is currently situational, but 2G/3G/4G capabilities seem to be pretty stable. And there’s a good few devices in the “successfully tested” list – given the way this software functions, chances are, your device will work! Remember to report whether it does or doesn’t, of course. Also, the project is seriously rich on instructions – whether you’re using Linux or Windows, it appears you won’t be left alone debugging any problems you might encounter.

This is a receive-only project, so, legally, you are most likely allowed to have fun — at least, it would be pretty complicated to detect that you are, unlike with transmit-capable setups. Qualcomm devices have pretty much permeated our lives, with Qualcomm chips nowadays used even in the ever-present SimCom modules, like the modems used in the PinePhone. Wondering what a sniffer could be useful for? Well, for one, if you ever need to debug a 4G base station you’ve just set up, completely legally, of course.

How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible

April 22, 2024 by 83 Comments

Wireless charging is pretty convenient, as long as the transmitter and receiver speak the same protocol. Just put the device you want to charge on the wireless charger without worrying about plugging in a cable. Yet as it turns out, the disadvantages of wireless charging may be more severe than you think, at least according to tests by iFixIt’s [Shahram Mokhtari] and colleagues. In the article the basics of wireless charging are covered, as well as why wireless charging wastes a lot more power even when not charging, and why it may damage your device’s battery faster than wired charging.

The inefficiency comes mostly from the extra steps needed to create the alternating current (AC) with wireless coupling between the coils, and the conversion back to DC. Yet it is compounded by the issue of misaligned coils, which further introduce inefficiencies. Though various protocols seek to fix this (Qi2 and Apple’s MagSafe) using alignment magnets, these manage to lose 59% of the power drawn from the mains due to these inefficiencies. Wireless chargers also are forced to stay active, polling for a new device to charge, which keeps a MagSafe charger sucking up 0.2 W in standby.

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Rabbit Sighted In The Wild

April 13, 2024 by 21 Comments

Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for old abandoned technologies, the more obscure the better. The history of the telephone has plenty to capture our attention, and it’s from that arena that something recently floated past our timeline. [IanVisits] reports a sighting of a Rabbit in a London Underground station. The bunny in question definitely isn’t hopping though, it’s been dead for more than three decades. It’s a base station for a failed digital mobile phone system.

We’ve had a look in the past at CT2, the system this Rabbit base station once formed part of. It was an attempt to make an inexpensive phone system by having the handsets work with fixed base stations rather than move from cell to cell. It was one of the first public digital mobile phone systems, but the convenience of a phone that could both receive calls and make them anywhere without having to find a base station meant that GSM phones took their market.

The one in Seven Sisters tube station is a bit grubby looking, but it’s not the only survivor out there in the field. We have to admit to being curious as to whether it’s still powered on even though its backhaul will be disconnected, as in our experience it’s not uncommon for old infrastructure to be left plugged into the wall for decades, unheeded. Does anyone fancy sniffing for it with a Flipper Zero?

A Dial Phone SIPs Asterisk

March 24, 2024 by 8 Comments

An endless source of amusement for those of advancing years can come from handing a rotary phone to a teenager and asking them to dial a number with it. It’s rare for them to be stumped by a piece of technology, after all. [Mnutt]’s 4-year-old son had no such problems when he saw rotary phones at an art exhibition, so what was a parent to do but wire the phone to an Asterisk PBX with shortcut numbers for calls to family and such essential services as a joke line, MTA status, or even a K-pop song.

It’s possible to hook up a pulse dial phone with a SLIC module and a microcontroller, but in this case, a Grandstream SIP box did the trick. These are all-in-one devices that implement a SIP client with a physical connection, and older ones will talk to pulse dialers as well as the more usual tone dialing phones. The phone in question is a vintage American model. Writing this from Europe we were surprised to find a little simpler inside than its transatlantic counterparts of the same era.

An Asterisk install on a Raspberry Pi completed the project, and thus it became a matter of software configuration. It’s a useful run-through for Asterisk dilettantes, even if you haven’t got a 4-year-old. Perhaps you have an old payphone or two!