Wireless Hacks

1047 Articles

WL-700gE Serial Port Mod

January 17, 2007 by 14 Comments


The Asus WL-700gE is an interesting device. It provides NAS, streaming and routing services thanks to linux. In their quest to modify the WL-700gE to a more flexible platform, [Eric] documented adding a serial port to its not so spacious innards. (FYI, Standard serial/RS-232 signals are around 5 volts ok, more like 12. I was thinking of the max 232/n variety) Asus was kind enough to provide through hole mounts and a TTL interface right on the board with console access already turned on.

I hadn’t realized it before, but the Siemens phone USB data cable is a nice cheap source of USB to TTL serial interfaces. Ironically, replacing the cable on the data unit was actually more difficult than adding the port to the router.

Airport Express Repair

December 31, 2006 by 6 Comments


[Eduard] was kind enough to pass along this airport express psu repair how-to (Translated version). The old Airport had those pesky capacitor issues. Apparently the power supply in the little buggers can have issues. The solution? Add a pile of voltage regulators and some smoothing caps to get things powered back up. No word on how the new PSU affects sound output.

Wave Bubble Portable RF Jammer

December 25, 2006 by 58 Comments


Hack-A-Day friend [Limor] AKA [ladyada] has been promising a portable RF jammer for a while. guess what she sent me for Christmas? The Wave-bubble is a self tuning RF jammer – good for around 20 feet of RF enforced peace. (It outputs .1-.3 watts) With a pair of less efficient antennas, it even fits inside a pack of cigarettes. She’ll never sell these because the FCC would come-a-knockin, but if you’ve got some major skills, you might be able to build one. (I’m going to believe her take on this, I’ve seen her work in person and it’s some damn fine stuff)

Merry Christmas! Get your Design Challenge entries in today!

Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform

October 29, 2006 by 10 Comments


[Archantos] sent us this one. The mustumbler project is actually trying to use some external hardware to make a miniature wireless stumbler. [Archantos] points out that it’s could be a cheap way to get your hands on an ARM development platform. He’s right. Just a few connections gets access to the I2C bus, a GPIO expander for I2C runs the LCD and an EEPROM is there for program storage. The software is still being sorted out, but the hardware itself is functional. If they can manage to reverse engineer the Conexant chipset, they should have a very promising platform.

WiCrawl – Next-gen WiFi Auditor

October 15, 2006 by 24 Comments


At ToorCon, our friends at Midnight Research Labs released a new automated WiFi auditing tool called WiCrawl. WiCrawl automatically scans for accesspoints. Once an AP is discovered a number of plugins can be run against it ranging from getting an IP to breaking encryption. Aaron Peterson’s talk and demo is 50mins. You can download the 640×480 170MB .mov version here. The tool is going to be included in the next BackTrack CD.